Notes Towards Day 20: "Visibility Politics"

II. Afterthoughts from last week:
aseidman: text message follow-up and on the exclusive club

"blogging is for old people"

Patricia Cohen, "Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know": "Getting to the root of people's fascination with fiction .... is like 'mapping wonderland.'" 

III. Today's new text: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
go round (as we did w/ Gaiman--so useful!)
sharing your initial reactions to this coming-of-age story,
to its visual (pared down) representation in particular/
your thoughts about the relation between medium and message:
(what genre is it? autobiography? history? novel?)
How cf. this, as genre, w/ A Game of You?

TPB1988 I can't believe they belong to the same genre
nk0825 I agree
spleenfiend undefined
rachelr Agreed

III. Doing some close reading (and getting outside, if desired...) 
following Art Spiegelman's observation that "people don't even have the patience to decode comics ... comics have become one of the last bastions of literacy"

also an initiative suggested by (sweetp-->skindeep-->)
ShanyaS In class...
sbg90 the case for images

one group each on
'The Veil,' p. 3;
'The Bicycle,' (esp. p. 15);
'The Party' (cf. p. 40, p. 42);
'The Heroes' (esp. p. 52);
'The Key' (esp. p. 102); and
'The Cigarette' (esp. p. 117).

Come back in 10-15 minutes ready to 'read'/teach
these pages to the rest of us.

Let's also look together @ the
abstract visuals on pp. 77 and 89.

IV. On the representation of trauma
Is drawing -- as a form of representation -- inherently fictional?

IV. What happens to our close readings,
if we place the form of Satrapi's work
in its long historical context?
(Cf. Paul Jefferson's visit to the James class, posing
close readings against culturally located ones...)

Consider, for example "the swarming effect" of

* illustrated Bibles (this is from The Holkham Bible, a “celebrated picture-book”/ collection of illustrated Bible stories modernised to appeal to 14th-century Londoners)
* Hieronymus Bosch (15th c. Netherlandish painter)
* Pieter Brueghel the elder (16th c. Netherlandish painter)

two additional sources identified by Sartrapi herself:
in Persian miniatures  ("the drawing itself is very simple," eschewing perspective); see Bihzad on "trying to paint the
world as God would see it and not as we, humans, do."

avant-garde, black-and-white, expressionistic films like
Murnau's vampire fantasy Nosferatu (1922)

"Before it's projected ... film is just a very very very very slow comic" (McCloud).

What do these comparisons highlight about what Sartrapi is doing? How has she altered the tradition?

______
V. Some additional critical imput
(to use for thinking about Thursday's discussion):

Nancy K. Miller, "The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in
the Age of the Memoir." PMLA 122, 2 (2008): 537-548.
"autographics"/"graphic memoirs": 
what do readers look for in life stories?

"Memoirs from sites of danger provide a safe space for readers to ponder the nightmare of contemporary global relations, even as the pages display the extreme difficulty of living in times of traumatic history. The story of the other citizen, preferably female--the exotic, foreign self in translation (like us after all)--is also a valuable template in the marketplace of contemporary autobiographical production and consumption."

The tangled relation of self to family stories and settings .... is further layered by ... literary texts ....

the female autobiographical self ... goes public with private feelings through a significant relation to an other .... the other provides the authorizing conditions for self production .... "Isolate individualism is an illusion" .... Autobiography's story is about the web of entanglement in which we find ourselves .....

The reader ... is the autobiographer's most necessary other .... You conjure the reader to prove that you are alive ....

Hilary Chute, "The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis." Women's Studies Quarterly 36, 1&2 (Spring/
Summer 2008): 92-110.
(NYTimes): "comic books are what novels used to be--an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal"

Some of today's most riveting feminist cultural production is in the form of accessible yet edgy graphic narratives.

"graphic narratives"... claim their own historicity -- even as they work to destabilize standard narratives of history.

I am interested in bringing the medium of comics -- its conventions, its violation of its conventions, what it does differently -- to the forefront of conversations about the political, aesthetic, and ethical work of narrative.

...  interpretation as a process of visualization.

... bridging wartime-focused testimonies and child-oriented testimonies ...

Persepolis was encouraged into existence ... by French cartoonists in the L'Association comics publishing collective ... because of the political situation in Iran it is unable to be officially translated into Farsi or published there --although ... there is a Persian version..circulating on the black market.

Persepolis is about the ethical verbal and visual practice of "not forgetting" ... modeling a feminist methodology in its form, in the complex visual dimension of its author narrating herself on the page as a multiple subject.

"The Veil"...
an icon of a single eye, directly engaging the reader, dangles over the book's very first gutter ... we are aligned with Satrapi's penetrating vision and enabling retracing ... "I gave myself this duty of witnessing" ... her self-establishing ("this is me") and the immediate deestablishment ("you don't see me") ... seeing a drawing, even as she announces ... a photograph...

Satrapi's stark style is monochromatic -- there is no evident shading technique; she offers flat black and white .... "the depiction of deliberately empty spaces" ... visual emptiness of the simple, ungraded blackness in the frames shows memory's ... thickness, its depth ....

... frequent scenes in which public skirmishes appear as stylized and even symmetrical formations of bodies ... in Persian miniatures ... "the drawing itself is very simple," eschewing perspective...

The minimalist play of black and white ... to present events with a pointed degree of abstraction in order to call attention to the horror of history .... Persepolis's ... stylistic inspiration is avant-garde, black-and-white cinema -- especially expressionistic films such as Murnau's vampire fantasy Nosferatu (1922) ....

"Violence today has become something so normal, so banal ... But it's not normal. To draw it and put it in color -- the color of flesh and the red of the blood, and so forth -- reduces it by making it realistic" .... Persepolis is devastatingly truthful and yet stylized ... style as a narrative choice ... is fundamental to understanding graphic narrative ... pared-down techniques of line and perspective ... as with abstract expressionism, which justifies a flatness of composition to intensify affective content ... is a sophisticated, and historically cognizant, means of doing the work of seeing."

"The Bicycle"
child-s eye rendition of trauma ... haunts the text because of its incommmensurablity -- and yet its expressionistic consonance -- with what we are provoked to imagine is the visual reality of this brutal murder ... the author draws a scene of death... as a child imagines it .... in a form keyed to structural gaps through the frame-gutter sequence...

present mass death in a highly stylized fashion .... almost architectural ... a child's too-tidy conceptualization ... and the disturbing, anonymous profusion of bodies ....

the pitfalls of other, ostensibly transparent representational modes: "I cannot take the idea of a man cut into pieces and just write it. It would not be anything but cynical That's why I drew it" ... from a child's (realistically erroneous but emotionally, expressionistically informed) perspective ....

... no perspective, however informed, can fully represent trauma .... it is in "excess of our frames of reference" .... [In] a child's imaging of torture ... one recognizes not only the inadequacy of any representation to such traumatic history, but also ... the simultaneous power of the radically inadequate (the child's naive confusion).

combining on a page ... the historical "routine" (execution) and the personal "routine" (sneaking cigarettes) ... uses understated graphic idiom to convey the horror of her "story of a childhood." Persepolis shows trauma as ordinary, both in the text's form -- the understated, spatial correspondences Persepolis employs to narrative effect through comics panelization -- and in style: the understated quality of Satrapi's line that rejects the visually laborious ... to departicularize the singular witnessing ... to open out the text ... while Persepolis may show trauma as (unfortunately) ordinary, it rejects the idea that it is (or should ever be) normal ....

Persepolis offers not simply a "visibility politics," but an ethical and troubling visual aesthetics...