Category: Week 12 – Darkest Hour

I agree with the majority of the posts that point to this graphic novel as an unappealing set of characters held hostage in a mind-numbing emotional and cultural miasma.  However, there’s a lot of decoding to be done here, much of it linguistic and psychological.

One point I’d like to bring up is the “human capacity to survive and adapt…  [that goes beyond a person’s ability to contain the “memory of one particular event [that] comes to taint all other experiences, spoiling appreciation of the present.”  Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisaeth discussed this in the “Traumatic Stress” article we read for Maus I.  The authors conclude that extreme trauma is not necessarily indicative of a severe and prolonged psychological or biological response, what we now commonly refer to as PTSD.

Some individuals can integrate the damage into their lives without focusing their lives on the trauma and replaying it in their minds.

To me, knowing this assessment – that some people get over the same or worse damage as another person, puts a great deal of stress on the individual to deal with the suffering and get over it.

In a yellow-washed section of the book, towards the end, we hear a balding man with university degree on the wall behind him explain SSRI’s effect on neurotransmitters on the brain during pharmacological treatment.  Does he complete this therapy?  Does Santiago see this as a possible answer?

Omar appears to be survivor of childhood sexual abuse who was confused between fear and enjoyment, and was never able to sort out his feelings.  Is Omar the individual who continues to relive the trauma?

In this respect, I think Santiago’s work succeeds as semi-autobiographical fiction.  Omar drinks every day, he is insecure, he is obese, his personal relationships are shallow, and he dulls his conscious with full time television whenever he is alone.  Yet, he is inventing his own strategy to deal with his depression.  His nature of trying to survive even is his ‘nurture’ doesn’t have a clue.

I must be missing something here, it appears that I just completed a text in which the protagonist appeared essentially useless. While I did not like Omar, I must say that there were a number of themes in Santiago’s work whose sheer resonance with society today cannot be ignored.  I think class discussion will probably torch the topic of female portrayals so I would like to start with one of my favorites, anger.

I’m sure it’s just me, but there seemed to be a bit of a political statement with regard to Omar’s anger in In My Darkest Hour.  We’re presented with a character, who as far as I can see, has only seen the external depths of abuse, which is to say that outside of abuse, I really couldn’t see a legitimate reason for Omar to carry so much anger.  His critical eye is quick to point out the negative in life (well, his life at least) but I struggle to see where Omar seeks the harmony of balancing forces, other than in women, Lucinda included.  Omar’s anger comes with an a priori touch, almost as if it is a product of man’s inevitable engagement with nature and the world around him.  I’d say it’s just the unstability of Omar, except Santiago does so much to create an ugly world that is easy to find displeasing (the shadowy feel of the black coloring, the unpleasant merging of different text fonts and sizes, the turbulent and sometimes undecipherable panels etc…).  

Is this the answer?  IMDH struck me with an agenda to inform me of the state of modern youth in transition in relation to the world today, and the agenda came with anger.  It seems to me that Santiago’s contemporary piece presents a message that “life today comes with many negatives and that anger will be all around us in our engagement with life.  The anger will be so present that it is almost as though the anger is a character in itself.  You’re only claim for sanity is to negotiate life spending a majority of your conscious efforts suppressing the anger that the is naturally inside due to living in this nasty ugly world.”  I’m not psychic, but I swear I heard Santiago whispering this to me throughout my three takes with the text.  Please, no one call a doctor, I am fine.  No mental or medical attention required over here, it’s my mind’s reflexive engagement with IMDH.

I too am having trouble grasping and dealing with everything in Santiago’s novel, but what stood out for me was the beginning with Omar reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel La Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada / The Chronicle of a Death Foretold.  This detail in the introduction of the novel seems to lend to many themes/styles that Santiago may be trying to weave into his narrative.  Garcia Marquez is famous for his use of magical realism across his stories, which focuses/challenges opposites.  I can see Santiago taking the themes of magical realism – presenting the conflicting perspectives of rational Omar vs. manic/depressed Omar, past vs. present, life vs. death, etc.  We do not see any instances of the supernatural in Santiago’s work, which is often a component for magical realism, but I think it could be argued that Omar’s various mental states (depression, mania, drunkenness, sex, memories, etc.) sets up reality/normal world against another space.

Second, I think that the inclusion of Garcia Marquez’s novel, title alone, and the story itself frame Santiago’s novel. A death foretold, I think, characterizes Omar’s depression and the dark themes of the book.  Death is foretold for everyone, we are all going to die, but we must trudge through life or as Santiago proposes like pigs through the slaughterhouse.  People raised the question of the chronology of the narrative, and I question the end of the novel.  The final frame is all black — does Omar go to sleep? Or is it his final sleep?  We have the sense that his life is more steady, but we have no evidence of positive turns in Omar’s life from the rest of the novel, so does Santiago’s introduction with Garcia Marquez’s novel foreshadow or maybe is it meant to influence our conclusion of the text?

Is Santiago making a modern graphic novel of Garcia Marquez’s text?

I enjoy ambiguity as much as anyone, but I think that an author also has an obligation to the reader not to make his or her writing so dense as to be incomprehensible, which is what I found  in Santiago’s text.  The mixture of at times indecipherable images and text is daunting.  If a text is unintelligible, the reader looses interest.  After several attempts at trying to wrestle meaning from Darkest Hour I decided that the easiest path would be to admit defeat, write about what I understand and see what others have to offer at the next class meeting.

As the twitter exchanges indicate, there is some confusion about the chronology of the book. “The actual story of the book is Omar getting up in the morning, going to work then he goes home and falls asleep watching TV” according to Santiago, who says that the  book is not a “story line” (http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?threadid=26002).

This may be what Santiago had in mind, but he doesn’t pull if off.  If Omar is asleep, then what we are witnessing is his dreams/nightmares, reflecting somewhat the conditions of his life as many of our dreams/nightmare do.  Santiago’s novel replicates Omar’s thoughts/dreams and in effect, is portraying Omar’s disorientation.  But without something to ground the narrative it is unsatisfying to the reader.  Did he rape the suicide girl, or just dream it?  Was he abused as a child, or is it only a nightmare?

Ultimately we are left watching the actions (or dreams?) of this very messed up young man.  His sexual abuse as a child, his mother’s practice of santeria animal sacrifice, etc. may have helped him on his way to his current state, but his acts seem organic; the result of hay wired thought processes. Many have seen/experienced worse and not turned out the same.  But if it’s only a dream, why are we supposed to care?

The question of whether of not to sympathize with Omar is difficult.   As his story begins, he’s on the edge.  Then he becomes a homeless vagrant, one of the crazies we occasionally cross paths with pushing shopping carts and mutter to themselves. He takes no personal responsibility for his actions, but personal responsibility can only be questioned when a person is responsible.  In Omar’s case responsibility goes out the window when he looses his mental balance.

I would have gotten more out of Omar’s story if Santiago had given us more to go on.  As it is, guessing about the nature of his fall, the chronology of his story and his character makes the book incomplete.  There is not enough here to make a judgment.  Maybe Santiago’s message is that we should not judge Omar, but that is not a satisfying one.

Two things stayed with me after reading In My Darkest Hour: how the images were constantly distorted, like a television set not adjusted to the right aspect ration, and the walls of text, ranging from Courier New typeface to spiral-arranged handlettered chaos, covering or forming the backgrounds to entire pages and sequences. Both of these unsettled (and truthfully, annoyed) me – and I think that is the desired effect. In his interview, Santiago notes that Omar is drinking in every panel – a state of mind often conveyed through visual distortion of images in film. The sharp use of digital tools to mimic other filmic techniques (such as the blurry/sharp focus pull effect when Omar and Lucinda face each other on the stairs) makes me think that Santiago probably drew his figures relatively “normally” proportioned, and then used the tools in whatever software he created the book in to distort them as he saw fit. However, none of the images necessarily required this two-step process (at least, from my perspective). The difference in creation process leads to the question of why would one choose to draw then manipulate over simply drawing already distorted. The former, as I noted, mimics the process of film, while the latter roots itself firmly in the world of draftsmanship. While not an unequivocal answer, I read Omar’s photographic habits and the splicing/collage use of actual photos as an indication that Santiago is deliberately copying techniques of film – probably, as John notes, as a reflection and commentary on our own viewing of the world through television and film (and to a somewhat lesser extent pictures in other media).

In contrast to the clear development of filmic techniques to both add visual sophistication to the work and assist in audience participation in Omar’s state of mind, the prominent positioning of text militates against the kind of smooth, quick reading I genearally associate with both filmic grammar and sequential art narratives. The constant jerk from combining small text balloons/captions to trying to take in what amounts to a complete page of prose, often in obscuring fonts/lettering and shaped/angled/spiralled out of comprehensibility frustrated me as a reader, and led me to posit two conclusions about Santiago’s goal in this technique. The first is that most readers wouldn’t scan the text pages, instead catching key words, the emotional state of the writer (from the font/lettering style), and the place the words have in the point of view of Omar. The second would be that Santiago actually does expect readers to scan instead of skim, rapidly changing pace in their information/page intake, perhaps contributing to the identification of Omar’s disjointed, constantly changing perspective and feelings about the world around him. For me, the former is an interesting and somewhat effective experiment, while the latter seems far to self-involved and arrogant. Though my own perspective on this is clearly based on my own reading habits, I would argue that knowing how to successfully navigate physical reading pacing shifts is an admirable skill, while deliberately piling up text like bricks in front of a train indicates a mentality I find difficult to admire or sympathize with.

I suppose I ought to have been as forthright as Lindsey and mentioned that both the style and character of In My Darkest Hour deeply irritate me, not necessarily because Omar is a misogynist (though I believe he is), but because Omar teaches me nothing about what it is like to feel worthless (a trait I believe he shares with the similarly apathetic, abused, and deeply misogynistic Jimmy Corrigan – and possibly several of Alan Moore’s Watchmen). Though there is a modicum of happiness/hope at the end of the story, Omar’s journey seems to be cyclical rather than teleological, merely revolving around his naval instead of walking towards a better life.

I’m not sure what to make of In My Darkest Hour. Overall I found the narrative dry and non-compelling and the characters completely uninteresting and unsympathetic. I wish to clarify this last point. I’m not saying that I disliked the characters (I did, but that isn’t really pertinent), but instead I am saying that there was nothing in the narrative or the characters that made me care one way or the other what happened to them.

I have the biggest beef with Omar, however, since he is the protagonist and “narrator.” The book is essentially from his perspective, so we are forced to move along with him, but I frankly struggled a lot with finishing this book because I did not care about this character. Omar embodies the classic and pervasive narcissism of manic depression. He does not care about Lucinda or any of the women in his life. He is focused solely on himself and what others can provide for him, all while blaming others for the things that are going wrong in his life. Even after 9/11, all he can think about is how it affects him and how he “doesn’t feel anything anymore.”

Are we supposed to care about what this character does or what happens to him? Presumably we are, since someone took the time to write a whole book about him, but I honestly cannot find a compelling reason to do so. His depression and some of the thoughts he has are relatbable to people with bi-polar disorder or similar problems, but having depression is not a character arc. He’s narcissitic and a jerk because of his depression, but so what? Lots of people suffer from the same type of disorder and feel the same accute feelings of depression, self-loathing, and self-destruction but are not jerks. Omar does not face any major existential questions or grapple with his depression, or really do anything. Things happen around him. He is just floating around. Any improvement in his condition, or regression, seems completely coincidental and does not appear to have any connection to his actions.There was nothing compelling about this character, and as such, there was very little compelling about the book as a whole.

My first reaction to In My Darkest Hour was to put it down in disgust at the overly sexualized females and the stereotypical horny male who has a hard time controlling his urges and so is constantly making women uncomfortable to the point of even violating one (with the mirror).  In my opinion anyone, whether or not they are bipolar, schizophrenic, sociopaths, etc who approaches women in the way that the Omar approaches them is disgusting.  My first impression is still reigning high, but unfortunately for my moral righteousness I decided to go back through and recheck my first reading.  The results are what follows.

I do not know where the line between reality and fantasy lies within this graphic novel and so it is particularly difficult for me to come to a conclusion as to whether or not I have any sympathy for Omar, or of his girlfriend for that matter.  We see a distortion of reality throughout. One example is towards the beginning when we see Omar looking for Lucinda, and there are several panels of him stretched horizontally so that he looks obese. He might be overweight, depending on his height , but not to the extent that these panels show.  Here we are seeing him through his own eyes, and the distortion that such a perspective brings with it.  The difficult aspect, however, is that there is no way of knowing, no indicator within the text, that, at any point, we are seeing something outside of Omar’s perspective.  In my first reading I assumed that only some of it was from Omar’s point of view, but after looking through it I’m not sure that any of it was from a third person point of view.

This graphic novel is not so subtly about sexual abuse, and as much as I want to dismiss Omar’s actions (again, looking up the girl’s skirt with a mirror) as being that of a self-centered male who sees women as little more than pieces of meat, it’s clear that the truth is that he does not understand the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior when it comes to approaching a female.  He’s not trying to overpower them or hurt them and for this I have to let go of my righteousness.

Finally, my dislike of Omar is because Omar does not like himself.  There must be some reason that Lucinda is with him, and we see pieces of the pain and disgust and confusion that Omar lives through with the “grotesque” images strewn throughout the novel.  We see his childhood abuse, his gross body, his strange dark dreams from which he awakes to Lucinda telling him everything is okay.  Some of the images, such as the female who’s breasts have been sewn on, who has what looks to be Jesus hanging out by her vag, whose face is made of pieces from different pictures, and who has something indecipherable happening to her mouth, remind me primarily of something I would find if I stumbled onto a serial killer’s art book.  But I think it’s important to remember that these are Omar’s eyes.  That image is the first hint that something else is going on here, that something along the lines of abuse have happened.  My first reaction is to think the artist was a little full of himself and that these images are unnecessary for the telling of the story (as Jay describes in his post), but now I think they’re there to show something outside the norm, something truly distorted and ugly and frightening, and it’s not Omar, at least not yet.  It’s his past, it’s the symptoms of childhood sexual abuse, it’s the extremely serious but rarely discussed psychological monsters that trauma can manifest.

In My Darkest Hour is a pretty grim read throughout, but I did find many of the creative choices that Santiago makes in the text to be very interesting.  One thing that I noticed during my initial reading is the clear visual focus that Santiago gives to the mundane details of commercialized products and pop culture, and their overall prevalence in the story.  While this aspect doesn’t seem to be overtly thematic when compared to the larger issues of addiction, mental illness, poverty, race, and post 9-11 U.S. foreign policy, it was interesting to see how Santiago portrays the everyday aesthetics of mundane life. 

As has been discussed on Twitter, Santiago’s images seems to be presented in a more straightforward, almost photographic style whenever the focus is on something commercial like beer and soda labels, liquor bottles, and candy wrappers.  But this same “cleaner” style is also applied to many of the more personal aesthetics of individual identity for various characters in the text.  By this I mean the things in life the characters use to send a message to others about who they are, what they believe, what music they like, etc.  This was especially noticeable for me in the different tee-shirts we see characters wearing (Omar’s “NIN” shirt, a “Faux News” shirt, and even a “Billy Ray Cyrus” shirt), as well as in the various posters in Lucinda’s and Caroline’s rooms (perfume poster, Art Institute of Chicago, Rosie the Riveter). 

Santiago’s focus on presenting a clearer picture of these mundane details of life sets In My Darkest Hour apart from most of the other texts we’ve read this semester.  A part of this obviously would seem to stem from the fact that this plot is the most rooted/dependent on contemporary society from all the texts that we have encountered.  But I’m also interested in how Santiago may use this technique to make a more deliberate commentary about Omar.  Omar’s confusion/hopelessness/general mental angst seems to be constantly represented in the distorted styles that permeate much of the text.  Does the clarity given to the commercialized products of booze and candy signify how these items (also symbolic of his larger addictions) serve as his anchors in a tumultuous world?  Likewise – does the focus on the mechanisms of a pop culture centered identity point to Omar’s ultimate shallowness and lack of any significant identity himself?  The text seems to take on a more deliberate anti-corporate feel in the post 9-11 section at the end, with the corporate logos interspersed with the drawing of the pig slaughtering assembly line.  But to me this seems a little disjointed with the pop-culture, song lyrics, and commercial references that are placed throughout the text.

John

I fairly positive there is a lot to take away from Wilfred Santiago’s graphic novel, In My Darkest Hour, but after reading and looking through it several times, I am not sure that I got the half of it (which does make me more eager to hear more about it in class—especially other people’s reactions to it). I’ve only tweeted a couple times about this book because I seem to be left with more questions than answers about what I have read. I was more visually assaulted with this graphic novel than any other one we’ve read so far this semester, as gruesome realism does seem to be appropriately attached this work as well.

I think I kept coming away from panels of this book thinking they were more grotesque than just gruesome. In fact, in some (okay more than some) cases, I could leave the panel almost positive that I have no idea what Santiago drew there. I felt chaotic reading it, like at times not knowing up from down or what to study and what to move on from quickly. The calming colors of Asterios Polyp are far….far……far gone. (Although I do think that it is funny that in the cases of IMDH and AP, I can say the colors are both “washed out,” even if they are in completely different ways.)

Now, with the dishwater yellows, BLACKS (capitalized because of the color’s domination), and antique-y washed out color tones, I feel that visually the images are unstable. The fact that we have drawings, real pictures, and montages of all kinds thrown in for good measure emphasizes that fact and disallows the reader from stabilizing the narrative concretely. Obviously, it would seem, the mental issues that arise in the graphic novel attack the reader visually as they try to make sense of the world they are reading about, just as Omar tries to make sense of the world he is living in. Are things at times just hard to read because mentally they are hard to deal with?

What echoes the whole grotesque or gruesome realism is that I can’t remember anything in this graphic novel being drawn or done in a flattering light. The world is, well…ugly, and in IMDH, it shows. When I got to the part of Bakhtin’s article on “Grotesque Realism” that says “The body copulates, defecates, overeats, and men’s speech is flooded with genitals, bellies, defecations, urine, disease, noses, mouths, and dismembered parts. Even when the flood is contained by norms of speech, there is still an eruption of these images into literature, especially if the literature is gay or abusive in manner,” I felt it to be extremely fitting with IMDH (319). We have copulation and overeating, as sex and being overweight are dominate image themes, and I think this graphic novel seems to be flooded with it as Bakhtin suggests some literature can be. While I may not be able to conclusively talk about everything within IMDH, I can assuredly say that in my opinion, the work, in color and in theme, is gritty realism, if nothing else.