Wounds from Exiting

From Wikipedia: “An injury in which an object enters the body or a structure and passes all the way through is called a perforating injury, while penetrating trauma implies that the object does not pass through.[2] Perforating trauma is associated with an entrance wound and an often larger exit wound.” Source

This is what I assumed the title of Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds referred to. I guess given the cover and images of explosions and Israel and my general knowledge of what an “exit wound” is, I made the assumption that there would be some kind of physical trauma. When I reached the end of the book, I’d completely forgotten about the title because it did not seem applicable to my reading until I looked back at it afterward.

Rereading the title suddenly put an interesting framework around the entire story for me: The novel is about the wounds left behind by someone’s exit from out lives. Perhaps this was obvious to everyone else immediately and I’m just a total idiot who wasn’t paying attention, but it really changed my view of the whole piece. In reading the Twitter feed and some of the posts prior to mine, it seemed that many people had a similar reaction to me in that I wasn’t quite sure what the story was about. Like Kelly there didn’t seem to be any closure for me. However, my new-found insight from the title does give me closure.

Essentially the whole book isn’t about Koby and Numi searching for Gabriel and finding him (as others have pointed out already), but is instead about the effects Gabriel’s exit has had on them. The ramifications of his abandonment of his family and various lovers is the central theme of the story. But it is more than just Gabriel’s abandonment, but also Koby’s mother Aviva’s death. The exits of these characters (or are they non-characters since we never meet them?) leave everyone that’s left in a completely different world.

I think the term “exit wound” is appropriate for this kind of psychological trauma, the after effects of the initial entrance wound are often much larger. In the case of Modan’s book, the ramifications of Aviva’s death continue to expand outward, injuring more and more people as Gabriel and Koby’s suffering continues and is projected, creating more and more exits and subsequent wounds. In this context, the ending does provide some closure, since both Koby and Numi choose not to make additional exits. Koby comes back and Numi doesn’t walk away like she says she will. In some ways this potential relationship (though clearly not solidified yet) closes the exit wounds both characters are suffering from.

Ending Exit Wounds

Reading Rutu Mordan’s Exit Wounds leaves me thinking “What’s the point?” I don’t mean this question to be in the typical sense, about questioning whether or not the graphic novel has a point, but rather, I think it is interesting to think about what Modan sees as being the “main storyline” of the work. If one was reading this graphic novel as a plot for Koby to find his father and Numi to find her once lover, who is also Koby’s father, then the book would be disappointing. Yes, Koby does “find” his father by finding his father’s new home and new wife, but he doesn’t meet Gabriel, nor do we get to see him by the end of the book. In that sense, the book would lack closure, perhaps, but I can’t make myself see the search for Gabriel as the point of the book. Rather, I see the search for Gabriel as a means to tell the story.

The point could be a practice in looking at Koby and Numi as they come together through their struggles about their own flaws and supposed shortcomings (Koby and his father issues and Numi and her physical hang-ups). It could be showing how the characters push aside inadequacies in order to overcome their loss (of Gabriel through his abandonment of both characters in different ways). I think to this point, Lindsay makes a lot of good point about how the book is painted by victimization.

I think what really led me to the question of what was Modan’s point was the fact that by the end of the book, I didn’t feel like the end was really the end. The book didn’t feel resolved, and I don’t believe that was simply because I didn’t get to see Gabriel by the end. Like Koby in the last panel, I’m left free-floating, not necessarily in plot but in feeling. Okay, they didn’t find Gabriel, but Koby and Numi found each other; I just didn’t and don’t think that the story could be left literally hanging without me feeling like the ending was a little abrupt. However, I do feel like that’s pretty unfair of me to ask for more at the same time because I’m not sure what else I would really want to see. I think it’s better we didn’t see Gabriel; I’m okay with Koby being with Numi, I think; but by the end of the graphic novel, I’m left suspended (which undoubtedly reminds me of the end of Fun Home, visually and psychologically but the latter in a different way).

I suppose this is the part of my post where I remark that the “left in the air” or perpetual juggling without falling was Modan’s point in ending this graphic novel the way that she did, and maybe, to that end, a lot of others found that ending to be effective, but for whatever reason (one that’s increasingly elusive to find), I can’t make myself be completely satisfied with the ending of Exit Wounds, even if I can see Modan’s point in leaving us always coming down to earth with Koby. Maybe I’m just over the “in media res” abrupt endings…

~Kelley

Illustrating a movie

While I liked Waltz with Bashir, the movie was better. Perhaps this comes from the fact that I watched the movie before approaching the graphic novel, or watched the movie a second time as part of a film class (Terrorism, Conflict, and Resistance), which helped me gain a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding the massacres at Shabra and Shatila. Either way, I felt the graphic novel was just an attempt to re-create– word-for-word, scene-for-scene–the movie. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I appreciated the muted tones and harrowing message of the graphic novel. It just couldn’t quite succeed in creating a haunted feel the way the movie does. There are two specific reasons why I feel the movie does more to Folman’s story than the graphic novel: music, and disjointed, moving images. One of Folman’s only memories of the war places him in the ocean as flares light up the sky over the Shabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon (11–13). He walks away from the sea and sees crowds of people swarming past him. In the graphic novel, these are powerful images, but contrast them with these:

Something about the way the camera shifts around him as the slow, sublime music plays in the background makes the scene even more haunting. The camera shifts and stuttering crowds create an effect that just can’t be gained with pictures alone. Perhaps more moment-to-moment shifts in the graphic novel would have better conveyed what exactly is happening and the tragedy it signifies, but reading the graphic novel, I just never felt tragedy the way the movie does. It just all goes by too quickly.

At other times in the movie, Folman glorifies war in stark contrast to the overall message of both the graphic novel and movie. For example, the scene that takes place on the beach with people surfing, smoking and drinking (before most of the men have seen real combat or witnessed a massacre) (46–47), does little justice to the movie’s Apocalypse-Now-like scene with a punk song playing over glorified war images:

Scenes like this don’t exist in the graphic novel at all. We are merely provided the memories of people who were there and the tale of a person trying to understand his part in the conflict. In a story about a massacre told by the son of people who were in Auschwitz during one of the biggest massacres in history, these scenes help provide an important, satirical viewpoint of war, unintended casualties and the real price paid, especially later, when the Phalangists knowingly and purposefully kill thousands of Palestinian refugees for revenge. I felt that the lack of glorified war scenes (or the inability to pull them off in a novel form) took away an important juxtaposition in the film and because there’s no music (you have to admit, that song is catchy), the graphic novel loses a big emotional element.

Since the pictures and dialogue in the graphic novel follow the film almost exactly, I feel like I’m left with a lesser text. I’ve often heard some people say “why read a book when you can watch the movie?” Of course, as English majors, we all know the books are better in 99.9% of cases. But what happens when the book comes after the award-winning movie? Well, why read the book, when you can watch the movie?

I’ll leave you with two additional clips from the movie (the waltz and the rocket scene) that the graphic novel tries to recreate, and comes close, but just quite can’t capture the effect I felt when I watched the pictures move to a stunning score juxtaposed with interviews in a way that makes for a more complete text in my opinion.

Look at the struggle for the gun. Listen to the music. It’s an amazing scene that the graphic novel just can’t recreate. And it also does a great job of overlaying interviews with the historical “footage” that is important to Folman’s story as someone trying to piece together the massacre he was a part of, but can’t remember.

Jump to about 2:45 and watch the way the rocket tracks slowly through the woods before they kill a kid. It’s amazing filmmaking.

Maybe I’m just being grumpy because I expected more from the graphic novel. I enjoyed reading it, but it felt like a lesser experience. For anyone who liked the graphic novel, I recommend checking out the movie, which you should be able to watch on YouTube.

Victimization in Exit Wounds

While reading the interview in the back of Exit Wounds, Modan’s discussion about victimization was particularly enlightening (p. 183).  She says that the Exit Wounds is about dropping the victim role, specifically for Israelis to stop playing that role so that they may move forward.  When read through the lens of victimization, the story takes on a deeper layer than the surface story of an estranged son meeting his father’s estranged lover and falling for her offers.  When we break down the various characters, it seems that they all embody the victim.  For instance, the lady in the morgue is very cheery, which is juxtaposed by her position as being the morgue receptionist.  Her defense is a particularly bothersome sunny disposition that we are not privy to seeing beneath.  She is nonchalant about death and to her everything is just a matter of course.  In other words, while Numi and Koby are freaking out about the fact that an unidentified body might be Gabriel and now they cannot be sure because he has been buried, the receptionist goes off to lunch and dismisses their emotional distraught-ness as nothing important.  Her defense mechanism is her impenetrable upbeat-ness, which is a sign that she is thoroughly entrenched in the victim role.  Instead of dealing with the facts of the bombings and bodies constantly moving in, she has become blind and untouchable to the atrocities around her.

Numi and Koby are both acting within their victim roles until the very end, when they lay such roles aside to be together.  Koby’s emotional distance is indicative of his victimization, specifically by his father.  When he does open up to Numi, because she has shown him kindness by getting him a perfect present that his father failed at, and they start to have sex, he overreacts to her joking comment, “Like father, like son” (p. 139), and leaves.  He is not confident enough to take her joke at face value.  Numi, on the other hand, plays the victim when it comes to her looks.  She is not beautiful and is awkwardly tall – in no way is she the typical or even celebrated female and because of this she has been victimized.  She is ready to assume that everyone believes her ugly, and does not want Koby to see her body (“Don’t look” (p. 136)).  Both Koby and Numi, then, are equally victims, only in different ways.

Gabriel is perhaps the more complex of the characters because throughout Exit Wounds we mistakenly think Gabriel has been a victim of a bus station bombing (probably by Palestinians, though this is not mentioned).  We find out throughout the course of the graphic novel that he has been the victimizer to both Numi and Koby. He victimized Numi by betraying her; Koby by not being a good father.  The link between Gabriel and the Palestinians is interesting because in a way I think Gabriel represents the Palestinians, though this link is more complex than a simple straight line.  If he does represent victimizers of Israel, but is also thought to be a victim of those victimizers, it would mean that Gabriel is a victim of himself, which I don’t think is necessarily wrong.  This would probably need to be thought out in more detail, and if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Finally, Koby sheds his emotional detachment and goes after Numi.  The many obstacles he faces (gate, high wall, dogs, Numi’s initial rejection) are ones that would have probably convinced him to give up if he still was still playing the victim.  Because he has finally shed that role, he is able to continue on.  Numi likewise sheds her victim role, and in fact is able to use her physique to save Koby, thus validating her untypical femaleness.  The happily-ever after ending takes place only because both Koby and Numi shed their victim roles thus giving them the capability of moving forward and being together.

Dystopia in Chicago

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.

A Politic of Anger? – Travis

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.

Santiago and Garcia Marquez

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?

It’s All A Dream?

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.

Stretch and text: In My Darkest Hour

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.

The Mythical Builder

While Greek and Roman themes are heavily referenced throughout this book, the most whimsical mythic icon appears to the left.  It is a section of the Cyclopean walls, still extant in Greece and Italy.  While not the circular face with two cut -out arcs of Asterios, the center stone in the middle column, middle row does mimic in style and ‘humanity’ the protagonists’ image and demeanor.

Almost top-heavy with dualities, Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp presents both Greek and Roman mythology (Polyp’s Greek father and Italian mother), the yin and yang of relationships (Asterios and Hana curled in bed together), and the contemporary paper verses scissors bilarity (cerebral architect and actual designer/builder).

Here’s the dichotomy of the plot:  In 1927, E.M. Forester wrote in Aspects of the Novel that the central suspense depends on the difference between flat and round characters and the believability that round characters must embody to produce tension, and hence, a book worth reading.  We have the story of an architect (with one effective eye) who never built any structures compared to  the Cyclopes race and members of a Tracian tribe of skillful architects who built the Cyclopean walls of “unhewn polygons, sometimes 20 or 30 feet in breadth”  (Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology).

Unnerving me further, after the Cyclopes were hurled into Tartarus, a prison of the underworld, they became followers of Zeus and made lightning bolts for him.

Here’s the punch line:  Forester also believes the protagonist often has to be sacrificed in order to end the book on the proper note of released tension.

The nuances and depths of this novel are many and the complicated layers provide a rich quest and odyssey.

Unimpressed

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.

Omar

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.

Commercialization and pop-culture in IMDH

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

IMDH: Gritty Realism

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.

A Duality that Fits

Being complete is such a weird notion. It has eleven different definitions, some referring to grammar and others mathematics. But when someone says it in reference to themselves, it’s a little harder to quantify. Does it mean they want to feel satisfied? Content? Happy? Or is it as simple as just feeling whole? As if they really lack nothing.

I just found it interesting how this story played with different themes of being complete. Like being born a pair, but not really. Before Asterios even realized that he was born a twin, he recognized a lack. Always looking over his shoulder and expecting…just something to be there. The knowledge that he was supposed to have an identical brother, rather than creating a sense of closure, only made an opening. Thoughts like, “Would he have been just like me? Better than me, worse than me” crowded in and he could never feel truly satisfied with anything he did.

I find it interesting that that writer introduced the Aristophanes treatise in Plato’s “Symposium”, although Mazzucchelli kind of left out that it is a speech about romantic love. Basically, Aristophanes put forth the idea that there is a special type of love that connects people, a soul mate. He goes on to say that there were once three genders: male, female and a combination of the two.  That these sexes in truth represented one’s soul and when the third gender split in half it created a mirror image of each. He thought that love was the search for the other half of one’s soul. Aristophanes also believed that this search for love showed a certain “lack”, as if being separated meant one was fated to die incomplete. Although, Mazzucchelli related through drawings of man’s drive to complete himself <Asterios in different modes of copulation> it can’t only be implied that his completion would be felt through a female. Maybe he was a fourth gender, his twin and the lives that would have played out had he been born alive.

This lack of completion follows through on a romantic level as well, with his wife Hana. The writer even has a blatant reason for why they were attracted to each other and why it didn’t work. At one point he even positions them in the extremely recognizable symbol of yin and yang. This Chinese philosophy explains how polar or seemingly opposite forces are interconnected but also interdependent. Asterios even comments about how well they fit together, how their lives just folded together so neatly.  But this “fit” couldn’t override the fact that the could barely communicate on the same level.

When the marriage breaks up Asterios is left floundering again, completely lost and still searching.

Duality and completion just kept battling each other right to the end.

Essence of Shoeness

Picking up on Jay’s excellent post, I was struck by the form vs. function argument made by Ignazio/Mazzucchelli.  It appear that Asterios = function and Hana = form or Asterios = Apollo and Hana = Dionysus.  Asterios is the practical one, as we see when he purchases the “essences of shoeness” in the “abstractions” section that begins the chapter (What happened to the functionality of numbers!!) mentioned by Jay. But Hana, as we see from Mazzucchelli’s drawings of her sculpture, is not necessarily so. She’s about form in her art.

You get the feeling that this is a doomed marriage, not because their differences which as the book begins, it is not certain they will be able to overcome, but because of randomness.  The section of the book that begins with an image of a clock and a screwdriver, presumably the clock he dismantled as a child, gives Ignazio’s thoughts on Asterios’ views on the Clockmaker theory of evolution as a grand design and Asterio’s preference for Greek deities because of the “random events of joy and tragedy that befall human beings.”

But his arguments that form vs. function is a duality rooted in nature (“abstractions” chapter) fails to take into account the utter randomness of everything in his life, including the asteroid that seals his relationship with Hana. He doesn’t hear the counter argument that randomness can create “superficial similarities that appear dualistic because we define them that way.”  For a man so skeptical about a supreme force in nature, his argument contradicts itself.

While opposites attract, it is surprising that they marry, but not surprising when she files for divorce.  They curl up as yin and yang on the bed, complementary opposites that interact to form a greater whole, after he tells her about the cameras he has installed to document if he is his Ignazio or if he is Asterio. While Asterio’s yin is about function, he has never built anything other than a tree house; Hana’s yang is always creating tangibles. The groundwork for friction is there if Astrios fails to acknowledge that the two halves of duality are equal, which he fails to do.

In one of my favorite passages from the book, he flashes back to when the essence of shoeness has left a blister on his foot. His memories of Hana, in all of her imperfect randomness, play across the top and bottom of the pages, while he pulls a puff of cotton from her ear with one of the three possessions he will save when his apartment catches fire – tweezers from a Swiss army knife, the ultimate functional item.  This is the scene that marks the beginning of his return to her, as he realizes that randomness has created a near perfect duality.

Visual Identity

In Asterios Polyp, Mazzuchelli uses visual motifs to characterize individuals. We have  seen similar devices used by other authors/artists but not to this extent.

Mazzuchelli uses  changes in dialogue boxes and in how characters are drawn to create visual identities. This is part of the.larger theme of the novel: that reality is in some ways an extension of the self. Hence each character is completely unique visually.

The End

The other day, I was riding the bus with a friend and the conversation turned to Wes Anderson. “I loved The Life Aquatic–at least, until the end,” my friend shared.

I was mildly shocked at this disavowal of one of my favorite movies. “How come?”

“It just ruined it for me,” she sniffed. “The movie should have ended five minutes earlier. It was just too over the top, too flashy, too loud…too unexpected.”

“Oh.” I thought over what she had said. “I used to agree with what you’re saying now, but the more I’ve thought about the film, the more I’ve realized how integral the end is to Anderson’s plot and what he’s exploring re. the framework of how we identify ourselves, the search for meaning and purpose, the cost of that search…I guess I think the ending is bittersweet, but not out of place in the slightest.”

That very same night, back in my apartment, I finished Asterios Polyp. As I processed the final pages, I swiftly realized my thoughts toward its ending were rather similar to my processing of Anderson’s comedy.

When that asteroid plummets towards earth, at first I was a bit shocked. Then I was amused–this is precisely how I used to finish off the stories I wrote in elementary school: with a bang, a flash, a conveniently placed atomic bomb–The End. Laziness aside, I was actually tapping into a long and respected literary convention. After all, similarly dire conclusions repeatedly seem to be the penultimate conclusions to all the problems of humanity’s own existence, regardless whether it’s a believer or a nonbeliever predicting the future (delusional utopian idealists aside, that is). I digress: the more I think about it, the more I think it would be a mistake to simply write off that asteroid in Asterios Polyp simply as a way to tie up loose plot threads.

Nor is it meant to be merely an ironic twist at the end of the narrative. “There are times when a beautiful image makes sense as good storytelling in ways that are not easily explained,” commented the author in an interview re. his artistic process. No, irony is too convenient, too cheap.

After all, this isn’t an unprecedented element in the plot. There is the slight matter of the titular character’s name, for starters. Just as importantly, and a bit like Steve Zissou’s opening encounter with the Giant Jaguar Shark, it takes a force of nature to shock Asterios (pun intended) into fresh action, early on in the story. That action is so very important throughout what happens next. And at least in my opinion, the action matters more than the causation (must be the humanist in me!) even as it is amplified and complicated through Mazzucchelli playing with huge meta-themes of freewill vs predestination via a long-lost twin, grecian myth, etc.

According to another friend of mine, Asterios Polyp is all about how we “order our lives according to particular structures,” certain frameworks of belief, different worldviews… I would agree; Mazzucchelli overtly plays with this by creating Asterios as an architect (more meta self awareness, of course!) And by the end, Asterios has engaged in a dramatic (perhaps even redemptive?) re-appraisal of the structures of his life. The resulting character growth is all the more poignant for its conclusion.

Yes, there are events that Asterios encounters that are far above and beyond his control. Call it fate, call it supernatural, call it nature–it matters not; in the end, “man knows not his days.” What does matter how Asterios conducts himself in the meantime–and it matters all the more for the uncertainty.

And yes, Mazzucchelli seems to think that we all have a choice in such conduct. Asterios is no Jimmy Corrigan–he is vastly more sympathetic and endowed with a great deal more agency.

Throughout the work, I think that Mazzucchelli posits that Asterios’ actions/structures do matter, both to himself and to the characters around him. I cannot help reading a very real sincerity–one that is, yes, bittersweet–in the character arc and in the ending.

Am I alone in this?

Drawing Philosophy

I was going to write this post about Asterios Polyp’s confused approach when it comes to philosophy. He sometimes subscribes to a structuralist/deconstructionist approach (dualisms prevade, to understand one thing “in a better light, understand the opposite”). Other times he admits things are more complicated, and goes with the sliding scale of situations and ideas that tend to dominate postmodern philosophy. While trying to figure out where Asterios discusses these things (a difficult task given the lack of page numbers, which make notes general guidelines), I noticed something pretty cool–Mazzucchelli (who I will refer to as “Maz” from here on out) puts a lot of work into drawing philisophical ideas.

I came onto this as I was trying to find specific pages and noticed it was easier to look for the image tied to the idea that passages themselves. For example, in one example our dead narrator writes “This desire to view the world through a filter–to superimpose a rational system on to its seeming randomness–is revealed in his own favorite ideation.” The images then take up most of the page. First an image of Asterios then one of him split into a mirrored two with internal and external on one side and factual and fictional on the other. This is followed two pages later by a similar image of him talking to a woman friend. The image is split in two as he discusses male vs female, positive and negative currents, right and left hemispheres of the brain. On the next page Asterios admits “…/that things/ aren’t so black and white-/-that in actuality/ possibilities exist/ along a continuum/ between the extremes.”   These images also highlight the idea of the philosophy. He begins lightly shaded and ends up darkly shaded, along a continuum, as he says each part of this sentence. Later when he dreams of it being more like a sphere, an image of a sphere appears.

In another instance Usrsala Major describes astrology, and some of the evidence she has to support it, and as John pointed out on the twitter, we have to turn the page, like reading the stars or a star chart.

Over and over, Maz uses images to actually illustrate philosophy. I know in some of the other books we could tie actions to the pictures that represent them, but this seems like something new. Maz’s constant attention to detail here helps bring us into the pages of the text by illustrating the complicated ideas people discuss. I’m no architecture student, but I’ve also noticed he tends to illustrate a lot of the architecture concepts, and I’m willing to bet the experience would be similar for someone better versed in architecture theory than critical and cultural studies theory.

Did anyone else notice places where the drawing of complex ideas takes place? Thoughts?

Color and Not

When I figuratively walk away from Asterios Polyp and ask myself what is the first thing I remember, I answer color, and lack thereof. My first tweets about this graphic novel were along the lines of “Does anyone else feel calm reading this work? Maybe it’s something about the colors…” Looking back at the book, I see so much white space, and what is colored is colored in faded yellows, purples, and washed out blues. It’s like I was looking at the story through a muted lens, and for whatever reason, this made me feel calmer about the work, even when meteors were crashing down in the pages.

Before I looked back at the work, I would have said that the all of the book was colored in the manner of muted hues. I would have said that every page was done in a similar palette to the next, nothing too jarring, nothing too saturated. But when I actually do look back at the pages, I find that that assessment is wrong. There are several portions of the book where the pages are drenched in color. Pages into the graphic novel, we have wall to wall purple as Asterios and others run down the stairs and as yellow fire trucks fight back yellow flames. No, there’s not the eye-gouging red and dripping blue, but color dominates the page in a way that I didn’t immediately call to mind.

The next saturated segment tells us Hana’s story. The pages are soaked in red, with the exceptions of the page literally being folded back to show us Asterios and Hana talking in the present, against the background of her past. I like Lindsay’s assessment of Hana and Asterios as complimentary colors, red and blue respectively, and I do believe that works in regards to these pages as well.

Hana’s often colored with red. From glimpses into her life story (as shown mostly by the red pages), we know that Hana is quiet, if not shy, and prone to avoid the spotlight either by it literally not being shined on her by her family or by choice as we see her avoid speaking engagements. As her “flower” name implies, Hana still has a thirst for life and in enjoyment for it, while Asterios is shown as seeing the world in dichotomies.

At first I thought where Hana can see the world saturated with color (like red), Asterios would have more binary color choices, which makes me first literally think of black and white. But, as the graphic novel (and the beginning of my post) shows you, the graphic novel operates in muted colors, seemingly negating my neatly packaged color metaphor. However, I still think it could apply because instead of trying to look for the world through Asterios as being just black and white, I see it rather as being pages of white and color, the absence of color and then the presence. Much of the graphic novel operates in colors portioned against consuming white space.

An example of this can be seen early on, following the “Here’s your coffee, Professor” panels. Hana is shown at the bottom of this page awash in red shadow. She’s etched onto the background, her portion of the panel blending into the page with no clear ending between her and the white of the page. Contrasting her is Asterios, shown in hard lines of blue. His portion of the panel is clearly defined; not blending into the page, although Hana’s red encroaches on his neat lines. While Hana is saturated with red, Asterios is still a practice in binaries, defined by the areas where his harsh blue lines take up space and the white areas where the lines do not.

~Kelley