Swallow Me Whole, while unlike any of the other graphic narrative we have read so far this semester, is extremely reminiscent of another graphic novel chronicling mental illness called In My Darkest Hour. IMDH is a portrait of a bipolar man as he goes through a normal day; normal including multiple flashbacks and hallucinations. I saw a lot of similar conventions used in Swallow Me Whole that appear in IMDH, such as the non-linear storyline and panels/pages where much of the image is obscured. Granted these two works are attempting to depict different mental disorders, but on the whole they have the similar task of trying to represent a type of altered reality narratively and graphically. As I said before one of the conventions for representing the reality of a character with a mental disorder is to have some part of the page be unclear or concealed. Interestingly, this plays out in SMW most of the time as obscured text. We run into everywhere: text bubbles in the background too tiny to read, or text so squiggly and loopy that it almost looks like it’s covering itself up. I think this has two effects, one is that we get the sense that Ruth (and maybe to a lesser extent Perry, though he isn’t explored nearly as in depth as his sister) is unable to be heard by or make herself understood to other people, as with the very literally case of her mother not being able to hear her from behind the refrigerator door because she is hard of hearing. The other is that the world around Ruth and Perry isn’t always intelligible to them, as we see when Ruth is in class and her teachers text balloons get smaller and smaller until they become the background buzz that so often accompanies Ruth’s hallucinations of the cicadas.
The other convention, the non-linear timeline, is one that I’m only mostly sure exists within this book. I inferred from the changes in the length of Ruth’s hair and facial features every now and then that we were jumping between time frames. However, I was confused at times whether or not we really were proceeding in a linear fashion despite the fact that at some points Ruth looks younger/the same age than/as at the beginning. Like when she’s talking to Perry and asks if he can believe that just a year ago Pogey and his friends were beating them up and now they’re dating; in the future scene where she’s talking about them getting beat up she actually appears younger than the scene where she and her brother are actually getting beat up. I couldn’t tell if this was just the art throwing me off because the character’s visualization wasn’t uniform throughout, or if maybe the timeline was meant to be confused on purpose due to Ruth’s supposed problems with perception. Whether or not the timeline was linear or not, the fact that I’m even asking the questions says that Powell succeeded in depicting a narrative, a reality, where it’s very hard to ever tell what exactly is going on. In fact, most of the scenes seem to beg questions from the reader like “why is this happening? when is this happening? is this even real?” which are probably questions Ruth and Perry asked themselves at least once or twice.
This is a great opening shot at what makes Swallow Me Whole so challenging. As you say, I think we’re meant to be confused; Powell is really trying to get us to experience the world in the same way as Ruth. And you point out several specific examples of this, like the text that dissolves into illegible squiggles. I think you’re right that Powell uses obscuration (obscuration?) effectively. There are a few key scenes where the angle of the page is askew and we’re seeing things as if we had fallen down, a great way to show the imbalance of Ruth’s perceptions.