Author: agill7

Reflexivity in Maus II

From what I’ve read on this blog and from our class discussion on Tuesday, it seems that everyone is (rightfully) fascinated with the “meta-narration” in Maus II, and I’d like to respond to the commentary we’ve built so far.

Dayneé had a great point about Spiegelman’s reflexive moments as a filibuster, and I agree that they provide a context for Vladek’s story. We discussed in class what happens when Spiegelman breaks the fourth wall on page 41 (the reader is implicated and made hyperaware of the book in their hands,) but I think that moment also aligns the reader with the author. We’re put in the same temporal context as Spiegelman in that moment, and we are reminded that we are not experiencing Vladek’s suffering alongside him, but are perceiving it retrospectively alongside Art (now a character in his own work.)

Considering this in terms of the layered narrative that Emma brought up, if the core of the story is Vladek’s experiences, the secondary layer is Vladek’s dictation to Art, and the third and final layer is present-day Art at his desk, then this reflexive moment pulls the reader from where we became comfortable at the core and puts us definitively in the third layer, as a reminder that while we’d like to imagine we can sympathize with Vladek, we can only truly understand it from the perspective of the present-day historian.

Like what Lauren mentioned in her post, Art frequently refers to his trouble with drawing events or places he’s never seen. He chooses to research and interview extensively to get his images as close to reality as possible, for fear of speaking for Vladek instead of revealing it through this cataclysmic medium. This dedication to the actuality of the event reinforces that earlier reflexivity, to guide us away from appropriating Vladek’s suffering.

Disney With Fangs – Grant Morrison on We3

After some extensive searching, I found this archived interview with Grant Morrison in which he discusses the ideas behind We3. The most interesting part, to me, was when he started talking about his feelings about animal rights. Morrison claims that if humanity wants to create a noninclusive identity – i.e., everything that is human can be defined by everything that is not animal – then humanity has to understand animalkind in a way that isn’t concerned with animal cruelty and the mistreatment of nature. That, to me, is the strongest theme in the graphic novel.

Gods’ Man

Lynd Ward’s Gods’ Man made me consider the reading experience in a new way. Instead of the continuous, forward motion I was used to while reading literature, I found myself flipping back, re-reading, and dwelling longer on a given page while skipping quickly through others. I became hyper-aware of how often I was flipping the pages and how I was constructing a story out of the images presented to me. The story, it seemed, came out of the image’s position between the previous and next image. The context created the story. When reading books that aren’t graphic novels, I read the page, processed the information and moved on to the next one. Then, repeated as necessary. The story in text-based novels was continuous and unconcerned with page sequence. The pages were more of a mode of transport for the story rather than a storytelling technique, as it was with Gods’ Man. My multi-directional experience with reading Gods’ Man made this previous method of reading seem laborious and menial in contrast.

The reading from Scott McCloud’s book also talked about the unique experience of reading graphic novels. His discussion of closure and the “staccato rhythm of unconnected moments” applies to the reading of Gods’ Man as well, but to a larger degree. Where McCloud was discussing how the gutter between panels creates a jarring movement in the story, in Gods’ Man, this effect is multiplied because the space expands from a few centimeters to an entire page.  The space is also coupled with the action of turning the page, so the revelation of the story is even more broken. However, as McCloud notes, this dynamic allowed the reader to become a collaborator, which was an entirely pleasurable experience for me.