I also found an interview with Nate Powell featured on tfaw.com for this week. While a lot of the interview is focused on the relationship between the two step-siblings featured in the book and how people/families handle mental illness, the interview briefly touches on Powell’s inspirations (for the novel and in life), his hobbies, and his future plans within the industry. Powell mentions that his older brother has a developmental disability, and how he had volunteered with the developmentally disabled for many years before writing this book, but he is very clear when he says that he didn’t take these things as an inspiration for Swallow Me Whole.
Like some of my classmates, I was really captivated by this story’s subject matter of schizophrenia, delusions, hallucinations, and the like. I was a little shocked at first to hear that Powell himself doesn’t suffer from mental illness, but it made more sense to find out that he had been working with mentally disabled adults for some time. I thought he did a great job at capturing something that so many find impossible to communicate. Since I don’t suffer from these conditions myself, I can’t attest to whether or not he did them justice. But I can say that I did learn how terrifying, disorienting, and disruptive it can be to suffer from a mental illness.
For my web search, I wanted to find some other pieces of fiction that attempt to do the same thing as Powell did here–fictional accounts of a mental illness or condition that try to give the reader/audience a glimpse at what it’s like to live with it. One I kept running in to over and over again in my searches was I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb. Lamb’s novel is supposed to be quite long (most publishings seem to be between 800 and 900 pages) but like Swallow Me Whole, it tells a story of two siblings, one of whom is schizophrenic and the other has his own emotional problems to boot. I imagine if, like me, you were really compelled by Nate Powell’s gripping representations of mental illness in Swallow Me Whole, this book by Lamb is worth checking out.
However, the one I’ve read and can personally vouch for is The Whalestoe Letters by Mark Z. Danielewski. The Whalestoe Letters are actually a part of Danielewski’s larger work House of Leaves, which is a trip in and of itself. But the Whalestoe Letters stand alone as a deeply moving account of living with mental illness, and the way illness can affect families. Like Swallow Me Whole, it’s also fictional, but somehow Danielewski seems to draw us right into the mind of a seriously disturbed person. It’s a short piece (much shorter than Lamb’s novel) so look into it if you get a chance. (You can explore it some through the “Look Inside!” feature for free on Amazon, but I don’t think this does it total justice).
What Happened to Ruth?
To add to what ekimo said about the ending, I was very confused about the ending as well. Frankly, I was a little annoyed about it. But, I have to admit, the ending kind of drove me much more into the story and quite suddenly too. As soon, as Ruth kicks her parents out of the house, she goes into this hallucinated state and then she drifts out of reality. In a way, she takes the reader with her. I thought that was a nice technique on Nate Powell’s part.
Yet, the actual plot becomes absent, and I’m left wondering about the purpose of a lot of the back-story. Still, there is one little clue I noticed regarding the build up to the ending. While I was reading the ending I asked myself, when was the last time Ruth had taken her meds? There are a couple moments through the middle section of the story where she is taken her meds and then the pills are just kind of thrown out of the story. Perhaps, the author wants us to look for little clues like that, which are causing Ruth to lose control.
I also feel like the Grandmother’s hallucinations, her random comments, were kind of playing a part in Ruth’s hallucinations. I also think Perry, Ruth, and the Grandmother were almost feeding off each other’s psychosis. It seems like Perry’s hallucinations come to a screeching halt. He takes a stand and decides to step back into reality. I always felt like his illness is much more minimal than Ruth’s. But, I think the ending suggests that the author wants his readers to reread the story and find more clues in order to discover what happened to Ruth.
Interview with Nate Powell
I found this really interesting interview with Nate Powell. It’s in 4 parts, but well worth the read. He discusses a vast number of topics from moving around the country to music, and eventually talks about Swallow Me Whole. Apparently he basically dreamt the entire concept in one night, which seemed really intense to me. He also mentions the movie Donnie Darko coming out right after his dream and having weird connections with that movie. Most prominent to me was his discussion of gender within the novel and how he went about critiquing that. He also talks a lot about working in the mental health and human services field, which gives him a lot of credibility in my mind. This interview really gives a great background to where Powell was coming from while writing Swallow Me Whole and brings up a lot of interesting issues and questions that I had not thought of previously.
Creatively Crazy?
When I was reading Swallow Me Whole it just reminded me of the connotation or stereotype of those suffering from mental illnesses as having some sort of transient power to converse with this bigger than life artistic inspiration or talent. Personally I think great art comes from the overcoming of great struggles, but who knows? Here are two different articles with two viewpoints on the matter:
http://www.findingoptimism.com/blog/reviews/art-by-the-famous-mentally-ill/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-healing-arts/200901/art-and-mental-illness-stop-the-insanity
Swallow me whole
When I started reading the first few pages, I had no idea what was going on. As I thought about it, I realize that may be the point; Ruth and Perry may not have been able to make sense of their earlier memories and hallucinations. I feel like my confusion was a reflection of theirs and was intentional.
As I continued reading, I started to at least understand the plot and the characters. I really like a lot of the random, unique parts of the book that weren’t necessary part of the story, like the small illegible writing, the representation of darkness, and the things filling the gutters. It was very captivating.
I agree with the person who said it was the most engrossing novel so far, I really enjoyed it. It kept me interested and the visual aspect was very appealing.
Small Text and Fuzzy Timelines
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.
Swallowed Whole
Whoa. What an interesting novel….
I read the review that “ekimo” wrote and I would definitely agree that “Ruth doesn’t fight it, while Perry does.”
I loved how many full-page spreads there were in this novel too — they were all very, very memorable, especially with Powell’s fantastic use of black and white imagery. The pill bottle alone in a page full of black? Wonderful.
Lastly, I’d be lying if I said that this wasn’t the most engrossing novel so far. I really felt part of the world they were in (or thought they were in) and seriously began to hear insects by the end of it XD
A bit hard to swallow
I’m afraid I’m not completely sure what to make of Swallow Me Whole, particularly the ending, so I apologize for my subpar review. There were a number of things I saw that I felt were important in some way, but couldn’t grasp beyond that.
I noticed that while both Ruth and Perry appear to be schizophrenic, Ruth doesn’t fight it, while Perry does. Ironically, or perhaps because of this, help is sought out for Ruth while Perry’s issues are simply brushed off.
Though it’s implied that the characters experience hallucinations, I’m hesitant to say that none of it was real. Near the beginning the grandmother is able to perceive somehow that Ruth also has visions, and later when they talk, she states “…if you call for it, it’ll be there.”
Some of her grandmother’s issues seem to be “passed on” to Ruth, as she has her epiphany shortly after her grandmother’s death, and looking at her face despite trying not to. From this point onward it’s event after event until the end; her outburst at school, her parents finding out that she stole the frog from the museum, etc. Throughout all this she’s able to justify all her behavior—to herself—until she is “swallowed whole” as it were.
On that note, Ruth’s visions are mostly manifested in hordes of insects, and her grandmother’s issues seem to be represented by that adorable little pill-monster thing, which is consistent with the statement that her hallucinations are medication-induced. At one point the monster is depicted as swallowing the insects, maybe showing that Ruth’s condition persists, despite medication. It could also signify that the nature of her issues has changed, so as to become more problematic. So perhaps Perry’s feeding of the frog-vision at the end is an indication that another “passing on of issues” has occurred?
Exit Wounds exited too soon.
While seeing all of the other students’ tracing projects was insightful (I really liked each novel got a good representation, so I learned something new about each of them), I wish we had some more time for discussion on Exit Wounds this week. There were quite a few things that we didn’t get to examine with this novel, and it would have been cool to talk a little more about Modan’s style. For example, someone brought up in their tracing project how Modan masterfully captures emotion in her drawings of facial expressions. I thought this was so true in this novel, and I’m glad someone brought it up. One example is on page 77, where Numi is staring at Kobi from the corners of her eyes…Modan is able to capture this perfectly, with such simple line drawings. I wonder if anyone else noticed any other great examples of this?
Overall we focused a lot on the story and less on the style, and I think that at the end we all just decided that it had a crappy ending (I disagree with this, by the way–maybe she’s too open-ended about what happens between Koby and Numi, but she did clear up the story’s big mystery about what happened to Gabriel). I wish we could have talked more about how Modan told the story–why she included such a graphic sex scene, yet left out any real graphic violence, for example. Also, we could have looked at Modan’s use of humor–sometimes black humor–in her story, and what implications this might have.
Exit Wounds
I though that it was really interesting in class on Thursday how so many people had different views on the ending of this novel. Many of the students had strong opinions on how they viewed the ending to be ambiguous or not fitting to the rest of the storyline and how that made them dislike the book. Others argued that they thought it was a fitting ending and that it was a nice way to finish this book since Koby and Nuni were on this journey together were both characters knew little to nothing about what path might take them where. Personally I wonder if the ending of this book just strikes a nerve because there is no finality to the ending. I think that since this book was a little opaque during certain moments the ending just further layers on the uncertainty of the journey these two characters are on, I liked it.
Weekly Round up – Exit Wounds
What I found most interesting about this week’s discussion of Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds was how divided so many of us were on several aspects of the novel, from meanings to whether we enjoyed it or not. In particular, on Thursday we talked about what we thought about the ending of the book. I have to admit, I was not really a huge fan of the ending myself, I felt like it was really abrupt and left me no feeling of closure. However, some people didn’t agree with me and genuinely enjoyed the ambiguity of the final panels. There was also discussion this week on whether this story was a story about love, a story about war and politics or a story about family. To be honest, I think it was a story about all of these things, which is why the story may have seemed a bit jumpy like Michael mentioned in his blog. At times it really was a little difficult to follow. I think the interview with Modan on the blog where she talks about her inspiration for the book and her experience in Israel really helped to bring an understanding to combining the aspects of love, war, and family together though in this novel.
Exit Wounds is the North American graphic novel debut from one of Israel’s best-known cartoonists, Rutu Modan. She has received several awards in Israel and abroad, including the Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem four times, Young Artist of the Year by the Israel Ministry of Culture and is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation.
Exit Wounds received praise from comic book artist Joe Sacco, who called it “a profound, richly textured, humane, and unsentimental look at societal malaise and human relationships and that uneasy place where they sometimes intersect.” Writing in The New York Times, Douglas Wolk compared her style to that of Herge’s Tintin books, “her characters’ body language and facial expressions, rendered in the gestural ‘clear line’ style of Hergé’s Tintin books, are so precisely observed, they practically tell the story by themselves”.
Time magazine’s Lev Grossman named it one of the Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2007, ranking it at #8. It also won the 2008 Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Novel.
Wolk, Douglas. Holiday Books – Comics, The New York Times, 2 December 2007.
Grossman, Lev (December 9, 2007). “Top 10 Graphic Novels – 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007”. Time. ISSN 0040-718X. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/top10/article/0,30583,1686204_1686244_1692196,00.html.
Exit Wounds BEST OF 2007!
I, myself, wasn’t a very big fan of this comic out of all that we have read this semester. I didn’t care for the drawing style and the story didn’t intreage me much like the others did. When I looked up the comic book online an article popped up saying that this book was rated 5 out of 10 as the best of 2007. I was shocked about that so I opened it up and read a little on it. The short statement that gave the reasoning to why the comic was best of 07 wasn’t that insightful I thought. This is what it said, “A quiet exploration of family in the face of Tel Aviv terrorism told through deceptively simple styling. The most “novelistic” of the books on this list. ” I realized later that there was a page before that gave more insight to the book and better reasoning and got me to see why this was such a great comic. I guess in the end I’m just not one for modernism.
A blog by Rutu Modan
I was curious to see what else Rutu Modan had done and my searching led me to a blog she wrote for a while for The New York Times. The blog consists of comic strips that aren’t much like Exit Wounds. Most are snapshots of different situations and life and for the most part funny. One that I particularly enjoyed is titled Queen of the Scottish Fairies which tells a story about a young boy who enjoys wearing a skirt. There is something of Fun Home in this, and I found it very funny.