Privacy and Lines in Lucky

Gabrielle Bell plays with tension between image and words, detailed thick lines and sparse thin lines throughout Lucky.  “I was able to get everything returned, except for one bag of chips, because it had gotten crushed under one of the soda bottles,” Bell captions above her smiling and cheek-stuffed face as she eats the aforementioned potato chips (31).  Earlier in the panels, she complains about this task with eyebrow lines that are angry, downward, never-quite-intersecting dashes, in humorous tension with her later indulgence in potato chips that she might not have eaten without the circumstances about which she complains—being asked to provide chips for the students that she teaches/tutors (Bell 31).  During scenes of a roommate conflict and poll over the removal of a painting and addition of furniture, Bell has few crease lines in her clothes, as she explains, “Tom wrote some ironic remarks on it and I wrote, diplomatically, ‘I like the table and the painting’” (27).  She put the table there in earlier panels, using this “diplomacy” to make fun of self-interest and its various rationalizations.  She can “reveal” a little about herself, poke fun at herself a bit, and still maintain privacy in the tensions that her thin an thick lines create in panels that depict alternately dot-eyes and detailed eyes.  She allows readers to look at her through the comical interplay of image and text, but advises them not to assume presumptuous understanding of its meanings.

Few creases show when she spends time with her brother and his friends; she even smiles, albeit in a minute line (Bell 39)!  The narrative brings up past family hangovers amidst overwhelmingly multitudinous rain lines, contrasting with the scarcity of lines that make up her brother’s “background” when she labels his clothing. The rainy foreground is an onslaught of wormlike lines mediating between reader and characters, invoking the sound-effect of hearing dialogue imperfectly through pouring rain.  As in the scarcity of lines in the modeling scene in which she turns away from viewers, Bell considerably reduces the lines that comprise the background when describing her brother (Bell 42).  Readers must look at him and reader her words, without obsessing over his background (literally his setting or figuratively his past): a gesture of individuation outside of simplified psychoanalysis.  As Bell assists Tom in moving throughout the panels, she has enough creases to suggest that she is in motion and literally weighed down, muscles tense (Bell 15, 41).  Practicing yoga and perceiving herself as the center of uncomfortable attention, Bell’s eyes (or eye in profile) go wide ate one point, seemingly in response to painful stretching (72).  Throughout those panels, her face shows gradations of detail, and her eyes are quite prominent at times (68, 70, 74).  The instructor suggests reasons for Bell’s flexibility, and her eyes sharpen in detail, a warning to readers to not make such a mistake in explaining what Lucky may present as “random” or without answer via voyeurism.  From the center of the panels in which she practices yoga, Bell moves towards corners and sometimes just off-center in later panels in which she walks and takes the subway (74-75).  While the memoir as a medium centers one person, Bell makes a gesture of embarrassment at this self-centering in these panels.  Background is still sparse, inscrutable in a sense, or left to the imposition of readers’ imaginaries.  “The more stress Bell implies, the more creases appear in her clothes, accentuating her joints and the discomfort of motion amidst a sense of stasis and monotony throughout the narrative: the panels span a relatively short period of time, segmented as vignettes, and Bell eventually comments on how much/little has changed (42).

Modeling at the end of one set of vignettes, Bell faces readers and gradually turns away (42).  Her eyes go from invisible to readers to visible in a moment of unusual detail, followed by more minimalist dots and lines common to the majority of the panels in Lucky.  In her first modeling scene, her face is visible to readers, but her mouth line disappears in at least two panels (10).  Thinner lines in her first modeling scene become thicker lines in this latter modeling scene.  More overtly ambivalent (albeit dichotomized) commentary on her own dialogue and narration accompany this shift from thinner to thicker lines.  Inserting surface-level friction with earlier narration, Bell writes back to her previous, disciplined recounting of quotidian goings-on, as if to question what level of minutiae, how many lines, what precision in paraphrasing a face or a sentence are necessary, when so little changes in her life outwardly to readers and perhaps so much internally, to the narrator. “I thought maybe in the past month so much had changed that I’d become another person, someone who doesn’t mind modeling.  But no, I’m the same person who hated modeling a month ago” (Bell 42).  Seeming to resent her own foregoing of private reflection for a moment, Bell turns away from the reader, her lines most clustered in her hair and the background reduced to a few contiguous lines (42).  Setting can become omnipresent in a narrative, and Bell seems to question this reliance on the centrality of setting and the expectation that internal changes in a character will be externalized through shifts in setting.  If readers want a rich background, they have to conceptualize it based on sparse lines; if they want to see her emotion in relation to setting, they have to consider why she turns away from their gaze.  The thicker, painstaking lines in her hair seem to laugh at the reader a bit; if they can divine the extent of her life changes in strands of hair rather than a smile or a frown, they perhaps take her readability too much for granted.  Who wouldn’t turn away once in a while?