Life: A Palindrome

Life is a palindrome: a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backwards as forwards. 

In Special Exits, author Joyce E. Farmer chronicles the palindromic nature of dying. In moments of weighty transition, direct language can make the symptoms of a transition more acute. Language can put too much pressure on the transition causing it to feel too real, too human. Farmer shows the irreplaceable function of humor in these difficult transitionary periods where it functions as a veil, or a band-aid, for the emotional symptoms that transition often induces. In veiling these symptoms with humor, we are enabled to move toward a stage of acceptance and surrender.

What I'm calling, "band-aid-humor,"is most frequently used by the character Lars in Special Exits. Lars, as a man with values from the early 20th century, uses band-aid-humor to soften harsh realities and as a way to reinforce his masculinity. Maintaining masculinity requires band-aid-humor as it allows for emotion to be ignored or more often, implied as opposed to explicitly stated. Lars consistently upholds his masculinity, exhibiting what Hemingway referred to as "grace under pressure." 

The Rodney King Riots are in full force, in section 5, when Lars calmly states, "I've locked up all the doors but we can't stop anyone who really wants to come in." There is a humorous element to this in that locking the doors of ones' house is a regular, daily safety measure. Instead of boarding the windows or arming himself with a baseball bat, Lars appears quite relaxed, even poised. He has one hand atop Rachels' while the other rests idly on his knee. Rachel, expressing fear, replies "I'm scared, Lars." In a perfect performance of grace under pressure, he simply and elegantly states, "Yes. But we've lived a long time," applying a deadpan band-aid to the dangerous riot just outside their doors.

After he has been diagnosed with lung cancer, Lars uses band-aid-humor to veil the emotional discomfort of newly developed physical disabilities. On page 165, Laura stands at the edge of Lars' bed with a reticent look on her face as she holds a large box of "Adult Disposable Pants." Lars, having anticipated this transition, cuts Laura off and says "it took fifty-five years to make the turn around...since I diapered you!" Though we know this is a troublesome moment for Lars, as Laura earlier says "there's no way to gently break this too you," Lars shows no emotion. Farmer's illustrations and detailed pacing, much like in real life, don't require straightforward expressions as the humbling and awkward feelings of the characters are implied.

Special Exits, in and of itself, is band-aid-humor, applying difficult but funny anecdotes of an adult child losing their elderly parents. Farmer honestly, delicately, and humorously depicts a transition (for both parent and child) into old age and death. The graphic novel comes full circle when Ching, the antagonistic cat, begins to love Laura on page 200. In the final frame, Laura uses band-aid-humor as she yells, "Dad! Dad! Can you see this?!" as Ching finally jumps into her arms.

Mother's Urn: Memoir in Dust

An urn is a vessel or receptacle generally used to hold the ashes of a cremated person. As cremations are consistent with the size and tactile features of dust, the title of Kalamity J's graphic novel, Mother's Urn: Memoir in Dust, implies that the bound, physical graphic memoir symbolizes an urn and the contents symbolize dust, or ashes of the dead.

Mother's Urn retains content within the pages with an all- encompassing true black backdrop. The black backdrop seems simultaneously contained while suggesting a limitless repetition of patterns. Blackness leads to more blackness. This reminds me very much of my conception of space; a most vast and minimally diverse expanse.

The physical qualities of the memoir such as the consistent black back drop and hectic multi-faceted illustrations coerce the writing onto the page and parallel a snow ball effect theme. The drawings are comprised of many components with variable colors. There is a certain urgency present in the gesture of the illustrations that mirrors the complex emotional narration. The combination convey the gravity of text and subtext well.

Anxiety in Are You My Mother?

Reading Are You My Mother was an acutely profound experience for me. Bechdel's cyclical and spiraling narration and the similarities between her mother and my own, caused a perhaps hyper empathetic reaction. The cerebral and the emotional cyclically merge and divide, as she brings us intimately into her relationships with Donald Winnicott, Virginia Woolf, and Alicia Miller. All of these fictional relationships become transitional objects, they provide comfort with theory, bridging the gap between Bechdel's psychic conception of her maternal relationship and the external reality of the relationship.

Anxiety is a central theme in Are You My Mother. Anxiety is a survival mechanism in the brain that signals danger. This danger signal causes a reaction that is often referred to as "fight or flight." For people with heightened anxiety, normal or non-threatening situations may be perceived as dangerous or at the very least difficult to predict, eliciting a fight or flight response. Bechdel regularly chooses flight, or avoidance, often anticipating an uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking situation and attempting to prevent it before it even happens. In both Fun Home and Are You My Mother we see that Bechdel is a severely anxious child this is particularly evident in her childhood diary where she obsessively signs over her words with a symbol that means "I think," as a precautionary measure against writing an untruth which could lead to punishment or alienation. Bechdel explains this compulsion as "an attempt to ward off evil from the people I was writing about... By far the most heavily obliterated word is 'I'" (49).

Bechdel uses the framework provided by Winnicott, Woolf, Freud, and Miller to reclaim her "I." We see an example of this on page 55. The perspective is straight forward and the light in the frame illuminates only Bechdel, as if she is watching herself as an omniscient being. Books and her teddy bear, the literal transitional object of her childhood, rest directly above her head, emphasizing their importance. These objects represent stability as they are constant, unchanging, and reliable. Bechdel cannot betray the books as she might a person; she does not need to "ward of evil"/anxiety when it comes to these literary relationships unlike her real relationships where people are impermanent. This impermanence and unpredictability in her external relationships seems to cause Bechdel to constantly to "obliterate the I" out of fear of upsetting those in her life and become unlovable.

The fear of being unlovable and abandoned causes Bechdel to seek her birth mother as well as mother figures in her relationships, upholding the title Are You My Mother? At the end of the memoir, on page 286, we see Bechdel as a child playing "the cripple game" with her mother. The "cripple game" is a metaphor  for Bechdel's anxiety. Bechdel is lying on the floor, her mother says "Alison, get off the floor!" to which she responds "I can't, I'm crippled!" Bechdel cites this "as the moment my mother taught me to write," signifying the transcendent nature of writing as the precise pathway out of fear, as an infallible mechanism to understand and make meaning.

Fun Home

Allison Bechdel's graphic memoir, Fun Home, reads rather phlegmatically. Bechdel seems to react to life with the same stoicism she does in reaction to her father's death. The unambiguous narration and drawings allow the story to stand on its own. The reader is never led into a reaction, there is no unnecessary psuedo-suspenseful foreshadowing, nothing hyper emotional, no appeals to the reader, no real surprises. In this tactful lucidity, Bechdel establishes herself as a reliable narrator.

Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel incorporates various points of view, using her father and mother's letters as well as passages from books and her childhood diary to fortify her truth and narration. In a similar way one uses quotations and analyzes them in a literary paper, these moments of insight serve as "proof" that Bechdel then puts pressure on in order to make meaning.

On page 211, Bechdel includes a letter from her father that she receives shortly after telling her parents she is a lesbian. In this letter her father writes, "but then, who are cop outs for? Taking sides is rather heroic, and I am not a hero. What is really worth it?" In the following frame, Bechdel is shown reading the letter while interacting minimally with her new friends. She appears absolutely absorbed in analyzing her father's words. Bechdel shows how she uses her literary analysis skills to uncover the/a truth about her father when she writes in the narration box, "what, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Dad's thought about my thought about him, and his thought about my thoughts about his thoughts about me?" (Bechdel 2012). Here, Bechdel's thought process is anxious and investigatory. The Bechdel family dynamic excludes any space for direct dialogue.

Fun Home is, in fact, an investigation. Everything in Bechdel's family goes unsaid forcing Bechdel to read between the lines and take note of what the unspeakable. Bechdel investigates a sort of familial crime scene, in which she must use evidence (letters, pictures, books) to piece together a comprehensible family story in order to understand her identity as an adult. The cooccuring Watergate scandal parallels Bechdel's own process of inquiry as Fun Home impeaches, or calls into question the integrity, validity, and conduct of the father.

Lucky

In the graphic memoir, "Lucky," Bell uses seemingly trivial moments from her life to allude to concepts with greater meaning. Bell does this artfully by leading the reader from an external circumstance, in which she often appears dejected and skeptical, into a moment of interior realization.

On page 9, Bell depicts herself in conversation with an art professor whose eyes are cast away from her while he motions her towards an empty chair. The empty chair alludes to ideas of space and the occupation of space. This metaphor is extended further when Bell writes, "imagine sitting inside a box exactly the size and shape of your body," suggesting a consideration not only occupation of a physical manifestation of space but how the body functions as a space in which the mind is permanently occupant. Bell also seems to be thinking about specifically female space and occupation here. A male figure of authority is deciding the space she is meant to occupy and precisely how she is meant to occupy the space. The professor asks, "now can you turn your head in the opposite direction," to which Bell, resisting his direction, replies "well, I'd like to but I'm afraid if I keep it like that it will cut off the circulation in my neck. And I'm like to get brain damaged." Bell is illustrated with a slight smile and with her eyebrows turned up in amusement, suggesting that while this may be a literal concern of comfort for Bell, her response also functions as a form of resistance against a heteropatriarchal society that designates female spaces and how women function within them.

Throughout her graphic memoir, Bell struggles to find work, often leading her back into art modeling. Bell seems to be commenting on the double bind of insufficient finance with a lack of justly compensating and/or meaningful work. In the fifth frame, Bell shows herself crying, curled into herself in a corner of a room filled with objects, showing the emotional and mental consequences women face when objectified. Bell, playing upon a relatable feeling of impatience and annoyance, underscores her loathe of modeling (and perhaps, of our heteropatriarchal society) in the sixth frame when she writes, "This line isn't moving! Argh! I hate this! ... Wait a minute, I'm not modeling, hey, this is kind of fun!" Throughout history and certainly in the present, this double bind often forces women into work of and relating to the female (and generally feminine) body, and is systemically sustained by devaluing women, the gender gap in the dollar, and constant maintenance of a corrupt gender binary.

This feminist narration continues throughout the graphic memoir as Bell often depicts herself with men attempting to problem solve her or for her. On page 64, Bell is shown having lunch with Andy. While Bell prompts Andy into advice giving, his solution that "it's much better not to hang to it so much," is abstract and reiterates generally male notions of strength and independence, "it means you have to rely on your own inner resources." In an attempt to help Bell, Andy then takes her to a yoga class with a revered male instructor. The instructor pushes Bell to do a handstand and is shown physically supporting Bell, but despite his "support," but Bell falls none the less. The instructor then takes it upon himself to validate Bell but with (karmic) qualifications when he says, "for example, this lady here... she accomplished in forty seconds what took me forty years to learn! But maybe she was a yogi in her past life" (73). Bell is then shown with arms crossed and an angry face implying contempt of the male>female dynamic.

The Impostor's Daughter

Laurie Sandell's use of accessible language in her graphic novel, The Impostor's Daughter, allows for Sandell to appear as a reliable narrator, be it of her own story. By using accessible language, Sandell juxtaposes herself with her father, who touts his unearned degrees and uses language to manipulate those around him. This juxtaposition implies that Sandell is not manipulating the reader and that she is, as the cover of the book states, writing "A True Memoir."

By including the childhood drawings of her father, Sandell further legitimizes her story as well as her stance. The fathers narcissism is illustrated by Sandell in early childhood with his extremely large head that occupies the majority of the space in the drawings. Sandell, now an adult, is literally illustrating the transformation in her relationship to her father by depicting him true to scale. In her adult depictions, Sandell no longer aggrandizes her father but does quite the opposite.

On page 225, Sandell affords neither him nor her mechanism of denial any favors; he appears overweight, negligent of personal hygiene, "stuck" in front of the television, and necessitous. He sits on a lime green couch, already connoting "retro" or "old," but with springs sticking out of it. Sandell goes further to use language to point out the demise of her father: a milk crate being used as a side table, a TV dinner, a bare light bulb.

The illustrations and narrative are interdependent in that they mutually depend upon the other to accurately tell the story according to Laurie Sandell . The structure of the graphic novel, in Sandell's case, allows for her to convey not only her emotions but what she sees and, more importantly, how she sees. We are able to experience Sandell's transformation or evolution from her elementary drawings through adolescence, into young adulthood, adulthood, and lastly as an adult in recovery.

Impostor's Daughter is a memoir that demonstrates a 12 step philosophy that recovery is possible. Sandell has told the story of her recovery and conversely the story of her father and the consequences of his unwillingness/inability to recover from his life and decisions.