Special Exits

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Special Exits was to me, bittersweet.  The vulnerability expressed was one unfamiliar to me.  My oldest parent is 62, and my grandparents had past before I was born, so the age before death, while obvious, has been distant.  The deterioration of both, especially Rachel, was vivid and clear.  The image of her on page 132, holding her breasts up by her nipples while Laura bathed her, says so much about their character, and the level of trust between them, such open vulnerability.

What I liked so much about the form in Special Exits was the amount of detail given in the drawings- as I reader I gleaned so much from the visual context.  In the beginning especially, Farmer offers many panels without dialogue, and yet express so much about the people and the story.  On page 7, a panel illustrates Lars and Rachel’s diet via their shopping cart at the grocery store.  There is no dialogue here but the informative text is on the packages in their cart- these images are repetitive throughout and show themselves consistently in the kitchen scenes at their home. 

These dialogue-less panels sometimes dominate entire pages, especially, as I said above, in the beginning.  The top half of page 4 illustrates a habitual scene with Lars, which adds context equal to, in my opinion, that which would be found in a novel (sans graphic).  It’s easy to think of graphic novels as reliant on dialogue- perhaps because of the iconic speech bubble.  We talked once in class about the possibility of graphic memoir being the future of literature, in this current and upcoming world that communicates in brief text messages, and where image and information is so readily available.  I think this idea is valid, but that the general negative connotations these ideas generate are unnecessary regarding the graphic novel as literature.  I think Special Exits is a pretty damn good contender as literature.

Woah.

So... obviously... this piece was interesting in many ways.

I apologize again for my late post.

I've been dancing around a response to Mother's Urn.  Maybe because my brain has found habit in reading text and image along side one another, and to follow along with Kalamity J, I felt a disconnect.  The wedge was only pushed further when I realized at the end that the art had been done by someone separate of the author.  So much about this experience is different from our work thus far. 

I call it a "piece" because I relate it more to a piece of art, whereas the other graphic novels we've read I consider "works", as in literary work- they carried the weight of the label 'graphic novel.'  Let's face it, they were books.  Something that I like about this piece is that it felt like a comic book.  It was the same shape and expected weight, it opened like a comic book.  It didn't necessarily read like a comic book.  In fact, it read less like a comic book than any of the other works.

In the beginning, we are introduced to a romance.  And yet shortly after, the time changes, for "long before this love occurred, she was a mother."  I am still uncertain as to who the first romance involves, whether it is the narrator and her lover, or a romance involving her mother.  With my first read, I was convinced that the memoir started two years before the narrator's birth, and she was talking about her father or step father:

"'She's just like you,' he said. Such a step (dad) in the right direction... Dad. Daughter. Two. Years Old. Two years ago, this mother carbon copied herself petite brunette and baby.  'I'm ok with that,' he said..." (page 5)

Yet if it had started before her birth, why would the romance be long after the being "a mother?"  Are we introduced to her mother as she may possibly be now,  in love?  Or am I misreading, and is the man, the "step (dad)," the "dad" the actual father?  After my first read I thought that he was not the biological father- something about "I'm ok with that," read to me as, 'I'm ok you have a kid."  And the distance emoted with that last line on 5- "He bought the child mint chipped ice cream and fed bits to her mother"- everyone is so separate, the man from the child, the child from the mother... the mother and the man seem pretty cozy though...

It becomes clear on the following page that the man mentioned on page five is her step father, with the line "First marriage daughter."  Yet the question still begs- who is involved in the romance in the first few pages- if what happens on the following pages occurred "long before this love?"

In the first collection, the voice of the narrator is very young, and fragmented, very much like young memories.  This collection really felt like memory.  The diction was concise, in a very naive and child-like way.  The next collection reads with a sense of responsibility as the narrator has a hand in the upbringing of her brother.  The third collection reads as a period of understanding as a more mature narrator tries to justify her mother's actions, taking on her mother's experience- "in walks domestic violence stage left right-left-right, left hook and she's down/ downer's for breakfast." And what could be more fitting for the final collection that resolution?  The memories, unlike those in the first collection, are more vivid.  It was apparent that the narrator speaks throughout all four collections as an adult,  in the style of the age and time period it pertains to.  I am hoping that this makes sense.

Okay, what the hell.  Why does it say it's a work a fiction... what's going on here... tricksters.

I will most definitely be late to post...

because my copy of mother's earn is captive at the post office, as it did not fit into my PO Box, and I cannot retrieve it until tomorrow.   :)

Undoing and Chronology throughout

I was surprised at how differently "Are You My Mother?" read from "Fun Home."  I imagine that one of the main reasons for this difference is that her father was no longer living when she wrote and published "Fun Home," and her mother was very much alive when she wrote "Are You My Mother" (to the tune of ritualistic transcriptions of everyday phone conversation).  Yet, it seemed to me that "Fun Home" focused on her childhood, her journey to adulthood, whereas "Are You My Mother?" focused more on her journey through adulthood.  The way in which she delivers "Are You My Mother" is therapeutic.  Regardless of the common appearance of her actual psychiatrist and psychoanalysts or her insistent mentions of Winnicott, it is apparent throughout the read that writing the book itself was the real therapy for Bechdel.

Throughout "Are You My Mother," Bechdel plays with the chronology, so much so that the reader is forced to recognize key details of her life in order to make sense of the time frame.  In the beginning, I found myself playing catch up trying to get a reference point from which psychiatrist she is seeing, Jocelyn  or Carol.  These patterns only become more complex the deeper into the novel I read.  She often refers to something not as having happened in a certain year, but rather as having happened in a certain time period before or after important events in her life.  Stories and events begin to rotate around these pivotal moments in her life, one of these moments, for example, being when she came out to her mother.  She relies on the repetition of moments to ground the reader as we bounce and rotate through her life.  The moment her first psychiatrist asks her if she is angry at her father is repeated at least three times, first on page 50, then on 73, and then on 96, each time the perspective changes and even though I recognized the repetition immediately, each time I read the important dialogue differently.  While Bechdel uses this and other moments repeatedly to lend reference to time, I felt also that she was going back to that memory almost as if she herself was asking herself again- 'Well, am I angry at my father for committing suicide?'
 
It is the chronology that really lends this text to read as Bechdel's intimate personal therapy.  She is piecing together her personal narrative like a puzzle, and as the reader, we are right along side her.  Using a similar form to that of the repetitive and/or pivotal moments, she weaves repetitive imagery throughout.  One of these bittersweet threads is that of the patch, which shows itself often toward the end of chapter 3 and in the beginning of four.  A patch, already being such a sweet symbol, is first introduced during one of the dream sequences, page 79, when Carol offers a relieving back rub and takes Alison's pants to mend a hole.  The following two pages offer a strangely disjointed story about her mother patching a pair of her pants when she was young.  The story runs simultaneous to readings from Jung.  Then on 109, a small patch is seen and mentioned on a childhood dress that Alison possesses as an adult.  The dress too, has been a repeating image in the recent pages, although she doesn't tell us it's significance until it then, on page 109.  Finally, on page 119, the opening scene of the fourth chapter, Alison is seen, in another dream sequence, standing boldly in a pair of pants covered in patches.

This text was so rich, richer than "Fun Home," which some may remember had me wanting to lick the pages.  I've only scratched the surface of a very large and laborious fruit, I can't wait for Tuesdays class discussion.

BUT I CAN'T

First, please excuse my lateness.

I love the way the title is integrated into the story, much in the way a credits and introductions roll in modern television shows after the episode has begun, with a bit of a teaser.  I don't think I've ever found that in a novel, the cover usually tells you what the title is, and there's little way around not knowing the title before reading the book.  And even though I knew the title before reading these panels, I still very much liked the placement.

I really like these shorts that pack a punch.  "But I Can't" seemed pretty simple at the start but after just four pages you realize how rich it actually is.  In those four pages, we learn about both the narrator and Harriet.  I like to ask myself when reading graphic literature whether or not the story being told would be as successful if were strictly text, strictly literature.  Images like that last panel, for me, make this medium the most successful for the story.  The parallel between Harriet's mom running off (read: carelessly) with a young banker and the image of Harriet standing alone in the wild knocks me on my ass.  Maybe it's just me and the idealistic empowerment I get from the idea of a woman running off and leaving everything behind, and the implied reassurance that her daughter, Harriet, was, in a way, able to do the same thing. 

While the author opened the story at first documenting her life and experience, I think it was Harriet's story that told the most about both of them.  You can read the conflict the author has, having believed so willingly at first in the presence of extraterrestrial life, having an entire friendship based on it, and then to learn otherwise overtime in a number of ways, to have one's way of believing mature.  Harriet's search for answers left her searching in the woods, because as a child, the only answer as to why her mother could leave her would be that she was literally taken by something alien.  Our narrator's mother kindly informs us that Harriet's mother was, in a way, taken by something alien, though it was not extraterrestrial. 

The narrators unwillingness to share her "alien" story with her peers denotes her belief that Harriet's mother was not abducted by literal aliens from outer space, but rather, taken by the search for a different life.  That last hopeful image in that last panel left me with the feeling that the narrator knew that her friend Harriet hadn't been abducted by literal aliens either, but that she had in a sense, found her mother in herself, and gone to find a different life. 

Use of ephermera as documentary

I love the details put into"Fun Home," both visual and otherwise.  Confronted on the first page, we are immediately introduced to Alison and her father.  The first panel is cramped and uncomfortable, like their practice of physical contact.  Her father's face is so emotive in his lack of emotion, Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" laying next to him, the elaborate rug framing his body.  Their relationship is so clearly represented, both through her descriptions and though her visuals.

For me, it is the most successful graphic novel we have read so far, just for that fact- the visuals work congruently with the text, and furthermore the text is so well written (it is clear that Bechdel is the product of two English teachers).  Yet neither the text nor the visuals act as a crutch the to other- rather they stand strong as independents.  There are moments throughout where the visuals are more powerful than the text, and vice verse.  On pages 30 and 31, the overview maps of her father's "narrow compass... [of] provincialism" and that of his family's is captivating and telling, and yet if it were to have been written as a traditional novel, I feel that description would have read tedious.

Bechdel also plays with the chronology, flipping throughout the pages of her life.  She pushes the experience of the reader, the outsider, to place them, us, in her shoes.  On page 28, shortly after we learn that her father has died/ is to die, we are thrust, almost in a "Being John Malcovich" manner, to read the "While You Were Away" note from the day of her father's accident.  The stern and cold "Your Mother" written with the date and time juxtaposed with the seemingly causal delivery of the real message itself- "Call home as soon as possible- it's an emergency."  The details in the note, which may not be so incredibly important that without them the memoir would be unsuccessful but they certainly add a depth to the story that makes me want to lick the pages (possibly inappropriate, but nonetheless true).  We are reading the note for the first time, just as Alison had read it for the first time.

She does it again on the first page of Chapter 3 (page 57).  Although this panel has less impact because rather than reading the note as she does, here we read the edited (read, highlighted) definition of the word queer.  But what makes this memory so influential is the following two panels, when the frame withdraws and we see Alison standing over the large dictionary that appears to have it's very own table.  She's holding a glass of sherry, placed in the Daedalusian maze built by her father and forced to use the props provided, she explores her truths and those of her father, those same embellishments she calls lies.

On a whole, I found "Fun House" to be a rich harmony between text and image that enhanced my experience as a reader.  The way Bechdel moves through time, simultaneously presenting the results and the process, helped me relate to, understand, and respect her experience.  Furthermore the way she embodies characters and moments by framing and highlighting found text and differentiating handwriting only adds more depth and interest.  I complained endlessly with "Lucky" that Bell's depiction of her journey was left stagnant on the surface.  I was pleased to find "Fun House" to be brimming with details and background.

Lucky?

Such an interesting title for a graphic memoir in which the author seems to find her life to have been so difficult.  Gabrielle Bell focuses on, forgive my personal opinion here, trivial moments in her life.  While she hints at a possible troubled upbringing (hungover parents unable to drive their children to school, page 39), Bell never really dives into her past.  Rather, Lucky chronicles Bell's trials and tribulations as an aspiring artist in Brooklyn- yet even these problems seem to lay flat on the surface.  Lucky #1 focuses mainly on Tom and Bell's perpetual apartment searching, while she often alludes to working on her "project," which I can only assume is the graphic novel itself. 

In Lucky #1, stories are broken into diary-like entries, with each entry seeming trivial and together lacking the feeling of having resolution.  While she introduces the idea of struggling find time to be alone in Lucky #1, this "problem" isn't resolved in Lucky #1, #2, or #3.  In fact, as a whole it feels disjointed.  Rather than a feeling of an important coming of age passage, I found Lucky to chronicle Bell's progress as a graphic artist.  Bell's drawing style changes in each edition, starting with crowded, text heavy panels featuring fairly simply line drawings and evolving to larger, roomier panels with more depth, both in content and visually.  She obviously introduces new techniques in the final installation, Lucky #3, with out of body, time and reality bending panels like those of her "what-if" scenarios while working with Sheila Bartok and the insertion of pen-pal Gérard's floating narrating head.

I still feel (ahem, personal opinion) that even at the end, her choices of topic sit stagnant on the surface and lack history.  Who will teach her how to greet people in France, that in itself reading as trivial, and then POOF like magic, without frame of reference, the magical pen pal Gérard, never aforementioned, he appears, dues ex machina style to solve the trivial problem of the moment.

I am well aware that these entries are not supposed to read as "I liked it, I didn't like it" opinion pieces, but I found Lucky to be unrelatable and I couldn't help but wonder why a graphic novelist living in New York City had to get her book published in Canada.

I found the time frame of Laurie Sandell's "the Impostor's Daughter" to be refreshing.  Typically, when I think of a coming of age story, the first thing that comes to mind is adolescence.  I was thankful that Sandell carried her coming of age story through to a time in her life when she felt she had not only resolved some of her personal conflicts reflected in the book, but also a place where she felt comfortable with who she had become.  She truly had, for lack of better words, come of age.  I think it important that the reader be able to understand the aspects that help shape the character, in this case the very real Laurie Sandell.  And while I have a natural aversion to tales of "daddy issues," I found the parallels between Sandell and both her parents to be unmistakable and believable.

It is clear to me in the beginning, that the child Laurie Sandell is somewhat afflicted.  Even though she idolizes her father, it is obvious from her cartoons that something is a bit off.  The second panel down on page 20 is particularly disturbing, an image of her father apparently pleased to discover a room of showering women.  A panel on the following page features another one of these cartoons, this one with a wall hanging that reads "sex is beutiful"(spelling as seen in text).  Coupled with the other unconventional parenting habits (playing with knives and awarding merits to unearned accomplishments), it is clear that Miss Sandell is in for a rocky ride as she progresses into her teens and further as an adult.

A lot of the focus seems to lay in her father's dishonesty, starting with the title and carrying throughout the memoir, yet I feel that Sandell's strange sexual interests and intimacy inhibitions are equally key in her outcome, though the topic may be more subdued.  Because the cartoons she did as a child showcase these perhaps inappropriate sexual ideas before she has lost admiration and trust for her father, I am led to believe that this affliction plays an equal role in her troubles later.  While she repeatedly refers to her trouble with men as a result of her father's dishonesty and consequently her lack of trust in men, I think that these possible sexual disturbances affect her relationships as well.