Selective Exits

I've found myself fascinated by the idea of selectivity in the graphic memoirs we've studied thus far, and Special Exits is no exception.  Joyce Farmer does an excellent job at selecting scenes and presenting individual panels that work together to clearly express a point without being overbearing about it.  Her expression of Laura's guilt after her stepmother's decline in a nursing home is a strong example.  

After taking Rachel to the emergency room for a blister, we see the doctor telling Laura "the news is all good.  We put a band-aid on the blister and she's ready to go home" (135), to which Laura responds, "Can she go to a nursing home?"  The disparity between the first statement and the responding question is so great that that panel would be absurd in any other context.  Laura is leaning forward in her chair, too, which makes her appear eager.  If one presented that panel as a cartoon in itself, it would clearly be about adult kids who are eager to ditch their parents as soon as the smallest thing goes wrong.  You want to ship your mom to a nursing home because she had a blister?  Wow, you must have had some childhood!  In the next panel, the doctor tells Laura Rachel "can live for years!" and Laura is frowning.   Her hair has also started to droop. She stands up to lean on the doctor's desk and plead her case, with her hair now falling forward.  In the final panel on this page her hair is drooping, but a bit of it is sticking up in front and her eyes look turned down at the corners.  These changes in her appearance make her look defeated.  The fact that she has to explain to the doctor that her stepmother's ability to remember his name is not evidence of her competency reinforces that impression.  The doctor's arrogance in thinking he knows everything about her, after one brief exam is very frustrating.  He claims that Laura's father is clearly taking good care of Rachel, while he can't possibly know that.  He may be doing the best he can under the circumstances, but leaving someone on the sofa to eat, sleep, and empty her bladder and bowels is not the kind of caregiving I want a loved one to receive.   Instead of questioning Laura and trying to understand the situation, including her father's place in it, he judges her, asking "Do you realize what you're doing?" (136).  In the final panel on that page, Laura tells her father, "I'm sick at what I did, Dad" (136).  

Farmer makes it clear that the staff at the nursing home is incompetent in just a few scenes.  Rachel falls out of bed because an aid left her alone in her bed with the rails down (138),  Nobody bothers to call her for two days, and then the person on the phone is calling while eating lunch, which certainly does not show a lot of compassion for either Rachel or Laura.  There are a few panels throughout the book that gave me pause (such as the cat's thought bubbles on page 80, or the nursing home administrator's on page 146) because the narration leaves the more standard memoir form, in which the narrator/main character/writer is present and is either a participant or witness to everything that happens.  This panel is one in which the narration is suddenly omniscient; Laura cannot see what the person calling is doing.  That the caller is holding a sandwich is conjecture, but even after acknowledging that, it seemed to me that it probably is not as heavy-handed as I wish it were.  (On a barely-related note, when my mother arrived at the hospital to give birth to me, her doctor entered the room finishing a bag of Fritos.)  The fact that we care about somebody does not mean that strangers who are paid very little money to take care of them are going to also care about them.  It is likely that Rachel's caregivers see her as another annoying old lady who is constantly demanding something, food and drink, in her case.  

The lack of competence of the staff is also demonstrated in all the tests the doctor orders.  Rachel's fingers hurt from the needles used for unnecessary tests.  Nobody asks her if the vibrating of her bed bothers her, and nobody seems to even consider that she might notice it until she answers Laura's question of how she's doing with, "Good.  My bed's not shaking anymore" (146).  When an aid tells Laura that Rachel does not usually eat, Laura has to tell her that Rachel is blind and must have the dishes handed to her.  The aid's response is, "I didn't know that" (146), even though the sign saying "Blind -- Must be fed" is right in front of her.  This is a different aid than the ones we've seen before.  In fact, there are so many staffers that none of them seem to be there long enough, or to care enough to know very much about their patients.  

When Laura drives away from the hospital after Rachel's hip is pinned, we see that she is thinking "My God!  What have I done to her?  She fell many times at home.  It was only fourteen inches to the soft carpet.  My god!" (139).  The burden of that responsibility feels crushing.  We know she was doing what she thought was best, but now she has to live with the rapidity of Rachel's decline and her part in that.  When she goes to the nursing home administrator to threaten a lawsuit, she says, "So you understand the situation: one, my mother was blind but in good health when she came here" (146).  Only ten pages have elapsed since Rachel's arrival at the nursing home.  It is not clear how much time has passed, but it does not seem to be a lot.  I read this as emphasizing Laura's feelings of guilt; Rachel's decline was very quick, and it all happened after Laura had her taken to a nursing home.  The scenes Farmer presents in only ten pages effectively convey experiences and emotions that leave me feeling almost paralyzed with compassion and pity for Laura.  

On a side note, I want to mention the incredible amount of detail that Farmer put into the artwork.  Every panel, and there are many, is intricately shaded.  There is so much shading of faces and cross-hatching throughout the book that I the thought that there are more than 1500 panels in the book leaves me feeling exhausted.  Again, I find myself comparing this work to others we have read, and Alison Bechdel comes to mind first.  While this book obviously contains a lot of very deliberate work, it somehow does not scream "DELIBERATE!" to me the way Bechdel's work does.  I think that's because the emotion of the story comes through more clearly in Special Exits.  Sometimes it felt that Bechdel was trying to make a statement about graphic memoir in general, that it is a serious medium and that it can be very intellectual.  Farmer does not seem so concerned with redeeming a form of art or proving that she is bright.  She gives us these very intense scenes, but steps back and leaves room for us to inhabit those scenes, to experience them ourselves.  I think this is a great and beautiful accomplishment.  

Tones of Tale

 The general style of Mother's Urn matched the tone of the text (the vulnerability to fingerprints was not terribly attractive, nor was the binding, which failed before I was finished reading the book for the first time) in a way that I appreciated.  The slightly abstract, poetic style of writing, along with the red text on black background in the beginning of the book made sense because the addiction issues of the characters were pretty dark.  

     There were  a few moments I found jarring.  The first was "...for long before this love occurred, she was a mother" (5).  Although it is early in the book, I felt that I should have known that a main character was a mother.  

    Another jarring moment begins with the section that starts on page 19, "No refills on the photo album."  The picture that accompanies the introduction to that section is small and it looks like a Poloroid.  More importantly, It is black and white only.  The previous images in the book have been rich in color.  Page 20 provides more jarring activity, as the narration switches into first person.  Thus far, we have read a sort of abstract narration, but page 20 starts with an "I,"which is the first time we have seen that.  I found this jarring because the artwork changes tone, from rich and multi-colored to black and white, and because the narrator has changed from someone we do not necessarily know to someone we must know, because she refers to herself as "I."  

     The perspective of the narrator changes again on page 26:  "She'll wash your window if you ask her and she'll offer if you don't" (28). The book sticks to the black and white style in this section.   The illustration reminded me of the Navajo storyteller, who has children crawling all over him or her.  There are many children in the image of  and all seem to be clamoring around the storyteller/mother figure in this book.  There is little  color.  Most of the image is in black and white, and the image of a fetus in the storyteller/mother is very clear,  This section ends as it began, with a claim that someone will wash your window if you ask her and she'll offer if you don't" (34).  To me, this section felt like a change in narrator from mother to daughter.  The artwork changed, even in color.  Page 35 begins with the same sort of super-saturated color, which is very different from the black and white work that has been offered.  I guess that it is the narrator's mother who will wash your windshield?  I'm not sure.  

     I think one of my main concerns is that I'm not sure what happened when the narration switched to an "I" perspective and when the artwork changed to a more black and white color scheme than the multi-colored I'd been seeing.  I *think* the perspective changed from the mother's point of view to the daughter's, at this point, but I am not absolutely sure.  The daughter becomes focused and important when the mother disappears?  I think the story is all the daughter's...She realized the truth of the story pretty late to write it, but wrote it anyway.  Even going on this assumption, I find the switch in perspectives jarring.  I assume that the preconceived notion of the book is that the story is that of a single mother, and how she became single.  When the artwork changes, along with the tone of the narrative,  I feel that I am to assume that the narrator is now the daughter of the person in the beginning of the book.  She knows that her parents had this courtship, that they were really into one another, but that then the mother developed a cocaine addiction, while the father focused on alcohol.  The daughter, who apparently is Kalamity J, is the creator of all the stories in the book, and she is now suffering from never re-connecting with her mother.  Again, I could be wrong.  I actually had trouble interpreting the  narrative of this story, which is weird to me because I really like this kind of artwork and narrative.   

"The jargon really gets in the way"

That quote, from page 217 sums up a lot of my experience with Are You My Mother.  This book reads to me more like a biography of Donald Winnicott (and a manual on psychoanalysis) than a memoir of Alison Bechdel's mother.  I was interested in getting some insight into Bechdel's mother, but there isn't a lot of that offered.  It reminded a lot of the notes in the back of The Impostor's Daughter, when the interviewer asks Laurie Sandell about writing a book about her mother, and she says she could not do that because her mother is unknown to her.  After finishing Are You My Mother, I still felt like I did not know her mother.  In fact, I feel like I'm not sure exactly what she was trying to write.   There is a box on page 29 that is in the shape that has been used for her mother's dialogue while on the phone, but it does not seem like something her mother is saying.  The text here says, "But it's hard to figure out what the story is."  That's how I felt a the end of the book:  I still don't know what the story is.

The tie between Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott seems tenuous, at best.  I understand that Bechdel is drawing parallels between her relationship with her mother and Woolf's relationship with her own mother, but I don't really understand why she ties Woolf to her experience of psychoanalysis.  I also understand that she is writing about her experience with psychoanalysis, but I do not feel that I needed all the technical terms and details about Winnicott's approach to psychoanalysis to understand her experience.

When Allison has a very frustrating conversation with her mother about her mother's discomfort with her book, and with her openness about her sexuality, one banner reads "I couldn't speak without revealing that I was crying.  In this pause, I suddenly saw something very clearly" (228). In the next panel, she tells us what that is, "Whatever it was I wanted from my mother was simply not there to be had.  It was not her fault" (228).  To me, this is the meat of the entire book.  She is coming to terms with the fact that her relationship with her mother will never be what she actually wants it to be.  This revelation renders all the therapy jargon and even some of the therapy scenes as unnecessary.  This is the moment she has been working toward.  It's a very poignant moment, but it does not seem to be any richer for having a lot of background information about psychoanalysis.

Continuity and Confusion

I wasn't sure if we were posting this week, due to the changes in schedule and material, but since I see that others have, here I go:

This short starts with a good sense of continuity.  I do not know for sure, but I assumed it starts in a dorm room; there are four young people sitting and talking about UFOs.  The narrator begins to tell us a story that she does not tell her companions.  The second full panel on the second page (I'm counting the two inset panels as part of the first panel) reflects the text over the first page very effectively.  Lucy, the narrator, tells us "I didn't understand it all at first, we were only eight after all, but I learnt more from Harriet than whatever science lessons I got at primary school" (2).  She shows us various print matter about UFOs, and we see Harriet with binoculars.  The next panel shows Harriet talking, but the word balloon only contains a mumble of thick ink.  She is saying a lot, and it is likely very dense; Lucy clearly does not understand what she is talking about.

The impression of continuity is present in the appearances of Lucy and Harriet, too.  They look almost the same from age eight through high school, minus some development in their bodies, so we know who they are all the way through the piece.

The first three panels of page four look desolate.  Each panel is empty of people, and the only signs of life are trees and grass, except in the third panel, where we see a police car and two officers, far out in the field.  These panels express a sense of hopelessness, which points back to the last panel on page three, in which Lucy is shut in her room, face down on the bed, presumably very upset.  She is likely feeling hopeless, and we see that reflected in the following panels.  Even the panel with Harriet's house for sale is mostly empty:  only the bottom third contains the image.

I felt a little confused about the last few panels.  When Lucy says her parents decided to give her a new start, too, I'm not sure what that means.  They seem to be moving.  Because her mother is hanging a picture, it seems to me that the whole family may have moved, but in the next panel, we are back to the young people from the first page.  I'm not sure if she is telling us this was her college apartment, or that her parents helped her get a place with some other people.  I also am not sure to what she is referring in the sixth panel on the final page when she writes "Of course, I don't tell them about that."  Who is them?  Her parents?  Her housemates, assuming the people pictured are her housemates.  What doesn't she tell them?  That her parents helped her make a new start?  That her friends watch videos of break-dancing potatoes?

Intimacy at The Fun Home

First, my apologies for being so tardy to the party this week.   A week of severe sleep deprivation followed by working until 3:00 a.m. over the weekend rendered me incapable of critical thinking.  My attempt to even look at my computer last night sent me straight to bed.

I was struck by the sense of intimacy that Alison Bechdel manages to convey in Fun Home.  The artwork gets very close to the people within.  The opening of the book shows Alison's father playing "airplane" with her (3).  Obviously, the way a book opens is going to set the tone for the reader's interpretation of the rest of the book, and Bechdel seems to be aware of that.  The three panels show a father and daughter playing a game that requires physical contact.  They are touching, in an increasingly intimate manner in each of the three panels.  There is only one word balloon on the page, containing "oof!" and one caption within a panel that gives information about acrobatics.  We can see from the first panel that Alison's dad has been reading, perhaps lying on a rug in a room hung with artwork and long curtains.  In the third panel we can see he has been reading Anna Karenina.  His sweater, button-down shirt and glasses give him a rather professorial look, and Alison's very casual and androgynous clothing match her very casual and androgynous hairstyle.  So much information is conveyed on that very first page.  The caption over the third and largest panel tells us something that sheds new light on the activity in the panels:  Alison is happy to be uncomfortable with her father's feet pressing her stomach, as long as she has the opportunity for "rare physical contact."  Now we know that what may be implied in the artwork, that they have a physically comfortable relationship, is not true.  We can continue reading the book with the knowledge that they are not a physically affectionate family, and l found myself intrigued about why, and how else they related.  Most of the time, throughout the book, the artwork and the captions seem to reflect each other; one does not seem to contradict the other, but on this first page, they do, to some degree, which also makes this page stand out to me.

One other place I see this sort of contradiction between text and pictures is on page 103.  The large, lower panel shows several people walking around, and captions contained in the panel point to various scents that are being produced.  None are pleasant, with the exception of pasty stop.  The smells that are labeled also lend to the idea that it must be a hot day.  These are all scents that one would expect to just hang in the hot air.  The caption confirms this, but in a funny, ironic way:  "In the hot August afternoon, the city was reduced, like a long-simmering demiglace, to a fragrance of stunning richness and complexity" (103).  One would expect a demiglace to smell pleasant, but we can be sure that's not what is happening here.  The caption both confirms and contradicts the captions within the panel.  This page also lends a sense of intimacy, in both the wink-wink tone of the caption over the artwork and in the labeling of the scents; I know what that particular blend of scent would smell like.  Bechdel has effectively pulled me into her world.

Another way Bechdel keeps the reader in an intimate space is through drawing other forms of media in her panels.  This pulls the reader into Alison's world by forcing us to see from her perspective.  Page 27 has a newspaper in the first panel, the newspaper announcing her father's death, while the last panel contains a picture of Albert Camus' A Happy Death along with another newspaper. That newspaper gives us a solid sense of setting, because it is dated, and because the headlines tell us what was happening in the world outside Bechdel's home at this time.

There is a drawing of Bechdel's first grade school photo on page 35, and, as her caption claims, she looks like she is in mourning.  Again, seeing the photo, as opposed to only reading about it gives a sense that I am sharing her experience, or at least getting a real peek into it.  She's sharing reading materials and photos and really letting the audience into her life.  These pictures also confirm her reliability as a narrator:  "I'm not just saying it.  Look, here, it's real.   I have proof."

The picture of a dictionary page in the first (and largest) panel on page 57 again brings us into Alison's experience, her perspective.  We see the dictionary page exactly as she does.  We also see that the entry for "queer" is missing the meaning for which she is looking.  She has been left out, as has her father, from existence, in a way.  If it doesn't even exist in the dictionary, it must not be real or valid.  This experience would not have been conveyed nearly as effectively without this image.  To see the entry and all that it is missing, in that panel, pulls us into her reality.   We see many bits of her world through her eyes, instead of simply through her pen, and it makes it more believable and makes her a very sympathetic character.

Unlucky and Unlikeable (And, yes, Margo, I know you don't care if I like the book, but I'm referring to the characters)

     One of my first thoughts upon finishing reading Lucky was, "another unlikeable character?  Two in a row?"  I think I'm being a little harsh, but I found Gabrielle's character...lazy.  And a little whiney, without actually expressing a lot of emotion, with the exception of her description of her experience modeling (9).  There is also some expression of frustration with the new space in which she's living (15), because the space is a mess of half-packed belongings, but instead of empathizing, I found myself annoyed:  if the problem was in her own personal space, why didn't she just fix it?  Unpacking and organizing doesn't take that much time, and considering that she does not have a regular job, it seems that she should have plenty of spare time.  The lack of money seems to be a problem, yet she lists all the things she's been doing instead of looking for a job (30), and one of them is looking at apartments.  She is wasting time looking for apartments for Tom, who moves out of spaces immediately upon moving in.  He annoyed me almost as much as she did.    Maybe she's trying to express a sense of depression, that she's too discouraged to look for a job, and too low-energy or depressed to unpack, but going to apartment interviews and interacting with strangers seems to me to be a much more energy-draining activity.  She's so concerned about money that she returns potato chips and soda for a refund after her class is cancelled (31), so I'm wondering how she affords to live in Williamsburg when she works four hours at a time for $15/hour.

     Gabrielle is leaving San Francisco at the beginning of the second book (46), leaving me wondering where she got the money to travel, especially while paying rent in Williamsburg.  Why is she traveling?  Who gets to take vacations when they don't even work?   Maybe the "fucking yuppies" or "stupid NYU students in their overpriced renovated luxury lofts" (34) that she and her friends ridiculed after not being invited to a party they were all creepily watching through a skylight.  After that trip, she takes a break to go to upstate New York, where she wonders why she took the trip, what emails she might be getting, and whether she should eat out of boredom (54) and that storyline is dropped.  Again, I found myself irritated by her character, her friends, and the story in general.

     Because she stopped dating the strips, I felt lost when she was suddenly on Bedford Avenue selling comics (55); she was still upstate on the previous page.  I appreciated that she started doing more with the background of her panels in this section.  The tone of the drawings was much darker, as the street and background were largely black for the first time in the book.   I could not help relating the sudden switch to a darker tone to the fact that she was working for the first time (besides the modeling).  It could be that the space in the panels was previously so empty because she was feeling so empty, but that now there's something more, so the space is more filled, but it is hard for me to read it that way because my dislike for the Gabrielle as a narrator and character has tainted my perception.

    In fact, when Sheila Bartok took credit for her work, I started to empathize and feel bad for her, especially when she is accused of being a "Sheila Bartok ripoff" (85), but I disliked her so much that I did not really care.

     I appreciated that Bell's style seemed to evolve throughout the book and that her panels became a bit less text-y (or at least the print became larger).  Her drawings improve a lot by the end of the book, and I can see the evolution from simple journal to actual stories, but the stories still fall flat and seem so random and disconnected that it is difficult to see them as a whole.  UnlikeThe Impostor's Daughter, Lucky lacks the continuity to shape interconnected pieces into a whole.  It feels like a lot of random comic strips thrown together into a book, with the only apparent reason being that they are all by the same artist.

Stoicism and The Impostor's Daughter

     One of the most striking things I found in The Impostor's Daughter is the matter-of-fact introduction of dramatic developments in the plot.  There is regularly a great deal of tension between the events that are taking place in the panels and the narration presented at the top of the panels. One example is on page 31:  Sandell's narration calmly states, "When I turned twelve, something changed in our relationship." We have seen Laurie's father losing his patience with her for not giving him the phone when someone called asking for an unfamiliar person (3) and ignoring her when she failed to perform a piano recital to his standards (9), instead praising one of her classmates, but the screaming for his stapler is something new, particularly as we see Laurie cringing behind him.  In the following panel, Lauries' mother tells her father to "take it to the basement."  There is no drama in her reaction, and the easy instruction suggests she's used to these kinds of angry scenes, even though we have not yet seen him focusing his anger on any of his daughters.  Again, Laurie looks scared, but goes to the basement.  She says something changed in their relationship, but does not specify, and my assumption is that she does not know and the fact that she goes to the basement to be yelled at by her father after he lost his stapler, which seems to have nothing to do with her is as bewildering to her as it is to her audience.  In the next panel she mentions that he was so loud it gave her headaches, and we see her father calling her a monster and an idiot.  It's very disorienting, because there seems to be no real reason for him to act like this.  Her face in this panel looks terrified; her eyes are large and her mouth is grimacing and the audience still does not know exactly what provoked this attack on her, but it seems to be a lost stapler.  

     The same thing happens in a flashback on page 57.  The narration at the top of the panel tells us that "naive stoicism in the pace of peril was second nature to me," while we see her father pointing and looking very angry while yelling at her that if she were a boy, he'd kill her.  Again, this is very disorienting and I was left feeling like it did not make sense, which I think is the point.  The tension between the words at the top of the panel, and the words in the dialogue bubbles, along with the illustrations is a very effective presentation of Laurie's discombobulation.  How can she make sense of something that makes no sense?  Sandell does an excellent job of putting her audience in that hopeless situation.  

     The scene on pages 80 -- 81 are also very emotionally intense, and although there is little narration there, Sandell sticks with her understated style.  Her father basically threatens to commit suicide, and she confronts him in a very strong manner.  He avoids engaging with the issue at hand, claiming that he has to "feed the meter.)  She has finally confronted him, and what the narrator tells us is that she felt a bitter emptiness.  Tat is simple and understated, but the final three panels on page 81 hammer everything home.  We see Laurie's back and her father's face in all three panels, first very close and large, then a little further away, and finally he looks small.  Her image stays the same size in each panel.  She has confronted him and she is growing away from him.  The man who has been the center of her life, larger than life, is suddenly rendered small and distant, and we see that change take place in three small panels.  Her relationship with her father has changed again and this time she does not tell us, but she shows us in a way that is undeniable.  I find it fascinating that the narration can hint at something while the illustrations show the full truth behind the understatements;  it's a strong illustration of the rule "show, don't tell."  Sandell often tells little, but she shows a lot.