Special Exits

This graphic memoir is different than any of the other ones we've read in that Joyce Farmer's character in the book, Laura, does not share the same name as the author. In Mother's Urn: Memoir Dust the narrator is never named, and much in like Mother's Urn, in Special Exits the reader is able to identify the narrator/author based on timelines matching up, and also a feeling I got that had to do with the way perspective was presented in the book. Because I wasn't expected to immediately draw an association in my mind with the narrator-author and begin to parse the message, or version of the truth being presented in the book, I was allowed to become more engrossed in the story than I otherwise would have been able to. I think this is because much of the story is imagined (not first-hand experience,) and actually more like a story in that way than anything else we've read this semester.  

The style of drawing, I think, matched the tone of the novel. The black and white caused the reader to need to rely on contrast in order to uncover where the illustrator wished to place emphasis. This was an arduous task, especially since the drawings also display a close attention to detail and there isn't a lot of negative space in the panels. The difficulty of the drawings allow for the haggardness of old age and the exhaustion of caregiving to show through.

Even though this is probably the case for most everyone in class, since alzheimer's/dementia is common and incomprehensible in a way that sticks with a person, I have to say that the increasing deterioration of the mind/body of both Lars and Rachel seemed so real to me and so similar to the experience my grandmother had, in the way that it happens both gradually and all at once. For my grandmother, it happened about three months after the death of my grandfather (I think Lars and Rachel likewise die three months apart.) She had an accident and broke her leg while swimming, and that my mother says, is the precise moment she lost her faculties. For Rachel, the alzheimer's was greatly intensified after her accident in the hospital bed. Before the accident, there were certain things that kept grandma going- her five-o'clock on the dot scotch, her sewing, and her "programs"; although, my grandmother never watched televangelists. She was an atheist. After she was hospitalized for her leg, my grandmother insisted she did not want to be put in a home, so we moved her to Rossmoor, my mom sold our house in Alameda and we moved in temporarily with grandmother to get her settled. That was when she started putting whole pineapples in the microwave (I laughed out loud on page 31 when Lars almost explodes the microwave,) and telling the same story over and over again about the first time she met our jack russell terrier and he licked her face ("Is there something to eat or drink?" I could go on about the repetition in the book.) I think, in these cases, the more the loved one's mind deteriorates and s/he is unable to communicate in a level-headed way, increasingly, the family will tend to place blame on doctor's/ other caregivers for the condition of the loved one as a way of coping. I observed this in my own family, and in the way Laura starts to perceive doctors as evil. Laura's character doesn't actually know what the doctors are thinking about when they're on the phone with her. Eventually, the family accepts hospice, but the distrust surrounding hospitals is crucial before letting go. It's as if the family feels the need to fight for what the loved one is no longer able to fight for themselves.

There are a couple other things that have been on my mind since I finished the memoir, and that perhaps we can elaborate on in class. For one thing, I'd like to hear what others thought about Lars' character. I kept thinking as I was reading that there was some secret that was going to be revealed about him eventually- that he was hiding something. Why did he wish to hurry along Rachel's death, and why does he communicate that to the doctors the way he does? Does he actually hurt Rachel ever, or is that claim on her part just a part of her alzheimer's? What's with this co-worker of Lars' who he emphasizes is also a friend of Rachel's, but who might have a crush on him? Why include this stuff? Why make the reader suspicious of Lars, who is after all, the father of the narrator/author?

Also, I found it interesting how the author chose to provide the reader with glimpses into her life outside of caregiving. Page 35 shows Art and Laura dancing the tango, and Laura says, "Did you ever drop your partner?" Art must have been some kind of dancer. The move that he teaches her comes in handy later, when Rachel is about to fall. The sequence on 35 is so intriguing, though, that I want to know more! Art appears in the book infrequently. He's so understanding when Laura says she wants to move in with her father in order to help out. The absence of nearly anything about Laura's life besides her role as caregiver in the book leads me to see her as a selfless person. The book is about Lars and Rachel way more than it is about her. But the book isn't completely devoid of anything else. There's Art. I want to know more.

Lastly, can I just say how cute the ending of the book is? "Dad! Dad! Can you see this?" Aww! It just warms my heart.

Mother's Urn: Memoir Dust

This graphic memoir demands to be reread and reexamined. The illustrations are so damn intricate. I found it hard to focus on the pictures. Instead, I eventually had to pick a spot to concentrate on and then slowly let my eyes drift along the images in order to take it all in piece by piece, before even attempting to view the pages as wholes. As I neared the end of the book, the binding was increasingly coming undone, which I feel added to the sense of decay and brokenness of the story. Much like the mother daughter relationship that in the end is not sustainable, the hard copy of the book itself falls apart in the end. On page 43, phone lines and state lines divide the mother and daughter, meanwhile the pages of the book are being materially divided. Of course this is probably unintentional, but I found it poetic nonetheless.

I definitely appreciated the tendency towards Oubapo in Mother's Urn, which caused an emphasis to be placed on decoding (upon rereading the decoding does inherit an organic quality.) Oubapo in this way definitely privileges and respects the intelligence of the reader. The images were so imbued with emotion in such a tragic way, however, that once I was able to focus on them, I felt moved by them, and didn't necessarily have to rely on intelligence to garner the feelings they are meant to evoke. Perhaps this is because this memoir hit close to home. Kalamity J and Antonina Gribnikova nail that realization that drugs can diminish and ultimately evaporate the intensity of relationships- The numbing/ hollowing effect of drugs and the ability of drugs to divide and make strange is profoundly sad, but it's comforting to see that moment become universal in this book.

I liked that the book wasn't perfect. I liked that the font and font color were inconsistent and the images didn't match with regard to emphasis on color, medium, style, or composition. For an underground book to convey such an underground feeling, I think this almost needed to be the case. After having read Are You My Mother, which was so meticulous and drew attention to the way in which it was constructed just so, I appreciated the chaos of Mother's Urn. It felt genuine- less insistent on its success as a post-therapeutic book, and less wholeheartedly insistent on resolution, which more often resides with fiction and not reality.

Are You My Mother?

The topic of anger comes up a few times in Are You My Mother. One of the therapists suggests that Alison harbors anger towards her mother, an analysis that Alison is reticent to accept as truth. Early in the novel, on page 21, Alison worries that her mother will perceive the book about her as angry. I tend to think that the focus of this book on psychoanalysis could very well be an attempt on Alison's part to mask the anger that she feels towards her mother by appearing to have undertaken a search for some truth, or the root of the complication surrounding Alison's relationship with her mother. The focus on the process of memoir, too, is a means for distracting Alison from the anger at hand. Alison's compulsion for keeping records and accounts of life, both of her mother's and of her own, seems more like a coping mechanism, than anything else. A great deal of her recording, I think, has to do with proving her mother wrong, that memoir is not a "suspect genre." Alison's mother believes that memoir is "narcissistic," "inaccurate," and "fake," (22) and in saying this, Alison's mother is indirectly accusing Alison's work of exhibiting these negative qualities. She indirectly accuses Alison near the end of the book of caring more about the story, than the real facts. The "observer effect" that Alison refers to illustrates the extent to which Alison's mother is bound up in and indeed inextricable from Alison's writing process. Alison's mother's judgments cloud her brain every time she picks up the pen.

On page 39, Alison brings up Virginia Woolf to demonstrate the capacity for fiction to pose deeper truth than fact. This thought seems to be a direct response to Alison's mother's belief that memoir denies the truth, is self-centered, and resembles fiction more so than it does non-fiction (conventionally aligned with truth.) The differentiation between an account of life and an account of the soul is also drawn, and the reader is left to evaluate which mode better promotes truth. The answer is foggy. This brings me back to the first page of the book, before chapter one even begins. On the page opposite the dedication, a quote by Virginia Woolf reads, "For nothing was simply one thing." Two kinds of truth govern Are You My Mother. There are the empirical facts. There are also attempts to understand the soul. These attempts are constituted by breakthroughs, which typically occur in therapy, or through reading psychoanalytical texts, particularly those of Winnicott and Lacan.

I find it very interesting that both Fun Home and Are You My Mother? end in much the same way- that is, with either parent in some way setting Alison free. Alison's mother offers her a "way out" (298). Alison's father gives her the confidence to embrace her sexuality as an example of someone who couldn't bring himself to do the same. Interestingly, neither instance of being set free occurs at the point in Alison's actual life when she feels liberated from her parents, which arguably comes when Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are individually published. Instead, the moments Alison chooses to depict as symbolic for her being set free are situated in her childhood. Moreover, is Alison's insistence on being free an indicator that maybe she isn't so free after all? Doth the lady protest too much? By giving the reader a glimpse into her writing process, Alison Bechdel sets up graphic memoir as a tool for separating herself from her parents.  So my question is, does Alison use memoir to suppress her anger towards her parents, or is it legitimately a cathartic process that enables her to become free, whatever that might mean?

"But I Can't"

The short "But I Can't" is skillful in its ability to depict the childhood obsession with UFOs that two friends share and how the mystery of the obsession hauntingly lingers into the narrator's adulthood in only four pages. The choice to use watercolor, I think, is indicative of a larger theme in the comic- that is, of imprecision. The emphasis on color, rather than detail conjures a feeling of nebulousness and uncertainty in the reader. The narrator's school mates exude skepticism, and the narrator herself struggles long after the fact of Harriet's disappearance with the discrepancy between what Harriet represents and the lack of sound empirical evidence supporting the existence of extraterrestrials; though, for our narrator, the tendency towards disbelief is not a natural impulse. Her childhood curiosity haunts her, even as she's faced with the improbability of Harriet's claims.

This thought brings me back to the subject of memoir and the quest for truth that accompanies the genre, and that can be observed in every graphic memoir we've encountered thus far in the semester. Our narrator feels a need to recount Harriet's story. She spends a great deal of time trying to reconcile facts with the superstition that she cannot help. In the end, our narrator states the three things she can be certain of: that Harriet was "a defenseless young girl," that "Harriet went out into the countryside," and that "there's no evidence to suggest that extraterrestrials visit Earth." The last frame grows to four times the size of the previous frame with an emphasis on "Still; sometimes I lie awake at night, trying to believe." It reminds me of a line I read in a book for another class: "Fact explains nothing." Moreover, fact requires explanation; however, there are some things that cannot be explained. The human capacity for knowledge is limited. The unknown cannot be encapsulated through words, or brushstrokes.

Fun Home

One thing upon finishing the book that has kept me thinking is Bechdel's reticence to place her father within the same category as all of the great authors and thinkers that she alludes to. It's as if she sees her father as having the potential for heroism, which is extinguished by his choice to commit suicide. When I was an undergraduate I took a Comparative Literature class, during the course of which we looked at the literature of Ancient Greece and compared it to Victorian literature. We discussed the Trails of Oscar Wilde through the lens of the Ancient Greek tradition of pederasty, aimed at the teaching of civic duties to budding citizens of the Polis. We also read Foucault's The History of Sexuality, which posits that the construct of sexuality is attributed to one's identity. In WIlde's time the implications of his predilections (to borrow a word from Colette) were that they reflected on his character. Committing the act of "sodomy" prompted suspicions of sexual deviancy during a time when homosexuality was considered an affliction. Naturally, the discrepancy between the way in which sexuality (a word that can only really be used in a modern context) as we now understand it and pederasty led to Wilde's condemnation. Of course I'm oversimplifying things. The "accusation" that Bechdel alludes to on page 175 may have constituted an equivalent of the accusation of "sodomite" (166) levied at Oscar Wilde by Douglas's father, but Bechdel's father's trial did not inspire the degree of courtroom enthusiasm that Wilde's is famous for. Bechdel's father never takes ownership of his sexual identity. Although he alludes to being gay in his letter to Alison, he never explicitly states it and remains closeted throughout his life. Alison harbors resentment towards her father, which is illustrated by her regret that he does not leave a death note. Her hope is that he would have expressed his homosexuality upon death, which would signal his acknowledgement of the fact, and in doing so, would validate his own daughter's sexuality. Alison implies that she finds her father cowardly throughout her memoir for this very reason.

Though, Bechdel definitely sees parallels between her father and herself. I have to wonder, also, if the image on the final page of the book indicates that despite all of the resentment and disdain that Alison has for her father, she has learned some kind of lesson from him as a result of their "entwined stories" that has enabled her to achieve greatness and that sets her apart from her father.

As a student of literature, I thought it was funny that Alison in her college years finds interpretation of literature a "suspect activity" (206), and describes the impulse to interpret in terms of "forcing." I think she describes her English teacher's interpretation of whatever they were reading as contorted. I think it's interesting that Bechdel ultimately turned to memoir, because while there is still lots of room for interpretation in Fun Home and the lines between fiction and reality are oftentimes blurred, memoir, I think, is less about subtext than other genres, as it usually entails a conscious search for truth. Bechdel's quest to find out the truth about her father, which Alison realizes is futile to an extent due to the lack of substantial proof concerning the circumstances of his death or his affairs, is fraught. On page 67, she says, "I employ these allusions to James and Fitzgerald not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms." Later on, "But in a way Gatsby's pristine books and my father's worn ones signify the same thing- the preference of a fiction to reality" (85). Alison's obsession with objective truth throughout her childhood is very telling (I'm thinking specifically of the symbol that she makes up as a shorthand for 'I think'.)

Lucky

The diary component of Gabrielle Bell’s Lucky made me think about our in-class discussion about how memoir is deployed through graphics in order to present a “slice of life.” In particular, the systematic search for some form of truth seems to be an undertaking that eventually is abandoned by Bell without explanation at the end of Lucky # 1, where truth is uncovered in a less deliberate way. In the first part of the book, Bell accounts for every day that passes from Tuesday April 22^nd through Monday June 2^nd; yet, she only chronicles one event that sticks out to her to represent each day. Bell’s choices seem at times arbitrary. Her selection of experiences nonetheless represents a passage indicative of the genre. With the diary, the reader witnesses a gradually changing self. Unlike The Imposter’s Daughter, which reflects a greater time period and thus orients itself more insistently around change and self-improvement, Lucky # 1 seems less self-indulgent. Maybe self-indulgent is the wrong word. Bell makes less of a point of emphasizing, “and this is what I learned,” if that makes sense, than does Laurie Sandell in her memoir. The craft of writing and of representing through drawings seems like less of a catharsis, or a means of therapy, and more of an amusement for Bell.

The decision not to continue with the diary thing in Lucky #2, and the general lack of consistency throughout the book also reveals something about the disposition of the author. In fact, the organization of the book, which seems to be some kind of hodgepodge of unfinished projects, suggests a short attention span and childlike whimsy on the part of the author that is endearing and in my case, relatable. Bell finds it difficult to stick to things. Her job situation is unsteady and always rotating (she’s a cartoonist, an artist’s apprentice, a model, a French teacher, an art teacher, and a jeweller!?) Likewise, the reader never really knows what the future holds for Tom and Gabrielle. Amusingly, she can’t decide on a place to live, so she makes scoping out apartments a hobby. Bell possesses a perpetual lack of contentedness that is reflected in her work. That is, extreme experimentation with modes for representation, as well as experimentation with style and comprise her work.

Gabrielle struggles with finding her artistic niche. At least that is how I interpreted the bit with Sheila Bartok. Gabrielle clearly possesses artistic talent, but she chooses to do work that ends up being passed of as belonging to someone else. She’s stuck with regard to her own work, just like she is stuck in various other aspects of her life, so she turns to the work of others. Ultimately, I really like where Gabrielle Bell went with Lucky. The development of her character (how she draws herself) and the increasing attention to detail in her work throughout the book is really cool. I like the lack of consistency and the fragmentation. It points to so much more than just a lack of focus. The beauty of memoir is that the author doesn’t have to have it all figured out.

My favorite pages are 53 and 54. 

The Imposter's Daughter

There are a few things that I am interested in discussing upon reflection of this graphic memoir. In part, these ruminations of mine are prompted by the interview at the end of the book between Laurie Sandell and Merrill Markoe. In particular, the notion that Laurie’s father’s behavior throughout the memoir is sociopathic and suggests some form of clinical narcissism intrigues me with regard to how the narrator subtly resists diagnosing her father in this way (I say subtly, because weirdly the prospect that one could attribute psychoanalysis to Laurie’s father eluded me until I pulled myself away from the memoir and began to think about it from a critical distance. In part, I think this has to do with the fact that a great deal of the memoir is told from the point of view of a child who blindly idolizes her father, as well as the fact that the message contained within a memoir is inherently biased, in that it is rigged to appeal to both the author and the narrator.)

One could say that The Imposter’s Daughter is almost equally about what Laurie chooses not to confront as it is about how she processes all of the lies that her father has fed her since childhood and the implications with respect to how she lives her adult life. I think the narrator acknowledges this towards the end of the memoir that constitutes a kind of transformation for Laurie: Shades of Hope, therapy, an attempt at self-awareness and acceptance of the truth. I think the idea is that, in the end, Laurie find a way to channel her anger, confusion and frustration concerning her father into writing, which she experiences as therapeutic. Laurie begins to accept that there are certain things that she has no control over. She is no longer a detective seeking answers; rather, she is able to find solace in the fact that she cannot know everything, nor does she want to anymore. She does not feel the need, like her interviewer, to put a label on her father’s sickness. Diagnosing him is not going to help her put all of the lies behind her. Laurie’s ability to heal necessitates a means of being set free from the lies, and no longer of painstakingly trying to understand and pinpoint the reasoning behind her father’s words and actions. Laurie had to learn this the hard way. While she previously judged her sisters and regarded them as being in denial for choosing to overlook their father’s flaws, and remain present in his life, one could say that Laurie now envies them for their ability to do so, but perhaps doesn’t regret the steps she needed to perform in order to arrive at her new outlook. Laurie’s process is so crucial, because without having gone through all of the meddling and investigation that she conducted attempting to uncover the truth, she never would have realized that the truth she seeks is perpetually elusive. She can now find comfort in and is contented by the impossibility of omniscience, and she can relax knowing that she’s done all she can.

Overall, Sandell’s memoir was highly enjoyable to read. I do, however, harbor a lingering difficulty with the way in which Sandell employs the construct of fame in order to illustrate the inner-battle that she experiences herself over the grandiosity and sensationalism that she craves due to her father, and that endows her with the ability to relate to celebrities. Alas, we can touch on that during our in-class discussion.  

Margaret Karr