My Spin on Vladek's emergent head (77.7)

At the end of class today, someone (forgive me for forgetting who) pointed out that in the last panel on page 77, Vladek's head and shoulders pop-up to provide the narration in a manner somewhat consistent with the original "Maus" cartoon. This is the only time in Maus that Spiegelman goes for this specific effect, but there are countless panels in which he gives us full frame shots of Vladek in the present providing retrospective commentary on the scenes he is describing (for example the bottom panel on 86: ('We didn't know yet of Auschwitz - of the ovens - but we were anyway afraid.")

So why the decision to include this abbreviated depiction of present day Valdek within the historically rendered scene on 77?

"Of course I said I only got half of what I really made. Otherwise I wouldn't save anything" present day Vladek says, but the Vladek of 1940 isn't saying anything in this panel. The narration, therefore, indirectly and retroactively puts words into young Vladek's mouth. I don't intend this to be a full explanation, as there is another factor to take into account: In additon to Vladek's head and shoulders being visible, we also see the handles of his exercise bike, an image that will take on greater significance as the chapter progresses.

In chapter one, when the bike is first brought into play, the reader might not take it as anything more than Speigelman's loyalty to accuracy. That is, if Vladek told him the story while riding on an exercise bike, why not commit it to paper that way. In chapter 4, however, greater attention is paid to this device, giving its use a ring of artifice. Upon completing his story about the last time seeing his father, Vladek is tired, which Spiegelman shows by cutting back to the present and depicting him hunched over on the bike (91.8). On the very next page, he says "Whoo - I overdid a little. I'm feeling dizzy" (92.1). Ostensibly, he's referring to the exercise session, but the implication that recounting history has exhausted him is impossible to ignore.

There also seems to be some significance that his chosen mode of exercise doesn't get him anywhere. Which brings us back to page 77. Here, the sly thriftiness that current Vladek describes did in fact get him somewhere. It was perhaps only through his frugal means of saving that Vladek kept enough money to bribe his way toward survival. On the other hand, here is an instance where Spiegelman is not resisting "caricature of the miserly old Jew" and is thereby spinning his wheels without getting anywhere.

Relying on the Narrator

In our class discussion it was argued that Bechdel's reliability as a narrator was sometimes faulty since she would often draw places or events that we know she could not have participated in. However, the bulk of the book focuses on events that she had been around for. What does it mean then, in comparison to Fun Home, that the bulk of Maus is visualizing a story that Spiegelman was not around for? Yes, it's true that there is more to emphasize that he learned this story from his father, but the fact remains that Spiegelman's story is wholly anachronistic. Does this make him an unreliable author?

Memoir as Therapy?

In her interview with Lynn Emmert, Bechdel discusses the benefit of therapy on her writing. In response to Emmert's half-asked question whether it had helped, she bursted out "Oh my GOD, yeah...It wasn't just the emotional benefits I got from therapy, but a whole way of learning to think psychologically," she elaborated. "Understanding what we were just talking about, these layers and layers of motivations behind people's behaviors." I found this fascinating, as the very same day, visiting writer Martin Moran had mentioned his "great editor" and his "great therapist" as the two biggest helps in writing his book. Obviously therapy mostly develops an understanding of one's self and the people in one's life, but is it also some kind of secret to getting a better grasp on people in general? Could all writers benefit from this "insider info" on our deepest motivations, whether for comics or prose, fiction or non-?

Bechdel mentions sharing her material with her mother, saying that each time it was very "emotionally tumultuous." I think that this depth of emotion is what makes her work so rich, and I think that it never goes too far into sentimentalism or schmaltz because a) Bechdel is an excellent writer and b) she had therapy to sort through her thoughts and memories, to sift out the deeper meaning and the strongest threads to braid together.

Character Depiction in Fun Home

Since we have discussed the way the writer depicts himself in many of our texts thus far, I thought it would only be fair to examine Alison Bechdel's self-portrait in Fun Home. Even in the few scenes that we see young Alison in a dress, there is an undeniable boyishness to her. She always has close-cropped hair, wears gender-neutral clothes, etc. We rarely see her smiling; in fact, she is often seen with a scowl on her face. The only time she is seen laughing is when she is telling a friend of her father's death on page 227. There is a slight hint of a smile on her face in several scenes when her father is giving her positive attention, most notably when she was his student on pages 198-199. There are very few similarities between the depiction of Alison and the depiction of her father; she mostly seems to resemble her mother. Whether this is actually the case or a just a way of Alison distancing herself from her father is unclear. Her character does not really change much physically over the course of time; it is easy to pick her out of crowd scenes and distinguish her from her siblings. Bruce, however, is not always drawn with a consistent pen. Even if Alison had not made a comment about her father's good looks on page 64, it would have been easy to tell that he was a fairly handsome man. His face carries a very bookish and serious quality, and his style seems to evolve in subtle ways with the passing of time. But the scenes in which he is reprimanding her or her siblings show a different man. For instance, the image of Bruce on 99.2 bears practically no resemblance to the image on 92.1, and is even quite different from the Bruce on 98.1. Perhaps this is Alison's way of conveying the idea that there was a side of her father that she didn't know, that he really was two people living in the same body. I think that Alison says a lot with her drawings, especially with the expressions on the characters' faces. She never states explicitly that she or her mother or her father were unhappy, but it is as clear as the titles of the books they are reading.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man

There is no escaping literature in Fun Home. Alison and her father are constantly seen book in hand, title visible. Chapter titles cleverly allude to some of the most celebrated works in the canon. Most of these references are explained within each respective chapter, but I found it curious that in Chapter 1, "Old Father, Old Artificer," Bechdel, allows the reader to believe that this is simply an invocation of the Daedalus/Icarus myth, whereas anyone who has read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will recognize this as the begining of that novel's very last line. Of course Joyce takes on greater importance in the the graphic novel's final chapter, "The Antihero's Journey" (which follow's Joseph Campbell's model for the journey of the hero quiye nicely), mostly in relation to Ulysses which Allison "studies" in college. A Portrait of the Artist. . . is brought up fleetingly as a text that she should read prior to Ulysses; and when Allison mentions this to her father he remarks "You damn well better identify with every page."

I bring this up because for all the heavy handed connections Bechdel between between her family history and the works of Proust, Fitzgerald, James, etc, it seems as if Fun Home taken as a whole is a far more subtle and compelling retelling of A Portrait of the Artist . . . and I appreciate that she doesn't have to spell that out for me.

Fun Home Photographs

Almost in direct contrast with Sacco, Bechdel uses literary devices to her advantage in Fun Home and brings the reader into her non-fiction reality in an effective and seemingly effortless manner. The juxtapositions and dualities of her and her father, literary allusions and analogies in literature, and metaphors of snakes/mud/etc all effectively advance Bechdel’s memoir without challenging its believability. [Perhaps it is unfair to categorize Safe Area Gorazde in the same context as Fun Home, however, as the former is literary journalism and the latter memoir. For a reader, it’s much easier to enter the “truth” in a world of someone’s childhood than in a political and influential war-zone. But if it’s important to recognize the works’ difference in categorization, it’s equally important to note why shared (or singular) literary devices work well in one context and not the other.]

Bechdel uses one particular graphic device - the retracing of photographs - to help verify her story’s alignment with reality. The retraced photographs that appear at the beginning of every chapter reinforce the “real” people that Bechdel depicts. The comics inside the chapter are likely drawn to depict reality, but the stroke and form of the characters are more comic-like and steer away from the painstaking details that appear in the photographs. Bechdel didn’t need to present her non-fiction work in a strictly realistic manner (in fact, Bechdel goes so far as to give characters lines and dots for mouths, even when they speak!) Instead, Bechdel uses the comic form to her advantage, adding in retraced photographs only when prompted by her discoveries in the story. Photographs that Bechdel discovers of her family, father and Roy (47.6, 100-101, 102.1-3, 120) help tell her story alongside her narrative, strengthening the reader’s perception of the characters and adding credibility to Fun Home overall.

But where photographs work well in Fun Home, SAG lacks any realistic variations in its overtly comic form. If memory serves, Sacco doesn’t employ a single image or character in photographic realism. Even when given the chance to present one small image (the television screen in 122.2) to mirror actual images from the war, Sacco still employs a more comic-like style to portray “reality” and leaves me wondering whether or not he overlooked an opportunity to help his case of the “real truth.” In the end, this is just one of many devices that Sacco seems to have misused or, in this case, forgotten altogether.

Sacco's Comic Essay

We spent a lot of time discussing Sacco's choice of form in class. It left me wondering about how another form may have looked. I think his most comparable alternative would have been a photo essay. He could balance words and images in the same way that he did with comics, coupling his own experiences with his interviews and journalistic "file photos" of the tragedies in Gorazde and the surrounding region.

This would certainly deal with the issues of "The Real Truth," as we also discussed. Photos have a reputation of being more accurate, more representative of the "facts." However, they lack many of the benefits of drawings, especially those as intricate and evocative as Sacco's. A drawing--though it may not be as "accurate" as a photograph--is able to integrate the feelings and experiences of an event in a way that photographs can rarely reach. The exaggerated features of Sacco's friends and acquaintances may not be photorealistic, but they emphasize the horror of what they've seen, the hardships they've survived, and the overall intensity of emotion they have to live with. Using comics to tell their stories is like the fairly contemporary split between journalism and creative nonfiction. We can't always trust our memories, but I think that how we remember something speaks to the event and its impact more than a series of largely impersonal photos.

This brings up another important difference between a photo essay and what we have here. I think it's important to note the symbolism of a photo being taken, the camera a physical barrier between the photographer and the subject. Sacco spoke to the awkwardness of sketching or taking notes during some interviews, and how instead, he would often rush to a private space and scribble everything down afterward. Imagine if he was reliant on a camera, and was forced to pull one out with every interview--I very much doubt that the (mostly) trusting relationships he had would have been the same. Instead, I imagine a reception more along the lines of Howard Miller's in "An American in Palomar," when they found out his true motivations. I think that this encapsulates the most important effect of Sacco's choice of form--the intimacy of a drawing, and how much closer it brings documenter to documentee.