The past two weeks of ASTU have been very captivating considering the texts we have covered. Following on from reading Satrapi’s graphic narrative: Persepolis, we studied a follow up article written by an American literary scholar and an expert on comics and graphic narratives: Hilary Chute, who discusses the various styles that Satrapi uses in her narrative that can convey many different messages and have very special effects in contrast to novels and regular comic books.
The main theme of Persepolis and, by extension, Chute’s essay is the graphic narrative style used by Satrapi. In each section of Chute’s essay, the basis is the use of graphic style and the various messages it sends. A point in Chute’s essay that I want to expand on is ‘violence and the ordinary’. Satrapi effectively conveys the trauma that she went through with a very blunt tone, however I question whether this tone is more effective than dramatizing her life events when trying to have an emotional impact on the reader.
While conducting research for this blog I stumbled across another blog that fits in perfectly with our discussion: http://goo.gl/9LJnZG. This blog discusses Persepolis in relation to Chute’s essay. This blog raises some excellent points about whether Satrapi’s graphic narrative fully captures the terror and trauma that befell Iran and the effect that it had on the country and the people. It is accurate to say that Persepolis seems simplistic however Satrapi does touch on traumas in a forthright manner, which is the probable cause of the argument.
I would like to digress from Chute’s essay and discuss a topic that was surprisingly not mentioned in the essay; the role that religion and faith plays in Persepolis. We witness how Marji’s faith is tested with each death and trauma that she experiences also how she finds comfort in God’s presence, however when her uncle Anoosh dies, the use of graphic narrative helps the reader to understand how Marji feels and how her detachment from God left her feeling empty.
I must confess that I have found this blog post particularly hard to write because I find myself analyzing Satrapi’s Persepolis instead of Chute’s essay, so by definition I am analyzing an analysis.
References
“Hillary Chute.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., date last updated (16 September 2014. Web. Date accessed (09 October 2014). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Chute Jensen, M. (2013). Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis – by Sarah MacGregor Group A. [online] writingwomendotorg. Available at: http://writingwomen.org/2013/11/21/retracing-in-marjane-satrapis-persepolis-by-sarah-macgregor-group-a/ [Accessed 10 Oct. 2014].
2 Comments
This is an interesting blog you link to outside of our ASTU class. Reading how it connects Chute’s analysis of Persepolis makes me want to extend into Joe Sacco’s work as well. Although both Persepolis and Safe Area Gorazde are classified as graphic narratives, they have extreme contrasts in both the graphics and the narratives. I like how you mention the simplicity of Satrapi’s style and the abstraction she puts into relaying her traumatic story arguably are intended to augment the trauma. Likewise, the blog you link us to mentions Satrapi’s minimalist black and white style as well as the limited scope through a child’s eyes make the way we see violence come across all the more powerful in this narrative. In quite a different approach, Sacco writes his narrative fully aware that he is retelling experiences as a journalist, not having lived through such accounts himself. Perhaps due to the secondhand nature of these accounts, one could argue Sacco relies more heavily on the visual representations he creates. His illustrations are undoubtedly more graphically violent and realistic. Every single page is busy with illustration aiming for a more dramatic emphasis on the violence conveyed. There were pages I admittedly had to skim through quickly because gore was too involved in the violence depicted. On both ends of the spectrum, it’s interesting to note both styles of graphic narrative, simplistic and abstract versus elaborate and realistic can drive the same emphasis of trauma and violence into readers.
I too would have liked to further explore the themes of faith and religion in the graphic Narrative Persepolis as it is an interesting topic especially from the view point of Marji. I would just like to point out that for Marji, she sees god as physically resembling that of Karl Marx, a German figure. This made me question how other people in other religions view their version of god and how this version gets shaped. Does it it shaped by the media we watch? Our parents? Our environment? Perhaps maybe our religion? I would have thought that Marji would imagine god as an Iranian figure. Thinking back to myself, my first imagination of god was from this movie I saw when I was around the age of 6. I wonder if we always keep this same image of god that we imagine. Even though Marji does not believe in god as the book progresses, I wonder if her image of him is still a physical resemblance of Karl Marx.