quasigraphy

In this blog, Sarah Polley discusses the process of making Stories We Tell. I noticed the reoccurrence of concepts of narrative ownership; Polley expresses gratitude to journalists who refrained from publishing her story.

In a sense, this is not just her story. To a great extent this is her mother’s story, and Polley reflects on the investigation of multiple narratives that was necessary to construct a version of the truth. “I’m not claiming that my film lacks self involvement but what I wanted most was to examine the many versions of this story, how people held onto them, how they agreed and disagreed with each other, and how powerful and necessary creating narrative is for us to make sense of our bewildering lives.” I’m interested in applying the concept of a dominant narrative – which Fred Wah mentioned in class – to this process; Polley avoided using a first-person ‘voice of God’ narration because it felt “too self-involved”. In having her father read from text, Polley evades the constrictions of a dominant narrative; she uses her creative agency to develop a ‘truth’ through dialogue, or maybe a metanarrative that serves as a truth to the viewer: “Anything I want to say myself about this part of my life is said in the film. It’s a search still, a search for meaning, truth, for whether there can ever be a truth.” To me this quotation indicates a sort of heuristic (or analytic) mode of coping on Polley’s part, a need to justify the events of her conception. This of course is conjecture and I do not believe I have any real basis for that claim. I do like the idea she puts forward of “[getting] to know my mother who died when I was 11 in a way that isn’t usually possible for people who lose parents young”. Though the actual experience is out of reach, it has been remediated and retold, and Polley has learned to experience vicariously through narratives; “I […] didn’t want this story to be out there in the words of someone other than the many people who lived it. Now it will be written about in many other people’s words, and I’m finally at peace with that.”

One thing I’ve learned in this course is to pay close attention to differences between narratives. I find they often reflect aspects of the narrator that would not be evident without a counterpoint; these differences represent junctions in the guiding framework we tend to follow when constructing our own narrative truths. For me, this is why Stories We Tell works so well: they’re our stories, not just her story.

Harry posits a different perspective, as we see in the second half of the film; he states that all the stories can be heard but giving ‘non-players’ equal weight is a mistake. He believes that people tend to declare themselves in terms of what they experienced, and indicates that loyalties and relationships also play a part in shaping narratives. For me this is visible in Sarah’s metanarrative documentary.

Something else that stuck with me: while Harry unilaterally declares that the ultimate goal of art is to get at the truth, Sarah states that the truth is ephemeral and hard to pin down. Different philosophies, I suppose…

The notion that comic books ‘should be funny’ used to be quite widespread. Several critics of Maus spoke to the controversy of portraying the Holocaust in a comic medium (forgive me). Kendall Bleckern brings up Michael Rothery, Francis Toselli mentioned the notion in his class blog, and the idea is almost omnipresent in a collection of essays edited by Deborah Geis.

I am not entirely sure that Maus was controversial (among literati) – revolutionary, certainly, but I’ve yet to find a credible argument against Spiegelman’s use of the form. (It did win the Pulitzer.) I think the shock value of ‘a comic book about the Holocaust’ was at least equally derived from subject and medium – the Holocaust is shocking on its own where a comic book is not. Emotional reactivity to constructed controversy could certainly serve as a justification for lazy scholarship – I am not at all leveling accusations, merely suggesting the possibility. The act of constructing controversy is far more interesting to me.

To me, the idea that comics should be funny seems naïve. I grew up reading Hergé’s Tintin comic books (1920-30s) and the predominant genre of American comics has always been the superhero; these are not intended to be ‘funny’ (not that they aren’t).

The perception of comics as ‘childish’ was also widespread. The desire of comic artists to avoid this perception led to a new genre – the ‘graphic novel’. This seemed like pretentious nomenclature to me, until I realized I associated ‘graphic novel’ with Persepolis, Maus, Watchmen – a different category than cheap Archie periodicals printed on recycled paper (n.b. I am a fierce advocate of sustainability). ‘Adult’ and ‘serious’ works of hybrid literature triumph over thin ad-platforms full of reused stories (I remember finding duplicates often, and even memorized a few plots. I had three brothers who really liked Archie, so our bathrooms were well-stocked.)

Joseph Witek explored these themes in-depth in his 2004 essay ImageTexT, or, Why Art Spiegelman Doesn’t Draw Comics and is worth checking out; also see his Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar out of Mississippi Press in 1989.

I’ve developed an interest in comic books (graphic novels are included in my definition) and will be doing some reading into comics theory – my critical vocabulary is limited and I’m drawing on literary and visual terminologies. Geis’ collection suffers the same malady, which is surprising given its date of publication (2003). If anyone knows where to start, please let me know.

Works Cited

Bleckern, Kendall. “Comics and Cartoons: Important Social Work.” Contemporary Lit 474. 23 Oct 2014. Web. 5 Nov 2014.

Geis, Deborah R. Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman’s “Survivor’s Tale” of the Holocaust. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: U of Alabama, 2003. Print.

Toselli, Francis. “Maus – Comic Book Forms and Coherence” ENGL 474F Auto/biography as Social Action. 27 Oct 2014. 5 Nov 2014.

Witek, Joseph. “ImageTexT, Or, Why Art Spiegelman Doesn’t Draw Comics.”ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 1.1 (2004). University of Florida. Web. 3 Nov. 2014. 

I feel I should qualify the following by stating I’ve not slept for twenty hours; this post represents an effort to overcome my circadian rhythm and intense desire to pass out in Irving K. Barber (where I work), which would be extremely unfortunate. My fatigue and sequential curmudgeonism will most likely be reflected in my tone.

I’m going to start with the confessionalism present in both Maus and PostSecret – more obvious in the latter. I’m avoiding Six Word Memoir because the site is weighted heavily toward community curation; the posts aren’t curated by one man in Maryland (constructing a narrative that arguably reflects Frank Warren more than it does the submitter). My first concern while reading PostSecret was that this form of anonymous confessionalism might not have substantive benefit; my impression was that sharing a secret with confidants that one doesn’t know commodifies the secret, turning a revelatory act of trust into a meaningless communication to be packaged and sold. I’ve looked into the sociological and psychological functions of secrecy and confession; according to Anita Kelly’s 1999 review of the field in Current Directions in Psychological Science, there are statistically significant correlations between revelatory acts and health. Kelly further stated to the Observer (run by the Association for Psychological Science) that “there is evidence that by writing about held-back information someone will get health benefits. Someone keeping a secret would miss out on those benefits.” (link) This indicates that PostSecret may very well provide quantifiable benefit to its confessors, and I am certainly not opposed to the site generally; I will forever defend Warren’s right to post secrets.

I do feel that Warren is profiting from a narrative feedback loop that he directly shapes (full disclosure: I don’t much like Warren, based on his interviews, and this paragraph will be subjective and unfair). A diary or confidant would likely provide many of the same advantages, and I don’t think secrecy is necessarily undesirable or inherently unhealthy either; of course, I do not intend to imply that the site is redundant or should be taken down. I simply don’t like it as a piece of art; many of the posts seem maudlin, all posts are archived – removing the temporal impermanence crucial to Snapchat and others – and while I have no argument against the fellow publishing five books of secrets, I do think his curation instills a self-perpetuating aesthetic of complaint that I don’t particularly like. I would certainly like to have thought of monetizing crowdsourced misery first.

For me, the revelatory mechanism in Maus is much more powerful. The narrative documents Vladek’s ‘confession’ as a means of building a relationship; Vladek and his son learn more about each other and their honest communication of memory is the genesis of the work. Anja is reconstructed through this process, as noted by Marianne Hirsch in her 1997 Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.  Vladek’s confessions are marked by a postmodern self-awareness; this “self-conscious voice” (667) was noted by James Young in “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past[…]” and the function of such is remarked upon in Saul Friedlander’s Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe: “commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce altervnative interpretations, question any parital conclusion, withstand the need for closure.” (132) This is a quality I find lacking in Postsecret; in my reading of Spiegelman, the surreal (and inconsistent) animal metaphor on a non-fictional narrative indicates a self-aware mediation, a postmodern coefficient for the intensity of the real Holocaust.

Works Cited

Friedlander, Saul. Memory, history, and the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Print.

Hirsch, Marianne. Family frames: photography, narrative, and postmemory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.

Jaffe, Eric. “The Science Behind Secrets.” Association for Psychological Science RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Oct. 2014. <http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2006/july-06/the-science-behind-secrets.html>.

Kelly, Anita E.. “Revealing Personal Secrets.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 8.4 (1999): 105-109. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: a survivor’s tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986-1991. Print.

Warren, Frank. “PostSecret.” PostSecret. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2014. <http://postsecret.com/>.

Young, James E.. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 666. Print.

The identities constructed by the creation (not representation) of life narratives are the product of a dialogue between user and media (internet, platform, creative technologies) and are shaped by such; the user maintains control of their input and thus retains agency not only in construction of a life narrative to be liked and shared but also in curation of that input, and (to an extent) the platform’s interpretation of those behaviours. The input of a user is neither static nor necessarily definitive of a user’s offline identities (contextually constructed and not necessarily ‘true’) – impersonation and quasi-anonymity are inherent to the internet as general medium. The user, therefore, still holds dominance over the platform in terms of the delineation of the user’s identity on a given platform, even as the platform shapes the pathways by which that identity is defined. The construction of a digital identity is a dialogic process.

At the moment, the preeminent platform for digital identities is Facebook. Facebook interprets its users by analysis of their input and attempts to anticipate their interests – crystallized in books, movies, music, and pages – based on demographic patterns and the relativity of these interests. Facebook thinks I should like this show and that band, because it believes I’m a 22-year-old male student who likes that show and this band. (It’s right, for the moment, but that’s not always true.) The targeting power of Facebook is incredibly valuable for marketers – you need only try out Graph Search for a demonstration. It even anticipates friendships, telling me who I should know based on shared friends. This is all reliant, however, on the user having input data and exhibited behaviours that reflect their own identity. My life narrative on Facebook adheres to a set of values shaped by Facebook – it’s less professional than my LinkedIn life narrative, and more expansive than my episodic 140-character narrative on Twitter.

I currently work as a researcher and project coordinator for the Digital Tattoo Project here at UBC – our work explores digital citizenship, digital literacies and asks questions about shaping digital identities.

Some worthwhile reading:

Howard Rheingold’s Tools For Thought (MIT Press), available in full at http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/

Douglas Rushkoff’s 2010 book  Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments for a Digital Age.

Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility [the 1987 translation, relevant particularly in consideration of the shaping processes applied through media]