Hello readers,

In the conclusion of my last blog post I acknowledged the comic book artists Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi for having the boldness to use the highly stylized form of the comic book to represent historical events that are often intentionally left unrepresented. As we continue on in my Art Studies (ASTU) class with discussing this aspect of Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, I have been reminded of another author who also uses her work to question the “unspeakableness” of past trauma – the Canadian author Anne Michaels. Michaels’ 1996 award-winning novel Fugitive Pieces follows Jakob, a Jewish boy who was orphaned in Nazi occupied Poland, throughout his life as he attempts to overcome the trauma that he experienced. Despite the fact that the highly visual, graphic narrative form of Persepolis and the highly dense poetic/prose form of Fugitive Pieces are on opposite ends of the form spectrum, the works remain comparable in many ways. In a similar fashion to how Satrapi uses the graphic narrative to deconstruct the taboos surrounding the representation of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and ensuing Iran-Iraq war, Michaels’ use of language in Fugitive Pieces serves to invert the legitimacy of the popular sentiment that “there are no words” to describe the absurdity and horror of the Holocaust.

In order to better understand the implications of this aspect of Satrapi’s work, my ASTU class has been referencing an analysis of Persepolis by the literary scholar Hillary Chute who asserts that “the complex visualizations that many graphic narrative works undertake require a rethinking of the dominant tropes of unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility that have tended to characterize recent trauma theory…” (93). Through her choice of the comic book form and furthermore through her use of a distinctly simple, abstract and monochromatic illustration style, I agree with Chute that Satrapi’s work effectively shatters previous norms surrounding the way that trauma is portrayed. In fact, as Chute notes, Satrapi harnesses the power of the abstract to paradoxically create a more realistic telling of her story.

While Satrapi reclaims abstract illustration to represent trauma, Michaels reclaims the power of the written word to do so. She does this through the structure, syntax and diction of the Fugitive Pieces itself. The novel is a very abstract narrative that reads like stream of consciousness poetry; Michaels’ training as a poet is noticeable in the prose. Michaels has been criticized for this by those who find it problematic to fictionalize and make poetry out of what was/is a painful reality for so many, especially because Michaels uses her artistic craft and highly stylized diction to make this dark history sound, well, beautiful. Satrapi’s work functions in a similar way in that her representations of trauma often result in aesthetically striking or even formally pleasing illustrations. Satrapi does not illustrate realistically but rather opts for abstraction, just as Michaels does not write factually but rather poetically. Thus, a critic could claim that the use of abstraction in both Fugitive Pieces and Persepolis overly romanticizes the historical events that these works attempt to represent. In an article she wrote for The Guardian however, Michaels defends her controversial prose by emphasizing that “Nothing can recreate the horror of certain events; a brutal language would not be capable of expressing this, yet it would pretend to do so… I turned to another way of telling, language that I hoped would bring both myself and the reader very close to events in another way…”. Chute suggests very similar conclusions about the representation of horror in her analysis of Persepolis. Thus, I would agree with Chute that Satrapi avoids glorifying the trauma in Persepolis not despite but in fact because of her abstraction of it, and I would argue the same for Michaels in Fugitive Pieces.

One reason I believe this to be true is that Michaels’ stylized diction is in fact an explicit response the misuse of language by the Nazi regime. The Nazi’s used language to destroy; they used it to manipulate society by integrating their doctrine into the vernacular and by taking away the power of language from the Jewish people. In her exemplary craft of it, Michaels therefore reclaims language from its use as a tool for destruction, using it instead as a tool to rebuild and heal. Likewise, as Chute discusses, Satrapi’s bold form and style of representation in Persepolis is in itself a statement against the censorship of the Islamic Iranian regime (106/7).

One interesting thing I would like to note as I wrap up here is the shared sentiment towards memory that both of these authors express through their work. Satrapi concludes her introduction to Persepolis by stating that “One can forgive but one should never forget”, a theme that continues throughout the narrative. This theme is prevalent in Fugitive Pieces as well. In the aforementioned article, Michaels explains her objective behind writing the novel as being that “Morality is a kind of muscle which must be exercised to remain strong… Memory itself is a moral issue: “What we save, saves us.”” While the importance of retaining certain memories is expressed in the content of both works (both of our young narrators struggle with the weight of painful personal and collective memories), this sentiment is also addressed in a more postmodern way in the very existence of the works themselves. By way of existing, both works have physically bound into book form and therefore solidified certain memories. Thus, while both of these authors explicitly emphasize the importance of what we remember, Michaels and Satrapi also stress in multiple ways the importance of how, or in what form, we choose to remember.

Hello readers,

This week in my ASTU class we have been reading Persepolis: The story of a childhood, the graphic memoir by the Iranian-born French comic book artist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi uses her former self, young Marji, to recount her experiences of growing up during the highly stigmatized 1979 Islamic Revolution and the following Iran-Iraq war. In doing so, the reader is reintroduced to these historic events from an unconventional and perhaps previously unheard perspective – that of a young girl from a “modern and avant-garde” family (Perspolis, 6). While the content of the work can stand alone as an impressive mix of political commentary, historical allusions and of course, a child’s personal wartime narrative, what makes Satrapi’s Persepolis so powerful is the way that she has expressed this heavy content through the dynamic comic book form.

As we were discussing in class today, the effectiveness of the comic as a genre has become a hot topic in academia, particularly since the esteemed comic book artist Art Spiegelman shocked the literary world in 1992 when his work Maus: A Survivor’s Tale became the first – and to date only – comic to win a Pulitzer Prize. Thus, relative to the serious analysis of this medium that exists (for example, Scott McCloud’s highly acclaimed work Understanding Comics) and to the abundant cult comic sub cultures out there, my own understanding of this form and the world of comics is very limited. Yet still, I find the medium to be incredibly fascinating. For the sake of brevity, this blog post will not focus on the effectiveness of the comic medium in portraying narratives, but rather on how the comic genre plays into conversations about the art industry and its socio-economic relationship to class.

In an interview uploaded by the YouTube channel I Am Film, Satrapi accredits her use of the comic genre to her “love” of “popular art”. Expanding on this, she continues by saying “I didn’t want to make some paintings that would go to some galleries and then some elite peoples would come and watch my paintings and that would be it… I said I can make something that would be popular and not stupid.”

Interestingly enough however, my own exposure to the comic medium has primarily been through these very gallery settings. In 2008 I saw KRAZY, the dynamic summer exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery which centred around comics, graphic novels and other such genres, and last spring I saw the Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective show at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Thus my personal exposure to the art form that Satrapi intentionally uses in order to create “popular art” has been through institutions that generally align themselves with more “serious” “high art”. This is interesting because it reflects a certain trend in the art world in which popular art, like comics, has come to be coopted by previously separate domains of high art, like the gallery.

I have to admit that at times I am somewhat skeptical of so-called popular art. Popular art is inherently associated with mass culture and therefore its mass appeal can make it an easy target for the corporate world to appropriate – art that appeals to a big market is art that can turn a huge profit. Thus popular art as a form helps contribute to the increasing commercialization and trivialization of art and culture (for a similar account of this idea explore the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their theory of The Culture Industry). For example, when thumbing through The New York Times Magazine one may encounter ads for Jeff Koons (the iconic American artist) edition Dom Perignon. Seen from one perspective the Koons bottles represent popular art, seen from another this collaboration is mere brand building for both artist and corporation. Yet Satrapi proves my cynicism to be too simplistic by reviving a still beautiful, uncorrupted side of the popular art form – a side in which popular art and more specifically the comic genre is used to create something powerful for everyone to experience.

Playing devil’s advocate one more time however, to what extent is the comic genre actually distanced from the classism that exists in the rest of the art world? Traditionally, comics are often associated with youth culture – think of the weekend funnies in the newspaper or of any iconic superhero series. Thus, in one way the comic represents a sensorial form that is unpretentious, relatively inexpensive and easily accessible to a popular audience. In another sense however, comics can also be associated with a political, highbrow and generally wealthy class – take the political cartoons and comics produced for publications like The New York Times and Charlie Hebdo. The highly erudite comic perhaps is not a “popular art” form because it is only distributed to and only intended to be interpreted by a certain elite class.

The real significance of works like Satrapi’s Persepolis and Spiegelman’s Maus then becomes that they effectively bridge these two worlds of comics and use the popular art form to transcend the potential elitism in the art world. They document political and historical commentary onto an unpretentious page. As Satrapi says in the I Am Film interview, “it is possible to make something that everybody can read but is well made.” In this synthesis something truly incredible is created. Using the genre of the comic book to explore often taboo and traumatic issues takes an incredible amount of artistic bravery. If one thinks of Theodor Adorno’s famous declaration that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”, one has to celebrate Spiegelman’s courage to go on to use not the poem but the even more stylized form of the comic book to recount his parents experience of the Holocaust in Maus. Likewise, Satrapi’s work is equally poignant. She utilizes the comic to represent the best (and not the commercial) aspects of the popular art form – she cuts through demographic blockades to reach a wide audience with her strong voice and powerful pen.