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.