Artwork by Ivalù
In the realm of contemporary politically engaged art, art historian Susan Best gave us a precious contribution with her definition of reparative aesthetics. In her book Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography published in 2016 she opens a discussion about how shameful histories are being represented in art and how feelings of shame are being aroused from it. Best then proposes through the work of four female photographers a way to give a reparative approach to the experience of shame, using as a basis of affect and trauma theory. The reparative position aims to shift the final goal of art, may it be identity politics art, political art, feminist art etcetera, from reversing a damage being made to seek pleasure rather than avoidance of shame but still assimilating the consequences of violence, as in the view of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that Susan Best deals with.
Fresh from this piercing and sometimes exhausting reading I had to go on a quest to look for an interplay between this study and the field of visual storytelling.
Here I remembered about Hilary L. Chute and her Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. The essay, published in 2010 explored the visual and narrative evolutions brought by some female authors in the comic scene; she focuses in particular on autobiographies in which recollection and memory processes are central. What interests me in particular is her chapter about Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a graphic novel published in 2007 that follows the revolution and the war in Iran throughout the 70s and 80s, filtered through the eyes of a young Marjane. It is specifically for the topics it touches, such as witnessing and collective trauma that I would like to dig into this analysis in relation to what is discussed in Susan Best’s Reparative Aesthetics.
Despite in Best’s book the focus on the topic always draws back to the perspective of the camera, my intention here is that of using her suggestions to explore instead the comic medium and what kind of results it can produce when it deals with representing trauma and memory.
In the comic book, the aim within the transposition of such a strong and complex autobiographical story is often stated and the practice of “not forgetting” is often brought up by the characters. This happens in a constant shift between the public life and the private one. As Hilary Chute states, this kind of memory allows for the constant debunking of history, challenging dominant images. And indeed, it is really interesting to notice about the reception of the comic itself, how such a small voice had such a loud resonance, a little story in its niche had altered the portraiture of the topics it touches. There are some aspects in the narration that are specifically relevant to understand why and how.
The split of the protagonist is one of the formal characteristics that Chute puts her attention on; she discusses the co-presence of the narrator (Marjane Satrapi in an ideal now), the young Marjane and the older Marjane that dynamically lead us in the narration. This brings a sense of timelessness to the story or better, an ubiquity in time of the character and the events that allows for a flow of memory that is vivid, one that echoes and transforms itself in the present.
This is particularly interesting if we consider the characteristics of the medium. In contrast with how we usually consume lets say a movie, the shape of the comic, the three- dimensionality of the object, allows us to go back and forward with the images and the story, therefore also permitting different kind of link building and a nonlinear narrative form. Plus, as Hilary Chute adds, the white spaces between panels make our reading dynamic in a sense that the narration needs our constant contribution with filling the gaps from one image to the other, making the whole process active and engaging. In the realm of storytelling I find this idea intriguing for the implications it could have on our experience and the memory-making of it. What does it mean to not only leave an open door for what we feel about a cultural product we are consuming but also for how we can make knowledge of it?
Another key aspect that differentiates Persepolis and its kind of witnessing from other famous graphic novel(ists) that have dealt with traumatic events, such as Joe Sacco (Palestine, Safe area Goražde and Footnotes in Gaza to say some) and Art Spiegelman’s bestseller Maus is that while these authors also have themselves as narrators embodied in the page, the testimonies that built their work always belong to others.
So while with Spiegelman and Sacco, the ‘transfer’ of the story onto us already comes from secondary witnesses , one that while it still identifies with survivors it does that “without the pathos and abjectness that victimhood often carries”, to put it as Dora Apel does; Satrapi’s testimony of her experience and others’ is different. In her work we get a multi-layered experience of her witnessing without just getting the narration of the story but also how the story was felt, and how the witnessing itself is being digested in the moment of rewriting the story. I am here referring to Dori Laub’s idea of three levels of witnessing that work within the process of testimony gathering, namely internal witnessing, external witnessing and being a witness to the process of witnessing itself. The direct testimony of Marjane allows us in this way to experience all this internal space and how this comes in contact with external reality. Furthermore, the panel structure within the page better allows for 'time travels’ without jeopardizing the clarity of the story. This is often used by Satrapi to move from the public to the private, from witnessing to witnessing the protagonist witnessing herself, from experiencing and discovering the outer world to recollecting informations about it and discovering herself.
Also her testimony of others surrounding her differ from the one a secondary witness could give, it gets filtered with her own (a child’s) imagination and understanding of the situation.
Really easily then, the reader, probably especially the Western one, gets away with the same feeling of estrangement of the protagonist.
The level of emotional engagement is really high because of a kind of ‘pathos’ that one may say interferes with getting clear knowledge from the testimony.
[This comparison with other war related comics that I quoted from Chute’s essay though, is not meant to disqualify the importance of comics or any kind of other testimonies brought by mediators, sometimes this kind of figures are essential to get even any kind of information about certain topics or other relevant point of views on them. What is important to stress anyway is how most of the times stories have been told from just the point of view of this kind of ‘mediator figures’, and they have for so long and on so many topics held a powerful grip on the narrative, most of the time for the sake of a “distanced and clear” point of views. But what I want to enhance with this, and what I think is also the whole point of Chute’s book is that the often irremediably traumatized protagonists of a story have full capacity to tell it on their own and in so many colorful and insightful ways as the rise of autobiographies and female actors in comics have demonstrated.]
Dori Laub discussed in an interview: “It’s not a matter of getting information from (the) survivor and believing him, It is rather a matter of being a fully sharing companion in all the moment of pain and relief that entail looking at one’s awesome life”.
Instead, for as much as I understood, I felt some authors and concepts appearing in Susan Best’s book somehow presented a dichotomy between sentiments and knowledge or political and private, good and bad witnessing; it felt like treating experience and memory as data, dividing what is useful for the public and what you can keep for yourself. This reading then gave me the urge to try to imagine an hybridization of such matters that can meet on a common hybrid ground, being faith always part of the knowledge building process and maybe feeling being a mean for it. And being comics my interest now I am left asking myself what is in play with graphic narrations that can’t be done anywhere else and how can we experience and reinvent storytelling with them?
Apel, D. 2002. Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing. Rutgers University Press. In Best, S. 2016. Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography. Bloomsbury Academic p. 40.
Chute, H. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Gender and Culture Series) (Illustrated ed.). Columbia University Press. p. 169.
Felman, S., & Laub, D., MD. 1991. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Routledge. In Best, S. 2016. Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography. Bloomsbury Academic p. 38.
LaCapra, D. 1998. History and Memory After Auschwitz Ithaca: Cornell University Press, In Best, S. 2016. Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography. Bloomsbury Academic. p.40.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miop-FHzzLI
What can witnessing be in graphic narrative?
In the realm of contemporary politically engaged art, art historian Susan Best gave us a precious contribution with her definition of reparative aesthetics. In her book Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography published in 2016 she opens a discussion about how shameful histories are being represented in art and how feelings of shame are being aroused from it. Best then proposes through the work of four female photographers a way to give a reparative approach to the experience of shame, using as a basis of affect and trauma theory. The reparative position aims to shift the final goal of art, may it be identity politics art, political art, feminist art etcetera, from reversing a damage being made to seek pleasure rather than avoidance of shame but still assimilating the consequences of violence, as in the view of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick that Susan Best deals with.
Fresh from this piercing and sometimes exhausting reading I had to go on a quest to look for an interplay between this study and the field of visual storytelling.
Here I remembered about Hilary L. Chute and her Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. The essay, published in 2010 explored the visual and narrative evolutions brought by some female authors in the comic scene; she focuses in particular on autobiographies in which recollection and memory processes are central. What interests me in particular is her chapter about Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a graphic novel published in 2007 that follows the revolution and the war in Iran throughout the 70s and 80s, filtered through the eyes of a young Marjane. It is specifically for the topics it touches, such as witnessing and collective trauma that I would like to dig into this analysis in relation to what is discussed in Susan Best’s Reparative Aesthetics.
Despite in Best’s book the focus on the topic always draws back to the perspective of the camera, my intention here is that of using her suggestions to explore instead the comic medium and what kind of results it can produce when it deals with representing trauma and memory.
In the comic book, the aim within the transposition of such a strong and complex autobiographical story is often stated and the practice of “not forgetting” is often brought up by the characters. This happens in a constant shift between the public life and the private one. As Hilary Chute states, this kind of memory allows for the constant debunking of history, challenging dominant images. And indeed, it is really interesting to notice about the reception of the comic itself, how such a small voice had such a loud resonance, a little story in its niche had altered the portraiture of the topics it touches. There are some aspects in the narration that are specifically relevant to understand why and how.
The split of the protagonist is one of the formal characteristics that Chute puts her attention on; she discusses the co-presence of the narrator (Marjane Satrapi in an ideal now), the young Marjane and the older Marjane that dynamically lead us in the narration. This brings a sense of timelessness to the story or better, an ubiquity in time of the character and the events that allows for a flow of memory that is vivid, one that echoes and transforms itself in the present.
This is particularly interesting if we consider the characteristics of the medium. In contrast with how we usually consume lets say a movie, the shape of the comic, the three- dimensionality of the object, allows us to go back and forward with the images and the story, therefore also permitting different kind of link building and a nonlinear narrative form. Plus, as Hilary Chute adds, the white spaces between panels make our reading dynamic in a sense that the narration needs our constant contribution with filling the gaps from one image to the other, making the whole process active and engaging. In the realm of storytelling I find this idea intriguing for the implications it could have on our experience and the memory-making of it. What does it mean to not only leave an open door for what we feel about a cultural product we are consuming but also for how we can make knowledge of it?
Another key aspect that differentiates Persepolis and its kind of witnessing from other famous graphic novel(ists) that have dealt with traumatic events, such as Joe Sacco (Palestine, Safe area Goražde and Footnotes in Gaza to say some) and Art Spiegelman’s bestseller Maus is that while these authors also have themselves as narrators embodied in the page, the testimonies that built their work always belong to others.
So while with Spiegelman and Sacco, the ‘transfer’ of the story onto us already comes from secondary witnesses , one that while it still identifies with survivors it does that “without the pathos and abjectness that victimhood often carries”, to put it as Dora Apel does; Satrapi’s testimony of her experience and others’ is different. In her work we get a multi-layered experience of her witnessing without just getting the narration of the story but also how the story was felt, and how the witnessing itself is being digested in the moment of rewriting the story. I am here referring to Dori Laub’s idea of three levels of witnessing that work within the process of testimony gathering, namely internal witnessing, external witnessing and being a witness to the process of witnessing itself. The direct testimony of Marjane allows us in this way to experience all this internal space and how this comes in contact with external reality. Furthermore, the panel structure within the page better allows for 'time travels’ without jeopardizing the clarity of the story. This is often used by Satrapi to move from the public to the private, from witnessing to witnessing the protagonist witnessing herself, from experiencing and discovering the outer world to recollecting informations about it and discovering herself.
