Order 888613: Persepoli

Rocı́o G. Davis

A GRAPHIC SELF

Comics as autobiography in Marjane

Satrapi’s Persepolis

This essay traces a crucial transition in the enactment of the autobiographical text and addresses its creative appropriation by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian immigrant living in France, in Persepolis. I will examine her use of comics – a thematically and representationally complex form that deploys the strategic juxtaposition of sequential text and image – as the medium for her memoir that enacts her process of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and/or national affiliation. Here, the juxtaposition of image and words constitutive of graphic narratives yields a new artistic, literary, and creative experience – a revised aesthetic. Combining theories on the childhood memoir and comics, I argue that we must approach contemporary graphic autobiographies as increasingly sophisticated forms of inscribing the past and read Satrapi’s text as a site for the negotiation and management of the memory of childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history, politics, religion, and art.

Keywords comics; autobiography; Marjane Satrapi; Persepolis; childhood memoirs

A sustained analysis of the forms of life writing being enacted in this century obliges us to reconsider the notion of the autobiographical act itself. Specifically, when we analyze increasingly complex questions about self-formation and the process of signification and the expansion of the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative techniques, the consequences in the context of transcultural self-representation become complicated.

1 In this essay, I trace a crucial transition in the enactment of the

autobiographical text and address its increasingly creative and subversive appropriation by a transcultural writer, Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian immigrant living in France, whose recent autobiography, Persepolis, was published to critical acclaim.

2 I will examine her

artistic project, particularly her use of comics – a thematically and representationally complex form that deploys the strategic juxtaposition of sequential text and image – as the medium for her memoir that enacts her process of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and/or national affiliation.

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As contemporary transcultural autobiographies negotiate renewed forms of experiences, these texts become experimental and revisionary narratives, which challenge textual authority and prescriptive paradigms. I want to argue that a significant challenge to the prescriptive paradigms of autobiographical writing comes through genre. In the case of Satrapi, the juxtaposition of image and words constitutive of

Prose Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 December 2005, pp. 264-279

ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2005 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/014403500223834

graphic narratives yields a new artistic, literary, and creative experience – a revised aesthetic. Indeed, to engage these narratives effectively, we must move beyond an analytical model of merely reading the surface of texts for potential meanings and attend to the cultural and generic codes addressed by the authors to unravel what the texts execute within the contexts of larger questions of cultural and political mobilization. Genre definition and choice directs the act of writing as well as readers’ reception of the ideological issues and concerns embedded in the narrative. This affirmation implies that a reconstruction of the memoir is necessarily inflected by the relationship between creative writing and immigrant or ethnic configurations of subjectivity and national affiliation. Writers sensitive to how differences in cultural contexts and paradigms create specific responses revise established genres to destabilize ideology and conventional strategies of meaning in order to enact distinct sociocultural situations. Readers who encounter these revisionary texts are thus obliged to reexamine their expectations and critical perspectives.

As they gesture towards new perceptions of cultural contexts and choices, transcultural autobiographies challenge the generic scripts prescribed by

Euro-American autobiography. The transaction between formal and cultural modes produces texts that consistently challenge inherited ideas of autobiographical structure and content. Importantly, the nuanced approaches of these narratives clearly serve a significant didactic purpose. The increasingly dialogic nature of life writing reflects a multi-voiced cultural situation that allows the subject to control and exploit the tensions between personal and communal discourse within the text, and signify on a discursive level. Issues of ethnic representation therefore become central to the autobiographical strategies employed by these writers and the manner in which each text performs individual processes of self-awareness. The engagement with the act of narrative evolves into a strategy that blends subjectivity and history, in an attempt to stress individual sensibility, challenge contextual authority, or claim agency.

From our renewed appreciation of the constructedness and performative potential of life writing – where saying something is also doing something – we need to consider, albeit briefly, the author’s choice of this particular autobiographical form. Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in Iran explains in particular ways the present self, and reasserts how the past can only be known and understood through narrative – in her case, a multilayered form of narrating. In a sense, reading her text involves asking pressing questions about the act of construction (or reconstruction) of the self-in- narrative. Her strategy serves as a highly effective vehicle for two fundamental concerns of transcultural self-inscription: the performance of selfhood and how meaning itself evolves. Importantly, transcultural autobiographers, particularly of experiences of childhood set outside Europe or the United States, may also be engaged in a didactic project – the reader accompanies the writer as her self-as-child learns about heritage culture and experiences historical events, fashioning a seemingly artless insider perspective that is, nonetheless, complexly layered.

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These revisionary models of transnational and transcultural position and affiliation have transformed reductivist ideas of the idea of otherness, and the process of othering. I suggest that Satrapi’s comic autobiography can exemplify that new “intermittent time and interstitial space” in literary studies that Bhabha refers to (1994: 312). Many writers engage in increasingly complex ways of understanding and articulating migrant and ethnic identity by choosing a transnational position, one that is neither purely assimilationist nor

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oppositional. Writing the self the way Satrapi does – privileging the transcultural experience through a genre that has not completely achieved mainstream acceptance – illuminates the more challenging strategy of normative self-fashioning and self- representation. As such, the performance of the Iranian child who will become the transcultural adult complicates issues in the discourse of nationalism and affiliation. In this context, William Boelhower’s approach to ethnic autobiography stresses historical contexts as well as the socially-constructed dimensions of the cultural discourses adopted by immigrants, specifically the macrotext of immigrant autobiography which revolves around the contrapositioning of different worlds. Boelhower explains that the process of transculturality becomes a metaphor for the contemporary, postmodern, condition and he argues that “the more one’s local ethnic encyclopedia is disestablished, the more its semiotic nowhere becomes a cultural everywhere, with the ethnic subject now forced into a floating practice of genealogical ordering and interrogation” (1991: 137). When the spaces represented in the text are located outside Europe or the United States, the implications for national and cultural allegiances become more complex.

Comics as autobiography: possibilities and challenges

Will Eisner, in his germinal work, Graphic Storytelling and Visual, posits that the last decades of the twentieth century have obliged us to rework the definition of “literacy.” The proliferation of the use of images as a communicant,” he argues,

was propelled by the growth of a technology that required less in text-reading skills. From road signs to mechanical use instructions, imagery aided words, and at times even supplanted them. Indeed, visual literacy has entered the panoply of skills required for communication in this century. Comics are at the center of this phenomenon (Eisner, 1996: 3).

Similarly, William Nericcio notes that the study of comics operates a significant link between textual and visual studies and that “the time seems right for the critical community to confront the innovative space of graphic narrative: to understand it as both epitome of and reaction against an age obsessed with ‘moving’ pictures” (1995: 106). But the renewed position of graphic narratives in cultural production did not evolve from merely technological innovations, and requires that we, as critical readers, consider the multilayered strategies marshaled in this creative endeavor. Graphic artists/writers are increasingly conscious of the possibilities of the form itself – the way the interaction between word and image reconfigures manners of meaning – as a medium of communicating complex ideas and positions. Though comics are still often considered a popular (read “inferior”) form, Matthew McAllister, Edward Sewell, and Ian Gordon argue that the nature of comic art deploys significant ideological meaning, in the manner in which it combines words and pictures allowing for much “flexibility in the manipulation of meaning”, which has important implications for “both representation and interpretation of ideological images and meaning” (2001: 3).

On the one hand, the communicative elements in comic art encourage the form to occasionally create a closed ideological text, imposing on the reader preferred

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meanings. The limited space in which the artist/writer has to work, for example, may entice the creator to use stereotypes to convey information quickly. Similarly, the use of storytelling devices such as captions and thought balloons can make the themes and values in a comic especially explicit. On the other hand, techniques— such as the use of comics to visually change the point of view in a comic strip or book and the semantic space created by the sometimes ambiguous relationship between the word and the picture—make comics a potentially polysemic text, encouraging multiple interpretations, even ones completely oppositional to any specific artistic intent (McAllister, Sewell and Gordon, 2001: 3 – 4).

The possibility of multiple, even palimpsestic, meanings constitutive of the graphic text has been harnessed in increasingly sophisticated ways by contemporary graphic artists who want to limn political, social, and personal agendas, or challenge the dominant tropes of writing.

5 For instance, Joseph Witek asserts that comics are currently “one of the most

dynamic cultural forms in the United States” and “while some cartoonists do aspire to social and commercial respectability, others turn to comics as a readymade tool for critiquing and subverting the values of mainstream America” (1992: 71 – 72). Because ideological positions are consistently deployed in these texts, it is necessary to interrogate the intersections between the possibilities offered by the form and effectiveness of this strategy, as part of an attentive reading of the layers of meaning offered by comics.

Since the 1960s, comics for older readers have developed into a variety of genres and styles, and autobiographical comics in particular are a distinctive and rewarding domain for exploration from a critical, cultural and gender perspective.

6 In this study, I read comics as

a sophisticated and developed medium, a set of cultural signifying practices in which the intersections of culture, history, ethnicity, and gender can be effectively negotiated by cartoonists and their adult readers. Moreover, the potential of the graphic narrative as a highly dynamic text, as opposed to the more static single-image narrative painting or plain text, determines the dialectic between text and image, providing creators with a wider range of artistic and imaginative possibilities. Thus Satrapi writes within a tradition of comics that is becoming increasingly multilayered in Europe and the United States. Creators of autobiographical comics use a uniquely palimsestic graphic medium (both visual and textual) to narrate and construct a life story. Paul John Eakin’s idea that “the tension between the experiential reality of subjectivity on the one hand and the available cultural forms for its expression on the other always structures any engagement in autobiography” encourages us to critically negotiate Satrapi’s generic choice (1992: 88). For writers who want to creatively limn their experiences, the specificities of the comic book format, Will Eisner argues, which “presents a montage of both word and image,” obliges the reader to

exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regiments of art (e.g. perspective, symmetry, brush stroke) and the regiments of literature (e.g. grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The reading of the comic book is an act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit (2003: 8).

Autobiographical comics have existed for almost as long as comic art has. Susanna Egan explains that Art Spiegelman’s Maus “produced an (auto)biography so powerful

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that the role of comics in autobiography must now be assured” (1999: 16). Spiegelman successfully deployed comics to portray the horror of the Holocaust – to draw the indescribable, so to speak.

7 Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noy, in their introduction to a

special issue of Rethinking History on the use of the graphic novel in historical representation, note that this text, more than any other, transformed the status of comics as a legitimate vehicle for the telling of history.

8 It has also become a staple in

women’s comics, with important comic artists such as Jessica Abel, Erika Lopez, Julie Doucet, and Lynda Barry expanding the possibilities of the form. Barry, in particular, considers issues of self-representation in the introduction to her One Hundred Demons, where she introduces the concept of “autobifictionalography” to describe her project, interrogating the limits between truth and necessary invention or elaboration: “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?” (2002: 7).

9 These

graphic artists have demonstrated the flexibility of the comics to literally represent memory, dreams, possibilities, and engage the idiosyncrasies of the present. Terri Sutton considers women’s autobiographical comics as the most “adventurous” of the genre, noting how their art is enacted most significantly in the private sphere (1993: 111). Interestingly, Trina Robbins explains that:

big chunks of women’s comix tend to be about the artist’s dysfunctional family, miserable childhood, fat thighs, and boyfriend problems. Although [Aline] Kominsky seems to have invented the form, the autobiographical comic actually harkens back to the confessional style of mainstream romance comics (1999: 91).

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Robbins’s perspective links women’s graphic autobiography with earlier forms, even as she notes that these contemporary women significantly transcend the limits of those earlier texts – artistically, thematically, representationally.

Contemporary graphic autobiography dialogues with other narrative conventions, as well as furthers the possibilities of graphic expression. Satrapi’s use of comics as autobiography illustrates Egan’s assertion that “[e]very occasion for mixing genres demonstrates how distinctive sign systems can intersect and merge to signify meanings at which neither one could arrive alone” (Egan, 1999: 21). This form limns the interactions between drawing and language, and its ostensible simplification is actually a complex strategy for the representation of events and perspectives that may be difficult to communicate only through words. Scott McCloud explains this strategy when he describes

cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification. When we abstract an image through cartooning, we are not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t (McCloud, 1994: 30, emphasis in original).

Interestingly, this approach to understanding graphic art is structurally related to one of the constitutive elements of the memoir of childhood, where specific details acquire heightened meaning. The process of memory often involves the symbolic interrogation of particular artifacts, sensory detail like the taste of specific food or the smell of a childhood home, brief conversations or episodes that resound emotionally in the author’s memory. Because these texts are written in adulthood, the significance of

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these “shards of memory,” to use Salman Rushdie’s term, is heightened as they might be the only remnants left of that lost past and lost time. In memoirs like Satrapi’s, the specific event or detail gives meaning to the whole, as with the comic, where the simplest drawing might acquire the most universal meaning.

Another structural connection between the writing of childhood and graphic art lies in the manner in which both forms negotiate specific ways of perceiving. The issue of perspective is fundamental to how we read both autobiographies and graphic narratives, as the forms themselves require the reader to position him- or herself strategically in order to comprehend the performance which has been enacted. In relation to comics, McCloud explains that

Cartooning isn’t just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing. The ability of cartoons to focus our attention on an idea is, I think, an important part of their special power, both in comics and in drawing generally (1994: 31, emphasis in the original).

Childhood memoirs similarly focus our attention on specific ideas and forms of understanding the world, the writers’ individual itinerary of selfhood. Noting constitutive intersections in these modes of inscription, we must approach contemporary graphic autobiographies as increasingly sophisticated forms of inscribing the past. Further, metaliterary elements serve as signifying strategies and these comics engage, in particularly effective ways, the writers’ perception of themsleves and their process of education. Indeed, graphic narratives are highly effective künstlerroman (novels on the education of an artist) – because the subjects of the autobiographical comics are, most often, graphic artists themselves. The reader is privileged to participate in the performance of both memory and art, and the complex interaction between them.

Persepolis: the graphic memoir

In the context of transcultural writing that negotiates the historical and cultural upheaval in Iran in the latter part of the twentieth century, Marjane Satrapi harnesses the expressive possibilities of the comics form to enact the dramatic changes she experienced as a child – beginning with the Islamic revolution and ending with her solo journey to Austria. I propose to read Satrapi’s transcultural graphic autobiography as a literary and cultural site for the negotiation and management of the memory of childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history, politics, religion, and social transformation. The narrator-protagonist’s emerging subjectivity in Persepolis is based upon a series of shifting affiliations and growing awareness of the complexity of religious, ideological, gender, class, and even literary issues. Her choice of medium is deliberate, though it appears to challenge conventional prescriptive ways of inscribing experience. As she explains in an essay titled “On Writing Persepolis”:

People always ask me, “Why don’t you write a book?” But that’s what Persepolis is. To me, a book is pages related to something that has a cover. Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.

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