Memoirs Made of Images: The Graphic Memoir
What is a Graphic Memoir?
A subgenre in memoir, that has been rising in prominence over the last 40 years, is the graphic memoir. It is not uncommon for a memoir to contain a small selection of photos related to the author’s life and story but the number of images involved in a graphic memoir number far exceeds the typical handful of photos. Graphic memoirs are composed entirely of images. Text is still there but far less of it than traditional memoirs. A graphic memoir is basically a comic book the length of a novel crossed with an autobiography.
Thus far, my discussions have been focused upon text in memoir and strategies for reading it more critically in order to get more out of the reading experience. This week, I turn my attention to the graphic memoir and how images impact the memoir reading experience, necessitating that we “read” the images as well as the text.
Reading Images
Graphic memoirs are characterized by a continuous exchange between word and image which creates a unique reading experience. When reading a graphic memoir its important to understand that the images do not simply illustrate the text but rather the two inform and contrast with one another.
In their text, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain that while text and image “[create] a unified whole” they also “remain distinct.” This distinctness results in “stories on the visual plane that are not explicitly signaled by the verbal plane, and vice versa, thus engaging contesting stories and interpretation of autographical memory and meaning.”
By “remaining distinct” and “contesting” with one another, text and image provide two different stories– one made of images and one made of words – that transpire seprately but side by side, informing one another. In situations like this, as readers we need to take time to “read” the image as well as the words and pay attention to how they affect one another. In an interview for The Comics Journal, Graphic memoirist Alison Bechdl describes the experience of reading the images as a sort of decoding process.
It’s very important for me that people be able to read the images in the same kind of gradually unfolding way as they’re reading the text. I don’t like pictures that don’t have information in them. I want pictures that you have to read, that you have to decode, that take time, that you can get lost in. Otherwise what’s the point? – Alison Bechdl
Bechdl is clear that she intends her readers to spend as much time reading the images as they spend reading the words. And Bechdl’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is, as we shall discuss, a compelling example of the exchange that can occur between text and image in graphic memoirs.
In the gap between reading the text followed by scanning the visual content, like completing
an electrical circuit, the reader mentally completes the loop between the words they read and the image they looked at and the linked concepts light up in the mind like a light bulb. This instinctive linking together of ideas is deeply engaging and intuitive on the part of the reader.
Commenting on the uniqueness of this reading experience, graphic memoirist Marjane Satrapi (author of Persepolis) said:
“Comics is the only media in the whole world that you can use the image plus the writing and plus the imagination and plus be active while reading it.” - Marjane Satrapi
Perhaps naming it the “only” media able to do this is taking it too far, but certainly graphic memoirs are a unique breed within the memoir genre.
The traditional memoir reading experience does not have a gap like this to draw upon so the reading experience is more of a continuous stream of thought with the connections pre-setup within the text for the reader to find rather than create. The graphic memoir draws its’ strength from this powerful linking process.
Linking Process in Action
Without giving away too much, in the pages of Fun Home… Bechdl skillfully recounts her experience growing up with a closeted gay father as well as her own coming out story. The juxtaposition of text and image allows Bechdl to craft a layered experience in which literary allusions hover above informing her life narrative in a deft image to text counterpoint.
Her canonical in-text references range from James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, and F. Scott Fitzgerald while the drawn images articulate the memories of her life. The reader passing back and forth continuously between text and image is actively engaged in connecting and contrasting the two.
For example, text in the gutter-space above somberly takes up the myth of Icarus and Daedalus (which features prominently in Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist) informing us “if my father was Icarus, then he was also Daedalus – that skillful Artificer, that mad scientist who built the wings for his son and designed the famous labyrinth…and who answered not to the laws of society, but to those of his craft.”
Image and speech bubbles below contain a mundane domestic re-decorating moment from Bechdl’s home life. Bechdl, portrayed as young child, looks dubiously at the roll of wallpaper her father has selected for her room and in the adjacent image yells in a speech bubble “but I hate pink! I hate flowers!” at her father who stands next to her, hanging a set of curtains. His response is a dismissive “tough titty.”
Alison Bechdl Fun Home... excerpt page 7 New York: First Mariner Books, 2007. Print.
Steps for Reading Graphic Memoir:
1. Start by reading the text in the gutter space above the image.
2. Next, allow eyes to hop over to the illustration and scan the image content and speech bubbles.
If desired, steps 1 and 2 can be reversed. I prefer to read the text and let that color how I view the image but the opposite can also work just as well.
3. Holding the text and image in our mind we conclude by forming a link.
The humorous link formed here is a comparison between Daedulus and Bechdl’s suburban 1960’s father, who in the process of hanging curtains seems a comically diminished version of the legendary figure but nonetheless shares the formidable and creative disposition. Impervious now as then to the needs of “society,” the father/Daedelus blithely goes about the task of decorating the walls of his labyrinth in floral wallpaper.
Without need for belabored explanation, the dialogue between text and image allows this extended metaphor, and many others throughout the memoir, to fluidly transpire over the course of many pages.
Forming Connections Without Words
The reader-viewer is also able to make connections unencumbered by the weight of excessive didacticism, or in other words being told directly what to think. Bechdl herself comments on the limit of words and the freeing aspect of images:
“This is the thing about cartooning for me, is that I really feel like much as I love writing, there are places I can’t go with just words. Language is very rich and flexible, but there are limits to it. That’s where pictures come in.” – Alison Bechdl
Just two frames down from the discussion of pink floral wallpaper, Bechdl sets up an analogy between the Biblical figure of Christ and her father. “It was his passion” says the text in the gutter above the image. “And I mean passion in every sense of the word.” The image below portrays her farther carrying a large decorative wood column, that instantly invokes the image of Christ bearing his cross. The image is able to bring in the Biblical reference without the words Bible or Christ ever being uttered.
Alison Bechdl Fun Home... excerpt page 7 New York: First Mariner Books, 2007. Print.
Carrying the weight of his own percieved sins proves to be more than enough for Bruce Bechdl.
The symbiosis of text and image allows powerful symbolism to come across without verbally forcing it upon the reader. The result of the combination of text and image in graphic memoirs is an amplification and simplification of a life narrative.
Ever read a graphic memoir? Tell me about your reading experience!
