Shadows, sound, angles, circles

I was incredibly moved by this work, even if I found myself disappointed by the rushed way in which Small seems to sum up time after he leaves his parents’ home. I forgive that ending for the power of the rest of the work. I’ve got a bajillion notes on different things I’ve noticed. Here I’ll try to distill some of the elements that for me made this graphic memoir so brilliant and impacting:

Shadows and silence:

I find it curious and poignant that Small opens his graphic memoir with an image of the Detroit cityscape. The landscape is rendered as a vast haunting shadow, the contours are vague, the buildings are almost indistinct, the belching smog is depicted with the same shade that is used to represent earth. This gestures meaningfully to what is to come in the story. As in: things are contaminated by this moment of industrial fortitude, just as Small’s cancer is the product of the medical milieu: x-rays. These shadows situate us in place and time. Through these shadows the city seems steeped in a profound echoing loneliness. Human presence and interaction are indicated only through the constructed environment: cold, and hard, and static. As Small zooms us in on that landscape in the following pages, the city is desolate, arranged a claustrophobic linear order, with empty parking lots, and empty streets. There is so much separation and space. When we finally enter his family’s home the isolation and silence are already palpable, establishing the emotional tenor in/through which the story emerges.

As a result each time shadow is used, it bears the echoes and saturation of the initial emotions with which it is laden in the first few pages of the work. This seems important then when considering that our first introduction to his mother is through her shadow on the kitchen floor on page 14. In this sense is introduced through a frame of distance and darkness, vacancy. Shadows like ghosts, haunt, so she haunts this first panel. On a symbolic level this represents the ways in which she is haunted by her own silence, pain, shame, secretes. The shadows on her bedroom door and the askew angle at which the light hits it gestures again to the internal darkness and rage with which she wrestles and her great distance from her son. The way little Small watches his father thumping a punching bag from the top of the stairs in shadow emphasizes again the fissures. It would take me many pages to document all of the moments in the text where this holds, but a couple more include:

·      The preserved fetus which he finds on the empty upper floor of the hospital which becomes in a sense a foreshadow (forgive the pun) of what is to come

·      The moment he is given sleeping gas and enters a shadowy oblivion that will eventually produce his literal silencing

·      The way that oblivion enters the space of his throat post operation

·      The way he becomes ghostlike at school

·      The way the world enters perpetual shadow after the psychiatrist informs him that his mother does not love him

·      The image of his father ascending the stairs to his bedroom when he invites him to have dinner in order to confess to him that it was he who ultimately caused his cancer due to overuse of x-ray

In shadow everything is flattened, things are not what they seem, so when we consider how silence and “being left in the dark” figure into the thematic explorations of this work, all these visual cues become profoundly relevant. It is in this (and many other ways) that Smith knits the narrative – what is told in word and image – together with incredible nuance. The way Small places the x-ray – both the machine and the image it produces – into juxtaposition with the shadow and silence, ie. the way in which the x-ray is supposed to lift into visibility what cannot be seen, is supposed to articulate the invisible, but in this story simply produces even greater silence, more shadow, more flattening darkness, seems important; particularly in relationship to the later part of the work, where what becomes redemptive, and where the/a truth is finally uttered, is through the work of creative practice, through artistic reinterpretation. He asserts that it is only through this refiguring through memory and craft that intergenerational cycles of silence that produce illnesses of all kinds are broken. Art was the thing that ensured he did not follow the path his mother was clearing for him in the closing dream sequence to the asylum where his grandmother lived her final days.

Other things I found incredible:

Sound:

The moments where Small gives language to sound ie. the punching bag: “poketa, poketa, poketa.” (17) He creates a rich sensory world inside of the text.

Angles and entry points:

His incredible camera work gives the text so much movement and holds so much control over the pace. On the very first pages we are flying through the air over the city, we are perched in a tree outside Small’s childhood home, we land on the ground where we push open the front door, we enter the home and see the child, we then assume the child’s gaze as he sees his mother’s shadow through the door to the kitchen. There is an incredible fluidity that emerges as a result of this technique. Another example is page 39 where he volleys us back and forth between little Small’s face and the preserved fetus. There is a staccato horror that becomes so incredibly loud with the final close-up on the eyes. Another example of this is page 57-59. Here he angles the camera so we see little Small running as Alice: we chase after him from behind, we see him again from the branches of the tree, we see him through the neighbors window, and then arrive into his point of view on the jungle gym. Obviously this is happening all over the text. The impact is that all of this movement of the camera makes gives Small’s world a deeply shifty uncertain at times fragmented feeling.

Another way in which this is accomplished is the way in which Small hones in on details – fragments of whole images ie. when he depicts the x-ray machine in parts, zooming in on the control panel, or a strange angle of a brick wall. These images become clues in a sense that become deeply relevant as we move into the story. The angles he chooses seem important, as his way of signaling to us that we should pay attention.

Cyclical structure

The cyclical nature of this work is also particularly neat because the symbols he suggests/introduces recur but in a manner that doesn’t feel heavy handed: ie. in the opening he is drawing the White Rabbit, then we learn of his love of Alice in Wonderland, and the way in which the Psychiatrist is then depicted as the White Rabbit. The return to the scene of him drawing in the living room accumulating different angles of story and meaning. The three voices lost in the text – his own, his great grand father’s and his, mother’s. The recurring image of being drawn into a cyclone of space following the wave of his mother’s wrath, the effect of the sleeping gas, the dark cavern of his throat and the silence following. The use of lines as a way to transition the story ie. the stitches on his neck become stairs become rain drops pelting the earth, become his tears in the psychiatrist’s office.

Anyway, so much more but I’ll leave it here. Looking forward to the conversation.