Speak, Memory

The first time I became truly aware that one could make art directly out of one's life -- unfiltered by fictionalization -- was probably back in college, in that long-ago era when the hapless Carter years were giving way to the malignant Reagan ones. I had a Work-Study job in television production (most of our portable equipment used open reel B&W recording, and the coming of portable, VHS cassettes was the Big New Thing), and one of my co-workers, Bob Kaputof, was a graduate art student who used the equipment, during off-hours, for various video projects.

"Kap," as we knew him (he's since gone on to become a professor of "Kinetic Imaging" in the art dept. of a well-regarded Southeastern college) would often keep things remarkably simple: Sitting in a chair in his backyard recording monologues about life, his parents, or past loves, or intercutting narratives with objects like school film strips, interviews with former girlfriends, visits to previous "locations" one had lived, or loved, in, etc.

(That we once did a spoof on 50s robot films as well might be more germane to SF Site, but beyond the purview of this particular discussion!)

Nonetheless, that was probably the first time that it occurred to me that direct reportage of one's life could in fact, be art. This was separate from straight autobiography, which was also a kind of reportage on one's life, though often, or traditionally, a recitation of the "actual facts" -- as my late grandfather would call them. But it was those videos that allowed me to consider that you could take those same facts and make something that was simultaneously objective and subjective --"factual" and impressionistic -- all at once.

As a young playwright, I knew that Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, say, were taking the "truths" of their lives and writing plays about them, through the remove of fictionalized characters, but Bob was being himself in his videos, and his life was being channeled directly into his art.

I was mulling all this recently -- even before I knew that tag-teamer Rick Klaw would be writing, in overview, about "non-fiction" comics in his last column -- with the arrival of two, well, they're not graphic novels, really, are they?

Graphic memoirs, perhaps, but more akin to something like Bob's videos than prose-based autobiography, taking "true" incidents -- letting them speak, stand as facts -- yet assembling them in ways that are ultimately -- once again -- "subjective," in the same way our lives, despite being strewn with "verifiable" incidents and circumstances -- are lived.

The two memoirs were Stitches, written and drawn by illustrator David Small (due out soon from W.W. Norton) and You'll Never Know, by C. Tyler (from Fantagraphics) which bills itself directly as a "graphic memoir."

Both reminded me of Kap's early videos, in that they were taking memory, and stories, and using an innately visual medium to recount their respective tales. In the case of Stitches, this tale was about Small's emotionally austere 60s-era upbringing in Detroit, by a distant doctor dad, and a hostile mom-with-a-secret.

As for You'll Never Know, Tyler recounts the process of getting her World War II vet dad to try and speak about the battles this "good and decent man" (as the subtitle goes) kept silent witness to, decade after decade.

But Tyler's memoir -- and Small's, too -- both operate on a "meta narrative" level as well, where they call attention to themselves as narrators, or as active compilers of these stories, interjecting themselves so that the process of telling the story becomes part of the story.

Comics are particularly well-suited to this -- as was video -- with the ability of frame and panel to comment on action that occurs in non-sequential, or non-chronological, manner.

This is different than the current explosion of You Tube-y video, where everything is relentlessly documented and disseminated. Little of it, however, is filtered or redacted (the "subjective" part) in any way -- it's all raw news feed.

And certainly much of our lives unfold like that, but if it becomes something we can all "art" -- the cartoonist's, the storyteller's -- it is the ability to assemble events with hindsight that allows the respective author/artists to comment on them.

Comics have done this before, of course -- Rick mentioned Maus last time out, which is as much about Art Spiegelman trying to get the story of the Holocaust out of his dad, as it is about his dad's particular endurance and survival of the Shoah -- and I remember the impression that Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby made on me when I first read it: His recounting of growing up gay in the 60s south was as indelibly good as an indie film (I thought at the time when, as a showbiz journalist, I was writing about a lot of 90s-era indie films).

What is interesting to speculate on is where the trend of comics memoir might be headed: Is it all so new that any life that can be rendered artfully into panels deserves full publication? Or is the filter simply whether that life belongs to someone with the skill to create a comic?

In other words, does subject matter need to "rise" to a certain level before it gets our attention? Or is Small's recounting of running down his physician dad's hospital corridors -- and the metaphorical "medical specimen" he finds there -- enough to rivet us, especially given the eventual pay-off that a return trip to the hospital has for him?

As for Tyler's book, my main frustration is that this is only "Book One" -- so this is mostly the tale of how she approaches finding the tale (her father's), and whatever his big emotional reveal is -- and whatever the war did to traumatize him -- we won't know till the next edition.

And I'm not sure I'm growing more patient with age!

More seriously, though, her book -- broken up into "traditional" comic panels, and notebook-page like reproductions -- becomes a meditation on how the "art" of our lives, its story, is found all around us, if we but pay attention (Small, on the other hand, may be speaking more to how one "survives" a bad emotional hand, and can touch down safely later).

That, I think, is what Kap's videos gave me: a realization that your own story was already happening, no matter how (or whether) you chose to notice it.

And yet, in the age of the Tweet and the blog post, there is still the "deep breath" of taking to the easel (or the editing room, or the draft revision) that also gives our lives, those triumphal and heatrbreaking events, large and small, a chance to "speak back" to us.

It's important to know what the story is trying to tell us, too. Even if the story is one we think we "know," because we lived it.

Both books are recommended. Even if neither is perfect (the "ending" in Small's, for example, feels a bit rushed), both are illuminating. And not about the authors' lives, really. But about yours. And mine.