Between History and Memory: Ambivalent Longing in the Work of Seth
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Deposit Guide Contact: email BETWEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY: AMBIVALENT LONGING IN THE WORK OF SETH DANIEL MARRONE A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BIRKBECK COLLEGE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2013 2 I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is solely my own. ____________________________________________________ Daniel Marrone 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sincerest thanks to Barry Curtis and Roger Sabin for their generous encouragement, astute advice, and attention to detail. Thanks as well to Charles Hatfield for providing the text of his 2002 conference paper. I am also deeply indebted to Seth for being such a gracious and willing participant in this research, for donating hard-to-find back issues of Palookaville, and particularly for inviting me into his home to talk about comics. Special thanks to Sarah Pinder for her constant support. 4 ABSTRACT The work of Canadian cartoonist Seth positions itself between history and memory, and in doing so gives rise to a range of ambivalent impulses, chief among them an ambivalent longing for the past. Seth suggests that “the whole process of cartooning is dealing with memory,” and by consistently drawing attention to the narrative representation of the past, his comics reveal the extent to which the making of history is an act of great artifice. In its exploration of what Walter Benjamin calls “the mysterious work of remembrance—which is really the capacity for endless interpolation into what has been,” Seth’s work exhibits a complicated nostalgia, well aware of its own reactionary, restorative and nationalistic inclinations and able to channel them toward productive ends. Seth’s ironic, humorous and metafictional approaches to memory, remembrance and longing for the past reveal that his attitude toward these closely related subjects is deeply ambivalent. He nimbly mobilises history, (auto)biography, anecdote, documentary and other parallel modes. This investigation seeks to understand the ways in which his appropriation of such historicising discourses substantiates the powerful evocations of longing, loss and memory that characterise his fiction. Memory is here conceived not just as an invisible, ubiquitous mental phenomenon that reflects our experience of time and relation to the past, but as a medium, an art – and one which is in many ways akin to Seth’s mode of expression. The fundamental operation of comics, as a visual medium, initiates and makes space for narrative interpolations in a way that is not only comparable to but in a certain sense mimics the historical interpolations of memory; in both cases, longing is spurred by incompleteness. Seth turns the medium of memory on itself, using it as an instrument to examine the processes of remembrance and making history. 5 CONTENTS Introduction 6 Surveying the Field: Comics Studies 22 I NOTABLE FEATURES 1 Style, Design, and the Appearance of Authenticity 42 2 Pictures at a Remove: Seth’s Drawn Photographs 69 3 Tropes and Chronotopes: Notes Toward a Liminal Poetics 96 4 The Rhetoric of Failure 130 II CONTINUAL CROSSING 5 Return, Repetition, and Other Ambivalent Impulses 153 6 Filling the Gaps: Fragmentation and Coherence 175 7 Collection and Recollection 202 8 Forging Histories: Ghost Worlds and Invented Communities 234 Conclusion 275 Appendix A: Comics Genres 287 Appendix B: Interview with Seth 291 Bibliography 340 6 INTRODUCTION In The Age of Empire, Eric Hobsbawm writes of “a twilight zone between history and memory” (3) – the work of Canadian cartoonist Seth seems to occupy precisely this ambivalent, in-between zone. In such a space, where history and memory interpenetrate, the latter often rushes to fill in the gaps left by the former. Seth’s narratives are consistently, and often explicitly, concerned with this process, what Walter Benjamin calls “the mysterious work of remembrance—which is really the capacity for endless interpolation into what has been” (Reflections 16). It is possible to conceive of the medium of comics in the same way, as both a practice and a capacity that is closely related to the excavation of the past. Seth suggests that “the whole process of cartooning is dealing with memory” (Taylor 15), a claim that goes a long way toward setting the parameters for much of this investigation. The past is inaccessible, except through imagination, memory and history – practices that are indeed mysterious in their attempts to make present a fundamental absence. As Keith Jenkins asserts, “history is a discourse about, but categorically different from, the past” (6). Anachronism is an inevitable starting point for even the most dispassionate history, which can only view the past from a moment that is not past, obscuring what has been even as it tries to bring it into focus. This is the essential, ambivalent operation of history: to juxtapose time, to set time against itself, creating continuities and discontinuities, constructing linear chronological progressions. In Narrative and History, Alun Munslow addresses the need to confront “the epistemological belief that history can be made to correspond with the past even though 7 the past no longer exists” (15).1 Echoing Jenkins, Munslow suggests that “because history is not the same as the past, the notion of correspondence has to be replaced with the logic of narrative representation” (Narrative and History 15). Without dismissing history as artificial, Seth’s comics draw attention to the narrative representation of the past and reveal the extent to which the making of history is an act of great artifice – as well as an invitation to readerly interpolation into what has been. Comics studies, not unlike cultural studies (with which it sometimes overlaps and from which it often borrows), does not constitute a particular methodology or unified body of expertise; there are many different streams.2 Overall, the chapters to follow engage in comics studies by way of literary criticism, but a literary criticism that is particularly alert to visual culture, and which is strongly inflected with the theoretical indiscipline of a practice that finds itself somewhat deracinated from its borrowed fields of study. This investigation may take its title from Hobsbawm, but its primary historiographical touchstone is Linda Hutcheon, whose focus is not history but literature. Hutcheon provides a remarkably apt description of Seth’s work when she uses the term “historiographic metafiction,” which, she says, questions “how we know the past, how we make sense of it” (Canadian Postmodern 22, emphasis in original). This investigation seeks, in a number of different of ways, to address one principal question: How does Seth make the past? This introduction frames this central question not only in terms of history, but also – drawing on W. J. T. Mitchell, Svetlana Boym, and others – through a consideration of memory and nostalgia. Hutcheon is a reliable source of insight on 1 Munslow’s Narrative and History (2007) and Deconstructing History (2006) thoroughly review the different epistemological approaches to writing history, namely: constructionist, reconstructionist and deconstructionist. 2 The study of comics accommodates art history, film and media studies, semiotics, sociology, geography, narratology, cognitive science, ethnography, philosophy, and political economy, among other diverse fields. 8 nostalgia, irony, the postmodern, and the Canadian, and pays particular attention to the ways in which these various properties relate to each other. Her greatest contribution to this investigation, however, may be the concept of the heterocosm, or alternative world, which Chapter 8 conceives in terms of narrative heterocosms that may be fictive or historical (which I sometimes refer to as “ghost worlds”). Heterocosms can be at once fictive and historical, as is often the case in Seth’s work. Chapter 8 draws on Hayden White’s landmark work Metahistory, and though it does not adopt White’s elaborate schema or terminology, it does find his notion of a “metahistorical consciousness” extremely useful as a way of describing the heterocosms that Seth creates. White also identifies three conventional conceptions of historiography from the eighteenth century: fabulous, truthful, and satirical. Seth deploys all three types of history, often in various combinations, to create multifaceted literary-historical metafiction that seems to present something different with each reading, approximating the changeability of memory. In his book History and Memory, Geoffrey Cubitt frames the two as “proximate concepts: they inhabit a similar mental territory” (4). Occasionally at odds, history and memory are “conceptual terms that have constantly interacted with each other, moving in and out of each other” (5). Cubitt provides a practical point of departure when he states that the term memory denotes “relationships to the past that are grounded in human consciousness” (9). It quickly becomes necessary, however, to refine this rather broad characterisation and move toward a sharper definition. One of Cubitt’s main strategies is to define memory in relation to history, and to some extent this investigation follows a similar trajectory as it attempts to describe a space between the two proximate concepts. David Krell pursues another line of inquiry that also proves useful in delineating this liminal, in-between space: in his dense and subtle book Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, it is the process of inscription that brings the topic of memory into focus. To 9 anchor this approach (which foregrounds mark-making in a way that resonates with comics studies) Krell begins with a helpful account of classical understandings of memory.