Rocıo G. Davis

Rocıó 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.3 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 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS 265 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.4 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 266 PROSE STUDIES 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

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