The Zen Master's Comics: Self-Awareness And

19 NEW MODES OF SELF-FASHIONING THE ZEN MASTER’S COMICS: SELF-AWARENESS AND POPULAR CULTURE IN GLEN DAVID GOLD’S I WILL BE COMPLETE ALEXANDRU BUDAC West University, Timişoara Abstract: Raised in a chic California mansion at the peak of the counterculture movement, novelist Glen David Gold recounts the tormenting relationship with his estranged parents, and especially with his bohemian and deeply troubled mother. When the latter leaves him alone in San Francisco, at the age of twelve, he has to find ways to survive and attend school. I assess how comic books, movies, music, Gold’s passion for the Japanese culture, and his perception of time make for the labyrinthine structure of his memoir. Keywords: Glen David Gold, American memoir, San Francisco, comic books, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki 1. Introduction: mother and son Is the need to confess considerably stronger nowadays than it used to be? Probably not, but we have found the means to make this need a public – and global – asset. Or at least many people belive it to be so. Technically, in the age of the Internet and social media, everyone’s private life might come under everyone’s scrutiny and it is increasingly difficult to tell the mere online confession from dishonest self-advertising, or truth-telling from malicious fabrications. Assessing the impact of generalized “confessionalism”, as he calls it ironically, on memoir writing – a venerable genre besieged by fraud and commercial success during the last decades – William Giraldi (2018: 99) notices that “social media has turned untold citizens into hourly memoirists in miniature. We live now in a culture of incessant confession and self-discovery: a non-stop spelunking into empty caves.” It comes as no surprise then that professional writers stand up for the memoir as an artistic form and genuine self-examination, rather than self-interest. If, following Northrop Frye, Giraldi believes that the notion of “self-expression” must be discarded in favour of the more literary (and philosophical) “self- assertion” – because “the trick is to keep precious personal experience from unwittingly becoming the antithesis of imagination” (Giraldi 2018: 97, 99) –, Vivian Gornick (2002: 14) states no less bluntly that “the memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom – or rather the movement toward it – that counts”. I would round up these opinions with a third one, namely that of Sven Birkerts, who refines the notion by adding to the experience and imagination indispensable to a literary memoir a rather Greek approach to fate and temporality, and the Proustian “voluntary memory”. In his seminal essay The Art of Time in Memoir, Birkerts (2008: 3-4) tackles the genre not so much as the result of one’s urge to narrate events – even though he B.A.S. vol. XXVII, 2021 20 does not disregard this universal proclivity – as one’s unquenchable need to imbue a particular life with meaning. His argument and exemples expound the conviction that the best memoirists are those who understand how the past shapes the present. One cannot miss here the echo from Augustine’s association of time perception and memory in Book XI of his Confessions, where he tries to make sense of divine signs and prophecy, while acknowledging that we live in the present moment only, because past and future do not exist: When we describe the past correctly, it is not the past facts which are drawn out of our memories but only words based on our memory-pictures of those facts, because when they happened they left an impression on our minds, by means of our sense-perception. My own childhood, which no longer exists, is in past time, which also no longer exists. But when I remember those days and describe them, it is in the present that I picture them to myself, because their picture is still present in my memory. (Augustine 1961: 267) Strip this of its religious overtones and you have Birkerts’ secular definition of the contemporary memoir. In place of Augustine’s angels, who need not read the sacred text, because they see the face of God in eternity (Augustine 1961: 322), Birkerts posits the vantage point of the hapless memoirist who struggles to make sense of her/his life: Each account in some way proposes the idea that a life can be figured on the page as a destiny, a filling out of a meaningful design by circumstance, and that this happens once events and situations are understood not just in themselves but as stages en route to decisive self-recognition. (Birkerts 2008: 8-9) Glen David Gold’s I Will Be Complete (2018) reads like a novel in part because the world he evokes and the relationships he describes seem so outlandish today, but mostly because his struggle to come to terms with his mother is so out of the ordinary that it really may pass as a piece of pure fiction. As one reviewer puts it, “the book’s driving force is the author’s relationship with his mother; the dynamic between them compels us through the story even as it increasingly repels the son” (Johnson 2018). Gold’s memoir is about how he came to not love his mother anymore. Stated like this, the whole undertaking might sound cynical, utterly immoral, or even vulgar. It is not the case. Writing his memoir works for Gold as a means to cope with a trauma and to finally accept that his mother abandoned him at the age of twelve, while still remaining painfully present in his life. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about I Will Be Complete – and I wonder if Glen David Gold realized this while structuring his book along the years – is that it adheres to an old narrative tradition, namely that of the princely offspring put in a wicker basket by his royal parents, just to be met at the other end of the river by hope, as much as by renewed suffering. Not that Gold introduces himself as a mythic character. On the contrary. His life is typically American, not a patterned one. It opens like this: I think you’re an adult when you can no longer tell your life story over the course of a first date. I might have gotten this idea from my parents, because they reinvented themselves so often their stories have odd turns which speak not of one life, but of many that don’t seem to match up, and of choices you’d think no one would actually make. (Gold 2019: 3) 21 NEW MODES OF SELF-FASHIONING Sven Birkerts (2008: 145-146) tends to oppose the “traumatic memoir” – whereby the writer “keeps symbolically reenacting a distressing situation” – and the “coming-of-age memoir” which usually is more lyrical. Glen David Gold succeeds in mastering both subgenres. In I Will Be Complete, the coming-of-age story reveals the double trauma: that his mother abandoned him because she did not love him – he understood that too early –, and that he also ceased, at a certain point, to love her (the latter proved much harder to acknowledge). In the process of retrieving the past, the shattered days of his childhood are often like the adventures of comic book heroes, who rush on the panel from frame to frame, forcing you to fill in mentally the missing pieces of action. The introspection sustained from an early age by Zen practice makes some long locked doors burst open, thus giving away the true shape of events he could not look back at over his shoulder: Then you know what it is like to be my mother’s son. It’s exhausting and it’s where art forms are born. I think Baroque draftsmen who made etchings of labyrinths were men raised by shattered women. (Gold 2019: 8) 2. The super-child dons the cape Glen David Gold grew up in Corona del Mar, California. The mansion of his early childhood – “a five-thousand-square-foot ranch house” – looked like a Hollywood movie set, with a swimming pool and a jacuzzi, a custom-designed kitchen, a Derby Day pinball machine, a robotic toy offered as a gift by a cousin who worked at Mattel, a living room conversation pit “executed by contractors who’d worked on the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland”, the father’s futuristic office, which strikes the boy as snatched out of a sci-fi scenery, and his own bedroom furnished Danish-style, with movie posters and walls painted in psychedelic colors (Gold 2019: 17-18). Even more impressive are the family’s collections of art – let us not forget that it is the age of Pop – and rare coins – “Thomas Jefferson himself might have carried these pennies in his pocket”, says the father reassuringly –, and a splendid Fabergé chess set (which might be a fake). On top of these possessions is the child himself, introduced to family friends and visitors as a wonder kid: “The end of the tour isn’t the coins, but me – I am the big finish, the most curious gem in the collection. I tell my history stories, I actually bow for applause at the end” (Gold 2019: 20). The Golds’ house is rich America itself during the ’60s. The oldest object in the collection dates from the XVIIIth century. However, it is displayed as an antiquity. Glen’s millionaire and workaholic father is the co-founder of Certron Company and one of the pioneers of the cassette tape. He drives a Porsche like James Dean’s and he uses his engineer’s skills to draw complex charts for his wife in order to clarify family issues.

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