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ChronoCorpoRealities: Embodied Perceptions of ›Extraordinary‹ Time in Comics 

About this issue

Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff (Berlin)

Comics and literature are each in their own specific ways ›temporal arts‹, unfolding sequences of action, collapsing or contrasting story time and discourse time, and representing temporal sequences in narrative or visual-spatial ways. Of course, both media can also deviate from chronological or ›mechanically unfolding‹ time; they may work with flashbacks, flashforwards, and fragmentation, thus evoking, for instance, the layering of time and simultaneity. When literary texts and comics represent experiences of Otherness due to illness and/or disability, perceptions of time that deviate from normal chronometry (or chrononormativity) gain center stage: In the face of unexpected physical or psychic changes, subjective time may stretch or contract, bring one’s past and present into aggressive collision or cast a spotlight on mortality itself. Individual experiences of time in the context of pain and waiting, of chronic ailments, degenerative illness and trauma, or »crip time« (Kafer 2013, 25-27) all call for specific representations.

The articles in this special issue »ChronoCorpoRealities: Embodied Perceptions of ›Extraordinary‹ Time in Comics« cover different genres of graphic narratives (such as autobiography, documentary comic, and (historical) fiction). In addition, some of them offer media-comparative perspectives by including poetry, drama, and literary prose. Even though the contributions address a vast array of diverse phenomena, such as living with mental illness, providing end-of-life care to loved ones, and suffering from trauma, torture, or medical experiments, all explore the aesthetic and individual repercussions of ›extraordinary‹ time and discuss their sociopolitical impact.

In her contribution »Manipulating Time across the Body: Subjectivity in Graphic Illness Narratives«, Nancy Pedri examines how autobiographical comics employ patterns of temporal manipulation such as disruptions (suspended time), loops and simultaneity (layered time), and disjunctions (fractured time), to communicate the ill protagonists’ subjective experiences of self. Reading graphic narratives by British, Canadian, French, and US-American authors, Pedri highlights how represented bodies can engage with fictional time to communicate an inner sense of a vulnerable self and reimagine illness outside of medical strictures.

The following two essays focus on the multiple layering of time in end-of-life care, loss, and mourning, as represented in literary grief memoirs, autobiographical comics, and fictional graphic narratives. Nina Schmidt’s article »›So I took some photos.‹ Time, Photography and the Materialization of Memory in Graphic Narratives of Bereavement« explores the ways in which Anders Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, and Antonia Kühn’s Lichtung make creative use of (reproduced or ›drawn‹) photos to reflect on the boundaries of representation, the tellability of grief, and the potential transformation, over time, of personal loss into publicly available graphic stories.

In »Repairing Time out of Joint: Narratives of Caring for Mothers with Cancer«, Sucharita Sarkar analyzes the ›extraordinary‹ times of diagnosis, treatment, and terminal care through a comparative study of two memoirs: the graphic narrative Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies and the literary memoir The End of Eve by Ariel Gore. The paper borrows and expands Scott McCloud’s concept of »time as a rope« (McCloud 1994, 96–99) to explore the different ways in which this (metaphorical) rope is twisted, knotted, unknotted, compressed or stretched in order to engage with, and make sense of, cancer trauma.

Does the night have a depressing, even threatening effect, or does it also create scope for a ›different‹ experience of mental illness, old age, cancer, and trauma? Anne Rüggemeier’s article »Krankheit, Tod und Sterblichkeit: Die ›arthrologische‹ Gestaltung von Nacht-Zeiten in Drama, Lyrik und Comic am Beispiel von Sarah Kane, Philip Larkin und David Small« examines the representation of the night from a transmedial perspective. Taking into account the different genres of drama, poetry, and somatography, the contribution explores their verbal and verbal-visual strategies to narrate different nocturnal temporalities in illness narratives.

The next two essays focus on suffering induced by surgical human experiments, torture, and imprisonment. Marina Rauchenbacher’s contribution »Körper-Zeit-Körper. Zeitkonzepte in Ulli Lusts und Marcel Beyers Flughunde« discusses how Marcel Beyer’s novel and its graphic adaptation by Ulli Lust convey the importance of voices and acoustic phenomena for bodily experiences of time in the context of German National Socialism. Subjected to political propaganda, surgical abuse, and lethal violence, the protagonists’ bodies are forced to turn into painful and fragmented sites of ›embodied memory‹.

Turning to today’s most contested US detention camp, Sebastian Köthe’s article »Zeitlichkeiten von Folter und Zeugenschaft in Sarah Mirk's dokumentarischer Comic-Anthologie Guantánamo Voices« analyzes the so-called ›clean‹ torture of captives which – among other things – seeks to destroy any reliable experience of time. The comics in Sarah Mirk's award-winning anthology of graphic journalism, Köthe argues, testify individual coping-strategies that the prisoners employ to ›re-temporalize‹ their indefinite detention in order to safeguard a minimum of body experience, identity, and personal memory. Reading Mirk with Nina Mickwitz’ Documentary Comics (2016), Köthe discusses different aesthetic choices that convey the detainees’ experience of ›falling out of time‹ without exposing them to intrusive, voyeuristic, or derogatory representation.

Natalie Veith’s essay »Diseased Bodies and Notions of Time in Ian Edginton and Davide Fabri’s Comic Book Series Victorian Undead« introduces a detective Sherlock Holmes who has to protect late-Victorian London from the diseased/deceased bodies of zombies and vampires. The series devises a poetics of contagion from which infected bodies emerge as sites of unstable temporality. Reading the City of London and Queen Victoria as impaired political bodies, Veith argues that Victorian Undead criticizes teleological narratives in the context of British nation-building and, on a more general level, questions chrononormativity.

 

The cover of CLOSURE #10.5, created by comics artist stef lenk, playfully picks up on time, illness, life and death. In the foreground a skeleton raises its arms to commence a dance-like movement with a sidestep; in the background we see the shadow of a female (childlike?) figure who seems to watch the scene with arms crossed. Both characters are joint at their feet, even though on a corporeal level they do not resemble each other. The illustration gestures towards the iconological tradition of danse macabre, but in a kind of ironic reversal, since the memento mori does not seem to emanate from the personification of death but rather from the shadowy female figure in the back. The artwork’s title The Chaperone evokes a dismissive elderly lady who resents the playful corporeality she witnesses, be it before or beyond death. Displaying a magical synchronicity between life and death, bodily enjoyment and critical observation, the illustration incites new approaches towards ChronoCorpoRealities. More information on the artist can be found here.

Earlier versions of most articles were presented at an international workshop convened by the »PathoGraphics« research group (Freie Universität Berlin) in cooperation with »AG Comicforschung«. The bilingual online event which took place during the Covid 19-pandemic finally turned into this special issue with articles in English and German. Co-editor Nina Schmidt and myself wish to thank all contributors for their inspiring work and their patience, and the CLOSURE team for their enthusiasm and support.

Berlin, October 2024
Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff

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Bibliography

  • Kafer, Alison: Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2013.
  • Mickwitz, Nina: Documentary Comics. Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
  • McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.