»So I took some photos.«
Time, Photography and the Materialization of Memory in Graphic Narratives of Bereavement

Nina Schmidt (Berlin)

 

But after all, time isn’t ›actual.‹ When it seems long to you, then it is long; when it seems short, why, then it is short. But how long, or how short, it actually is, that nobody knows.
Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain. 1924. Trans. H.-T. Lowe-Porter

Literature –  and the arts generally – know about the subjective nature of time, the limited relevance of clock time to the way we experience the world. Literature and the arts know, too, that our perception of time tends to be bound up with space – a point made so memorably by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), for instance. But is not time also marked by people, by our closest relations – is not time as we experience and remember it meaningful because of others, that is, quintessentially relational?

I suggest that this is why the loss of those closest to us can have significant effects on our perception of time and can have the power to disrupt life courses. This seems to hold especially true since the 19th century, when, with advancing secularization, acceptance of death decreased markedly while acts of mourning moved into the private sphere, becoming more idiosyncratic – and more personally felt (Ariès, Ch. 3, 4; Sykora 2009, 226; Richter, 194, 216). The origins of the affect of bereavement, grief, are therefore typically located in modernity (e.g. Sörries, 230). Fast forward to the 21st century and one notes grief to be positioned precariously close to illness in the public mind; the result of attempts to distinguish ›normal‹ from pathological variants of grief, and grief from depression. A historical example contributing to this development is Sigmund Freud’s essay »Mourning and Melancholia« (1917). In recent years, the debate was reignited ahead of the removal of the bereavement exclusion in the diagnostic description of major depression and the inclusion, however contested, of certain forms of grief in the DSM-5 (APA, 155, 789–792; Pies; Schaub, 145–148).

Especially when it is a traumatic loss, time for the bereaved can easily appear out of joint and grieving may become a ›prolonged‹ and ›complicated‹ matter, as the psychological terminology today has it. In her 2019 graphic grief memoir Das Licht, das Schatten leert [The light that empties the shadows], covering the first one and a half years of her life following the stillbirth of her son, German comics author Tina Brenneisen writes: »Es heißt, die Zeit heilt alle Wunden. Aber was, wenn sie still steht?« (96) [Time is said to heal all wounds. But what if time stands still?].¹

As of late, and mirroring the developments in literary publishing of recent years,² grief memoirs appear on the rise in the realm of comics, too – beginning to take personal experiences of loss and the attendant feelings of grief back out into the open (without reverting to the ritualized forms of mourning of former centuries), one text at a time. From a social constructionist perspective on bereavement, such publications are no surprise. To the contrary, they come at a time that sees sociologists and psychologists review the culturally predominant view that conceptualizes grief and mourning as »an interior process« (Neimeyer/Klass/Dennis, 485, 494), that is, a purely intrapsychic and therefore private matter. Neimeyer, Klass and Dennis (487) recognize periods of grieving or mourning as periods of intensified self-narration and conversation with others that are necessary to, for example, »establish the meaning of the deceased’s life and death, as well as the post-mortem status of the bereaved within the broader community concerned with the loss.« As sociologist Tony Walter emphasizes (20), »bereavement is part of the process of (auto)biography.« In the long term, it shapes identity.

Against the backdrop of such research carried out in other subject areas, I am interested in the unique as well as the universal aspects of the loss of a loved one and the grief that accompanies and/or follows it, as represented in contemporary literature and comics (including grief’s potential longevity and open-endedness); its private and public dimensions, the intrapsychic and the social. This article begins to explore these dimensions by focusing on three comics: two graphic memoirs – Anders Nilsen’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow (2006/2012) and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (2014) – and one fictional narrative of bereavement, namely Antonia Kühn’s graphic novel Lichtung [Clearing] (2018). Each of these comics centers dying, loss and grief in different ways and accentuations. I choose to read them alongside each other because they all make creative use of the medium of photography or harness the cultural relevance of printed photographs as haptic memory objects. They do this by incorporating facsimiles of personal photographs into the comics form (Nilsen; Chast) or drawn images the reader understands to signify photos (Kühn), employing comics capacity for »stilistische Mimikry« [stylistic mimicry] (Schmitz-Emans, 56). These uses of, or references to, photography expand the comic medium’s inherent intermediality as an ›imagetext,‹ typically constituted by words and drawn imagery, potentially of different styles.³

Links between photography and death are, of course, well-established in intellectual history (e.g. Sykora 2009; Sykora 2015; Hoffmann/Tietjen). As a medium, photography is often said to heighten our awareness of the passage of time exactly because of its ability to freeze a moment in time (e.g. Sontag, 15). Among the theoreticians of photography, Roland Barthes (1982; 2011) stands out for thinking through photography and bereavement both in- and explicitly. More recently, Jennifer Green-Lewis (17) has highlighted the significance of loss or its anticipation in the making and retrospective viewing of photographs as key to the medium: »A photograph is concerned with the way things are but will not remain, or perhaps the way we wish they were, or the way we wish they might have been.« The reader’s or viewer’s perspective comes into play here and is recognized as important (as it is indeed in much of comics studies, too).

Cultural historians have correlated the popularity of postmortem photography in the 19th century to the privatization and emotional intensification of mourning during the period, identifying photography as a new medium of remembrance and tool in grief work for the surviving dependants (e.g. Richter, 216). The role of photographs as memory objects is stressed in this historical context; with the analyzed comics in mind, this role can be confirmed to be of continued relevance today. All three works of art examined below play with the materialization of memory in the form of photography – bringing out the diverse qualities and effects of photographs as »objects of affect« (Edwards).

As Barthes (1982, 76) wrote at a time that he grieved intensely for his mother, »in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there.« Photographs can console their viewers, as this indicates, as well as drive them into despair (because the ›thing‹ or person may have ›been there,‹ but is no more – clock time passing relentlessly). So while photographs crystallize feelings, these can be a number of, even contradictory feelings (or a variety of subsequent feelings over time; certainly depending on what viewers bring to an image) – a circumstance the comics art I discuss below reflects.

Photographs can frame or punctuate narratives of loss and remembrance for authenticating effect (authors or publishers strive for this effect when using a photo on the cover of a book announcing a true and personal story, for example); but more often than not, their relevance goes beyond this function, and proves central to the structure, aesthetics and aims of the story told, in literature as in comics. Fictional narratives of loss make that point particularly clear when referencing photography as a medium (e.g. by assigning photographs a central role or function in a character’s or narrator’s engagement with their grief) – as in the case of fiction, this cannot possibly serve the purpose of authentification or verification, only mimic such effects.

Rather, fiction’s references to the photographic are a reflection of photography’s omnipresence in our lives generally, and – in the case of the narratives of interest here – the established connection, socially and culturally, of the medium to loss. What is more, the incorporation of the photo into the graphic suggests that contemporary artists and auto/biographers understand that either visual register comes with specific representational strengths as well as limitations with regards to witnessing dying and addressing loss; and it indicates that there is particular narrative power in moments of transition from drawn to photographic registers, and back. This – and what it reveals about the tellability of grief (in the given socio-cultural context and attendant feeling rules) and a potential transformation, over time, of personal loss into publicly available story, into art – is the focus of the analyses to follow.

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow – Photography’s retrospective bittersweetness and its supersession through drawing in the face of terminal illness

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow is an autobiographical book by the US-American artist and comics author Anders Nilsen. The book takes the loose, episodic form of a multimodal collage and pays homage to his six-year-long relationship with fellow artist Cheryl Weaver, ending in her unexpected death from cancer in 2005.⁴ It combines – or ›assembles‹ (Oksman) – elements such as high-resolution facsimiles of the couple’s correspondence and plane tickets with holiday snapshots, poetry, comics and a selection of diary entries composed by Nilsen in the final weeks of Cheryl’s life.

The book opens with humorous descriptions of trips gone wrong; of a camping trip, a Christmas journey home and a flight to France for the Angoulême International Comics Festival. The first 64 pages of the 90-pages-long book thus notably take their time to paint a picture of the nature of the couple’s relationship, establishing it as fulfilled and happy, even across distances or against minor odds, before addressing what Nilsen (afterword) calls »the end of normal.«⁵ When the text subsequently turns to the subject of cancer, the interpretation of the experience as another journey suggests itself by way of the episodes’ arrangement.⁶ As a metaphor for Cheryl’s illness and death, it stresses Nilsen’s initial expectation that all would be well in the end – like any of the previous »minor disasters« (afterword) they experienced together.

Skilled as he is in graphic design, Nilsen makes the various mementos he includes in Don’t Go appear as similar to sticking the real thing into a personal scrapbook as possible – thus bridging the gap from unique to shareable: see, for example, the postcards and letters framing the narrative from a time »early on in the relationship« (afterword), cherished and treasured by the couple, or the piece of masonry (DG 65) in »a creamy light green, something very close to Cheryl’s favorite color« (afterword), which Nilsen picked up in the hospital car park with the intention »to present one to her once she was well« (afterword). The photorealistic representation of these items textures this story of loss and remembrance and allows us a privileged look into Nilsen’s personal archive. One cannot help but take them as comments on mortality in themselves: As material objects, they have already outlived Cheryl and may possibly outlive Nilsen, too. Individually, each item carries meanings and feelings (or layers of both, in fact, as the piece of masonry, for instance, indicates; layers that sedimented over the course of events, i.e. over time), made decipherable for a wider readership by the afterword, which Nilsen uses to give some explanatory context. The intimacy of the scrapbook is further reinforced by nearly all text in Don’t Go appearing as handwriting, referencing the diary and travel journal as well. The result overall is a new material souvenir in its own right, one that, in this form, can be reproduced and shared with others – and exist beyond the life and archive of its author, who is so hyperaware of the vulnerability and potential brevity of life as he composes the book.

The chapter »France,« narrated in photo-journal form, then contains the bulk of the photographs proper. Starting out with lengthy captions, these become shorter and sparser as the chapter goes on, until the reader is presented almost exclusively with pictures. We see typical holiday snapshots, of French village centers and roadside curiosities, shop windows and notable buildings, pictures the two have taken of each other, and some of the couple together. As such, they do not demand much linguistic framing – we all know how to read photo albums. By tracing the two photographers’ choices of motif and angle, we recognize the couple’s keen eye for the aesthetic and learn of their fondness for all things weird and wonderful. In themselves, the photographs assembled in »France« document a happy normality, of the couple’s »existing in the world together,« »walking around, looking« (afterword), as the author puts it at once plainly and poetically. This is what Nilsen wants remembered, and wants to remind himself of: their identity as a couple, a team of two. Don’t Go mourns a lost future that was to be had together.

These photographs gain their poignancy retrospectively, through our posthumous reading perspective; a poignancy which is reinforced through their juxtaposition with the ensuing chapter »The Hospital.« Referencing two photographs from »France« in particular that »forecast an impending future absence« (Oksman, 29) – one of a roadside silhouette marking the site of a fatality (DG 50), the other being the second of two photographs taken in quick succession and a result of double exposure, showing the couple posing for the camera together and on the more ›ghostly‹ plane showing Cheryl facing out of the image’s frame, gazing into the distance (fig. 1, DG 58) –, Oksman (30) goes so far as to say that »the beloved’s future absence seems consistently to have been part of this past shared life.« Anticipating but also resisting interpretations like this somewhat, the afterword to Don’t Go states: »The black and white pictures were not intended to be, or to seem, poignant. That was simply the roll of film that was in the camera that day.« It continues: »The two double portraits are my favorite pictures of her that I have now.«

Reproducing the double exposure photograph in Don’t Go, Nilsen does evidently play with the meanings and feelings photographic images can attract in retrospect (such as the idea of impending doom), but I do not think it is meant to suggest that either of the portrayed had a way of knowing what the relatively near future would bring. I imagine that the photograph is appreciated by Nilsen for two interlinking reasons: first, for the coincidental artistic value brought about by the felicitous coming together of the two planes there are to the image and second, because as two recorded moments fold into one image, it comes to function as a visual commentary on time, its passing and the reevaluation of past experience that goes hand in hand with this. Doubly exposed, the photo draws attention to these aspects.

The selfie of the foreground is slightly blurred, which makes clear that it was taken in a quick gesture, has not been premeditated for long. The travel scene in the background equally is the result of a snapshot. Together, however, the overlaying scenes become extraordinary and in the form of double exposure, highlight the preciousness of ordinary moments one only ever recognizes as special belatedly. For the posthumous reader, the black-and-whiteness of the image, however coincidental it may be, then indeed adds gravity to it. Nilsen’s inclusion of this particular photograph (in addition to the technically ›successful‹, i.e. inconspicuous, self-portrait printed right above it) nods to the beauty of getting things wrong (here: accidentally exposing a bit of film twice), as well as to the value that lies in the human inability to know the future, as knowing it would likely only extend inevitable times of grief, make untinged happiness and any carefree sense of being in the moment impossible.

Significantly, photographs have no place in »The Hospital.« »The Hospital« is a chapter very much rooted in the present of the medical experience and Cheryl’s worsening condition, with Nilsen frequently taking note of dates and the times of the day in it. Portraying the time spent with Cheryl in her final month alive, he relies on journal entries from the time (consisting of a combination of handwritten text and ink sketches). Whether or not personal photographs taken in this period exist, readers do not learn. The exclusion of the medium henceforward points to the fact that Cheryl’s death can no longer be ruled out, which is further reflected in the accompanying text’s uncertain tone. In order to create his bedside portraits, Nilsen evidently prefers to trace his partner’s contours with a pen rather than exposing her, in this vulnerable state, to what he may have perceived as the cold, mechanic gaze of a camera. This would certainly match western sensibilities today as culturally, we refrain from photographing the dying and the dead (outside of art projects such as Briony Campbell’s Dad Project [2009], at least); we instead want to remember and be remembered on the basis of imagery that shows the deceased when they were most alive (i.e. young, happy, well).⁷

As an activity that takes time, drawing her is the more laborious but also the more contemplative and attentive process at a paradoxical time of »waiting waiting waiting« yet »so much to do« (DG 68). Immersing himself in the activity seems an appropriate way of sitting and being with Cheryl and documenting her state as the outcome of treatment becomes increasingly less clear. At the risk of simplification, I would argue that the focus of drawing someone’s portrait is more on the process (and the intimacy it can create) than on the result, while in photography, it tends to be the other way round. Reflecting on the difference between painting and drawing, Nilsen too has emphasized the idea of drawing as »a process of thinking and seeing« (Alaeff); it is what he values it for. With this in mind, drawing his partner in hospital thus appears to be a way of dealing with the situation in limbo for Nilsen, as it anchors him in the present, in which Cheryl is alive – keeping thoughts of potential future developments at bay – and it thus helps him endure a time of extreme uncertainty.

Drawing Cheryl rather than photographing her furthermore gives Nilsen artistic control over questions of focus, such as which of her features to draw out and which to have receding into the background. Thus acting as intermediary between his later book’s audience and Cheryl in the hospital bed, Nilsen protects her privacy and, literally, her image somewhat. When regarded as a sequence, the four drawings rendered across pages 68 to 72 visualize the changes in Cheryl’s physical health: while she is awake in the first one, she is asleep in the others, growing increasingly frail from image to image. Nilsen’s capturing Cheryl in these drawings thus can be understood as a form of spiritual caregiving (compare Nilsen quoting from the Tao Te Ching; DG 76), a way of ›beholding‹ her in dying. The drawings bring »visual presence« (Garland-Thomson, 194) to her, help us honor her once more in all her uniqueness (e.g. by zooming in on the exact shape of her left ear, DG 71) as a chasm between the dying woman and her partner widens: »I can’t know what it’s like,« states Nilsen in one of the diary entries reproduced in this context (DG 67).

The chapter culminates in a full page depicting Cheryl after her death (DG 74), with a completely blacked-out page to her right (fig. 3, DG 75).⁸ In yet another change of drawing style, the image on the left-hand side focuses in on the gear of medicine, and, employing a bird’s-eye perspective, effectively displays the traces the attempt to prolong her life has left on Cheryl’s body. It may be the most drastic image of the whole book – and it is not a photograph (nor, we note, a photorealistic drawing). In a twist on classic medical illustration, annotations by Nilsen list every bruise, prick and incision she has had to endure, e.g. »sites of former I.V.s band-aided, bruised« (DG 74). Beyond that, they make visible what would otherwise remain unknown to the onlooker: »voice lost, partly from aftereffects of breathing tube, possibly from medications as well« (DG 74). And while we continue to recognize Cheryl here in the person shown because Nilsen draws her wearing the glasses we have become acquainted with, this stripped-down and much more schematic drawing also suggests to take her individual body as standing in for the many bodies who endure similar treatment (a lot of it invasive and painful) in a bid to survive cancer. It calls on our empathy to ›ecce homo‹ – behold the (wo)man – and invites readers to join in mourning for Cheryl but allows them space to contemplate their own losses, too. The full-page image is a perfect example of how graphic storytellers like Nilsen portray their personal experience of bereavement against the backdrop of its universality, and indeed, everydayness. Unable or unwilling to read any kind of meaning into Cheryl’s death, the subsequent black page then further slows down the reading process; it makes us pause as it refuses to show anything tangible, almost willing time (and space, and all things) to end.

Although Nilsen abandons the inclusion of photographs as he draws closer to the narration of Cheryl’s death and the scattering of her ashes, their significance overall must be understood as directly linked to the experience of loss and grief the book shares. On the one hand, the incorporated photographs attest to a life and love that »has been« (Barthes 1982, 76), and in this, they are consoling to the artist in grief as well as the circle of friends and family whom the book initially addressed. Yet, on the other hand, as Barthes (1982, 76) too notes: »There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past.« Caught in our own time or ›reality,‹ on a trajectory away from the depicted scene of any photograph we view (and the people, objects, spaces it indexes), we recognize a paradox that Barthes (1982, 77) puts thus: »what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred.« Both Nilsen and his readership intuitively hold this bittersweet knowledge. Don’t Go encapsulates it – without valuing photography higher than modes of writing and drawing but instead relying on the respective strengths of each medium to narrate different stages of the illness journey and the narrative synergies of the media mix employed.

Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? – Artistic agency and the comic’s switching between visual registers as a means of calculated rupture

In Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, famed US-American cartoonist Roz Chast uses cartoons, text and photographs to tell the story of her parents’ aging and their eventual deaths in relatively quick succession of each other. Like Nilsen’s book, Chast’s first graphic memoir is a relational narrative, »as much a portrait of a family as it is a story about two people’s deaths,« as Lyall (n. p.) writes. Directed against a culture of denial that she felt her family too cultivated (CWT 3–5), Can’t We Talk sets out to share what actually happens at the end of life as opposed to a sanitized or censored version of events. The memoir details the long goodbye and the grief particular to seeing one’s elderly parents die a medicalized, slow death that is increasingly common today. It is complicated by the fact that Chast’s relationship with her mother was a strained one throughout their lives.

Can’t We Talk contains over thirty photographs. A large number of them look like they have been taken straight from the family album. These images (some sepia-toned, some black and white) show the author as a child, posing either by herself or with one or both of her parents. In their majority, they are notably staged photographs, with the author’s younger self often looking distinctly uncomfortable, sometimes outright defiant. We must note here that Chast specifically chose to include images that draw attention to the cracks in the idealized past, which is exactly the kind of past family albums tend to conserve in an accumulation of ›happy moments.‹

Rosy Martin (n. p.) describes family photographs as providing a »glistening surface of meanings to reflect and project upon, […] contain[ing] myriad latent narratives,« finding that: »They are kept because of the part they play in confirming and challenging the identity and history of their users.« In the memory work that is Can’t We Talk, Chast capitalizes on the ambivalences the photographs reveal once one looks more closely. She uses them to challenge her parents’ narrative as it comes out from their photo albums, putting forward her own retrospective view on her childhood and the relationship to her parents since. The selected examples tend to appear in between sections of the graphic memoir’s narrative (e.g. CWT 167, fig. 4) or at the end of chapters, concluding them (CWT 123, 159, 180, 202). Thus positioned, they invite the reader to linger, to pause for a moment, and give the opportunity to bring together the insight gained over the preceding pages with what one sees in – or indeed notes missing from – the photographs.

It is true only at first sight or to a certain extent, therefore, that as the narrative oscillates between the photographic and the graphic plane, it too moves between two perspectives on the family: that of the author/daughter, as rendered in text, cartoons and comics, and that of the parents, as manifest in the old photographs, each arisen from an occasion deemed worth remembering (i.e. worthy of photographing) by them. Chast’s point of view is, ultimately, no less present on the photographic plane of the story than everywhere else: the images in Can’t We Talk are, after all, the result of her selection from the family albums she inherited, and on top of that, some have been visibly modified or, as Nancy Pedri (2017b, para. 22) would put it, »tampered with« by her, that is to say given captions and/or thought bubbles. Thus modified, they reflect the adult Chast’s perspective on her younger self and the scene depicted in an explicitly humorous way. On a more serious note, this practice of editing the family album and distancing herself through humor from the scenes and settings depicted, differentiating between the child she once was and her adult self, seems to »allow Chast to reclaim a past that felt out of her control since she was granted so little agency as a child« (Kam, 222; CWT 166). With both parents dead, Chast can rewrite the narrative in this way without having to consider their feelings or likely objections. It is her voice and view that is foregrounded in Can’t We Talk.

A second category of photographs included in Can’t We Talk relays the daughter’s confrontation with her parents’ abandoned flat following their move into a care home. These images are grouped together at the very center of the book, displaying different corners of the crammed apartment and close-ups of a selection of Elizabeth and George’s possessions in the chapter »The Old Apartment« (CWT 105–123). Overwhelmed by confronting the material consequences as well as the emotional baggage of decades of compulsive hoarding, the memoirist writes: »I began the massive, deeply weird, and heartbreaking job of going through my parents’ possessions: almost 50 years’ worth, crammed into four rooms« (CWT 108). And, with both clear-sightedness and dark humor with regards to the finality and trajectory of her parents’ relocation, she adds: »If I wanted mementos, it was now or never.«

Facing the task of clearing the flat without her parents’ explicit consent, the memoirist expresses feeling both intrigued and uncomfortable at violating her parents’ privacy in the process. There is a sense of attachment to, or identification with, this home environment and all it contains, too: despite her depreciatory judgement of the flat’s contents as »dusty old junk,« the first-person narrator nonetheless thinks of it as »our junk.« In order to facilitate the task of parting with objects so closely associated, for her, with her parents and her »unhappy childhood« (CWT 11), she begins to take photographs in that moment as a coping mechanism and a seeming compromise between keeping the things and throwing them out. Indeed, Chast holding the camera in between herself and what she sees (CWT 108) can be understood as establishing some much-needed distance between herself and this all-too-intimate object-world. To include them in the published book in such unmediated form,⁹ however, is a different matter – not a spontaneous action born of the moment but a calculated move »that disrupt[s] the visual stylistic coherency« (Pedri 2017a, para. 12) established over the course of the preceeding cartoon and text sequences. The relatively abrupt visual change of gear from page 108 to 109 is what shocks us and draws us in (fig. 5). We suddenly see too much, come too close. This may awaken the voyeurist in some while making others distinctly uncomfortable – and thus, in interesting ways, aligns the readership’s various and, likely, conflicting feelings with those of the daughter in the situation remembered and relayed here.

If the preceeding mix of written words and drawn imagery risked being understood as hyperbolic, the ten-page long display of photographs from inside the flat (CWT 109–118) clears its author of such suspicions. The pictures make plain the immensity of the task of clearing out, and, in this sense, they function quite prototypically for the photographic as evidence or proof (of the level of mess encountered, the severity of the flat’s dilapidation). Exhibiting old shaver models or the packaging of smelling salts (CWT 109, 118), they visualize the decades gone by that have been preserved in this flat. That does not, however, make them ›objective‹ images in any way. They are the work of a daughter taking stock, taking the inventory of her parents’ lives. Looking closely at the images Chast shares with us, one realizes that before releasing the shutter, she arranges most of the items to be photographed in a certain way or decides on a field of view in a room or cupboard, respectively.¹⁰ In other words, the artist curates her finds for the viewer, picking and organizing them according to her own aesthetic vision and personal perspective.

There is something uncompromising about this: it is an outright presentation of the objects and spaces of this most private of spheres, the long-time home, to an unknown audience. As such, Chast seems to veer toward the edge of taboo publishing these images within Can’t We Talk. Exhibiting their hoarding in this manner and commenting on it in captions, Chast stresses how old and dated, and just how useless, some of the things kept by her parents were. By pointing out the irrationality of this behavior – ultimately demonstrating it to be pathological – she may actively be attempting to break with it for herself as well. I put it so cautiously because while Chast manages to part with the majority of her parents’ possessions, taking the photos, she at the same time creates new memory objects to keep. Approaching the situation (also) through her perspective as an artist and later de facto using the images in the memoir is a way of making this situation her own; simultaneously attempting to captivate as well as to hold at bay the atmosphere of the parents’ flat (and childhood home), a veritable time capsule, and concluding, once and for all, the chapter of her own life spent there.¹¹

Beyond personal memories, this central set of photographs and the accumulated objects that take center stage in them, raise the specter of a history of intersecting traumata – of cross-generational Jewish displacement,¹² of having lived through the Great Depression (CWT 6) and the Second World War (CWT 120). Taking in Chast’s pictures showing collections of glasses, shavers, pencils, handbags and more, one is likely to have associations to what are today iconic images of the piles of possessions taken from Holocaust victims – equally assorted by type of item, while of course not as neatly arranged. Neither these historical references nor Chast’s own pictures depict people; and still, or rather because of this, they are particularly emotive in their focus on the inanimate, and the everyday.¹³ They exhibit absence, invoke their owners’ (impending) death. Readers who make this connection momentarily leave behind the chronology of this graphic memoir – and find the lives and deaths of previous generations of Jews resonating in Chasts’ story. The daughter’s grief as expressed in Can’t We Talk relates not least to the fact that her parents had »tough lives« (CWT 6).

Elizabeth Chast ends up surviving her husband George by a year and a half. Committed to seeing her mother through to the very end, Roz Chast too begins to draw her as she watches her die. It is a sign of the daughter more consciously taking up the role of witness by then, and processing »what was happening« (CWT 209) as she transitions into life without her. As was the case for Nilsen at Cheryl’s bedside, drawing and thus beholding her mother provides one of the few ways left to engage with her at this late stage. Sketching Elizabeth both in the weeks leading up to her death as well as on the day of her passing but after the fact, the artist feels the need to include a justification in the memoir for doing the latter – signaling her awareness of the fact that this might upset some readers, which shows how divorced we are today from producing, keeping and showing any postmortem images, not only photographic ones. While alone with the cooling corpse, Chast therefore makes explicit she simply »didn’t know what else to do. I had been drawing her all summer, since the conversations had been reduced to almost nothing« (CWT 210). It struck her as the adequate response, and bridges the before and after of Elizabeth Chast’s death. In a sense, drawing the mother postmortem takes on some functions of holding a wake for her; providing the daughter with the opportunity to pause and reflect on this momentous death before »they took her away, and she was gone« (CWT 210).

The book’s final chapter (barring an epilogue) ends on a display of thirteen of the resulting images from the author’s sketchbook, drawn between July and September 2009. Their simple, subdued style is striking, because it is so thoroughly different to Roz Chast’s style as a cartoonist. Being much more ›of the moment,‹ less polished and less busy, they signify another break with visual coherency – and the reality of Chast’s narrative hits readers anew. Again, it is the effect of the transition that Chast exploits here; it is how the author gets to us. The weightiness the sketches carry has its origins in the fact that they stem from the immediate time of death and bidding the mother farewell, whereas most if not all other drawn imagery in Can’t We Talk can be assumed to have been created retrospectively, with more distance to the events (temporally as well as emotionally).

Like Nilsen’s bedside drawings of Cheryl, these are documentary, observant images –communicating »a lasting sense of both attachment and separation« (Böhme 44). Most show a date, which indicates the artist’s intent to archive and revisit them, and five of the drawings are furnished with short captions. Some simply read »My mother,« while others draw attention to changes Roz Chast notices in Elizabeth Chast’s body as she sits with her, such as »She raised her eyebrows suddenly« or »intense frowning« (CWT 213). Capturing these subtle changes in expression in her drawings is a way for the daughter to meditate on the question of how her mother is at this late stage of her life – whether she feels discomfort or pain or fear, for instance, and it shows just how much the daughter cares. One might even wonder if slowing down and consciously recording time by drawing her enables Chast to make the above-mentioned observations in the first place.

The sketches in themselves obscure the line between sleep and death – more so than contemporary photography does (or would want to).¹⁴ The final drawing of the series reveals itself as a postmortem image only through its caption: »My mother died tonight / at 8:28« (fig. 6, CWT 222). The choice of the graphic medium here and the sheer number of successive images created at Elizabeth Chast’s bedside over the span of several weeks present the process of active dying as a slow one, as having taken time, and thus renders it less alienating – though only maybe less threatening than death is commonly perceived (as her whole decline had taken, in fact, unbearably much time; CWT 200, 205). Noting down the exact time that her mother’s death was pronounced in the caption releases Roz Chast into the world as her parents’ only surviving child and marks the beginning of a new time in which she is liberated of care responsibilities as well as of the burden of their complex relationship – something to be worked through, later, in the process of creating Can’t We Talk, which resulted in a rich graphic elegy to both her parents, despite everything.

Lichtung – the opacity of photographs and the loneliness of grieving suicide

The ›glistening‹ surface of family photographs is an aspect we reencounter in Antonia Kühn’s fictional narrative of bereavement Lichtung [clearing] (2018). Another theme this first full-length graphic novel by the German comics author shares with Can’t We Talk is the theme of speechlessness within the family. In Kühn’s work, it is the effect of grieving a sudden and traumatic loss, complicated by the different perspectives of the surviving family members on the wife’s/mother’s death, its circumstances and the questions that linger, of responsibility and guilt and how to adjust to a future without her. While Nilsen’s and Chast’s autobiographical texts are suffused with grief, large parts of their works discussed here look back on the lives of their loved ones as well as the process of dying; Kühn’s story, however, focuses squarely on the time of grief following on from bereavement.

Lichtung centers on the 11-year-old Paul and the loneliness of his days a few years after his mother’s death, a probable suicide. The graphic novel focuses on the boy’s efforts to understand the events as well as his family’s history prior to them. Taking the form of comics, however, it »crucially retains the insolvable gaps of family history,« as Hillary Chute (175) has observed with regards to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), another graphic narrative with a probable parental suicide at its center. Paul, his father Karl and his sister Laura each have their own memories of their wife/mother Thea but cannot find the strength or terms with which to share them. The siblings’ relationship is particularly strained, as they express their grief in very different ways. While Paul withdraws, Laura rebels. Readers encounter a family falling apart, atomized by the loss. One way in which the graphic novel gets this across is by having Paul’s father, Laura and Paul himself look for each other repeatedly, without being able to find one another (L 25–26, 59, 95, 109, 197–198, 203). The father’s night shifts are only partly to blame for this. As this indicates, Lichtung is a narrative relying strongly on visual metaphors and tropes, and they exude a deep sense of melancholy.

Most of Lichtung is focalized through Paul’s eyes, although Laura’s and the father’s perspectives do enter the picture intermittently.¹⁵ Sparing with words but not with visual creativity, objects play an important role in the graphic novel, and they are highly charged with memory, meaning and emotions. There is the cot/crib mobile (made up of geometrical shapes, including what may be a sun or moon, planets and birdmen with large, round heads), above all, which is introduced in the unpaginated prologue and reappears throughout the novel, becoming a sort of leitmotif (Schröer). The mobile or rather, a single birdman figure from it, reemerges in between sections of the narrative, in characters’ worlds of thought (esp. when absorbed in them; L 68–69, 97, 194), and twice the birdman becomes Paul’s reflection in a bus window (L 81, 206).

The non-paginated prologue informs us that seeing this mobile dangle from the bedroom’s ceiling may be Paul’s »allererste Erinnerung überhaupt« [first-ever memory of all] (L [4]). It was a gift of his aunt Hedda’s at the occasion of Laura’s birth. When the family of four moved away from the seaside when Paul was four years old, leaving their home and Hedda for reasons unexplained (that is, beyond Paul’s knowledge), the mobile could not be disentangled and put up in the new flat in the same way as before. Determined to fix it, his mother cut the threads and reassembled it anew – forgetting, as the text has it (or deliberately omitting, as adult readers might wonder) one of the birdman figures in the process. The missing figure, »wohnt seitdem in unserem Wandschrank« [since living in the walk-in closet] (L [12]), represents incompleteness, loss and hurt (fig. 7). Although hidden from view, it remains always present. It is not a fixed metaphor but an ambiguous, fluid one, over the course of the narrative coming to stand in for the mother, her once beloved sister and Paul himself (e.g. when his head morphs into that of the birdman’s, L 64).

In the introduction, I stressed the importance of narrating loss to a person’s identity, of working out the meaning of a death in conjunction with others for the bereaved’s well-being. In Lichtung, however, a sense of isolation, mystery and trauma dominates. This heightens the significance of a set of old photographs Paul finds in his father’s bedroom one day when home alone – relics from happier days he did not know existed. These represent the »autobiographical nucleus« [autobiographische Keimzelle] (Platthaus) of this fictional story: Kühn has shared in interviews how fascinated she herself was when she found a box of photos in her family’s possession that she, likewise, had never seen before, and that made her think hard about her family’s history (Förster).

Paul finding the box filled with photo albums and bundles of correspondence atop his father’s bedroom wardrobe is, therefore, a crucial scene in the novel (L 60). Watching him looking at them for the first time (L 61–64), the emotional impact is clear straight away (compare, for example, his facial expression on page 61 as well as the way he looks at the images close-up, and readers with him) – and becomes yet clearer when in the end, he does not put the pictures back where he found them but hides them like a treasure under his own bed (L 70–71).

As he takes in the photographs (most of which are from a time before his birth), his attention fully absorbed by them, the scenes in the photos mix with images of his mind’s own creation (L 61–69). Such an imaginative approach is the only one available to Paul, of course, as he cannot possibly know what this time/space in which he did not yet exist was like. Readers see the three central figures of father, mother and aunt dancing, moving in and out of frames. This creates the impression of them playing catch with Paul. The line between phantasy and reality becomes purposefully blurred in Kühn’s representation of this moment. Note, for instance, his mother’s foot reaching into a panel otherwise occupied by Paul in the present of the narrative at the bottom left of page 62, which shows him jumping up and down his father’s bed – so on a completely different plane of existence, at least theoretically (fig. 8). Yet as we read from left to right, at the same time it looks like he is following her. I read this fleeting blurring/merging of the different planes – of past and present, phantasy, memory and reality (also L 65) – as connected to the intensity of Paul’s feelings of grief and longing for his dead mother.

Andreas Platthaus associates their dancing – here and elsewhere in the comic – with representations of the Dance of Death or danse macabre from the late middle ages, while Marie Schröer, more positively, has to think of Henri Matisse’s painting La Danse (1910). Either way, the characters do not keep still. This has a two-fold effect: Readers understand that the character’s younger selves as depicted in the photographs are coming alive before Paul’s mind’s eye but their being constantly on the move also makes it impossible for any new or definite knowledge – about the circumstances of the suicide, or a possible ménage à trois – to come into view. Both the past and the pictures ultimately remain enigmatic to Paul (and, in consequence, to the reader) – though no less compelling for it.

His repeated engagement with this precious set of photos – discovered at a time that he is beginning to forget what his mother’s face looked like (L 82–84) – strikes me as similar to that of Roland Barthes with the Winter Garden Photograph (a picture of his mother as a young girl) in Camera Lucida, finding in it »the truth of the face I had loved« (Barthes 1982, 67) – a photo so precious to him readers do not get to see it, only to read about it, in contrast to other (less personally meaningful) images discussed in the essay. »For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ›ordinary‹,« writes Barthes (73). The piercing effect of photographs (of the deceased especially) described by the theoretician seems exactly the effect Paul experiences, and is keen to expose himself to repeatedly. Spending time with the photos, however illegible and opaque they may ultimately be to him, appears to be a way for Paul to reconnect to his feelings, allowing him to ponder the magnitude of his loss.

The photographic scenes become similarly animated – if not more so – when his father views the pictures (L 151–158), having discovered them under Paul’s bed one night when searching for clues as to the whereabouts of his son. Time and space seem to dissolve outright for Karl as he begins to handle the photographs and finds the loose birdman figure tucked between them (L 153). The birdman’s beak begins to record an activity of sorts – signs of a coming to life of Thea, in Karl’s imagination at least? – before Thea breaks through the lines the beak has drawn,¹⁶ and directly addresses her husband by name (L 154). A slightly surreal, dream-like sequence follows (L 154–158), in which Karl enters the timeless space of memory in which Thea, as he remembers her, is moving. Presenting Karl’s immersion in the photographs in this way makes sense because in contrast to Paul, Karl has actual memories of the long afternoons spent at the seaside. Events involve a search for Hedda, instigated by Thea, and attempts of Karl’s to protect and help his wife and be close to her. Readers get the sense of something awry. Some sort of balance being lost, the forest seems to close in on the family and what at first may have struck readers as joyful dancing à la Matisse (L 155) becomes a frustrating game of hide and seek (L 155) or indeed a danse macabre (L 158). The fact that Paul’s father can hear his wife’s and sister-in-law’s voices and tries to engage in conversation with them indicates how strong his desire to go back in time and undo what happened (whatever happened!) must be – and how raw it all still is for him, too, despite the years that have passed since.

As the only tangible thing left of his mother, Paul’s mind – and hands – keep returning to the photographs. One afternoon, unable to concentrate on his schoolwork, he gets them out again (L 96–103). And if it seemed thus far that the boy was fetishizing the images, the crafting scene that follows changes that view and highlights his grief and the related repeated engagement with the photos as important emotion work in process (fig. 9). It begins with Paul making more birdmen in the style of the ones that form part of the mobile. He goes on to produce a paper cutting of figures holding hands, dancing a roundelay, before using the remaining scraps of the photos as material for his art as well, spontaneously rolling them into pendants in order to make a necklace for his sister.

The crafting of the necklace and the thoughtful way in which Paul places it on the handle of his sister’s bedroom door for her to find when she comes home (L 103) speaks volumes of Paul’s desire to reestablish a connection with her. Offering this gift, he is reaching out to her. The novel ends by hinting at the possibility that Paul and the other surviving family members will indeed find a way out of their isolation: In a final dream sequence,¹⁷ Paul’s father tries to help his son exit a glasshouse he has outgrown (his body being much larger than his father’s in this dream; Kühn is playing with scale here and in other dream sequences as well). And although their joint efforts do not manage to get him out, father and son do succeed in opening the door and freeing Paul’s right arm to begin with. Looking each other in the eyes and physically touching – Paul’s father cupping the tip of his son’s index finger with both hands –, Paul begins to share some of his inner life with his father when he says: »Papa – ich hatte heute Nacht einen merkwürdigen Traum…« [Dad – I had a strange dream last night…] (L [251]). Lichtung thus ends on a cautiously optimistic note, giving readers reason to hope that Paul, Laura and Karl can overcome the loneliness of grieving suicide and come together as a family of three after their wife’s / mother’s untimely and traumatizing death at middle age.

Conclusion

In Lichtung, the young protagonist creates something new from the old photos. This indicates both a wish, to fix the damaged relationship with his sister Laura, as well as a possible way forward in life, learning to live with the trauma of losing their mother so abruptly and violently without disavowing the time spent with her. The necklace symbolizes that way forward, materializing the siblings’ memory of her, making it wearable and visible for others to see (in all of these aspects, the necklace is reminiscent of traditional Victorian mourning jewelry). I also see a link back to Nilsen and Chast here: Paul’s getting creative is comparable to the work of the auto/biographers turning their experiences of bereavement into publicly available graphic stories (incorporating photos from their personal archives, too) – translating into art the challenging experience of witnessing a loved one dying and the process of grieving this sets in motion.

In doing so, the artists put to use the established connection of the photographic medium to loss and remembrance – what I termed its bittersweetness –, but in the self-reflexive medium that is comics, they strip photography of some of its alleged powers and connotations at the same time. As we have seen, photography in itself does not ›speak,‹ nor can it bring anyone back to life – but as one element of visual-verbal storytelling about bereavement, it is an effective tool in drawing attention to the boundaries of tellability (in all three comics) and representation (in the cases of the auto/biographical comics discussed, as their authors knowingly transgress the boundaries of the private and the public).

In the 2012 author’s note at the back of the book, Nilsen fittingly describes Don’t Go as »a small [...] memorial« to Cheryl. Above, I myself have described Chast’s graphic memoir as an elegy to her parents. But that is not to say that these books’ relevance is limited to friends and family. The personal and the public is always interlaced in narratives of bereavement – the particular speaks to the universal. With each new narrative that comes out, including works of fiction, societal feeling rules (Hochschild, Ch. 4) around loss and grief are being reviewed and, potentially, expanded. Together, these texts give an idea of the many forms grief can take, the many facets there are to it. They are, as Martha Stoddard Holmes put it with regards to cancer comics, both »aesthetic and sociopolitical agents« (148).

Grief is unruly, in the sense that it is not easily brought in alignment with social expectations of its ›proper‹ moment, intensity, duration or place (Hochschild, 63–68). Despite it being such a universal experience, grieving a loss can therefore alienate and isolate individuals, be difficult to verbalize, especially when accompanied by a variety of conflicting feelings or when a person’s environment deems their reaction inappropriate. It seems important to note, in this context, that none of the three graphic narratives explored in this article tell a ›simple‹ story of just one ›pure‹ emotion or perspective, or of grief easily resolving itself. The comics form seems to lend itself to such more complex narratives of bereavement – providing a space in which they become tellable.

In an interview, Antonia Kühn has deliberated on the affordances of the comics medium as follows:

Comics unite language and images. That opens up the possibility to approach a topic at various levels. Comics are able to devote their attention to an issue with a lot of care. They thus give the reader a lot of space for their own position. The pace plays an important role in this – I as the comics artist can plan for a certain reading pace, but it is the reader who decides how long for and how often they view a page or just a single panel.¹⁸ (Wiesner)

We note: The reader is central to her concerns as a graphic artist – as is the idea of doing complex issues justice. Both these aspects together help explain why the hybrid comics medium is well-suited to handle the emotive topics of loss and grief: it can bring out their layers, contradictions and phases – without that what is found to be true, emotionally, for an auto/biographical narrator or a central character becomes a prescriptive model for others, or is shared by other characters of the same storyworld; depathologizing rather than repathologizing people’s diverse experiences. And the comics medium avoids normativity in other ways too, for instance in that it gives readers the freedom to sit with particular images or moments of what their authors know to be challenging narratives as they create them. This respects the fact that the »personal […] clock« (Hochschild, 66) of readers – and mourners – may tick at different paces. In the light of the above, comics emerge as a sensitive new space for grief and grieving.

 

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Table of Figures

• Fig. 1: Art and accident: a meditation on the human perception of time (DG 58).
• Fig. 2: Drawing Cheryl in hospital: beholding her in dying (DG 70–71).
• Fig. 3: Cheryl postmortem. Nilsen’s invitation to the readership to come together in grief (DG 74).
• Fig. 4: A daughter’s memory work: questioning and reframing the family album (CWT 167).
• Fig. 5: »So I took some photos.« Chast changing media, disrupting visual coherency (CWT 108–109).
• Fig. 6: Recording the time of death. The final of thirteen sketches drawing her late mother included by Chast in Can’t We Talk (CWT 222).
• Fig. 7: The birdman figure, cut from the mobile’s web of relationships (L [12–13]).
• Fig. 8: Triggered by the precious find, past and present, phantasy, memory and reality mix in Paul’s imagination (L 62).
• Fig. 9: Paul crafting the memorial necklace as a gift to his sister (L 102).

 

• 1]   Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German are mine.
• 2]   True, at least, for the English- and German-language realm.
• 3]   Nancy Pedri (e.g. 2015; 2017a; 2017b) has done much to advance the study of photography in comics as well as the mixing of different visualities in comics more generally, attesting this area a persistent lack of research. My work here builds on hers while bringing a specific type of graphic narrative – grief narratives – into focus.
• 4]   In his afterword (n. pag.), the author stresses the fact that Cheryl’s initial prognosis for surviving Hodgkin’s lymphoma was so favorable that surgery to remove her spleen was deemed unnecessary.
• 5]   Unless otherwise indicated, I am referencing the 2012 edition of Don’t Go.
• 6]   The journey analogy is well-established in life writing generally and much-used in illness narratives in particular (e.g. Hunsaker Hawkins). Oksman (25) points out its popularity in grief writing.
• 7]   Campbell’s Dad Project encompasses images of her dying father as well as images taken after his passing showing parts of the corpse, but never all of it – thus walking the fine line of taboo. The practice of postmortem photography fell out of fashion when, in the late 19th century, city councils and, later, national governments prohibited it for hygienic reasons, fearing the spread of infectious disease. This changed the perception of postmortem images top-down (Richter, 215) and explains the relative shock value of postmortem photography today.
• 8]   The insertion of this latter page strikes me as arguably the most significant artistic change made to Don’t Go for its 2012 republication.
• 9]   As photographs, that is, and not redrawn by hand, for instance – a common practice in graphic memoir writing, see e.g. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) or Birgit Weyhe’s Im Himmel ist Jahrmarkt (2013).
• 10] Made transparent in one caption especially, which begins thus: »I arranged all of my mother’s purses on the bed« (CWT 112).
• 11] Cf. the image captioned »This used to be my bedroom. Same horrible linoleum of my childhood, same nice view of the brick-walled side of a neighboring church« (CWT 113). Tanya Kam’s argument (cited above) regarding the memoirist reclaiming agency through the way she deals with the family photographs seems to fit here too – and makes apparent at least one shared purpose that the two different types of photography Chast utilizes in Can’t We Talk serve.
• 12] Addressed explicitly CWT 6, 188; both Chast’s mother and father were descendants of Russian Jews who had migrated to the US because of a rise in antisemitism and pogroms in the wake of the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
• 13] Chast’s photography is furthermore comparable, in this, to the photography of Thomas Demand – also in the aspect that viewers know that what they see was disposed of soon thereafter.
• 14] See, for example, Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta’s project Noch mal leben [to live again], which exhibits facial portraits of people in hospice care, in each case juxtaposing one image from before with a second image taken after a person’s death.
• 15] To value each family member’s own perspective on the events was important to Kühn, as she explains in an interview (Förster 2018).
• 16] NB: These morph into the trunks of trees at the clearing in the woods where the family used to enjoy spending time.
• 17] The plot is interspersed with dreams of Paul’s, which give the reader insight into his inner landscape through allegory, adding to the graphic novel’s interpretative openness or ambiguity.
• 18] Original wording: »Comics vereinen Sprache und Bilder. Das eröffnet die Möglichkeit sich einem Thema auf sehr vielen Ebenen zu nähern. Sie können sich sehr behutsam einem Gegenstand widmen. So geben sie dem Rezipienten viel Raum für eine eigene Position. Dabei spielt das Tempo eine wichtige Rolle –  ich kann zwar als Zeichner eine bestimmte Geschwindigkeit anlegen, beim Lesen entscheidet dann aber der Betrachter, wie lange und wie oft er sich eine Seite oder auch nur ein einziges Panel anschaut.«