Dense and Porous: Browsing, Parataxis, and the Texture of Comics

This chapter offers a multifaceted account of the distinctive texture of comics, exploring the simultaneous fragmentation and coherence of the comics page, as well as addressing exceptional cases like the single-panel gag cartoon and the fold-out page. Various modes of representation, in tension and concert with each other, produce the singularly dense and porous texture of the medium. Seth’s inventive storytelling techniques often call for a different reading practice entirely, one that is not exclusively geared toward plot progression. Parataxis is a particular type of heightened juxtaposition that creates a field for readerly interpolation. By gently disorienting the reader, Seth draws attention to the re-orientation of perspective that constantly takes place when assembling a coherent narrative. Seth’s work points to itself by emphasizing these gaps and reminds the reader that it is only through fragments that a coherent literary world can be suggested.

Pictures at a Remove: Seth’s Drawn Photographs

This chapter closely examines Seth’s drawn photographs, comparing the ways in which comics and photography relate to their represented realities in terms of time, narrative, duration, and framing. Seth’s drawn photographs synthesize these complicated temporal relations in metapictures that invite the reader to consider the nature of visual mediation. These metapictures are caught between the subjective and objective, the atomized and continuous, the opaque and transparent, the classical and grotesque, the absent and present. At the seat of these tensions is an ambivalent relationship to the (historical) referent, inherent in the photographic perspective and amplified by Seth’s drawing. In their extreme reticence – an uncommon synthesis of photographic and cartoon stillnesses – Seth’s drawn photographs exemplify his method of compelling the reader to take a position between history and memory in order to make sense of images.

Conclusion

This brief concluding chapter summarizes and synthesizes the arguments of the previous chapters, placing them in context with each other. Emphasis is placed on the role of the reader in filling narrative gaps, and the ways in which Seth creates a space for the reader’s interpolation. Ultimately, Seth’s work turns the medium of memory on itself, using it as an instrument to examine longing, loss, and the processes of remembrance and making history.

Style and the Appearance of Authenticity

This chapter considers the materiality and appearance of Seth’s work and attempts to determine how a sense of authenticity becomes visible to the reader. Particular attention is paid to the influence of New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno on Seth’s drawing style which strongly recalls a bygone era of cartooning. Seth’s pages seem charged with the tension between authenticity and the artifice used to conjure it. This is understood as something of a double move on Seth’s part: because artifice is not “natural” or effortless, it can seem to slide away from authenticity; at the same time, however, the evidence of craft and effort reveals the reality of the human hand that must work to create the polished appearance. Seth uses style as a historicizing discourse – in much the same way that art historians do – and his style ultimately becomes a meta-discourse that comments on the concept of style itself.

Forging Histories: Ghost Worlds and Invented Communities

This chapter explores Seth’s invented worlds and interior landscapes, making particular use of Linda Hutcheon’s concepts of the heterocosm and historiographic metafiction, as well as certain frameworks from Hayden White’s landmark work Metahistory (specifically, the conception of three kinds of historiography: fabulous, true, and satirical). Seth ambivalently situates himself in relation to the past by remaking it in fictional form – and in the process encourages the reader to take up a similarly ambivalent position. Seth takes advantage of the credibility often attributed to historicizing discourses, using them to fortify his invented Canadian realities. His work accommodates the double meaning of the word “forge” and in doing so points to the deliberate manipulation of material that even the most apparently neutral history entails. Seth’s work engages readers in the process of making their own historical knowledge. Moreover he prompts readers to make historical knowledge that is ironic, nostalgic, or otherwise ambivalent.

The Rhetoric of Failure

This chapter considers the frequent revaluation of success and failure in Seth’s narratives, placing him in a Chekhovian tradition of storytelling that is characterized by “the irony of unfulfillment.” An examination of the “rhetoric of failure” – which David M. Ball identifies in the work of cartoonist Chris Ware – is framed by a critical approach that borrows from Francesco Orlando’s study of obsolete objects in literature. For Orlando, the failure of the obsolete body is the failure to function, a failure which is directly related to the passage of time. Many of Seth’s characters value objects precisely because of their age. The twilight, in-between tone of Seth’s work is accompanied by a strong impulse to save. Seth’s work repeatedly depicts an uncertain transmutation: failure develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it ultimately coincides with its opposite. Though such inversions are not stable, failures and obsolete objects are briefly redeemed.

Introduction

Precisely because Seth’s interest in the past can be mistaken for unadulterated longing, his body of work becomes an ideal site for redressing the somewhat impoverished understanding of nostalgia in contemporary comics. In this book, Marrone locates his work between history and memory, along a spectrum of “ambivalent longing.” Walter Benjamin describes remembrance as “the capacity for endless interpolation into what has been.” This book re-conceives that comparison as more than just a metaphor: Marrone proposes a relation between interpolation into the past and the reader’s capacity for interpolation into the comics text. Interpolation, as Marrone has defined it, concerns an ambivalent impulse related to the past that is characteristic of what W. J. T. Mitchell calls “the composite imagetext structure of memory,” which parallels the imagetext structure of comics. Interpolation encapsulates these complex relations, referring to the memory-inflected filling of gaps that comics pages invite the reader to undertake.

Collection and Recollection

This chapter draws together arguments about ambivalence, remembering and forgetting, narratives of the past, and the fortification of identity through the process of collecting. For Seth’s characters, collecting is a way of thinking. Through collection, what is being recollected is the self: identity is the absent thing being made present by the collection. Selection is understood as the most fundamental element of the process of collecting; to a large extent, the act of selection is what distinguishes the collection from the archive. Seth’s characters are often on the cusp of anachronism because they are continually attempting to fix their positions within narratives of the past. The collection helps to fortify identity by arbitrating between inside and outside, i.e. what is part of identity and what is not. Through collection and recollection, the collector means to keep loss at bay – Seth reveals the potential for meaning that resides in this loss.

Return, Repetition, and Other Ambivalent Impulses

Beginning with Zygmunt Bauman’s account of ambivalence – which depends on the “master-opposition” between inside and outside – this chapter delineates the relation of ambivalence to modernity and ambiguity. It also elaborates the role of Freud’s thinking in the overall investigation of Seth’s work through a consideration of the uncanny, especially with regard to his character Simon Matchcard. The uncanny is considered as part of a family of ambivalent phenomena that includes nostalgia, obsession, compulsion, and the return of the repressed. This chapter relies heavily on Linda Hutcheon description of ambivalence as “the desire to be on both sides of any border, deriving energy from the continual crossing.” In comics, this continual crossing takes a particularized form in the movement from panel to panel. Seth subtly fosters ambiguity, arousing a generative ambivalence in the reader, which in turn reciprocally animates the text.