Comics and the structure of childhood feeling: Sublimation and the play of pretending in Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I study the narrative structure of comics as a means to describe the ways that indeterminate modes of representation can allow the reader to imagine that which in childhood can never be fully expressed. Analyzing a number of panels from Gilbert Hernandez's graphic novel, Marble Season, I describe a conceptual link between the psychoanalytic idea of sublimation (referencing the theories of Freud, Loewald, and Winnicott), and Raymond Williams’ notion of a “structure of feeling.” In particular, I examine the latency stage of childhood as a time where the challenges of individual development involve a struggle to channel into the social world, in potentially productive ways, the internalizations of lost love. I also explore how the gutter, the space between the panels in comics, may function as a zone of sublimatory reconciliation between the self and the object world, and where, in their interactions with the space in the middle, the reader invariably engages with the structure of childhood feeling as a product of their own reading.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• culture and literacy
• narrative methods
• arts-based educational research
• curriculum studies

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to guest editors Dr Lisa Farley and Dr Julie Garlen, as well as the anonymous reviewers. Thanks also to Drawn & Quarterly, the publishers of Marble Season for permission to reproduce panels from that work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As I use the terms “libido” and “libidinal energy” throughout this article, it is important to note that I am using them broadly to represent movements toward unification and development, and while they most definitely refer to the sexual or survival instincts represented by the concept of Eros, libidinal energy represents more than “just an urge towards procreation, [or] towards pleasurable bodily gratification” (Lear, 2005, p. 84). Rather, libidinal energy (as with erotic energy) represents all attempts by human subjects to reach “beyond themselves” (p. 85), and to take advantage of a “distinctively erotic longing – this reaching beyond – to resume the developmental process.” It is in this context that play and reading can both be considered libidinal, erotic activities.

2. Again, I may note that, while traumatic and childhood memories are not the same thing, they bear a structural similarity in terms of how the remembering person relates to such experiences. Moreover, since children enter the social world unaware of how the influence of past generations may affect their perception of the world itself (through such conduits as language, architecture, education, cultural norms, dress, etc.), there is necessarily a kernel of trauma (of unknowability) in childhood experience.

3. In my use of “internalization,” I follow Loewald's (2007) understanding of the concept:

as a general term for certain processes of transformation by which relationships between the individual psychic apparatus and its environment are changed into inner relationships and interactions within the psychic apparatus. Thus an inner world is constituted and it in turn entertains relationships and interactions with the outer world. The term “internalization” therefore covers such “mechanisms” as incorporation, introjection, and identification, or those referred to by the terms “internal object” and “internalized object,” as well as such “vicissitudes of instincts” as the “turning inward” of libidinal and aggressive drives. (p. 1119)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Lewkowich

David Lewkowich is an assistant professor in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta. His research interests include reading experience, young adult literature, psychoanalytic theory, adolescence and/in graphic novels, and representations of teaching in literature and popular culture.