Is There a Body in This Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography

ABSTRACT

If the great advantage of the graphic memoir of illness and disability is that it features the body in the text, for greatest effectiveness—and affectiveness—the body ought to be recognizable as a particular human's—manifestly a thing of flesh, blood, and bone, a truly corporeal body.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have been told that this amounts to a genre[d] bias—for “adult auteur” comics—that is, comics intended for adults and drawn with care by talented graphic artists.

2. I have similar reservations about Roz Chast's memoir of dealing with her aging parents. Her use of her signature New Yorker cartoon style troubles me somewhat in this context: it is one thing to use it to depict generic neurotics, another to use it to depict her own parents. There is a disjunction between her characteristic style and her subjects—and the genre of graphic somatography.

3. “The narrative is deliberately completely fictional. My first book was autobiographical and that was so intense that I decided to make only fiction” (Vanistendael, “Permission”).