Capturing alternate realities: visual metaphors and patient perspectives in graphic narratives on mental illness

ABSTRACT

The diverse affordances of the medium of comics like spatio-temporality and visual rhetorical devices enable artists/patients who suffer from mental illnesses to approximate their experiential reality via graphic narratives. The graphic narratives analysed in this essay are reflections of the authors’ experiences of dealing with friends and family members who suffer from mental conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia. Weaving together dreams, myths and reality, Nate Powell and Glyn Dillon create complex narratives that bring to life the patients’ subjective worlds through the medium of comics. In so doing, these narratives vindicate the significance of graphic medicine in negotiating an alternate reality which is not captured in reductive biomedical and popular accounts of the illness conditions. Spatial and stylistic visual metaphors are used in these narratives to depict specific psychological experiences in viscerally engaging ways. Drawing theoretical insights from Elisabeth El Refaie, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, this essay explores the middle ground between triumphalist and fatalist narratives through grey metaphors that stylistically encapsulate the patient’s lived experience. It also investigates how Powell’s Swallow Me Whole and Dillon’s The Nao of Brown use visual metaphors to intersperse multiple temporal and spatial dimensions that mimic patient’s altered inner world.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual metaphor
• graphic medicine
• comics
• mental illness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Conceptual Metaphor Theory was proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work Metaphors We Live By (2003). They proposed that ‘metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action’ (3), and that ‘our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature’ (3). Thus, distinct from the predominant understanding about metaphor as a matter of language, these cognitive theorists argued that they are a significant tool through which two distinct conceptual domains are mapped, thereby impacting the behaviour and action of the users of language.

2. Conceptual domains that are mapped together in metaphors are represented in capital letters as per Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory.

3. “Justin Green’sBinky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is considered as the first autobiographical work in comics medium which details the author’s struggles with OCD. Hillary Chute describes it as ‘the ur-text“of comics illness and disability narratives’ (248).„

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sathyaraj Venkatesan

Sathyaraj Venkatesan is an Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. He received PhD from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. He was a Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, New York and currently, an International Field Bibliographer with the Publications of Modern Language Association of America (PMLA). His research interests include Literature and Medicine, Graphic Medicine, Critical Medical Humanities.

Sweetha Saji

Sweetha Saji is an Assistant Professor of English at Mount Carmel College, Bengaluru. She received her PhD from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli. Her research focuses on Graphic Medicine and her published research articles concentrates on visual metaphors and graphic narratives on mental illness.