‘Posing for all the characters in the book’: the multimodal processes of production in Alison Bechdel’s relational autobiography Are You My Mother?

Abstract

During the production process of her graphic novels, Alison Bechdel poses for all the characters (including her own former self), then makes a photo via a self-timer, and finally reproduces this photography via her hand drawing. As a consequence, her comics not only combine words and (drawn) pictures, but they also materialise various modes of experience: first, Bechdel performs a scene from the past with her own body, then she takes a photograph of that performance, then she reproduces the photograph in the mode of a handmade drawing, then that drawing is put into print via technical reproduction. Especially in the context of graphic auto/biography, this production process triggers certain questions concerning authenticity and self-staging. However, Bechdel not only performs her former self, but also re-embodies other people’s past experiences, which becomes particularly clear when she starts to learn her late father’s handwriting to be able to reproduce his letters to her mother. Against this background, the current article argues that Bechdel uses her own body as a medium of experience and interconnection that allows her to transgress the limited focalisation that the autobiographer is usually bound to, thereby working towards an intersubjective representation of the past.

Keywords:

• Alison Bechdel
• archive
• authenticity
• embodiment
• graphic memoir
• performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term ‘palimpsest’ is used here mainly because of the materiality inherent in the original meaning of the word: the overwriting of older manuscripts with new ones and the later efforts to make lost (hidden) texts readable again. It is also a characteristic of the palimpsest that older texts can often only be reconstructed fragmentarily. This is why their existence can often only be perceived as a trace, or a present absent, that can neither be ignored nor be fully understood.

2. To discuss individual panel images it is useful to consider the vocabulary developed by film studies for image sizes and angles. It is well worth keeping in mind that, ‘by choosing a particular image size and angle, the comic presents us with a clue on how the story is to be perceived’ (Kukkonen 2013, 46).

3. Michael Chaney argues in the same vein, noting that, ‘when the “I” of autobiography is explicitly stylized as a kind of cartoon, the result is a brazen departure from the “seemingly substantial” effects of realism that traditional autobiographies presume’ (Chaney 2011, 7).

4. As, for example, Thomas Couser remarks: ‘Many forces in Western culture – such as Christian theology or Cartesian dualism – have devalued or effaced the body. … As a result, the body has not, until recently, figured very prominently in life writing in the West’ (Couser 2001, 121).

5. Or, as Paul J. Eakin puts it: ‘To recognize that the content of our so-called inner lives comes heavily freighted with material from outer sources is to send us back once more to the troubling connection between thoughts and things’ (Eakin 2008, 102).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Rüggemeier

Anne Rüggemeier is a Junior Research Group Leader at the Heidelberg School of Education of the University of Heidelberg and the Heidelberg University of Education, Germany. She is the author of various articles on life writing, multimodality, and autobiographers as family archivists, as well as a monograph on relational autobiographies in contemporary English literature that focuses on texts by Hanif Kureishi, Alison Bechdel, Nancy. K. Miller, Rudy Wiebe, Pat Mora, and John M. Coetzee (Die relationale Autobiographie, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014). Her research interests include teaching multimodal literacies, narratology, illness narratives, and the field of literature and knowledge.