Ware, C. (2007) The ACME Novelty Library, #18 (Chicago: Acme, 32) © Chris Ware
The young woman in this story is nameless. This is a deliberate decision by Chris Ware as the world his female character lives in is banal (‘Whatever sort of stupid life that is…’). What’s the use of a name if it doesn’t help to tell her apart from others? She is anonymous but she is also unlike most other girls her age: the lower half of her left leg has been amputated, which does not make things easier.
Her anonymity, though initially disconcerting, is quite convenient in the long run. It permits us a certain distance as we slide into her thoughts without too much difficulty. This is the first thing that draws attention when reading the page. We follow her at work in a flower shop, where she apparently does not exchange a single word with anybody and is completely immersed in her thoughts. A beautiful paradox! On closer inspection the events depicted on the page reveal that the author has ‘rigged’ the scene.
In panels six and eight it is unlikely that she did not utter any word given the gestures she makes (returning change to the customer, addressing her workmate). Ware, it seems, has discretely muted the soundtrack. But not completely. The reader can still ‘hear’ the young disabled woman’s inner monologue [1]. It is the author’s privilege to portray her expression in any way he deems fit. But why should he select this specific approach?
One reason could be to show that comics have the power to depict the dissociation of thought and action. But is this really a straightforward case of dissociation? The events take place within a homogeneous time-frame, but that frame does not include the reminiscences of the thought balloons. Ware does not use parallel montage to show the protagonist’s actions on one hand and the materialisation of memory on the other: in this case, her life with the young man whose features she is able to remember without quite recalling his face.
This is another paradox: visual memories that lack a ‘figurative’ aspect. The young woman’s thoughts are comprised of words, the images they evoke do not seem any more accessible to her than to the reader – unless the reader uses their own imagination to give them life… On this page, the visible conceals a world that cannot be accessed anymore. The author’s manipulation does not only concern sound. Hence the image of the young man, face turned away from the reader, as suggested in the title.
Although we have no direct access to the character’s consciousness, we are able to access her non-figurative thoughts because they are written. The young woman joins a literary workshop and reflects on a writing exercise, based on recollections, which explains the purely linguistic aspect of remembrance. As we have no access to the visual aspect of her memories, there is dissociation. What Ware is showing here is how comics are able to represent temporal nuances, just as language does with verbal tenses.
Ware has frequently spoken of his preference for a more subtle expression of time, where “that particular part of the story have more of a past tense feel and less of an immediate quality’” (Groth, 161: 2003). His achievement is a tour de force, as this eloquent page attests, in its evocation of a past that is finished yet constantly re-emerging into a present in which the lack of personal achievement is barely endured. In other words, something of the felt incompleteness –akin the perfect progressive tense– of a gloomy life.
[1] The choice of thought balloons is very surprising here, because Ware usually represents interior monologue in italic type directly printed into the images.
REFERENCES
Groth, G. (2003) “Understanding Chris Ware’s Comics”, The Comics Journal, #200, Fantagraphics Books Inc., Seattle.
Ware, C. (2007) The ACME Novelty Library, #18 (Chicago: Acme, 32)
—
The original French version of this text first appeared in Samson, Jacques, and Peeters, Benoît (2010) Chris Ware: La Bande Dessinée Réinventée (Brussels and Paris: Les Impressions Nouvelles)
English translation by Roberto Bartual for The Comics Grid.
