Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 125 Hillary Chute's Ambivalent Idiom of Witness
Charlotte Pylyser
Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia UP, 2010
Paper, 316 pages, ISBN: 978-0-231-15063-7
Hillary Chute these days is one of the most high-profile scholars in the field of comics studies. With Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics she has produced a text whose unique subject matter arguably makes it equally high-profile: graphic life writing by women authors. The authors Chute chooses to engage with in Graphic Women - all furiously drawing out their demons in the works featured - include Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel. They range from internationally renowned (Satrapi) to half-buried in the underground (Kominsky-Crumb). Chute's selection of authors is obviously American-centric. Interestingly, this orientation does not actually produce bias in the text as Chute shies away quite radically from making overarching claims in Graphic Women. This characteristic, it will become apparent below, will prove to be more of a curse than a blessing for the book. For each author Chute reads one or a number of central works. Although the works she devotes most of her time to are primarily the more established ones, the connections she makes between these tentative magna opera and lesser-known works is refreshing. The Kominsky-Crumb chapter is perhaps the most heterogeneous one, featuring readings of both Kominsky-Crumb's work in underground comix magazines and her novel-length publications Love That Bunch (1990) and The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics (1993) (the latter in collaboration with her husband Robert Crumb) . In chapter two Gloeckner's A Child's Life and Other Stories (1998) and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002) are explored. Next, the Barry chapter focusses on Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Coloring Book (1984), "The Red Comb" (1988) and especially on One Hundred Demons (2002). This Chapter is followed by one on Satrapi (adapted from a 2008 article in Women's Studies Quarterly) which deals with Persepolis (2003, 2004) and to a lesser degree with Embroideries (2005) and Chicken with Plums (2006). The final chapter is entirely devoted to Alison Bechdel's family memoir Fun Home (2006). Amply documented, including beautiful colour reproductions of the comics panels and pages quoted, a plethora of notes that should satisfy even the hungriest of scholars and about twenty pages of Works Cited, Graphic Women certainly succeeds as a reference work for those interested in its subject matter. Chute makes sure to include relevant and novel biographical and contextual information in her interpellation of the graphic novel(ist)s she presents, especially with regard to the authors that come from an underground comix background, with Kominsky-Crumb as the most obvious example. In this capacity Graphic Women, as a witness of the female presence and (sexual, gendered) experience and of the gesture of its engraving, warts and all, into the (comics) world is an invaluable addition not only to comics studies, but to the whole array of disciplines that can be associated with the words that
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 126 constitute the title of the book. As Graphic Women progresses a more analytical train of thought emerges alongside Chute's strikingly descriptive approach. Throughout the Satrapi and Bechdel chapters the analytical strain increases to eventually culminate in the final pages of Chute's reading of Fun Home. All throughout the text, however, the impression lingers that Chute is at least partly rendered speechless by the images with which she engages. That is, in her commitment to a method that she calls “mapping” or “critical describing”, her usually incisive scholarly voice becomes lost in the effort to (re)present and to a certain extent interpret her chosen authors and especially the images taken from their work. Chute's choice to forego a conclusion is arguably reflective of her intention to “map” and to remain intimately connected to the work and especially the author rather than focus on unearthing patterns, abstracting tendencies and framing new insights in the form of an overarching argument. In fact, Chute does not explicitly make a point in this book as a whole. She makes several points within the confines of each chapter, intriguing ones at times such as how the practice of censure with regard to Gloeckner's work helps corroborate the seemingly paradoxical depraved yet titillating nature of the story told, however - some incidental cross-referencing notwithstanding - the chapters mostly seem to function separately, which makes for a rather idiosyncratic map. The issue is not that Chute fails to generate interesting remarks, on the contrary, especially in the final two chapters any given page is filled with a wealth of inspiring suggestions. The issue is that those suggestions, unanchored to a substantive argument, eventually blow away in the wind. Chute’s description of the empowering mode in which her authors operate, which she calls the “idiom of witness”, is as suggested before applicable to Graphic Women as well, only without the personal experiences, convictions and deeply felt emotions and quandaries of her authors Chute's observations threaten to become almost weightless. Based on that stream of free-floating ideas it is up to the reader to formulate the in-depth and fundamental questions Chute might (and sometimes should) have asked herself. Chute's insistence on the importance of what she calls "retracing - materially reimagining trauma" - and on the "risk of representation" connected to the authors' visual testimonies in the introduction invokes the spirits of many theoretical approaches, not the least of which feminism. Clearly aiming to construct a feminist project, it is surprising how fragmented and repetitive Chute's engagement with the concept is. The same observation can be made for the other theoretically productive concepts that are mentioned in the introduction: (self-)representation, trauma, materiality, ethics, (sexual) politics, visibility. Strikingly, neither does Chute orient herself towards comics theory in a compelling way. This begs the question as to what audience Graphic Women is written for. In this particular case, Graphic Women's wavering position between overview and analysis might ultimately leave (comics) scholars dissatisfied. Of course for a reader to want more also implies that what is there already inspires. Chute's engaged and informative effort certainly succeeds in bringing her graphic women to attention and tickling the reader's curiosity.
Charlotee Pylyser is research assistant at KU Leuven, where she prepares a PhD on the Flemish graphic novel.
