The World at a Glance

A few weeks ago I discovered the work of graphic illustrator and animator Guy Delisle. During the past few years, in addition to working at various animation studios, he has accompanied his wife, who is a member of the international group Doctors without Borders, to several fascinating international outposts, and has published graphic works that are autobiographical in nature.

For example, the first work that I read details his experiences in North Korea. Given that this country is notorious for its closed society, and for harboring a repressive regime led by the Sung dynasty (the world’s only Communist dynasty), I couldn’t help but be attracted to this work. He promised, after all, an unflinching glimpse into this country, part of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil”, and a country that furthermore has undergone a leadership transition to the third generation of this dynasty.

What he offers in this work, as well as in others, are short episodic narratives that chronicle his own experiences as he attempts to adjust to life in what are inevitably short-term posts. It must be emphasized over and over that he has the luxury of being able to escape whenever he feels like it, and he is furthermore exempt from the limitations and barriers that are enforced among the native citizens. As such, I feel at times that his works devolve into a type of tourism narrative that never fully delves into the complexities of these respective societies, whether they be North Korea, or China, or in the case of his latest work, Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Delisle offers narratives that follow a familiar trajectory. For example, his arrival, with the accompanying first impressions. Since his spouse, once again, is a member of a prestigious NGO, he typically is able to secure housing in areas as well as edifices that are guaranteed, from the outset, to isolate him from the bulk of the population. Part of this is due to a conscious strategy on the part of the authorities, as is the case in North Korea, where foreigners are concentrated in specific building with the understanding that they will be easier to monitor, but part of this is also dictated by his own understandable concerns with obtaining lodgings that will provide a level of comfort suited to someone from a Western country. There are no multi-generational households here. And this thus can’t help but inevitably constrain him, as I feel it must, for not only do linguistic and cultural barriers come into play, but also economic and class differences. He and his family, once again, are not forced to confront and understand the true dynamics at play in these respective societies.

The type of drawing in these books is one that is characterized by a linear style that emphasizes strong lines and little to no shading or color. These are drawings, and he portrays himself as a character with a prominent jaw and sharp nose, earnest, young, in a clean drawing style. Such is also the case with the other characters he encounters, although from time to time the setting is rendered with more texture. Such is particularly the case with the drawing of the monumental and imposing central tower that is found in Pyong-yang, a building that is meant to be North Korea’s equivalent to the prestige buildings that were erected in other Communist societies (such as the Fernsehtür in East Berlin), but that in this case has become this forbidding and uninhabitable structure that is slowly crumbling. One can’t help but view it as a symbol of the Sung dynasty, and the monstrous scale of the building is rendered in a memorable way.

This rendering of the landscape is also evident in the depiction of holy sites in Jerusalem. During his family’s stay in this area, the author lived in the West Bank, and he undertook to travel and sketch not only the dividing wall but also the many famous landmarks that range from the Wailing Wall to St. Lazarus’s Tomb. They are depicted in what seems an authentic style that can be summed up as a pictorial snapshot, for the way that they are framed in pleasing perspectives that would seem to be in accord with the priviledged gaze of the viewer who seeks harmony and a pleasing composition.  And therein lies another of my concerns, for Guy DeLisle is too much of an commercially-oriented illustrator and storyteller and this limits as well his perspective. He approaches these narratives as a traditional artist would approach a composition, trying to portray an organic whole while at the same time missing the jarring elements that one gets the sense are being self-censored.

I wouldn’t claim to say that he is consciously censoring his material, only that the view seems at times too superficial, and conforms too much to the formulas of a conventional travel narrative. In his book detailing his experiences in Burma, for example, he gives us episodes that would seek to describe Buddhist customs in that country. The monks who circulate with their bowls from house to house, receiving gifts of food the giving of which is considered both an honor as well as a duty on the part of average citizens, or the festivities such as the water-drenching that accompanies the celebration of the new year.

In the case of the West Bank, given that he chose very specifically to live in a house owned by a Palestinian, I was hoping that he would venture from his traditional mode and focus more on the dynamic of cultural as well as political conflict that is in play. I wasn’t looking for a description of Muslim customs among the Sunni majority, or of the political strategies of the Fatah party, but more of an openness to see the jarring elements that are evident. And yet, he seems to concentrate once more on places, on buildings and landmarks and on his interactions with other expatriates or with groups who seem more culturally similar.

The settler movement and the tactic of expropriating buildings is relayed in several episodes, but he never truly tries to contact any members of this group to elicit an explanation of their goals or a recognition of the way in which this movement has impacted the peace process so negatively. His explorations seem, once again, to be all to brief and solitary, as are many of his journeys, and when seeing and reading these episodes where he recounts once again driving out into the barren desert, or being stuck in traffic, I can’t help but think that he has chosen to concentrate on the most superficial elements of his experience in these places.

I suppose it would be unfair to expect that he engage in a form of journalism, but as a graphic animator who specializes in a visual as well as narrative mode that compresses symbols and manipulates them in accord with a special vocabulary that stresses concision, one that at times  breaks modes of static perception, I was looking for narratives that would delve deeper into the respective countries in which he found himself. Narratives that would not end, as they do so frequently, as gags do, with a prompt and simplistic termination that highlights a disparity or ironic element, but one instead that leads to a breakthrough in perception.

Such was undoubtedly the case with Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”, his narrative of the persecution of the Jews in World War Two. The point of view is clear, and the persecutors are portrayed as merciless, grotesque and predatory cats in Nazi unforms, preying on the mice who are unable to defend themselves. This conceit would seem to hark to Kafka’s “The Transformation”, with the portrayal of the salesman who is turned into a cockroach, but it has an ancient history in Western civilization, and it harks back to the earliest fables and myths of classical society, the epics of Homer and the religions of the ancient Middle East. This pictorial language, in other words, refers to an ideological order, and is used to frame stories that seek to question not only the logic of these social and political structures, these being subject to bewildering transformations, but they invite new insights.

Such was very much the case in another graphic work that I recently read, this being the “Illustrated Book of Genesis” that was published by famed counter-culture artist Robert Crumb. In this work, we are treated once again to the hallmarks of a visual style that is able to portray this dynamic, multi-layered approach to representation.  Characters are portrayed with a certain distorted realism, one that seems to inevitably emphasize instincts and impulses that are irrational and as such uncontrollable, and thus we have characters who are at times impossibly sexualized, women who are graced with bursting curves and exhuberant mouthes, as well as those who are gangly and defenceless and awkward, or those that are comical because of the clash in the symbolic language used to represent them (for example, Mr. Natural, the short and impulsive old man with the flowing beard of a biblical patriarch). There are codes that play once again on transitional modes of representation, and these are brought to bear on this work which illustrates the first book of the bible, injecting a note of cynicism and at times irony that can also be viewed as poetic. Graphic representation, to state the obvious, is by no means literalism.

 

In the case of Guy Delisle’s works, and most recently, of “Jerusalem”, one garners the impression of encountering a work that details experiences that are ultimately inconsequential. They are too fragmentary, they are to post-modern, they reveal more of the biases of the author than they do of the experiences and motivations of the people who live in the West Bank, and the motivations that underscore the perennial conflict in this area. Perhaps it is part of the intention of the author not to offer narratives that conform to a distinct ideological program, and instead let the reader thread the bits that are offered here, but what happens is that one feels at times that the bits that are offered never truly penetrate the surface, and instead, what we have in this narrative as we have in so many narratives of Western explorers in travel literature dating back for several centuries, are experiences that fall back on a portrayal of the inscrutable nature of these exotic places. The veil of the Muslim women who occasionally attend his seminars serves to exclude the artist, and it is here, at times, in one memorable episode, that we see how the author is able to communicate his frustration, while offering a critique of a society and culture that does not conform to Western modes of equality of opportunity.

After all, if he has chosen to write and illustrate a book that details his experiences in a region that has been characterized by one of the most intractable conflicts of the modern era, he would do well to focus on the dynamic of power at play, and not to limit himself to what at times seems to be a self-centered narrative of inconsequential episodes that inevitably are concluded with a semi-ironic observation.  This is part of the frustration that I have come to feel with these works, although I appreciate them as individual chronicles that, while signaling no individual transformation as provoked by an unexpected insight, nonetheless offer an engaging look at the surface of what will remain inscrutable societies.

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013