War Comics

A Postcolonial Perspective

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000163438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book focuses on non-fictional, visual narratives (including comics; graphic narratives; animated documentaries and online, interactive documentaries) that attempt to represent violent experiences, primarily in the Levant. In doing so it explores, from a philosophical perspective, the problem of representing trauma when language seems inadequate to describe our experiences and how the visual narrative form may help us with this. The book uses the concept of the ineffable to expand the notion of representation beyond the confines of a western, individualist notion of trauma as event based. In so doing, it engages a postcolonial perspective of trauma, which treats violence as ongoing and connected to several incidents of violence across time and space. This book demonstrates how the formal qualities of visual, non-fiction may help close the gap between representation and experience through the process of 'dark' writing.

1

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms

Introduction: Accommodating the Ineffable to Share Experiences of Violence

What Is the Ineffable?

What Is ‘Dark’ Writing?

Approaching the Ineffable through Aesthetics

The Relationship between the Ineffable and the Ethical

Painterly Aesthetic Forms

Approaching Violence through Images

War Drawings

War Photographs

Conclusion

Introduction: Accommodating the Ineffable to Share Experiences of Violence

In the introductory chapter, I briefly outlined the inadequacy of language and words alone to transmit or instigate the experience of violence itself if we want to go beyond merely representing it. I then briefly contextualised the problem of representation in the west, which comes about as a result of an over-emphasis on the distinctions between subject and object; mind and body; representation and experience. I suggested that the notion of mimetic representation of an object to a subject paradoxically perpetuates a way of thinking that takes us further and further away from being able to share experiences. I also suggested that it might be more useful to speak of an experience-representation complex, where experiences and representations are thoroughly interdependent rather than binarily opposed. I also started to discuss how certain representations (that use images) may be more effective in bridging the gap between representation and experience and transmitting presence rather than merely representing it. I proposed that a way to show the merger of experience and representation and thus share experiences of violence is by accommodating and preserving the ineffable in our representations. I also recommended that this could be done in the realm of aesthetics by expanding our view of what representation is to such an extent that we might better call it something else, ‘dark’ writing. Julia Kristeva reminds us of the power of literature to go beyond mimetic representation ‘[a]ll literature is … rooted … on the fragile border … where entities do not exist or only barely so, double, fuzzy… altered…” (Kristeva 1982, p. 207), making it a potential channel for ‘dark’ writing.

In this chapter, I will discuss in more detail how ‘dark’ writing operates in the aesthetic realm and in particular with regard to the role of visual representation in expressing trauma. I do this so that later in this book, I may apply ‘dark’ writing to the specific visual form of the graphic narrative that uses both images and text to enable several lines of representation to be pursued and juxtaposed to support a complex and ambiguous reading of violence and trauma. In doing this, the book aims to show that graphic narrative accounts of war can increase the ambit of what it is possible to apprehend of the experience of the violence of war. The need for a more developed aesthetic perspective on the problem of the representation of violence has become apparent because factual accuracy – the political mission that is served by the traditional mimetic structure of representation in the west – has increasingly been shown to crowd out the pervasive, ineffable aspects of the experience of violence.

What Is the Ineffable?

In this book, I think of violence as a specific and extreme instance of experience. This is because I conceive of violence as an aspect of experience that contains an ‘invisible’ dynamic, which may help us to infer the presence of the ineffable. I contend that the ‘representational’ method of ‘dark’ writing allows us to accommodate the ineffable in violence and trauma in this way. Most forms of violence whether they are caused by earthquakes or bombings take the same form because they give rise to the same effects. According to Žižek (2008a, p. 11), the only aspect of the process of violence that allows us to distinguish different types of violence from each other is not the apparent origin of each but instead whether the violence is ongoing, or whether the victim has the luxury of escaping it, and then revisiting it or having flashbacks. If a victim cannot escape constant trauma, the victim tends to survive the perpetual cycle of violence by living as if the trauma itself were ‘invisible’ (which is the more limiting term he uses instead of ‘ineffable’). It is particularly this kind of ongoing violence that requires the concept of the ineffable to make it more visible, because attempting to access and represent it directly often does not work. This is because its boundaries are difficult to discern as it seems to have no beginning or ending, although it may be punctuated by moments of more and less intensity.

The ‘ineffable’ is a key concept throughout this book. As I demonstrate, several authors, in closely examining the process (as opposed to emphasising merely the content) of representation, are moving towards including the concept (though not always the exact same term) of the ineffable into their understanding of what it means to represent experience. Jan Zwicky (2012) is one such author who expressly uses the term ‘ineffable’ and identifies the ineffable as addressing the persistent problem of the inadequacy of representation. Zwicky (2012) explicitly links the ineffable to an understanding of shared experiences, asserting that the ineffable is part of experience and consists of a complex of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories and is a process that one claims to undergo in various enriching contexts. Hence, my discussion of representation through aesthetics as a conduit for the ineffable includes both the idea of art as product, and the process of representing and reflecting upon representation itself.

Carter (2009), from whom I adapt the concept of ‘dark’ writing and apply it to the field of (visual) aesthetics, is another author who refers to the concept of the ineffable though does not often use the term itself. Carter (2014, personal communication) describes the workings of the ineffable in communication and encounters between people as the element which provides the basis for the possibility of real sharing of experiences, an opportunity in which participant selves may rub up against each other momentarily, in a dynamic relay, to achieve an encounter. He states that the language of the ineffable works as if ‘a mimetic relay allows both parties to “discover” “shared” signs, symbols, gestures’ that are ‘liberated from previous social significations and become the site of a new, improvised “language” of exchange’ in the moment. ‘This “language” does not exist apart from its performance. The communication of this situation occurs on the edge of disappearance/appearance. Everything depends on its perilous negotiation. If it is allowed, it can furnish the basis of a “meeting place”’ or sharing. Carter’s views (2009, 2013) thus sharpen the notion of the ineffable in his challenging insistence that the ineffable resides in ‘dark’ writing, a process or performance that is not akin to simple representation, or to recording something that can be witnessed.

What Is ‘Dark’ Writing?

Carter’s (2009) notion of ‘dark’ writing is powered by his (2013) complex consideration of the possibility of meeting as a drive towards an ethical position. The closest Carter gets to defining ‘dark’ writing is describing the entwined relationship between representation and experience, language and encounter.

… ‘dark writing’ is not simply a figure of speech for what is left out of enlightenment-inspired descriptions of space. It is a method, a poetic praxis that works outwards from a perceived anomaly, absence or oversight toward its marking.

(Carter 2009, p. 228)

I maintain that the trace of such anomaly may be approached or instigated in an aesthetic representation of experience. Understanding ‘representation’ in this way requires expanding what it means to represent experience by considering key features of ‘dark’ writing. ‘Dark’ writing is an indirect approach to sharing violent experiences that accommodates the ineffable, which may be approached through aesthetics, to help represent these experiences more adequately. ‘Dark’ writing is not representation in that it does not pit representation against experience but operates within the experience-representation complex. I see ‘dark’ writing as a method of transmitting parts of experience that significantly broadens our concept of representation and goes some way towards closing the gap between representation and experience because of its accommodation of the ineffable. For me, the ineffable is the lynchpin that holds the potential to enable the sharing of experiences and encountering others, and it is ‘dark’ writing that is the means of expression that accommodates the ineffable.

Carter’s (2009) conceptualisation of ‘dark’ writing is that it is a process that operates in a liminal space between the material and the abstract. Simply put, the concept of ‘dark’ writing must address both the representational process, and the opacity and ambiguity of meaning. To address the former, in the context of philosophy and the design of ‘meetings’ between subjects, ‘dark’ writing operates in the transitory moment. This emphasises at once the unpredictable dynamism and the embodied nature of ‘dark’ writing as a liminal concept. Carter refers to ‘dark’ writing as a dynamic movement form being able to capture the fleeting moment, ‘the instant between two strides’ (Carter 2009, p. 1). This description emphasises the dynamism, mutability and embodied nature of the ineffable in the experience-representation complex rather than its content and points out the challenge that we have if we want to represent a process we have undergone or are undergoing. It also implies that ‘dark’ writing is more akin to performing or enacting experience than to merely ‘representing’ it. As such, it must occur in a fundamentally participatory space (Carter 2010, p. 5). Viewing ‘dark’ writing as an enriched instance of the representation of experience (as I do) allows a nuanced understanding of the representation or transmission of experience and allows the connections it sets up to become visible.

To address the impervious aspect of ‘dark’ writing, Carter analyses the shady and marginal environment of ‘dark’ writing. He asserts:

The dark is… the interest of the phenomenal environment, its tendency to fall into movement forms, but for which stable ideas could not take shape…

(Carter 2009, p. 232)

In general, because ‘dark’ writing preserves the ineffable, one may view the kind of knowledge that ‘dark’ writing creates as something that does not necessarily clarify content or enlighten. Instead, it is an indirect, shadowy process that brings into the frame what would usually be considered to be in the background or to be inaccurate. It is in these shadows that the ineffable resides, often occluded by ‘accuracy’. The knowledge that the ineffable gives us is the knowledge of how knowledge is formed. This kind of knowledge helps us to disentangle the seemingly inevitable correlation between seeing and knowing. Thinking in this way allows for the exploration of the possibility of knowing in other ways than just contending with what is visible. Jill Gibbon (2011, p. 105) reminds us that in the English-speaking world, we tend to assume a very close correlation between knowing and seeing. This correlation may form a precondition to our efforts to represent the violence and trauma of war and conflict. Sometimes, it lets us presume that what we do not see (directly and first-hand) cannot be represented or even lies outside of the frame of experience. This may lead the pursuit of accuracy to limit what we think can be represented to such a degree that we assume the inadequacy of the representation to be a result of violence and trauma. Alternatively, ‘dark’ writing may give us a way to know what cannot usually be represented or shown. It may assist us to experience and represent content that is often obscured in the pursuit of ‘accuracy’ alone. Thus, the operation of ‘dark’ writing allows us to see and know violence differently because it accommodates the ineffable.

If we begin to understand the ineffable in this way, then in accommodating it in the process of sharing experiences of violence through ‘dark’ writing means that we are able to transmit more of the experience of violence itself rather than merely representing it. This is because ‘dark’ writing has the key features of performativity, dynamism, indescribability, materiality, and the potential to facilitate sharing of experience itself. These features are more closely based upon the Heideggerian notion of being as the basis for reality rather than the more Anglo-phone empiricist notion of the subject simply experiencing objects through his/her senses as a basis for reality. According to Heidegger (1962), the interdependence of subject and object is the foundational structure of reality because something only comes into being as an object once it is engaged with by a subject who cannot be independent of it. This does not necessarily mean that the subject and object have the same experience of a moment of being but merely that the moment of being that each has is interdependent and may blur into one another. We need a concept to describe some of this process without explaining it away, and this is the job of the ineffable as it operates in ‘dark’ writing. Therefore, in this regard, I argue that ‘dark’ writing is a process which differs markedly from mimetic representation. Mimetic representation assumes that subjects try to get to know substance, which is primal; in ‘dark’ writing, by contrast, epistemology is fundamental and it is ontology that is derived. This means that ‘dark’ writing leads us to an emphasis on the process of representing or encountering violence and then pays attention to the particular form that it takes, rather than trying to be merely a close and accurate representation of the content of discrete violent events. Furthermore, I suggest that in studying the violence and trauma of war through the lens of ‘dark’ writing, we are able to engage with the performative and ineffable qualities of the transmission or instigation of the experience of violence itself, rather than merely recording its content. Thus, ‘dark’ writing of war and conflict provides us with a way of coming to grips with violence that seems (initially) overwhelming, unshareable and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms
• 2 Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable
• 3 ‘Dark’ Writing the Khan Younis Massacre
• 4 ‘Dark’ Writing the Sabra and Shatila Massacre
• 5 ‘Dark’ Writing Violent Experiences in New Aesthetic Forms
• References
• Appendix A: Images referred to in Chapter 3
• Index