Reconstruction 7.4 (2007)
Return to Contents»
Graphic Travelogues and the Revival of a 'Rotting Form': Peter Carey's Wrong about Japan and Guy DeLisle's Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea / Gene McQuillan
<1> One need not be a malicious critic to be curious about an insulting review. One day while browsing on-line for new travel books, I came across the following statement by Ian Sansom:
In his remarkable book The Art of Travel (1855) Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton noted that "In Napoleon's retreat, after his campaign in Russia, many a soldier saved or prolonged his life by creeping within the warm and reeking carcase of a horse that had died by the way." These days, Peter Carey does much the same with travel writing, snuggling up inside a rotting form for a little rest and relaxation in between writing Booker-winning novels. (1)
These two sentences immediately frame a few familiar issues that have remained a steady part of on-going debates about travel writing and its "literary" status. To begin, there's the almost obligatory contrast between today's travel books and those of the past. Sansom makes this tour a very brisk one, starting with the brief reference to an earlier "remarkable" book and then the quick allusions to Darwin, Galton, Napoleon, the Russian front. Sansom's argument is quite conventional; in essays such as Sally Tisdale's "Never Let the Locals See Your Map (Why Most Travel Writers Should Stay Home)," the nineteenth century is frequently projected as the golden age of travel and travel writing, as a time of incredible convergences. Great minds, open spaces to explore, new concepts, terrible conflicts: all of these contributed to the sense that one could write a book about the grand "Art" of travel with no sense of irony or hesitation. That generous mood lasts only until the second sentence of this review, in which we have already arrived at the present, when travel writers are working with "a rotting form". Of course, the more closely one reads this accusation, the less sense it makes: Napoleon's soldiers were acting out of desperation, while Peter Carey has the option of "rest and relaxation." Yet even if Sansom's analogy doesn't quite work, it still manages to suggest why some contemporary travel writers - and the scholars who study such writers - are suspicious about their own efforts. [1] Their awareness of a much more crowded and accessible world is compounded by the knowledge that travel writers must often settle for forms that are, if not rotting, then close to falling from exhaustion. After all, one needs to think carefully to list travel narratives that are not autobiographical, that are not chronological, that are not written as a form of mid-brow literary journalism. One could offer a lame defense against Sansom's accusation by pointing out that many other forms are seen as "rotting," and that one can easily find allegations about the impending death of print newspapers, Broadway musicals, TV sitcoms, and of course, the novel. I prefer to take a more challenging view, one that begins with a quick question - can you name a literary form which is not rotting, which seems ready to energize the lives of readers, writers, and perhaps even academics?
<2> One very likely candidate is the "graphic novel." [2] 2006 marked the 20 th anniversary of the publication of Art Spiegelman's Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. The reception of Maus suggests some of the ways in which this form immediately leads to fascination and confusion. Maus almost single-handedly created a serious audience for graphic novels, and that audience continues to diversify. As evidence, consider how often graphic novels are serialized in The New York Times Magazine, how well they are adapted as films (ranging from Sin City and V for Vendetta to Ghost World and The Road to Perdition), how often they are cited by serious scholars in a range of disciplines, and perhaps most importantly, how often teenagers sprawl in the aisles of bookstores to read them. Yet it's also obvious that graphic novels often confuse readers. Graphic texts openly flaunt - and nervously question - their own status as both carefully recorded non-fiction and as carefully re-arranged narrative, as both serious art and popular trash. They often seem to be relatively simple texts while also expecting their readers to recognize multiple layers of verbal irony and visual allusion. Some scholars and teachers predict that graphic novels will soon have a wide-ranging influence in bookstores and in movie theaters, on the Web and in our classrooms. [3] I've been writing about travel narratives for years, and have only recently developed an obsession with graphic novels, so when I heard about "graphic travelogues," they initially seemed to provide an immediate example of a "rotting form" being revived.
<3> I'll argue (briefly) that there are four particular reasons why "graphic travelogues" have shown the potential to become a complex and engaging literary hybrid. The first is that travel writing has always strained against the expectations of a standard prose essay - in plain English, travel writers always bring back souvenirs, and for better and worse, they want to take them out and show them off. Like graphic artists, their desire for more complex narratives often means that they resist simplistic distinctions about what can appear in a text. In an interview, Art Spiegelman clarified the choice of "comics" as his preferred narrative form. Spiegelman stated, "Rather than comics, I prefer the word commix, to mix together, because to talk about comics is to talk about mixing together words and pictures to tell a story" (quoted in Young 670). In several obvious ways, this idea of "commixing" has always been a part of the tradition of travelogues, since a typical scrapbook from a journey - such as those by Frederic Church, Peter Matthiessen, or a high-school kid with a lot of digital equipment - might include a personal diary as well as sketches, passport stamps, bar tabs, photos, postcards, maps, guide books, tickets, and who knows what else. Of course, the twentieth-first century model for such "commixing" is neither a 19 th-century encyclopedia or catalog, nor a 20 th-century photo essay or National Geographic article. Imagine a post-modernist, heteroglossic traveling carnival, one in which word and image don't necessarily correspond, one in which the "framing" of a scene reveals its own contingencies and constructions, one with links to personal photos, movies, histories, YouTube, and so on. Perhaps graphic travelogues are ideally suited for the new globalized and wired world, one that seems to become more homogeneous and yet more fractured every year.
<4> A second related issue is that of the contested distinction between fiction and autobiography. [4] The reading of travel writing often requires a strange balancing act: one may have to "suspend disbelief" about a text which is allegedly "non-fiction." In simpler terms, if you feel some need to verify the dialogues of a Bruce Chatwin book or fact-check a Redmon O'Hanlon escapade, then it's probably better that you just skip to other books. So rather than trying in vain to figure out "Did this really happen?" it might be more helpful to ask, "How does one even try to tell a truth about another place or culture?" One of the more concise discussions of this recurring problem of "fact" in modern travel writing appears in Terry Caesar's essay "Romancing the Facts," in which he argues that we need "to locate travel writing as a practice that writes across generic boundaries, whether those of a memoir or essay, journalism or pastoral, fiction or ethnography" (123). I don't think that statement alone to be especially insightful, but Caesar takes his questioning in a much more provocative direction when he asks "Is there a "self" in travel?" Consider again the generic categories mentioned above. To what extent is the "self" of a travel writer linked to the textual format that he or she chooses? If one is looking at, for example, at a Hiroshima memorial, the North/South Korean DMZ, or a Moroccan beggar, does the author's choice of ethnography or fiction or memoir also require some sort of epistemological make-over? This is where I am especially fascinated by the ways in which graphic novels self-consciously frame the development of an authorial voice. It's common in graphic texts for an author to use various visual cues and icons to suggest how popular culture often speaks an individual voice, how the slogans and images of a group or nation shape voice, identity and perspective. In this way, graphic novels emphatically represent a constructed authorial voice - so that the authorial self seems multiple without becoming incoherent.
<5> Travel writing and graphic novels also share a sustained awareness of how complicated - or perhaps impossible - it can be to write reliable autobiographical narratives about traumatic events. A common assumption of some readers is that comics cannot (and perhaps should not) take on serious historical events. Adam Gopnik's 1987 article "Comics and Catastrophe" took direct aim at such readers and readings:
If you ask educated people to tell you everything they know about the history and psychology of cartooning, they will probably offer something like this: cartoons (taking caricature, political cartooning, and comic strips all together as a single form) are a relic of the infancy of art, one of the earliest forms of communication (and therefore, by implication, especially well-suited to children); they are naturally funny and popular; and their gift is above all for the diminutive. (29)
Gopnik's essay was a strong defense of Maus and of the ways in which it bravely attempted to use such a "popular" and "diminutive" form to speak of the unspeakable. In retrospect, the essay seems also to provide a rich context for reading through the terrors of several recent graphic novels, ranging from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood to Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon History of Hiroshima to David B.'s Epileptic to Joe Sacco's War's End: Profiles from Bosnia. I also find it helpful to recall that Maus has been described as a double autobiography and a double biography, as it tells the story of a father and son, each remembering and re-telling their own and each other's story. This sort of narrative, in which one finds it very hard to isolate just one narrative voice and one reliable sequence of events - especially traumatic ones - is also being tested by contemporary travel writers. I'm thinking in particular here of Robert Kaplan's The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy, in which he travels to a series of war-torn lands such as Sierra Leone and Uzbekistan. While doing so he patches together a highly self-conscious and complicated mix of personal misadventure and dense scholarly analysis, one that never settles into a fixed and allegedly "objective" framework, one that struggles to include a range of narrative voices. Yet one should also know that Kaplan probably doesn't have any steady readers who are under twenty.
<6> That leads me to a last and simple reason for high expectations about graphic travelogues: lots of people, especially young ones, seem ready to read them. I've often heard that travel writing is a relatively popular format, and college students seem to enjoy all sorts of different travelogues, yet when I've gone to the Travel Essay section in local bookstores, I can't say that I've seen a whole lot of young people reading Bruce Chatwin. When I've gone to the Manga and Graphic Novel sections, I often have to walk over and among piles of young people. An on-line search about "graphic novels" will lead one to essays by Gopnik and other "serious" writers, yet it will also lead to unexpected comments. Some readers look for the New York Times Book Review, others tune into NPR, and yet others browse on-line for the "temple of the screaming-penguin" for comments by the "bookslut" Jessica Cripsin, who declares that if your 2005 end-of-the-year best-books list "did not include at least one graphic novel. . . . then your reading must be stunted" (quoted in Cooper 2). Graphic novels seem to have "made it" as a commercially viable genre and one that gains critical praise, yet I'm also struck by the words of Michael Chabon, who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He stated, "Comics have always been an arriviste art form, and all upstarts are to some degree ashamed of their beginnings. But frankly, I don't think that's what going on in comics anymore. Now, I think, we have simply lost the art of telling stories to children" (quoted in Gravett 184). This basic tension - of adapting a seemingly pre-adult format for some very adult topics while still trying to appeal to semi-adult audiences - leads to all sorts of conflicting expectations for writers, readers, publishers, teachers. And, of course, these tensions are what matters.
<7> But enough about contexts and expectations - let's get on to the stories. During the last year I've been reading a number of graphic travelogues. Several were book-length narratives: Craig Thompson's Carnet D'Voyage: Sketches from Paris to Morocco(2004); Ted Rall's To Afghanistan and Back: A Graphic Travelogue (2002); Josh Neufeld's A Few Perfect Hours (and Other Stories from Southeast Asia and Central Europe) (2004); and Rick Smith's Baraka and Black Magic in Morocco (2004). There were also a few more experimental texts that defied any easy categorization: Pete Kuper's "A New Yorker" from Pete Friedrich's collection Roadstrips: A Graphic Journey Across America (2005); Tom Downey's "A Barcelona Mystery" from Conde Nast Traveller (2006); Justin Hall's "La Rubia Loca" from The Best American Comics 2006. Yet as I reviewed these and other graphic travelogues, I kept coming back to those by Carey and DeLisle, even though the first is not really "graphic" and the second is not really a "travelogue." So I'll openly admit that these are not the predictable first choices, but they both present a reader with truly fascinating - and also botched - attempts to comprehend another culture and to crawl out of the "rotting form" of a straight-forward travelogue.
*******
Was there a mystery here? I seriously doubt it, although this is how it is with traveling - the simplest things take on an air of great inscrutability and so many questions arise, only to be half born and then lost as they are bumped aside by others. The most mundane events take on the character of deep secrets.
Peter Carey's Wrong about Japan
<8> It shouldn't be that surprising to find that Ian Sansom actually liked much about the book he seemed to be trashing. The first thing a reader probably notices about Wrong about Japan is that there is no clear beginning to the book. There's an obvious title page that also features an unidentified cartoon character screaming "OH NO! MOVE IT! GANGWAY, YOU IDIOT!" Yet when a reader turns the page there's another title page, this one featuring another cartoon character, a malevolent-looking biker speeding toward a photograph of a traditionally dressed Japanese sword-fighter. There are several more pages of this: unidentified cartoon characters cringing from explosions, standing defiantly before unknown threats, lying injured in the middle of a highway while a shadowed enemy approaches. One two-page spread contains nothing more than the drawing of an eye-ball. You won't find a single caption or explanation for any of this until much later in the book - and then you'll be told that the explanations are almost certainly misguided.
<9> Early in the book Carey makes a seemingly simple statement: "I was at home in a strange, intriguing land. I was as hooked as Charley. I wanted more" (7). He has, however, not even left his home in Manhattan. The "land" that he refers to is the world of Japanese manga and anime. Twelve-year-old Charley is one of Carey's two sons, and he had developed a passion for manga that borders on unhealthy. Carey tries his best to be patient with Charley, taking him on daylong tours of New York comic shops in search of the newest and coolest manga, but finally he decides to go to the source. This is where those previously mentioned Booker prizes come in handy. Carey's many literary contacts include a few in Japan, and his agent soon arranges a series of visits with several famous manga and anime creators. It's like taking a young baseball fan into the Yankee clubhouse - and then finding that it has been re-designed with a few fun house mirrors and a few trap doors.. Wrong about Japan is not itself a "graphic travelogue," since Carey contributes none of his own graphic texts, yet the decision to make this a tour of manga/anime culture still struck me as an intriguing gamble. Their travel arrangements were also made with certain conditions: as Charley says simply, "No Real Japan. You've got to promise. No temples. No museums" (11).
<10> Looking for this alternative to the Real Japan seems very refreshing until Carey starts to work through the implications. Perhaps the most serious impediment is that Carey has only recently developed any interest in manga/anime. So he immediately challenges an assumption that many Americans make about manga and anime: "Of course, some anime are original, some are shallow, and many are downright silly, but even the really silly ones began to seem like artifacts worthy of cultural investigation" (7). For those of us, including me, who may have associated manga with bubble-eyed androgynous youth and Peekachoo and Yugio cards, it was at first hard to see why they are worthy of sustained "investigation." The book features a few moments when such curiosity leads to patient and graceful exchanges. In one of the richer scenes from the book, Carey and his son visit an architect (in his office) and watch Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 anime My Neighbor Totoro. Carey and Charley had previously watched the video several times and thought they had it figured out; since the anime centers on two daughters who move with their father to a country home while their mother recovers in a hospital, it didn't seem to require a lot of cross-cultural decoding. A few of the details that appear early in the anime (a red gate separating a house from a nearby forest and the water wells near each home) seem obvious enough that readers who haven't even heard of Totoro before (including me) might also settle for a similar complacency. Yet as the three review it, in some cases re-watching the same scene in slower and slower sequences, their host patiently and gently dismantles many of their assumptions. In this case, the red gate is explained to be a gate to a religious shrine, the water wells are seen as conduits to the spirit world, and these in turn leads to other subtle revelations about the understated imagery of the film. Such suggestions give both Carey and readers of Wrong about Japan a welcome reminder to slow down and listen.
<11> While watching this particular anime, Carey's misperceptions don't trouble him all that much; Totoro is described as "a charming hymn to animism, a world of ghosts and spirits" (129), and the insights provide by his host tend to focus on matters of dialect and architecture. Yet Carey has also discovered that much manga and anime deals obsessively with much more serious topics, and Carey actually lists them: "feelings about foreigners, America, the Vietnam War, swords, decapitation, evisceration, soldiers, aliens, Commodore Perry and Douglas MacArthur" (147). And, of course, atomic bombs. These are the sort of texts and issues that Carey wishes to consider more fully, and his attempts to gather some insights become a series of miscommunications. One of his first plans is to meet the author of the anime Blood: The Last Vampire, a tale of "monstrous shape-shifting creatures" that can only be killed by "special swords." Carey couldn't care less about a modern vampire story, but his interest perks when he learns that the vampires inhabit an American military base, and according to Carey, "what really made my heart beat faster was a story packed full of coded Japanese attitudes toward controlling foreigners" (28). When a meeting with the author is delayed, Carey manages a visit with one of the few remaining traditional sword-smiths in Tokyo. The meeting becomes one of a series of encounters in which Carey and his host seem to be talking past each other in increasingly frustrating ways. Carey had hoped to actually see some of these rare swords, and soon realizes that this was naïve; he had read that sword-smiths worked best at night so that they could more clearly judge the mysterious molten art of their work, but he is told that the two smiths in Tokyo worked only from 9 to 5 so that they didn't annoy their neighbors after work; Carey's seemingly obvious question about whether a sword-smith considers how his creation will be used (that is, to kill), is met with a dismissive evasion.
<12> In this case, Carey later finds that his host had baldly lied, since his own writings had affirmed Carey's last question in detail. But things are destined to get even worse. A crucial series of meetings revolve around the various representations (anime, photography, toys, etc…) of the Japanese phenomenon known as the Mobile Gundam Suits. Not easily described - think of a deep-sea diver's outfit complete with wheels and weapons and protected against radiation - these suits were once again "familiar" to Charley and his dad, who had actually mailed some detailed questions in anticipation of a meeting with Yoshiyuki Tomino, the creator of Mobile Gundam Suits. To Carey, these suits represented all sorts of metaphors about Japanese culture, since the suits were originally described as huge machines piloted by children in a post-nuclear war. These children, both isolated and empowered within these robotic weapons, seemed almost self-explanatory to Carey. Yet these and other comments don't survive long during the resulting meeting, and Carey almost begs for some positive response. The conversation goes something like this: Are these suits representative in ANY way of an essential aspect of Japanese culture? NO. Are they in ANY way linked to the samurai tradition? NO. But surely Japanese viewers would see SOME subtle references that others might miss? NO. Tomino becomes most expressive while explaining that he was actually most interested in creating a line of toys (94-100). It was as if Carey had asked about Godzilla and the A-bomb, only to be told that the Godzilla films were just a form of cross-marketing to help corner the market for some new X-Box game.
<13> As the book continues, Carey becomes more and more frustrated and self-deprecating. The book initially reminded me of Lost in Translation, but unlike the characters in that film, Carey had seriously expected not only to have some insights about Japanese culture but also to share these insights with other authors and perhaps to gain some sort of approval. At times he seems ready to make some sort of breakthrough. In Chapter 5, which appears in between the debacles described above, he meets a Mr. Yazaki, who had survived the firebombing depicted in the anime Grave of the Fireflies. Mr. Yazaki is the most forthcoming person in the book, and tells his tale of horror and survival for a full twelve pages of the book. (By "full" I mean that this is an uninterrupted twelve-page quote.) Yet by the time of Yazaki's oral history, it's becoming clear that Carey isn't quite sure how to work Charley's voice, or even Charley's presence, into his various exchanges. That doesn't mean that Charley is feeling left out. While his Dad is being subjected to some of the most polite beatings in literary history, his son is free to visit one anime playground after another. Rather than analyzing and categorizing anime/manga culture, Charley is psyched to just be walking through it with his own private guide, whom he had recruited via the Net in his own preparation for the trip. Takashi is a 15-year-old Japanese boy who models his appearance and life after anime characters: he is initially described as someone whose appearance "is detailed so fastidiously that they achieve a polished hyper-reality" (21). The two boys bond instantly and spend hours text messaging or exploring Sega world together. While Peter Carey is asking all-too-serious questions about the implications of placing children in robotic suits, Takashi seems to be living this role and inviting Charley to witness it without reservation. Yet Takashi isn't just some cold and disconnected technogeek. Late in the book, Takashi not only invites Charley to visit his grandmother, but takes the time to write an exquisite map of directions on fine onionskin paper. Carey is very touched by this and writes, "Charley has this map still, amongst his collected treasures of Japan. It is very beautiful indeed" (125). Charley's exchanges with Takashi lead to some of the liveliest sections of the book, and they capture what seems to be the creation of a new cultural movement, one in which language and culture - and adults in particular - seem irrelevant.
<14> Of course, a problem soon develops here. In an interview about the book, Carey admitted that there was no such person as Takashi. [5] Carey's frustrations as a would-be scholar of Japanese manga/anime culture were perhaps just a problem with the form he chose: his text finally seemed to work when he switched from an allegedly non-fiction travelogue about graphic culture to a semi-fictional travelogue with at least one graphically-inspired character. Perhaps Carey's admission is not too surprising. His previous travelogue about Australia was subtitled A Wildly Distorted Account, one of his better-known books is titled My Life as a Fake, and he freely describes himself as "a terrible reporter" (129). My initial reaction was amusement: I had been suckered but had enjoyed the game. My later responses feature a good deal more suspicion. It isn't just that Takashi appears in several chapters of the book which now seem disconnected from the rest of the text - even the chapters without him seem a little too staged. (While Mr. Yazaki tells a riveting tale, it's also a surprise that this extended version got past an editor.) At this point, Ian Sansom's review becomes helpful once again. The last phrases of Sansom's comments remind us that contemporary travel writing not only suffers in comparison to previous texts - it sometimes isn't even as good as its author's other work. Carey is not only the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize; he won it twice, and did so by writing novels that playfully defy many conventions. Could it simply be that Carey's travel writing was just an aimless detour, something to be done in between his "real work?" Rereading Wrong About Japan confirms many of my suspicions (and other's). Michiko Kakutani calls it "a thoroughly cursory travelogue that feels as though it had been written on a tight deadline for an airline magazine" (9). [6] It's roughly 160 pages long, but once a reader factors in the large fonts, the semi-blank pages and numerous reproductions, this becomes almost a test-case of what qualifies as a travel "book." It's fair to ask which were lower, Carey's expectations about his readers or about travel writing itself? It's also fair to ask why this article devotes so much space to a book that I would never recommend. Yes, Wrong about Japan is a careless and hasty attempt to "investigate" a series of fascinating texts, and Carey's self-deprecating comments soon become more of a lame excuse than an act of humility. In the long run, this book will be remembered only as a trivial example of Carey's abundant skills. Yet I cannot re-read it without imagining and hoping for some other encounters with the explosive graphic narratives of Kabul, Saigon, Quito, Khartoum, Brooklyn. While more than a few of Carey's decisions are regrettable, at the core of his text there remain some very resonant and troubling questions about how a text - any text - can be "right" about any large-scale traumatic event. Wrong about Japan also makes a point of contrasting how the perceptions and assumptions of a "literary" artist actually interfere with his ability to read the codes of a "graphic" text. Charley gets "inside" these much more gracefully, and then another obvious question arises: what if a younger graphic artist is the one investigating another culture's graphic texts?
********
It is no hyperbole to say that there are no Edens anymore: we live on a violated planet. Travelers are witnesses to change and decay, and when they write we are entertained and sometimes enlightened. But the mode of expression, like the world, has changed.
Paul Theroux's "Introduction" toThe Best American Travel Writing 2001
<15> One version of such a narrative can be found in Guy DeLisle's Pyongyang : A Journey in North Korea . When he arrived in North Korea in 2003 to supervise the development of a low-budget cartoon, the Canadien cartoonist spoke no Korean and was told that it was not in fact 2003, but Juche 92. As a carefully watched foreigner in a country well-known for its human rights abuses and self-delusional policies, DeLisle finds himself intent on writing a work of non-fiction in a place thick with fictions about itself. Unlike Carey, DeLisle has worked extensively on graphic texts, including his own previous graphic travelogue, Shenzhen, about his travels in southern China. DeLisle ends up in a hotel in which globalization meets the graphic novel. Other teams of animators are there, including one for the well-known Corto Maltese, and those graphic artists who think they're poorly treated in America or Europe might want to think again. While artists in the West produce the "key" frames, the rest of the "in-between" frames are sketched in places where labor costs and workers' rights are less of a concern to the local government. (And if you've never heard of these terms, DeLisle provides examples and even a short quiz.) He doesn't have to go far for surpises. When he visits one animation studio, he finds a team working peacefully next to a rack full of rifles, which turn out to wooden models used for some sort of daily "military" drill. But he soon finds himself trying to make sense of far more warped and fractured scenes.
<16> DeLisle's choice of a graphic format is especially well-suited for trying to comprehend North Koreas's obsessive attempts at self-representation. DeLisle finds that he can rarely look around without confronting one of the thousands of statues, icons, posters, films, and memorabilia of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il that appear on any prominent public surface. (And private places as well, such as his hotel room.) It's hardly surpsising that DeLisle chooses Pyongyang itself as the focus of his book, and after just a few pages a reader is eager to find any scene which is not an example of what Michel Foucault termed "disciplinary space." DeLisle leans heavily on certain visual effects: carefully cropped frames which are stripped of any non-essential details; a pallete that is not so much black-and-white but oppresively gray; page after page of rigid squares and parallel forms. The book's loosely-defined chapters have no titles, but are framed by twelve full-page images, almost all of which depict airports, museums, billboards, monuments, and other forms of architecture-as-propoganda. The only full-page image depicting actual people appears late in the book when DeLisle attends a musical recital at the "Children's Palace." DeLisle had previously watched these children engaged in calligraphy, embroidery, and any other form of learning that allows them to create more pro-Kim hagiography. The musical "improvisation" is the highlight of the chapter, and features row after row of eight-year-old accordion virtuosos (described as "little savant monkeys"). Their concert is not so much a display of skill but a performance of mandatory self-control, and the crucial image is of the exaggerated smiles that the students must struggle to maintain throughout the recital. DeLisle says simply, "It's all so cold…and sad" (157).
<17> This sense of confinement and confusion is everywhere is Pyongyang, and in many ways the book's title is intentionally misleading: DeLisle had a journey to North Korea, but once he was in the country, his travels effectively end. He can go nowhere outisde his hotel without a guide, and after brief incident in which he slips away to stroll through the city, he realizes that his brief wandering could lead to severe punishment - for his guides, not him. When DeLisle and his watchers "escape" long enough to have a picnic, the depiction of a waterfall and a tree-lined vista take on an almost heavenly aura. Then he looks over his shoulder and finds that an entire mountainside had been stripped down to bare rock and chiseled with yet more slogans (108-09). As the book proceeds, its graphic format also allows DeLisle a means to address the most frustating aspect of his trip, namely the inability to have any meaningful conversation with his North Korean hosts. As DeLisle is guided through yet another hagiographic tour of the "Beloved Leader's" achievements, DeLisle decides to find out " Do they really believe the bullshit that's being forced down their throats?" (74) While one young man briefly admits that he found the evening's propoganda film to be "boring," DeLisle can find or hear no other trace of "subversion." Actually, he can't even find a North Korean who will have an open coversation with him, and Pyongyang becomes the perhaps most lonely travel account ever to take place in a major city.
<18> DeLisle's book has gathered some minor critical praise [7], and North Korea's status among the "Axis of Evil" also draws readers to the book (how many other graphic novels ever got a postive review in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists?). While I was first reading Pyongyang, it seemed reminiscient of Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, in which a young and idealistic teacher goes to China and finds that seemingly simple tasks - meeting a friend, openly discussing a book in class, choosing where one lives or works - are all subject to complex, harsh and confusing rules. Yet Iron and Silk is filled with moments in which such curtains can be pulled aside and then hidden behind, and the book becomes both comic and poignant in its descriptions of "illegal" intimacies - such as Salzman's bicycle ride after dark with an intriguing woman whom he will never see again. In DeLisle's case, he hits wall after wall in his attempts to have any meaningful contact with North Koreans, and it leads a reader to question whether this book is anything more than an intriguing view of those walls. Some readers - or at least this reader - expected some brief glimpse, maybe even some insight, into the minds of those in a nation often deemed both dangerous and delusional. Yet this article is no place to argue whether North Korea should be judged in these terms or any others. I hope that it might explain the extent to which graphic travelogues might be expected to provide such an analysis. It's easy to argue that graphic travelogues feature a few promising characteristics of a hybrid genre: they commix all sorts of forms, they test out all sorts of creative non-fictions, they challenge the reliablity of autobiographical texts to serve as witness, and they try to pitch many of these complex issues to a wide popular audience. Yet it's also crucial to remember that graphic novels, for all their perceived limitations, are continually being adapted as film noir, disability narrative, post-apocalypse dystopia, teenage (g)angster confessionals. Travel writing has remained so closely aligned to exploration narratives, journalistic excursions, and carefully-wrought memoirs that it faces a very basic problem: experimental travelogues are soon seen as examples of "something else," as hypertexts, post-modernist photo montages, as blogs.
<19> How might one resolve this? In a 2005 article from Columbia Journalism Review, Kristian Williams offers a succint explanation in defense of "comics journalism." She states, "The independence of the words and pictures allows for an overlay of subjective and objective storytelling. Tensions between the written word and the image can be used to highlight uncertainties, ambiguities, and ironies that other media might inadvertently play down or deliberately ignore" (4). After a while, it becomes very clear that this is going to be the main theme and the central limitation of DeLisle's book. In his efforts to find out whether any North Koreans doubt or resist the daily onslaught of "bullshit," DeLisle examines all sorts of "uncertainties, ambiguities, and ironies" - but none of them are expressed by his North Korean hosts. Of course, graphic novels don't pretend to be history books: readers who open up Maus, Persepolis, or Barefoot Gen in search of a detailed factual account of the Holocaust, the Islamic Revolution, or the bombing of Hiroshima will find instead that these narratives tend to provide what James Young has termed "side-shadowed history," that is, accounts of historical events which highlight the personal and openly subjective views of those involved (679). They place an emphasis on voice and memory, on visual symbols and selectively framed narratives, so it isn't surprising that DeLisle doesn't attempt an analysis of why North Korea has been so neglectful of its own people or so dismissive of world opinion of its nuclear program. Yet as the book develops, it becomes quite frustrating to see that the book doesn't actually develop, but instead settles into a series of low-level confrontations and evasions. North Korea's obsessive need to re-construct itself requires the sort of archeology that Maus boldy attempted, and perhaps another graphic artist will be soon be able to find a voice from the other side of the wall.
Literature is what gets taught.
Roland Barthes, from Mythologies
<20> I'd like to be able to present some far-reaching statements about graphic travelogues, yet as I think about the the course on "Travel and Exploration" that I'm scheduled to teach again next year, I need to decide a few some practical matters. What will appear as the "Required Readings" that get careful attention in class, and what will be relegated into the limbo of "Some Suggested Independent Projects?" Does Rick Smith's Baraka and Black Magic in Morocco displace Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky? How about these choices: Pete Friedrich's Roadstrips or a Granta travel issue, Josh Neufeld's A Few Perfect Hours or Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, Justin Hall's "La Rubia Loca" or Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Ted Rall's To Afghanistan and Back or Rory Stewart's The Places in Between, Guy DeLisle's Pyongyang or Colin Thubron's In Siberia? At this point, I'll be candid in saying that I don't yet see a graphic travelogue that has completely convinced me that it deserves to displace the books listed above. But why play it so safe? That's why I'm always looking for a chance to "teach the conflicts," and why I'm also trying hard to learn from all these new texts. So as a brief "conclusion," I'll just steal some advice from www.screaming-penguin. If I'm planning a course on Travel Writing that doesn't include at least one graphic travelogue, then my reading - and my teaching - must be stunted.
Works Cited
B., David. Epilectic. New York: Pantheon, 2005.
Caesar, Terry. "Romancing the Facts in American Travel Writing."
Temperamental Journeys: Essays on the Modern Literature of Travel . U of Georgia P, 1992.
Carey, Peter. Wrong about Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son. New York:
Knopf, 2005.
DeLisle, Guy. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. London: Jonathan Cape,
2005.
Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Picador, 2001.
Cooper, Robert "kebernet." "2005, A Year in Lists." <http://www.screaming -penguin.com>
Downey, Tom. "The Case of the Missing Angulas: A Barcelona Mystery." Conde Nast Traveller. June 2006.
Gopnik, Adam. "Comics and Catastrophe." The New Republic. 22 June 1987: 29-34.
Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life. New York: Harper Collins, 2005.
Hall , Justin . "La Rubia Loca." The Best American Comics 2006. Harvey Pekar,
Editor. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006: 55-102.
Jack, Ian. "Introduction." On the Road Again: Where Travel Writing Went Next. Granta 94. Summer 2006: 11-14.
Kakutani, Michiko. "A Father-and-Son Adventure to the Heart of 'Japanese Cool.'" The New York Times 15 March 2005: E9.
Kaplan, Robert. The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. New York: Vintage, 1996.
Kuper, Peter. "A New Yorker." Roadstrips: A Graphic Journey Across America. Friedrich, Pete. Editor. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005.
Nakazawa, Keiji. Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon History of Hiroshima. Volume 1. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2004.
Neufeld, Josh. A Few Perfect Hours (and Other Stories from Southeast Asia and Central Europe). Self-published through a grant from the Xeric Foundation, 2004.
Rall, Ted. To Afghanistan and Back: A Graphic Travelogue. New York: NBM Publishing, 2002.
Sacco, Joe. War's End: Profiles from Bosnia, 1995-96. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2005.
Salzman, Mark. Iron and Silk. New York, Vintage, 1990.
Sansom, Ian. "Stuffu Happens." The Guardian ( London). 22 January 2005: 1-2.
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
Smith, Rick. Baraka and Black Magic in Morocco. Gainesville, Fl. Alternative Comics, 2004.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
Thompson, Craig. Carnet De Voyage: Sketches from Paris to Morocco. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2004.
Williams, Kristian. "The Case for Comics Journalism." Columbia Journalism Review. March/April 2005: 51-55.
Young, James. "The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History." Critical Inquiry Spring 1998: 666 - 699.
Notes
[1] Tisdale, Sally. "Never Let the Locals See Your Map (Why Most Travel Writers Should Stay at Home)." Harper's. Sept. 1995: 66-74. For more extensive explanations of travel writing's literary reputation, see Buzard, James. "Tourist and Traveler." The Beaten Track. New York: Oxford, 1993; Kowalewski, Michael. "The Modern Literature of Travel." Temperamental Journeys. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1992. Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan. "Travel Writing at the Millenium." Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Similar doubts and insults also come from fellow "travel writers." See "Whether on the Shores of Asia" from Stewart, Rory. The Places in Between. New York: Harvest, 2004; Theroux, Paul. "Introduction." The Best American Travel Writing 2001. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001: xvii-xxii; Hamilton-Paterson, James. "The End of Travel." Granta 94: On the Road Again: Where Travel Writing Went Next. Editor, Ian Jack: 221-234; Mewshaw, Michael. "Travel, Travel Writing, and the Literature of Travel." South Central Review. 22.2 (Summer 2005): 2-10. For some of my own previous responses, see McQuillan, Gene. "Defending Travel Writing (from Other Writers)." Journal of American Culture (Fall 1999): 11-21; and "The Forest Track: Working with William Cronon's 'The Trouble with Wilderness.'" College Literature. 27:2 (2000 Spring): 157-172. [^]
[2] I will be using the term "graphic novel" because it is familiar and convenient. This article will not try to reconcile the obvious contradiction that many graphic "novels" are much closer to "memoir" than "fiction." Even those that are fiction, such as Sin City, V for Vendetta, Road to Perdition, and Ghost World, often read more like short stories than novels. ( Sin City was adapted from the book by Frank Miller; V for Vendetta was adapted from the book by Alan Moore and David Lloyd; Ghost World was adapted from the book by Daniel Clowes; Road to Perdition was adapted from the book by Max Allan Collins.) [^]
[3] For more on the influence of "graphic novels," see Peter Schjeldahl's "Graphic Novels Come of Age" in The New Yorker. 17 October 2005: 162-168. Also, see Sarah Boxer's "Comics Escape a Paper Box, and Electronic Questions Pop Out." The New York Times. 17 August 2005: E1+. For a quick tour of the world of manga, see Leith, Sam. "Open Your Eyes: 'Manga' Comics Are at the Centre of Japanese Culture." The Daily Telegraph. ( London) 22 January 2005: 1-4. For broader views of how graphic texts fit into literary history, try Perret, Marion D. "Not Just Condensation: How Comic Books Interpret Shakespeare." College Literature. 31.4 (Fall 2004): 72-93; Hutcheon, Linda. "Postmodern Provocation: History and 'Graphic' Literature." Torre. 2:4-5 (1997 Apr-Sept): 299-308; Young, James. "The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History." Critical Inquiry. Spring 1998: 666 - 699; Gopnik, Adam. "Comics and Catastrophe." The New Republic. 22 June 1987: 29-34. For some views from "historians," see Frey, Hugo and Benjamin Noys, "History in the Graphic Novel." Rethinking History. 6.3 (2002): 255-260. For a brief review of graphic novels and literacy issues, see Schwarz, Gretchen. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Nov 2002: 262-266. [^]
[4] I won't try to settle this contest, but I would point to the journal Granta as one indicator of how such questions are framed. Ian Jack's "Introduction" to Granta 94: On the Road Again: Where Travel Writing Went Next insists that "If travel writing is to be more than persuasive literary entertainment - if it's to have some genuinely illuminating and perhaps even, these times being what they are, some moral purpose - then the information needs to be trustworthy." He contrasts this expectation with those of Bill Buford, editor of the classic 1983 Travel issue, who preferred texts that were "informed by the sheer glee of story-telling, a narrative eloquence that situates them, with wonderful ambiguity, somewhere between fiction and fact" (14). [^]
[5] For more on Takashi, see Freeman, John. "Peter Carey, Making It Up as He Goes." The Toronto Star 13 January 2005: G11. For more about other "fictions" in Carey's non-fiction work, see Sullivan, Paul. "True Lies and Other Stories." Financial Times 20 September 2003: 26. [^]
[6] For a review that starts out nasty and gets nastier, see Kakutani, Michiko. "A Father-and-Son Adventure to the Heart of 'Japanese Cool.'" The New York Times 15 March 2005: E9. Also see Theroux, Marcel. "The Road to Anime." The New York Times 30 January 2005: Section 7: 8; Jones, Susanna. "Culture Shock." New Statesman 10 January 2005: 1-2; Sheard, Sarah. "Really Lost in Translation." The Globe and Mail ( Canada) 22 January 2005: D4. [^]
[7] For reviews of DeLisle's Pyongyang, see Bures, Frank. "Welome to Bizarroland." http://www.worldhum.com/books; Cumings, Bruce. "Northern Exposure." Bulletin of Atomic Scientists [Pop Culture Review]. March/April 2006: 63; Faber, Michel. "Peppered Goat Lung, Anyone?" The Guardian ( London). 23 Dec. 2006: Reviews 8. Rall, Ted. "Drawing Behind the Lines." Foreign Policy. May/June 2004: 72-75. [^]
Return to Top»