Pre-clímax en la cocina

It also needs to be asked to what extent our theoretical notions, such as narrative agency or a narrator, are informed by background assump­ tions about authorship and the practices of creative production in the me­ dium. Presuppositions about authorial ‘voice’ or intention, authorship, and the process of production regularly play into the narrative analysis of comics whenever the analysis moves into the domain of interpreta­ tion. The question about the relation between narrative agency and the author’s intention becomes relevant, for instance, when the reader tries to understand what someone intended to convey by writing or drawing a comic in the way that they did, and not simply to understand what the story means, what happens in it, or how the comic works struc­ turally. Some of the challenges in this respect are medium­specific. As with films, comics are often collectively authored and produced—most mainstream mass­market comics and many independent ‘auteur’ comics are not created by a single author or consciousness—yet, unlike most films, a single author can also control the whole production. Thus, while many comics involve a complex set of relations among contributors, in many other cases we can refer to a single author. Moreover, joint au­ thorship can take forms that are quite specific to the art form. This not only refers to the traditional division of labour in comic book or comic album productions, such as between the writer, the penciller, the inker, the colourist, and the letterer, but also the ways of conceiving author­ ship in the medium.2 For instance, some collectively produced comics are commonly identified with and recognised for the cartoonist’s style (Jack Kirby), others for the writer’s style and oeuvre (Alan Moore), and still others for the collaboration between a particular cartoonist and a writer (Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny, Jean­Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud, and so on). Authorship is of­ ten collective in comics, but since joint authorship and production can take various medium­specific forms, the crucial question then is how individual and collective intentions may relate to each other.3 This is a particularly relevant question in many autobiographical and first­person fictional narratives.

Theoretical Possibilities: Narrative Agents in Comics

But how, then, do we conceive of narrative agency in comics story­ telling? If narratological notions like ‘narrator’—or other options that refer to the activities of a more or less personifiable narrative agent such as ‘teller’, ‘presenter’, or ‘enunciator’—are problematic and potentially misleading, we are left with the difficult question of to whom to attri­ bute the functions of selection, organisation, comment, and distribution. The problem is partly one of terminology, but it also begs the difficult questions of the specificity of the medium and the individuality of the narrative comic (versus what is common to all narratives irrespective

of their medium). Let us first sketch out a palette of available theoreti­ cal options to address the question of narrative agency in comics, and then elaborate the question in an extended close reading of a first­person graphic novel.

The Fundamental Narrator

The available theoretical options, due to the composite nature of the me­ dium of comics, are in many ways closer to the models proposed in film studies than they are to narratology that is based on literary examples, notwithstanding the essentially spatial nature of narrative organisation in comics and the lack of sound. One option is to hold on to the narrator concept and redefine it to fit it better to the medium. A strong version of this approach would be to argue that an implied or underlying narrator, or a narratorial consciousness, call it for instance a graphic narrator, is responsible for the whole narrative organisation, including the produc­ tion of both the words and the drawings, as well as the showing of each panel image and scene. This position is one that Thierry Groensteen adopts in Comics and Narration, following Philippe Marion’s earlier formulations (1993) and André Gaudreault’s film narratology. It neces­ sitates the distinction between the global and implicit ‘graphic narrator’ and any narrator who may be included in the storyworld.

Philippe Marion’s narrative system of enunciation in comics is a hier­ archical approach to narrative agency that gives the narrator concept a global role, as a kind of great graphic image­maker, and envisions new subcategories of enunciation that are specific to the medium. Based on Gaudreault’s notion of a higher­level ‘fundamental’ narrator, a ‘mega­narrator’, or Great Image­Maker, who is responsible for both monstration (the activities of mise en scène and shooting) and narration (the editing of the images) (Gaudreault 1989, 88–89, 91–94), Marion’s fundamental narrator is responsible for communicating the work in comics as a whole. Therefore, the narrator’s activity in comics involves narrative breakdown and page layout, and is thus roughly equivalent to editing and montage in film composition, as distinct from the functions of the graphic sign and showing, e.g. presenting characters in action (Marion 1993, 193–194). Again in accordance with Gaudreault’s model, the agent responsible for graphic showing is the monstrateur or monstra­ tor (show­er). Graphiation, by contrast, is reflexive or ‘autoreferential’, directed to the graphic trace and gesture themselves (Marion 1993, 36). The two activities, monstration and graphiation, are partly overlapping due to the fact that, as Marion claims, the graphic trace in comics is always to some extent self­referential, i.e. marking the artist’s style and subjectivity.

Groensteen derives his notions of the fundamental narrator (narra- teur fondamental) and monstrator from these narratological premises.

However, what is important from our perspective is that Groensteen sees the distinction between monstrator and graphiator as superfluous for the reason that the idea of graphiation basically indicates the ‘haunting presence’ of style in all drawn narratives rather than any separate level of enunciation (2011, 92–93). The question of graphiation can then be subjected to the issue of graphic style—a position that I also hold here. At the same time, however, Groensteen distinguishes between je mon- trant (a graphic shower who is responsible for showing the images), and the reciter, je récitant, the instance responsible for verbal enunciation (as in the narrative captions). Clearly, Marion’s model neglects the issue of verbal narration and narrative instance, which can take both extradi­ egetic (narrator/narrative voice does not belong to the world of the story) or intradiegetic (narrator belongs to the world of the story as a charac­ ter) forms. This is an important modifier to Marion’s model: the issue of verbal narration needs to be given more attention, especially with regard to many of today’s comics, such as Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds (2007), that create complex relations between the first­person voice and visual ‘track’ of narration. In Exit Wounds, the main narrative burden is seemingly carried by third­person narration, which focuses on dialogue and action, but it is interspersed at regular intervals with passages told by first­person narrative voice, a taxi driver called Koby Franco. These passages have the effect of subjectifying much of the rest of the story. Think also of the importance of the main character’s statement of un­ reliability in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke (1988). The Joker is not a narrator, but his claim that he remembers his past sometimes in “one way, sometimes another”, and further that “if I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!”, affects the re­ liability of the many subjective flashback passages in the story. The Joker can thus be perceived as a potentially unreliable focaliser.

At the same time, while more sustained verbal narration is crucial in many comics today, comics rarely show narrators in the images in their role of narrating. There are various significant exceptions, but these re­ main mainly local instances. One exception is Jack Cole’s Betsy and Me comic strip series (1958), where the protagonist Chester B. Tibbit is shown as the narrator in the first panel of each strip, and Blutch’s Blotch (1998–2000), where the character­narrator, the despicable com­ mercial artist Blotch, is shown in the first panel of each instalment as a kind of master cartoonist. In Bryan Talbot’s graphic narrative Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment (2007), the cartoonist frequently depicts himself as the narrator who guides the tour of the history of Sunderland. In Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000–2003), the autobiographical narrator­character may occasionally address the reader directly in the images where she is portrayed—thus the younger experiencing and the older narrating self temporarily fuse into one. The rarity and perhaps a sense of awkwardness in portraying the narrator in the act of narrating

may be another indication of the importance of telling by showing. Rela­ tively rare are those comics that would suggest that all images of the story are wholly marked by the narrator’s subjective vision, as well as those, autobiographical comics exempted, that would imply that the images are somehow shown to us, or perhaps drawn, by the narrator­character.

A difficult problem that characterises both Marion and Groensteen’s theories of graphic enunciation is the multiplication of narrative agents and levels, namely, the positing of various agents responsible for different functions, such as verbal narration and graphic showing and, further, the positing of hierarchical relations between these levels. In Groensteen’s model, there are three levels of narrative enunciation at play. While any character­narrator, including the writer as the auto biographical charac­ ter in their story, is subjected to the graphic shower in the images (mon- strator), both of these agents, the reciter (or the character­narrator) and the monstrator, are subjected to and manipulated by the fundamental narrator (2011, 109–110). The fundamental narrator, furthermore, is also responsible for the panel arrangement and relations, and page lay­ out whenever these elements have a narrative function. What confuses the hierarchical relations between these levels, however, is that on the level of graphic showing the monstrator is capable of acting to some extent independently of the fundamental narrator: “the narrator leaves to the monstrator the task of representing what the characters are up to” (2013, 96). The fundamental narrator, nevertheless, ‘intervenes’ in the monstrator’s act of enunciation whenever that includes speech and thought. This is because, Groensteen argues, images are powerless to translate speech, and can only cite it in their space (2011, 106). Accord­ ingly, in dialogue scenes speech would be represented as if the narrator had ‘recorded’ the characters’ speech as it is supposed to have been pro­ nounced and then reports that speech to the reader (2011, 106). Thus, one unfortunate consequence of this approach is that narrative analysis becomes increasingly interested in identifying the activities of various narrative instances and evaluating the relations between these modes, for instance whether one of the reciters or the monstrators is highlighted or backgrounded with respect to the other instance, instead of looking at narration as a whole.

The presupposition that dialogue between characters in comics is a kind of pretended speech act is problematic in at least two senses. First of all, this presumes that the characters’ speech does not constitute a level of telling in its own right, but requires us to posit a fundamental narrator who channels and filters their narrative meaning to the reader. Certainly dialogue in comics is always mediated, for instance through layout, style of writing, or speech balloons, perspectival choices (point of view images), or the narrator’s discourse that may filter and interpret the speech. Yet, the relevance in positing two different narrative instances and activities in conversational scenes, those of the monstrator and the

narrator, is not clear, and seems as superfluous as the distinction bet­ ween the monstrator and the graphiateur. Second, the idea of pretended speech acts that are controlled by the fundamental narrator supposes that verbal narrative information in conversational scenes can be un­ derstood on its own, cut off from the way the scene is presented in the images. However, dialogue scenes in comics are typically based on the relation between represented speech, the speakers, and the other con­ tents of the image. What is shown in the images affects the way in which the utterances can be understood, while represented speech guides us to look at the images in certain ways. Briefly, it is not necessary—and it can even be misleading—to posit two different agents of enunciation in order to analyse the narrative meaning of conversational scenes in com­ ics. It may also be significant to relate speech in dialogue to narrative captions, or study and appreciate the effect of layout in such scenes.

The notion of the graphic narrator also begs the admittedly difficult question of how human­like or personal the graphic narrator may be conceived, in the sense of a human subject or intelligence communicating to his or her audience. Speaking of film narratives, Seymour Chatman has offered a clearly depersonalised version of the cinematic narrator concept, understood as ‘the composite of a large and complex variety of communicating devices’ (1990, 134). Other film theorists, however, have preferred more anthropomorphic models, amongst them the strong po­ sition that a narrating agency’s consciousness and commentary informs each scene in a film (see Butte 2008).4 A further problem with concept of the graphic narrator is that it may be based on false assumptions about symmetric organisation between narratives in different media, for in­ stance, that all narratives would make use of narrators.

The Implied Author

From the idea of some overall intelligence at work in comics, it is only a short step to the notion of an implied or inferred author, or some other author construct, that could be seen to be responsible for the choices and values of a given story. In fact, while emphasising the importance of distinguishing between author and narrator, Gaudreault perceived his ‘fundamental narrator’ also as an intratextual image of the real and con­ crete author (1989, 88–89). The advantage of the implied author theory is similar to the strong version of the graphic narrator concept in that it offers us a means by which to account for the possible discrepancies between the narrative as a whole and what is presented in words or what we may see in the images, including the role of character­ narrators. In other words, the concept of the implied author is a theoretically grounded way—and a kind of compromise between text­centred inter­ pretation and intentionalism—for talking about the constraints imposed on the understanding of narratives. These constraints are not created by

textual (or text­image) elements alone, or directly related to the actual author’s intentions and activities, but require that the reader makes in­ ferences about that relation. The implied author approach also enables us to redefine the concept of the narrator in a weaker sense: the graphic narrator would then be responsible, for instance, for all narrative ef­ fects and conventions that are observable in a particular comic, or that can be inferred from the text, but distinct from any authorial element whose presence can be inferred in a work. Some of the uncertainties and problems embedded in the fundamental narrator and implied author approaches, however, are similar: is the implied author a textual and structural element or rather something that the reader constructs?5 How does one distinguish between those indexes in a narrative comic that indicate the activity of the narrator and those that may be associated with the implied author? Is the implied author an intratextual image of the actual author(s), or not at all an anthropomorphic figure? The use of any implied author notion requires a definition, and the definition in itself suggests a particular perspective on the question of enunciation. Subsequently, our choice is likely to influence the way the narrator can be conceived.

The two options of an extended mega­narrator or an implied author may or may not be accompanied by a (re)conceptualisation of the issue of narrative agency in comics through a new theoretical term. In film narratology, for instance, Manfred Jahn has coined the phrase ‘filmic composition device’ (or ‘filmic composer’), which is in many ways com­ parable with Chatman’s notion of an impersonal cinematic narrator, while Jahn refrains from using the concept of the narrator in the broad sense. This enables Jahn to give the concept of the narrator a strictly limited role, relegating it to an optional status, as in the cases of a voice­ over or on­screen narrator.6 In comics storytelling, a similar ‘graphic composition device’ or ‘comics composition device’ could be envisioned. Concomitantly, a narrator in comics would then only refer to narrators as characters, or narrative voices when they can be distinguished from the author(s), i.e. cases when a narrative comic represents in some sense the act of narration itself, such as shows the narrator telling a story, while the overall narration is conceived in terms of an impersonal acti­ vity (narration) or ‘device’.

Impersonal Narration

Finally, comics narratology can opt for not multiplying narrative agents, that is, not using any concepts referring to an agent, such as implicit nar­ rator, implied author, presenter, enunciator, monstrateur, graphiateur, Great Image­Maker, or the like. In practice, this would mean defin­ ing narrative agency in comics as ‘narration’ or in terms of some other meaning­making activity, which can embrace the whole complex of

narrative devices and expressive techniques in the medium without re­ ferring to an implicit agent of narration and enunciation. One advantage of this option is that it would allow us to keep better in view the question of reception and the readers’ active production of meaning. One analogy in film studies for this position is David Bordwell’s influential theory of film narration that rejects the idea of external personified agents such as the cinematic narrator to explain the organisation of a film. Bordwell’s claim that in watching films “we are seldom aware of being told some­ thing by an entity resembling a human being” (1985, 61–62) seems a logical intuition, even if it is not based on actual empirical evidence con­ cerning moviegoers’ perceptions and sensitivities.7 Bordwell’s theory of narrative agency in films does not adhere to a model of communication that would look at stories as messages from some sender (author, im­ plied author, implicit narrator) to a receiver (reader, viewer, narratee), but stresses the role of narrative strategies, as means by which films may have a certain effect on the spectator. In this view, the viewer’s meaning­making processes constitute the crucial constructive activity, and the issues of enunciation and authorial intention are to a large extent left aside. The concept of the narrator is not altogether abandoned in this approach, but it is relegated to those cases where there are evident traces of the presence of such an organising instance.8

It is useful, in order to avoid confusion between various narrators at different levels, to restrict the use of the narrator concept to the diegetic level. What matters, then, is our capacity as readers to evaluate changing degrees of subjectivity in visual showing and perspective, and to relate