The Wrong Side of History
Sophie Yanow’s Montreal comic and the fight against spectacle.
I read the faces, calculated, and made the wrong decision.
In the winter of 2012, I was teaching a course on the graphic novel at Concordia University in Montreal when the student strike, which came to be known as the Maple Spring, began to alter the parameters of the class. As an employee of the university, I was to keep holding classes, but on in-class tests I accommodated those who chose to wear the red square out in the cold. Then one student, active in the protests, asked to speak in front of our class about the mandate and misperceptions of the strike. He was a charming speaker until he held the class hostage, metaphorically: he found it outrageous, and said he was personally offended, that I was having a final exam.
As he tried to get me to cancel the exam, I scanned the class of about sixty on that day: many students appeared vexed, some curious, others angry. To be fair, I offered a vote, but it came out fifty-fifty, so I joined the vexed and said that the final was still a final, in part because I hated this ambush and thought that his harangue, complete with stupid swear words, undermined all of his good points. If I wasn’t teaching about form and content in a comix class, then I don’t know what: when the content of your message is so strong on its own (access, equality, public good, anti-commodification, and free tuition), the form should follow suit. The difficulty is: can I support the content when the form it comes in is grotesque? He was a terrible representative of the cause. The paradox is: can I support the cause while denying its representative?
I came out on the wrong side of history: the police mobilized like there was no tomorrow, commanding land and sky and law. The repression was brutal. As the semester and strike wore on, I kept hearing about the issue of what to do with those who are still enrolled but who have renounced their classes. Do we dole out all Bs, project a grade based off the ones you have, submit a grade as of the last completed assignment, or fail them on any number of grounds? The last was perverse. Once more, I led a vote in class and amended my stance by changing the final into a take-home. I’m no hero, only a complacent thinker, and I’ve already consigned myself to hell for everything I’ve done and plan to do (see the previous column).
In War of Streets and Houses (Uncivilized Books), Sophie Yanow happily approaches the tuition strike from this vacillating, stuck in the middle perspective: as she slips into the march, she reports, “I want to fight but / Abstractly I am afraid of being arrested. / Concretely I am afraid of being hurt” (11.3-5). The tension between the abstract and the concrete animates this comic, which is why it is really an essay on “Architecture … and control,” as the character Sophie puts it, uttering the ellipses because the connection might take a second for some to tease out (15.4). What can really be said about the places you mindlessly walk through or drive to? They’re invisible, right? Street-level scenes of congregating and kettling trade off with academic meditations from Foucault and Bugeaud. As the back of the book notes, “theory and personal experience collide into an ambitious and poetic cartoon memoir.” This is an intellectual comic, but the most important collision is between the intellectual and the crowd. Quite startlingly, there are no splash pages, single or double, of the sublime breadth of the student demonstrations. (For a wild, comedic representation of the endlessness of parade, check out #bonhommes en cours, compiled by Vincent Giard, to which Yanow contributed.) In War of Streets and Houses, it is notable how many solitary scenes and reminiscences about a childhood in the country there are.
As an outsider—an American on a work permit—Yanow’s commitment to the strike is broadly sympathetic, though many scenes in the short comic show her in transit (on her way to the manif, or running away from the cops) or absent from the scene entirely (on a balcony, at a lecture). She winds up in jail for a night, but she also leaves the city and goes to the country for a while. The Sophie character in the book plays the role of the nondescript intellectual. Yanow draws herself in a minimal, loopy, jagged style: the only things that give her away are the two big circles, sometimes unattached in the middle, to represent her glasses. Signifiers such as “queer” attach to her only biographically, since this is not thoroughly an exploration of queer identity, queerness and access, or queering the city. Above all else, she is those iconic glasses, and their blankness is echoed in the many blank (or blank-seeming) panels and pages throughout, as structure dissipates. There is little characterization in this essay, and the abstractions of Yanow’s style favor contemplation over realism or reportage. (Her political Montreal comic does not combine, say, the everyday qualities of Jimmy Beaulieu with the unflinching details of Joe Sacco.)
Which is not to say that that Yanow is unaware of her choices or of these dangers. She is. Her visual and psychological shorthand forces you to accept the following as facts: that the strike is on the right side of history and that queer people are fighting for access and equality. Good; now we move on. This understated tactic allows Yanow to then use the essay to make the case that repression is abetted by the city and that the intellectual might also be complicit.
In one of the best sequences in the comic, as Sophie is auditing a class on the twelfth floor of one of downtown Montreal’s superstructures (possibly at Concordia), she is above the city, looking down at a sparely rendered car. “Tactical advantage,” she says (24.5). Sophie is “Thinking about space / Abstracting / In order to understand / Might be one way to deal” (25.1-4), and on page 25 she zooms in on the car, making it appear crude and formless. Up in the lecture hall, learning about architecture, and still an outsider, she admits that she is “trying to remove myself from the picture” for the sake of blending in, “but it is impossible” (6). Form follows content: Sophie, like the car, has also been blown up, bleeding across four panels, so that panel five is mere geometry without a macroscopic understanding of the page.
Sophie claims it is “impossible” to subtract herself, or perhaps she is reminding herself not to do it. On the next page, she declares, “I drag myself down” (26.6), using “drag” to indicate the difficulty of that action when one is high above everyone else. The human scale, reduced to being “quaint or unimaginable” (20.6), must be reasserted against the “expanded scale” of the city (28.5). Here we see the abstract versus the concrete once again: removal of self versus reassertion of self. Contemplation is one of these large self-annihilating forces, like sprawl is, but insofar as this story has a focal point or protagonist it is Sophie, and in every crowd scene we look out for her glasses to ground the text. It is, therefore, a tricky comic: we don’t understand the undifferentiated crowd, only Sophie; we barely understand Sophie (because of Yanow’s understatements and omissions), only her glasses, those emblems of thought. Yanow is dramatizing the precarious position of the supporter who accepts the fact of the protest and then persistently looks beyond the fact. The comic benefits from this radial structure. In this way, she wonderfully avoids any recourse to spectacle that might undermine her serious study of protest and self-annihilation.
The other provocative text about space and control this year is Emily Dickinson’s The Gorgeous Nothings, which carries reproductions of the drafts and experiments she fit onto the surface of envelopes. Sometimes Dickinson is confined by the edges, but other times she tears the envelope and expands her surface. The envelope as an object, however, reveals an even deeper form of constraint, as Christina Pugh in Poetry points out:
… Dickinson’s gorgeous envelopes underline the power of writers’ physical or technological constraints—and suggest that the limits of our material technologies, whether electronic or flimsy as an old wrapper, can play as large a role in creative production as the more traditionally “formal” or aesthetic demands of, say, meter itself.
The thrill comes from seeing Dickinson’s hand and lead on yellowing paper and realizing that her sense of thrift and the saturation of letter writing are historically situated. In Yanow’s case, there is essay after essay, essay collection after essay collection, on public space and urban resistance (I recommend Rites of Way, edited by Mark Kingwell and Patrick Turmel). Yanow’s comic essay, then, exists at a certain point in time when old forms have once more become exhausted; education is valued while academic literature is not; photocopying and distributing zines remains easy to do; print culture is contradicting death claims and is still respected; and novel autobiographical graphic novels are in demand from publishers that don’t have to be D&Q or Fantagraphics or Pantheon. These material conditions undergird Yanow’s analysis of freedom, and they are bolstered by the city, which enables and constrains speech and ideas. The book is unfortunately not a product of the country.
I admire Yanow’s uncertain comic, but I dislike the vindication that I am left almost exactly where I was when I fumbled and equivocated at Concordia.
Reading:
Anne Ishii interviews Sophie Yanow at the Comics Reporter. I like this exchange:
ISHII: I guess what I’m alluding to in my earlier question though is that there can be a borderline anti-intellectual tendency in comics, and I wonder how you deal with that as a latent academic. YANOW: Yeah, definitely. I don’t know. I guess to that I just say “screw it.” I can only be anti-intellectual to such a degree. I feel like a lot of contemporary fine artists are also super anti-intellectual.
