Women in the IDF are, horrifying though this may seem to a young teenage boy torn between hormones and politics, quite attractive. That this merits a good half a page in Joe Sacco’s “Palestine” tells you that this is a man who knows his Holy Land. In fact Sacco knows it well enough to recognise the truth which overwhelms even the casual visitor to Palestine; everyone has a story. I can remember a lecture I once attended on the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict where, after much deliberation, the relevant academic was forced to give two lectures on the same events, one in the persona of an Israeli settler, the other as a Palestinian militant. The point being, no single viewpoint or narrative could fully encompass the vast and polarised history of this country. This is obviously true of all countries, and all histories, but it is perhaps even more pertinent in Palestine, where history plays a disproportionately large role in shaping the attitudes of the now.
This is an idea that Sacco attempts to confront head on throughout his work in the region. He acknowledges how insufficient the single narrative is, and, as a journalist, how limited the dominant story that fills most of the media is. In “Footnotes in Gaza”, Sacco sets out to tell an alternative, to tell the story of the ‘footnotes to history’: the victims rather than the oppressors. In an exercise of oral history, the Palestinians are to be allowed to express their own voices, to speak in their own words about an event, the massacre of 111 Palestinians in the Gaza town of Rafah in 1956.
If “Palestine” is ‘graphic-journalism’, then “Footnotes” is arguably graphic-history, Sacco employs his enviable skills to bring to life not only the accounts themselves, but the process of collation. He scales down the expressionistic, Crumb-esque caricatures of ‘Palestine’ and exchanges them for a more realistic aesthetic, with some impressive detail and an especially sharp eye for landscape composition. The eye-witnesses whose testimony are portrayed are drawn as head and shoulders mugshots, speaking directly out of the page, in an evocative portrayal of the victims indeed speaking in their own words. There’s a lot of this direct portraiture, again and again eyes are directed out of the page at us, there’s rarely the experience of detached viewing.
Despite his commitment to allowing the victims to simply tell their story however, Sacco acknowledges, and engages with, the necessity of drawing narrative from memory. With as much of the text concerned with the modern day collection of the oral accounts as with the history itself, Sacco is able to express concerns and difficulties with the oral testimony. He complains about the weakness of memory, the conflating of events and the exaggeration and elaboration he finds as he compares accounts. In the memorable segment entitled “Memory and the Essential Truth”, Sacco takes several different testimonies of a single event, the killing of three brothers, and compares their omissions and deviations, before finally concluding that the only confirmable truth, and yet also the only one which matters, is that three brothers were killed. The sequence becomes a justification of the methodology of the entire history, from this point on events are narrated by a succession of witnesses, with Sacco demonstrating both the convergences, and the deviations between the accounts.
Another instance where Sacco steps outside of his simple historical narrative is in his comparison, and then conflation, of past and present. He notes the tendency of his subjects to prioritise the current over the past, to focus on the latest atrocity with no importance assigned to the past. He is slightly perturbed to realise there is little understanding of why he cares about 1956. So he shows us the importance, shows us the connections and repetitions of history, drawing visual parallels between militants past and present, as well as places and rhetoric. As Nina Mickwitz explains in a much more detailed reading of the panels than I’m capable of, the very composition of the page often seems to reinforce the cyclical nature of the conflict, where the past is repeatedly played out in the present.
An oft cited criticism of this book seems to be that it slows down in the middle, full of repeated, barely distinguished events of horror or death. Yet that is exactly the point, Sacco blurs the lines between time and place, and places his event within the ongoing conflict. Rather than simply a distinct position in the past, he demonstrates its relevance through to the present. Through our reading of the book then, we begin to experience the blurring of memory and confusing of events which afflicts its subjects, the elderly refugees themselves. Throughout the book in fact, Sacco uses his composition to express not simply the facts of a scene, but the impressions of its subjects. Take this page for instance, where the contradictory viewpoints of the panels reinforces the confusion and chaos of the moment.
There seems to be a conflict here though, between Sacco’s drive and demand for truth which he confronts in the ‘Memory and the Essential Truth’ section, and the aforementioned projection of the event through the lens of blurred memory and confused experience. In one instance Sacco is railing against his unreliable sources, and trying to define the true account of various events, on the other he depicts those events with the very vagaries which he condemns. Sacco seems caught between two ideals, between the historian’s desire to uncover and visualise the ‘truth’, and the more artistic drive to depict events from the perspective of the subjects, to allow them to speak directly. Throughout the book this remains an unresolved conflict between truth and memory, as central a presence as the Israel/Palestine conflict itself, until Sacco leaves Gaza, and muses:
“how often I sat with old men who tried my patience, who rambled on, who got things mixed up, who skipped ahead,who didn’t remember the barbed wire at the gate or when the Mukhtars stood up, or where the Jeeps were parked, how often I sighed and mentally rolled my eyes because I knew more about that day than they did”
The statement is followed by the final sequence of panels, without words, depicting flashes of the events depicted earlier. They are confused and fragmented, with only a faintly observable narrative running through them.
There is an acknowledgement here, that, for all that Sacco has become, as he says, “the worlds foremost expert” on the massacre of 1957, this book only constructs one narrative of many. That, despite the aim of writing the narrative of ‘the footnotes’, of the victims, Sacco’s book is simply his own narrative, his own interpretation of the collective memories of the victims. It’s an idea reinforced by one of the final panels, of Sacco staring, emotionless, across a boundary, at a grieving Palestinian man. The process of research for the book, the sifting and comparing of accounts, the search for the ‘definitive version’, ultimately separates us from the alternative narrative of the victims which Sacco originally intended. In the end Sacco has to some extent fallen into the same trap as the journalists and historians he rejects at the start of the book. His single narrative overpowers the individuals involved, and once again the Palestinian victims become footnotes to yet another (though admittedly more sympathetic), history.
Despite a conviction in his ‘essential truth’ idea, Sacco therefore seems to end by acknowledging his folly. He cannot combine an awareness of, and sympathy for, the individual with any kind of objective truth. Yet if the conclusion of a work of history is that history is subjective, then that only begs deeper questions. Aguably, Sacco’s commitment to his ‘essential truth’ causes an artificial distinction between history and empathy. Once we accept that we cannot draw an objective narrative from oral accounts of memory, once we accept that memory is not truth, then it seems a more interesting to ask, what is the actual relationship between memory and truth?
Halbwachs has argued that “It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories”. The point being that a social context both shapes and is shaped by memory. Arguably, here is the more interesting aspect of Sacco’s project, hinted at yet never addressed, eclipsed by the pursuit of ‘history’; memory is constructed, not only by social interaction, but by current experience, and vice versa. Thus the memories of the Palestinian refugees are influenced by the dominant narrative of society. As Halbwachs puts it, “society provides the materials for memory”. This narrative is not constant, but continually developing, and events in the present prompt re-evaluations of the memories of the past.
Conversely, as Sacco takes at face value the assertions of young Palestinians that they have no interest in the past, he fails to engage with the idea that their anger in the present is not simply a product of current atrocities, but also an unconscious product of an ongoing narrative of conflict. Their inherent notions of ‘we’ and ‘they’ are shaped by the dominant discourse as much as by physical events. Thus the connections between past and present which Sacco draws so clearly are not merely symbolic of the circularity of the ongoing struggle, but are themselves a factor in the production and maintanence of paradigmatic perspectives which shape both memories of the past, and attitudes of the present.
In a sense, what Sacco does is position his event within history, within temporal continuity. What he ignores however is its position within a social environment, the way in which events of the past become reduced to myth, their complexities subsumed as simply another example of the ‘them vs us’ narrative. Of course, not all history is required to take this deeper analytical view, and it is perhaps churlish to expect this level of insight from Sacco. However the use and reliance on memory in his methodology means that throughout the book we are constantly confronted with the flaws of memory, yet without a deeper investigation of its nature. If the objective truth of the events of 1957 is difficult to ascertain through memory, that is only the superficial conclusion. The deeper mysteries lie in how those memories are formed, and how they engage with not simply the reality of the now, but its dominant discourse.
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Ben is an itinerant and easily distracted Arabic postgrad who blogs about culture and comics here, and summarises Middle Eastern news here.
Hey, Ben.
Joe Sacco recently was commissioned by the remarkable French reportage journal, ‘XXI’, to investigate the plight of poor farmers in India: ‘Les fermiers à pieds nus’ (The Barefoot Farmers):
http://www.revue21.fr/Les-fermiers-aux-pieds-nus#middeul
I guess an English-language version should come along soon.
Sacco’s been commissioned by non-Americans before, witness his embedded stints in Iraq for Britain’s ‘The Guardian’. He’s Maltese, BTW, though he spent a lot of his youth growing up in the States.
Not the worst perspective on America you can have.
I have read hardly anything by Sacco, believe it or not, but I really like the questions you raise about history and memory and truth. I think you’re getting at what was one of the basic methodological issues in history, which is the divide between the idea of history as an account of what happened vs. the idea of history as an ongoing argument, or struggle around interpretations. Or, to be pseudo-Lacanian, is the goal of history to always approach closer and closer to the Real? Or is it an exercise in the Symbolic, with different Symbolizations competing and appearing at different times? Is history about the past? Or is it about the present?
It’s kind of an interesting dichotomy to bring to Eric’s discussion of Maus too. Particularly, I like your (low-key, but still) rejection of what might be called the nostalgia for the Real…which I think is still present in Derrida, as Eric discusses him. That is, the inapproachability of the Real doesn’t necessarily have to figure as tragedy or loss; it doesn’t have to mean that presence is impossible or inaccessible. The Symbolic is itself a presence; the narrative is alive in the lives of people, even if it is itself mysterious.
I think that’s what Badiou is getting at in his focus on the Event. Lacan sees faith as imaginary, I think, but faith in the event could also be seen as the Real, perhaps. The Event isn’t this thing that happened and then you can’t uncover it; it *is* an immanent, ongoing present. You don’t try to retrieve it; it retrieves you.
I’m lucky Caro is moving into her house. If she were paying attention she’d kill me for mangling Lacan like this….
Badiou and Lacan could be accused of a certain amount of nostalgia for the “real” as well– their accounts of ontology as set theory is definitely something of a Platonist move, for little-r realism versus the nominalism of both analytic and poststructuralist philosophy.
And if Badiou’s Event certainly lines up with the Real, the unmoved mover of experience, and the contingent surfaces of Appearance is obviously the Imaginary, but then deep Being is the Symbolic. History is sort of a benevolent delusion that produces a multiplicity of Truths, history is sort of a version of the Real– versus a less Marxist Foucault version of history that works off the archive and the genealogy, with the Real becoming power itself– which is a less humanist vision of reality.
Whereas everything in Derrida seeems like lowest-denomoinator approximations that is more conservative and humanist than either, with neither history nor power nor the Real nor the Event being given ontological status. The encounter with the Other structured by differance is internal and aesthetic, not social and tangible.
Sorry about all my grammar there. I blame Van Hagar playing on the radio.
Alex: Thanks for the link! I think my French is up to the task…As a Brit, The Guardian was actually where I first encountered Sacco, have you seen his work on illegal immigration in Malta?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2010/jul/17/joe-sacco-unwanted-immigrants
Noah and Bert: Not having read Lacan I’m a little out of my depth with the terminology, but your description of the ‘nostalgia for the Real’ fits pretty precisely with what frustrated me in the book, and what I was struggling to express in the post. Having said that, I think I quite enjoy having my journalists at least attempting to revere the Real rather than the Appearance…
Ben…that’s a tricky question isn’t it? Investigative journalism is so structured by the quest for truth, *and* by the insistence that the discovery of truth and the affirmation of truth is the source of liberatory potential. Investigative journalism without the quest for the Real wouldn’t exist, I don’t think. When you’re expressing a discomfort with Sacco’s approach, you’re not saying, “he should be a better journalist.” You’re saying, for better or worse, “maybe possibly investigative journalism is not the ideal lens through which to approach these problems.”
Okay…Bert. Let’s see if I can parse that at all….
The thing about Badiou is that he’s not nostalgic for the Real, because he thinks the Real is accessible. He’s nostalgic for a past time when people took the Real seriously, but that’s not quite the same as the yearning after a lost/never accessible solid ground. For Badiou the solid ground exists; it’s the Event. Which means that for him the past is more present than the present in a lot of ways. The present is appearance, but the Event is Present through faith….
Okay, so Event is Real, the Imaginary is the present — I’m not getting what deep Being is? I would say instead that the Symbolic in this formulation might be faith? It’s the sign that points to but doesn’t encapsulate the real; the liturgical symbols (like language) that unify a community.
I would say for Badiou history is in the imaginary. There are many imaginary truths, so history is multiplicity in that sense…but the Real is the Event, which appears to occur in appearance from an a viewpoint outside faith (the symbolic?)…but from within the symbolic, the Event is the Real, and is not multiple, but one.
For Foucault…right, the Real is not the Event, but Power, which exists within history rather than off to the side of history (because Foucault’s less Platonic.)
And for Derrida, the Real is the apophatic denial of the Real itself apophatically denied and so on and so on. Change is a heraclitan fire, whoever said that. That’s where Sacco is coming from, I think it sounds like — the mourning and simultaneous fetishization of the lack at the heart of history. And it *is* humanist and capitalist, because it is in thrall to the internal experience of ineffability — the recognition that you know what these other people don’t know which is that there’s a nothing to know.
I’m sure someone’s thought of this but it just occurs to me…Derrida’s big paradigm shift is capitalist, isn’t it? Jettisoning the spoken word for the written word is to make primary the thing that is a lot easier to copyright….
Anyway…could you explicate the encounter with the other structured by differance maybe a little?
Ever since I started understanding Derrida as one of the all-time cleverest theorizers of the humanist grid, I thought of him as a fantastic asset (as it were) to capital.
You aren’t really missing anything with the differance thing. Differance is to defer and to differ. Derrida and Levinas share a highly contingent and private (as opposed to public) notion of ethics, and the encounter with the Other destabilizes presence (identity) just enough to allow our subjectivity to dissolve into various intersubjective registers, like a swindled mortgage being fragmented into sundry market-digested derivatives.
For Badiou, deep Being is mathematical speculation (the capitalist puns keep coming)– the universe of infinite possibility. This is the structuralist part– it’s absolutely language forming the conditions of comprehension, but in a more science/truth/metaphysics-friendly context. Faith is completely in the Event camp. The Symbolic is not at bottom about what is true (Real, historical) or empirical (Imaginary, visible), but what is possible and what is permitted (only a shade of difference (differance) there).
I guess I’m resistant to deep Being because it sounds idiotic. It’s like Yoda nattering like grover and waving his hand and getting a compass that draws squares instead of an x-wing fighter. And set theory being the key to the universe just makes me want to tell him to shut up. (Badiou, I mean, not Yoda. Though maybe him too.)
I still like faith as what is possible/permitted…but he’s the french philosopher, not me, so I will have to defer. As it were.
I’m also sort of idly wondering about the direct portraiture. It’s obviously there as Ben says to provide a direct embodiment of history or the Real in some sense. It’s metonymy — the faces symbolize or refer to the real faces — which is supposed to be closer to the real than the pure language you would get in just books (or than the caricature of Sacco’s earlier books, according to Ben.)
I haven’t really thought this through…but what if the point of the images is in some way the opposite of that? What if metonymy is less embodies than metaphor? More solid, more artificial, and less real? It coalesces as this false thing; it’s not the embodied real but an embodied sign. The point of graphic journalism would then be not that it’s *more* or closer to the real, but that it’s deliberately less or further away.
Oh yeah– the “aura” of truth attaching to the reality of images (even audio) is a major problem with documentary media of all kinds. Zizek calls out Derrida and Levinas for focusing on the face of the Other– like a Suzanne Sommers commercial for starving babies, which is obviously an ethically provblematic form of propaganda. That’s the Imaginary.
As for faith as Real– the whole point of Christianity is that faith (or commitment, what have you) must be previous to understanding, which is the proper function of the Symbolic.
Right; I’m saying faith is the symbolic, not the real. So we agree!
That also puts faith with art, which seems right.
What I’m wondering with images though, is whether you could see images as resisting or denying the aura of truth. Do Joe Sacco’s talking heads insist on their own truth? or do they symbolize their own symbolness? Suzanne Sommers is referencing not reality, but her own artificial kitsch.
No no, faith is *previous* to understanding. Faith is not understanding. Art is imaginary, which is ironically where I think Derrida is spending a lot of his energy.
Ahh, I see; faith precedes the understanding, and the understanding is the symbolic. So faith is the Real for Badiou (though presumably the Imaginary for Lacan.)
I don’t actually think it would be crazy to make faith be the symbolic, though. Feyerabend doesn’t think reason and faith are that far apart; he’d probably argue the first is a subset of the second, I think. Belief systems or patterns that organize experience…you could call that faith, I think…. That would make art more solid than experience, which seems like a reasonably Platonic move.
Derrida would collapse art and symbolic and real I’m pretty sure…?
Ben is never going to want to write for this blog again.
It follows from the mirror phase stuff that the ego, in Lacan, is Imaginary (remember “image” is the key part of that term). “Love” would be the companion (in “love,” “hope, ” “faith”). Faith is ontology, not epistemology. “God is truth” and “God is love” means nothing without “God is.”
I’m happy to accept that you know Lacan better than I do. I still like the idea of having faith be the symbolic though. Probably just stubbornness on my part….
Though “God is” is language, which is in the symbolic. Damn it.
Faith demands a level of direct engagement that has to be other than symbolic, or it is vitiated into mere aestheticism (in the Kierkegardian sense), something on the order of a cerbral game.
Noah:
“Though “God is” is language, which is in the symbolic. Damn it.”
That’s not the case in many strands of Judaism, wherein the Torah is eternal, precedes creation, is indestructible.
The circular self-definition of the Tetragramaton– “I am He who is” — is a short-circuit of our human logic, via language, that both affords a glimpse of God’s unfathomable mystery, and rebukes us for presuming to encompass it with our feeble reason.
And Christians often evince this seemingly crazy “realist” view of language, too:
” 1.In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
— John I
True, Alex. Language has a special crazy realist status in religion. That’s what I’m saying. And unsaying. The original status of the Word is how nature could arise from artifice. But it’s not the case that the Word, as we know language in general or Scripture in particular, captures and defines God, and the experience of God, whose inexpressibility is constantly being expressed.
Replacing ontology with epistemology, Noah, is the signature poststructuralist move you were congratulating me for opposing in our last conversation with Caro. Re: the Marx voncersation, what makes Marxism more compelling than nearly all other political ideologies is that it has not only an epistemology (class is truth) but an ontology (history directs all aspects of collective and individual life). Maybe I should copy this comment on that thread.
“Voncersation” is Marxist for “conversation,” bourgeois tools.
It’s true; I am fickle.
I guess it just seems like the post-structuralist thing is to make faith part of the imaginary usually; that’s where Lacan would put it, isn’t it? Making faith part of the symbolic makes it collective rather than individual, and doesn’t necessarily insist that the real is non-existent.
I’m sort of thinking about Catherine Pickstock and the liturgy. Isn’t the liturgy symbolic? I guess the argument would be that that’s not faith, but the sign of faith….
The Event is collective, which is sort of how he gets some distance from poststructuralism, and how Milbank sort of hijacks him for the purposes of Christianity. The bonding of the ego and the big Other is Imaginary, and a sin in poststructuralism, but if you look back through the Symbolic to a source of the Word, rather than into the image for a reflection of oneself in the universe, you can potentially find a faith rooted in something other than narcissism.
My big Other “him” there being Badiou, sorry,
Right, see, this is why I’m saying that putting faith in the symbolic maybe is not the same as making faith disappear in a puff of reflection. Faith is the looking back to the source, possibly; faith isn’t the big Other, because the big Other is the big Other, but faith is a collective dedication to big othering. Maybe.
Faith as symbolic is maybe a way to emphasize the symbolic’s social/collective aspect rather than its deferral/arbitrariness. We pray therefore I am is referring to different people, but that’s not an ironic joke; it’s the point.
Noah, I think you keep thinking I’m agreeing with you and I’m not. The Imaginary comes out of us and is corrupt– that’s part of its charm, but certainly an impediment for letting it The Symbolic is from God, and points to God. There’s a serious problem with saying that everything exists in language– not for most things, probably, but God being defined by language, rather than defining language, is one of the things that just doesn’t quite work. I’m at least that much of a fundamentalist evangelical wacko.
I keep screwing up. The Imaginary is not where the core of religion should exist, I meant to say, but imitative acts, like the Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola or liturgical devotions, make lots of sense in that register.
No, I know you’re not agreeing with me. But you should be!
The thing is, faith isn’t god. It has to do with God, it can come from God, but it’s a human thing.
True, faith isn’t God, but the Real isn’t reality. Imaginary, Real, and are registers of experience, you could say. In religious experience, the Real of faith is the transrational apprehension of God, the Symbnolic is the expression of God, the Imaginary is the reflection of God.
There are real problems with letting God be just a human thing– at least for religion. It sort of stops being religion– which is where questions come up, like how can there be language without a speaker?
The Holy Spirit is the member of the Trinity properly identified with faith. God is properly identified with the Symbolic, as you say, and Christ, the image of God, with the Imaginary.