This first appeared at Splice Today.
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In one sequence from Guy Delisle’s autobiographical Jerusalem, the artist attends an exhibition of his own work at Nablus University in the Palestinian West Bank near Jerusalem. In the opening panel of the sequence, we see a long shot of the gallery. Mostly (literally) faceless people stand around chatting while in the distance the artwork hangs on the wall. The pictures are so far away you can’t make out any of the drawings; just tiny blank squares.
It’s an image breathtaking in the aggressive blandness of its narcissism. There’s no effort to pretend that we’re looking at anything interesting; no suggestion that there’s a worthwhile story. We’re here solely because Delisle was here, and he was here because it’s an exhibit of his own work. And just to emphasize the banality, Delisle has us explicitly looking at images of his own images which he hasn’t even bothered to draw. It’s as if the effort of creating a picture worth viewing would distract from a celebration of his own gloriously quotidian essence. He’s made himself tiny so that he can block out everything else.
That one panel may not exactly be typical, but it is emblematic. Jerusalem is in the well-established autobio comics tradition of low-key slice of life nothingness. It chronicles the year French-speaking Canadian Delisle spent in Jerusalem with his family while his girlfriend worked with Doctors Without Borders. Maybe if said girlfriend had written it, it would have had something to say, but, as it is, Delisle is basically a tourist, and he’s got little to tell us that we didn’t know coming in. The Israelis treat the Palestinians badly — check. Jerusalem is a giant mess — yep. Caring for small children in a foreign city where you don’t know the lay of the land is exasperating — not something I’d necessarily thought through before, but not exactly earth shattering either.
Early on in the book, there’s a whole page explaining that Israel considers Jerusalem its capital but the international community places its embassies in Tel Aviv, and that there are similar disagreements over borders and territorial claims. It’s not rocket science — I’m no expert on the Middle East and I’ve basically heard it all before. But Delisle has himself sitting there acting like he’s being presented with some sort of complex multi-layered revelation. “So we’re in Israel, right?” “But Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, right?” And then he finishes up by declaring: “I don’t really get it, but I tell myself I’ve got a whole year to figure it out….” Either he’s stupid or he thinks his readers are.
If this were a book or a documentary titled Jerusalem, the creator’s lack of even rudimentary knowledge or insight would generally be a bug. But it’s autobio comics, so the less intelligence and insight on display the better. How else to explain the studious ugliness of the color scheme? Though there are dashes of other colors here and there, for the most part Delisle has chosen drab browns and washed out grays; combined with his blobby, undistinguished character drawing, you end up feeling like you’re staring into a mud puddle.
The blah art and the blah thinking are of a piece. Both are in the service of an aw-shucks (hopefully) faux naivete. Delisle is a humble seeker, drawing without flash, seeing without knowledge, letting us know the truth without the distracting accretion of talent or insight. It’s just one man’s impressions of Jerusalem. We learn that it’s awfully hard to find a good playground in East Jerusalem; that traffic is awful; that ultra-Orthodox Jews are intolerant and unpleasant; that the Palestinians in Delisle’s comics class hadn’t read Tintin or much else. Doesn’t that tell us something, after all, about Jerusalem, about Israel, about the Middle East — about, humanity?
And sure, I suppose it tells us something. Mostly it tells us that the most banal of insights can be justified by dumping a ton of human misery somewhere in their general vicinity. Also, and relatedly, it tells us that tourists suck, and that autobio comics suck, and that, if you put them together, they suck doubly.
“Vaunting” mediocrity? Do you mean “vaulting”?
Nope; vaunting’s correct. It means boastful or prideful. I’m saying he’s proud of his tedium, which I think is true.
Ah, got it.
Geez, between you and Suat this book really gets it in the neck on HU. Makes me curious to read it.
Noah: “But it’s autobio comics, so the less intelligence and insight on display the better.”
Huh?…
Autobio comics often seem to feel that tedium and stupidity are validating. Makes them more real.
Strong disagreement here, Noah. For me the seeming vacuity, a well established strategy of Delisle’s, well captures a sense of everyday living in a confusing place. And the studied simplicity of the drawings is not blandness; it speaks.
The critical and ideological dimensions of your argument would be more convincing to me if you did not insist that things I find pleasing to look at are self-evidently unpleasing: drawing style, color palette, etc. In any case, I found the work revelatory in its accretion of detail and its evocation of human ordinariness in a bemusing environment.
Therefore I also disagree with Suat’s review, as articulate and generously detailed as it is. The accusations of artlessness and self-absorption are, IMO, mistaking the persona for the total effect.
What Charles said.
i think there’s another problem with both these writers.Noah and Suat are looking for sensationalism. Car bombs,bulldozered houses.
That’s the exciting stuff when you live in such respectable enclaves as Singapore or Chicago.
In my semi-long life (58 years and counting) I’ve encountered, time and time again, the same phenomenom– calm where the media posit hysteria.
For example, I know individuals who’ve lived through such events as London’s Brixton riots, the 1968 Washington DC riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the liberation of Paris in 1944.
In every case I was struck by the normality, the banality of most people’s experience.
People who live in Jerusalelm aren’t necessarily pawns or participants in the torment of that city’s identity. Mostly, they’re just getting by.
I remember how New York, my hometown, was stigmatised worldwide for ultra violence in the ’70’s. Horseshit.
The same horseshit that oppresses Noah’s Chicago in world opinion. For the world, Chicago is caught forever in the 1920’s and its gang wars.
Noah scoffs at Delisle for being a ‘tourist’:
“…tourists suck, and that autobio comics suck, and that, if you put them together, they suck doubly.”
Yeah, a real tourist.
Who gave up everything to follow his partner’s commitment to ‘Médecins Sans Frontières’.
Some “tourist”.
I don’t need sensationalism. I just need a small smidgen of insight beyond, “the Palestinians — life sure sucks for them.”
I’m curious Charles — what did you learn here? What did he tell you that you didn’t already know?
This may be a testimony to my relative ignorance, but Delisle’s Jerusalem impressed me with its sense of a city demarcated into territorial odd pockets and zones. I had learned a little about these things from prior reading (not least from some of Joe Sacco’s work), but what I got from Delisle was a fuller sense of the stitching, so to speak, that makes of the city such a jurisdictional as well as cultural patchwork. I also got a more vivid sense of what the settlements are like.
What I came away with was an impression of a city crisscrossed with dotted lines, carved into more or less hostile jurisdictions. It would be an exaggeration to refer to the resulting city life as Kafkaesque (that old cliche), but certainly Delisle gives me some sense of the routine strangeness of things.
I suspect that the relative cluelessness of “Guy” as an onlooker serves that larger purpose. I grant that Delisle does not even pretend to have a journalist’s instinct for trouble, as he himself acknowledges, and this makes certain parts of the book, for instance the discussion of war in Gaza, pitifully inadequate to the circumstances. But I believe that’s part of the design (as well as perhaps a fair reflection of Delisle’s lived experience in East Jerusalem as a father of young children making ends meet in a rather unwelcoming land).
I especially like the moments in Delisle’s book where he and others go threading through parts of Jerusalem’s ancient architecture. The sense of cultural division in those moments is often as simple and as strange as a doorway, or a fence.
That’s very nicely put…and alas, much, much better written than anything in Delisle’s book.
I guess I both had a fair sense of how balkanized the city was.
I don’t think there’s any indication anywhere that Delisle is anything other than clueless. Sometimes he comes across as faux naif, but I find that to be even more clueless than cluelessness, really. I agree that the lack of insight is meant to be both true to his lived experience and a marker for “humble seeker.” I just consider those things a blight, rather than a plus.
Noah: “Autobio comics often seem to feel that tedium and stupidity are validating. Makes them more real.”
That’s completely different from your former comment, but it allowed me to understand the irony (I didn’t get it the first time as my “huh” comment indicates).
The problem is that you put bad autobio and good autobio in the same bag.
I won’t defend Delisle though… ’nuff said?
Well…there aren’t a whole ton of autobio that I like…though there are some.
I’d be pretty surprised if you’d defend Delisle.
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AB says:
….In my semi-long life (58 years and counting) I’ve encountered, time and time again, the same phenomenom– calm where the media posit hysteria.
For example, I know individuals who’ve lived through such events as London’s Brixton riots, the 1968 Washington DC riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the liberation of Paris in 1944.
In every case I was struck by the normality, the banality of most people’s experience.
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Joe Sacco did a story (“How I Loved the War”) where, as the Gulf War was inexorably approaching, he showed how his attention was seized and captured by his chipped tooth, becoming more important to him than the buildup to war.
The difference is that Sacco was aware of, pointed out and ridiculed his shallow self-absorption.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Autobio comics often seem to feel that tedium and stupidity are validating. Makes them more real.
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Hah! Yes, indeed. Was it Harvey Pekar (who wrote a story about his efforts in unclogging a toilet) who first claimed — hopefully with irony — that there was “splendor” in banality?
Is this not of a piece with the Punk music attitude that amateurishness and technical incompetence are validating; more “real”?
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
[To Noah] The problem is that you put bad autobio and good autobio in the same bag.
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Mmmwell, he did say “often” (thus, not always) and “seem.” (Hooray for those caveats and qualifiers!)
BTW, Here’s a link to Ng Suat Tong’s splendid takedown: https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/05/jerusalem-nothing-special/ .
I don’t think there’s any indication anywhere that Delisle is anything other than clueless.
I disagree. Delisle’s comics are often cannily organized around symbolic devices that suggest that he is considerably more self-aware than your critique will grant. A case in point would be his self-aware take on the separation wall as a recurrent device, obsession even, in the book. What he does with this is not unlike the recurrent paper airplane image that serves to organize his Pyongyang.
So, I think you’re underrating his grace and intelligence here, though I’m sure I cannot convince you of that.
Yeah…using the separation wall as a central organizing symbol of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict does not exactly strike me as particularly thoughtful or subtle. But mileage varies in this as in all things, I suppose.
Mike: “Mmmwell, he did say “often” (thus, not always) and “seem.” (Hooray for those caveats and qualifiers!)”
Not the first time.
Anyway… More than trying to be “more real” through boredom and stupidity the main problem with autobio is the line between the private person and the public persona (forgive me the naivety). Bad autobio is not even real autobio because the author refuses to show him/herself becoming some sort of a blank. The autobio pact (Philippe Lejeune) is not easy to fulfill not only to the artist/writer, but also to those around him/her as shown by Fabrice Neaud who did reach a limit of public exposure (I don’t believe that he will do more autobio comics ever again…).
Domingos, I wish the bulk of autobio comics were at the point where those theoretical issues were the main problem. I really think a kind of punk aesthetic of deliberate crappiness is unfortunately a more serious hurdle at the moment.
The only artist I care for who arrived at autobio comics coming from that direction is John Porcellino and, as you know, I think that he largely outgrew his origins…
I should read more of him; he’s definitely an interesting artist.