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Fish without Bicycles: Feuchtenberger and the Distortion of Scopophilia

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Over in the comments to Erica’s introductory post, Robert Stanley Martin commented that the art of Amanda Vahamaki’s The Bun Field (the subject of the last Fish without Bicycles) doesn’t appeal to him. I’ve heard similar things recently from male friends about both Vahamaki and Anke Feuchtenberger, specifically W the Whore Makes Her Tracks. Although Feuchtenberger’s drawings are sharper than Vahamaki’s with much more contrast, they’re aesthetically related (maybe someone with more art knowledge can give me some vocabulary here), and there’s indeed something about this aesthetic that doesn’t appeal to a number of men I know. Not all the men of my acquaintance – the book was recommended to me by a man. But women seem to like it more. It’s not a scientific sample, but it’s good enough to trigger a blog post.

In the same comment, Robert also called out an objection to French Feminism, specifically Hélène Cixous, who is perhaps best known for coining the term écriture féminine – used by all the French Feminists to describe a kind of richly metaphorical, non-linear writing that “inscribes the female body,” playing off the Pythagorean table of opposites and trying to embody the elements associated conventionally in the West with the female half of the table.

Male Female
Odd Even
One Many
Right Left
Straight Crooked
Activity Passivity
Solid Fluid
Light Darkness
Square Oblong

 

In prose, this project often results in writing that is nearly impossible to parse; the (intentionally) less-than-comprehensible Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche by Luce Irigaray (whom Robert also has issues with) is the definitive case in point.

Feuchtenberger’s work, in contrast, strikes me as far more successfully accomplishing Cixous’ ambitions for “women’s writing”:

“A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity.”

Her work “inscribes the body” with a crystalline clarity that the prose experiments never quite master.

Given that, and the apparent frequency with which men dislike this style of art, does the reaction against the aesthetic imply that it alone constitutes something like an “écriture féminine” for comics, something that is inherently, if unconsciously, challenging to male readers and empowering for women? It’s not impossible, especially if you’re very Freudian, but I don’t think so: The shadowy, filtered aesthetic gives a surreal quality that makes room for Cixous’ metaphorical, non-linear écriture féminine, but the aesthetic in itself isn’t sufficient to make that happen. Although it’s common to see this type of aesthetic deployed in the service of metaphorical or non-linear graphic narratives — narratives which are always, somewhat condescendingly, called “dreamlike” — the aesthetic doesn’t mandate any particular content, and I’m hesitant to gender a visual style independent of what it represents.

I find Feuchtenberger’s book remarkably more “feminine” than Vahamaki’s, but the gendered perspective is not in the aesthetic so much as in the imagery. I would not describe The Bun Field in Cixous’ terms, whereas they seem precisely appropriate for W the Whore Makes Her Tracks, despite the surface similarities in aesthetics (and with no implication of intent). Whereas Vahamaki’s text deals with the experience and perception of older children of both genders (a topic often interesting to women but not exclusively so), the subject matter of W the Whore Makes Her Tracks is explicitly sexed: the perspective not (only) of a woman’s mind but of the female’s body.

There is something very much interior about this style of art, something dark and fluid and in keeping with the right side of Pythagoras’s table. It certainly makes sense aesthetically for Feuchtenberger’s narrative. The perspective is intimate – no wide angle here – and the light is dim. The landscape is clearly imagined rather than seen; it does not yield readily to the creation of a “mental map”, except metaphorically. It is immensely difficult to orient yourself in space and impossible to orient yourself in time, except very slightly in terms of relative time internally to the narrative (such as it is.) The use of one panel per page rather than a grid enhances this sense that the story’s movement through time is less important than the visual metaphor of the landscape. The narrative is almost entirely metaphorical, and the overall effect is, again, either of the surrealist mindscape or the imagined Other-world.

But these elements are only obliquely “feminine,” and insufficient to account for any immediate aesthetic reaction against this kind of drawing. It seems wrong to say that men have an unconscious reaction against metaphorical, dreamy, non-linear stories. (One of the men who objected said, “It’s not that I don’t like it really. It’s that it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work.”)

Although the aesthetic itself is not gendered, it would surely be difficult for a man — at least a heteronormatively gendered man — to “recognize” the imagery in the book as true to his experience, especially the more metaphorical imagery:

Feuchtenberger creates the contours of her landscape out of fragments of the female body during the sex act – but unlike most representations, the perspective imagines sex from the interior of the woman’s body:

 

Of course, men can certainly “parse” the imagery – all the typical Freudian visual metaphors for sex make appearances in the book: tunnels and trains, phallic-shaped anythings, orchid-like flowers…they’re all there, and they still mean the same thing.

These images are semiotically packed: as stand-alone panels their signification is already varied. The last image for example is simultaneously (most representationally) the view of a woman from above, a view of sex from inside the woman, and a view of birth from outside. It also carries narrative significance for the book’s foregrounded conceit about sexual objectification and the marked-ness of the female gender.

But that turned-around perspective resonates more with a woman’s experience of her body…

…than with a woman’s visual image of her body, whether from the mirror, photographs, or a sexual gaze.

So what can we conclude from this? Despite this sexual subject matter, the book is not erotic. Bart Beaty comments, in a discussion of Feuchtenberg’s earlier “W the Whore” in TCJ 233, that “even in her nakedness none of the images are particularly sexualized.” Although I don’t have the earlier book to compare, the statement is true for this book as well, even though W the Whore (the character) is not naked very much in this volume.

But why is it that these evocative sexual images don’t have an erotic effect?Of course, they’re not intended to have an erotic effect, because that would undermine the critique of objectification. But what is it about them that interferes? Beaty’s observation puts into perspective not only how much our ideas about what counts as “erotic” are shaped by artistic (aesthetic/dramatic) representations of sex, but how conditioned we are to perceive even our own sexuality from the external perspective of most of those representations: “sexualized imagery” generally is based on something you can see during sex, not on things that you feel. Watching sex on TV or seeing sexually provocative images in a comic or illustrated book doesn’t replicate the experience of sex, it replicates the experience of voyeurism. This is – or at least has the potential to be – an immensely objectifying construct for both men and women, making sex less of an experience and more of a performance. To no small extent, the immense anxiety over body image that many women suffer is connected to this distorted, externalized perspective — as Feuchtenberger’s narrative explicitly points out.

Beaty describes Feuchtenberg as “exploring the outer margins of the comics form with seemingly no interest in making concessions” and “casting the very project of comics storytelling into doubt,” but I think this is too narrow a vantage point to accurately discern what makes this work so distinct an artistic achievement. The conventions of comics storytelling are no more called into question than the conventions of films and books for how to represent stories of women’s erotic experience. Comics form is part of the same broader culture of representation, and it is illuminating to shift the emphasis away from limited questions of form to questions about the extent to which gendered – in this case, sexed – erotic experience informs and shapes perception in general.

It’s a bit of a truism that women find erotic fiction much more arousing than erotic images, and Feuchtenberger’s perspective throws some light on why this is: representing the “inside out” experience of feminine sexuality is, on the surface, much more difficult in art than it is in words. Prose is appealing – and representational art vastly limited – for capturing interior experience: mind, imagination, sensation. In prose, you can just describe the experience, whereas the visual artist has to find a way to bring non-visual sensation to mind through visual means. Resonating with Cixous’ challenge to women writers, Feuchtenberger’s images make clear that French Feminism is profoundly physical but not in the least bit scopophilic. (The French Feminist emphasis on physicality has resulted in charges of essentialism by a great many Anglo-American feminists, including Susan Gubar, whom Robert also didn’t much like). When Feuchtenberger does represent scopophilia it is very distorting:

or creepy, represented by a crowd of anonymous watchers (also visible in images 5 and 6 below). The watchers represent that “experience of voyeurism” discussed above, and stand symbolically in the narrative’s interior space for the ways women internalize the perspective of these collective, objectifying voyeurs.

To parse the literal strain of the narrative, recognizing the distorting effects of this scopophilia is “freeing” for W the Whore, but ultimately futile.

Despite this rather despairing narrative thread emphasizing the futility of écriture féminine, Feuchtenberger’s text in conversation with Cixous’ is “freeing”: it allows us to see the effects of a cluster of binaries between text and image, voyeur and participant, inside and outside, seeing and feeling, male and female. W the Whore Makes Her Tracks illuminates the cultural insistence that “the body” is what we see from the outside rather than what we imagine and experience from the inside, and it turns that insistence “inside out.”

The conventions of illustration and representational art insist that we think of Feuchtenberger’s vantage point as “metaphorical” and “dreamlike.” And yet, Feuchtenberger’s most significant achievement in the book is very direct: the reminder that there is no reason why what we find erotic should be based on the perspective of the voyeur, and that there is so much more to the body than what that voyeur can see. Although I think it definitely matters that this book was written by a woman, it seems like that insight applies equally well for men.

In which Caro reads The Bun Field, muses on gender and metaphor and remembers how hard it is to write short

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This is the first of a series of posts about art comics by women, combining reviews with critical attention to whether it matters that women wrote them. Bear with me through a little awkwardness; it’s been awhile since I’ve stretched these muscles.

In her response to last week’s “Gender and Cartooning in Chicago” thread, Erica Friedman gave an insightful and succinct summary of a theme that’s run through a number of recent HU posts: “Men represent men’s stories,” she said, “and set that as societal norm, so any women looking to rise in the field will have to write/draw those stories too or be relegated to an inferior ‘girl’s’ position.”

Hold that thought for a few paragraphs, will you, please?

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Finnish artist Amanda Vähäm?ki’s The Bun Field (Campo di Baba) got a decent amount of attention from critics when it came out in English translation last summer (June 2009). If you haven’t read it, Bart Beaty gave the following summary of the action in his review of the original Italian publication :

Campo de Baba is not much of a story, and it is probably not even a story at all in the classic sense of the word. A young man (sic) awakes from a dream — or does he? At breakfast he is confronted by a blob-like creature. He goes for a drive with a bear. He trades teeth with a dog. He is winked at by an apple. With a tractor, he slaughters a field. He disappears.

Most reviews of the English-language version follow Beaty’s lead and read it as a lushly drawn extended dream sequence that makes no particular attempt at specific meaning. Other critics, like Popmatters’ Sara Cole, go a little further and claim the book represents the “lived experience of a child,” the vulnerability and confusion, how nightmarish the adult world seems. But even Cole says it “lack(s) a coherent narrative.”

To the book’s credit and in defense of the reviewers, part of Vähäm?ki’s achievement is that the book satisfies equally well either way…

…but the incoherence is vastly overstated.

Up through the title scene, it works just fine to read The Bun Field using one or the other of these two interpretations. But the panels with the younger child on the bicycle don’t fit very well with those readings.

The younger child leaves our heroine crying and rides her bike back into the setting of the original sequence (with Donald duck and the brontosaurus).

Original sequence (second panel in book)

 This time, though, from the perspective of the younger child, this setting is not ominous and foreboding; the child is not vulnerable, and the world is not surreal.

To make the narrative coherent, we have to account for that shift in perspective.

There’s a double meaning in the title of this book that admittedly is a little weak in translation. The baba of the original title is an Italian pastry shaped like the buns in the bun field, but it’s also the way a baby says “baby.” In English, you’ve got to come up with “bun in the oven” before it starts to hang together.

A Google search for “Finnish bun metaphor” adds an additional image: “eating a dry bun” is something like “a hard pill to swallow.”

The coherence of the narrative – the scene in the bun field – hinges on this cluster of metaphors: the bun is a symbol for early childhood, plowing the field destroys (eats up) the buns, the loss of childhood innocence is “a hard pill to swallow” but an inescapable part of growing up.

The moment in childhood that the book’s narrative represents marks the collision of the affectionate, imagination-rich world of the young child, where animals drive cars and talk, with the colder, crueler, more violent adult world that the older child is becoming aware of – an awareness symbolized by the acquisition of the canine incisor.

That’s why the trigger for the sobbing is not her realizing that she’s killing the buns, but the younger child telling her she could “come home,” that “everybody was waiting” for her.


In the initial readings, the tears were trauma from the inescapable nightmare, or guilt and impotence over this “murder” she was forced to commit, and the younger child was an anomaly. Here they are tears of grief over the loss of that innocent perspective of childhood, over the fact that she really can’t return home to that beautiful place where the younger child still lives with the smiling dinosaur.

That’s a pretty coherent narrative, really. It’s a fully symbolic narrative, it isn’t transparently obvious or even particularly readily accessible, and I make no claims that it’s the only possible coherent narrative in the book – but it is coherent. What it isn’t, as Bart Beaty points out, is a “story.”

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Erica commented that “men write men’s stories.” The obvious corollary to this, which came up in other comments and threads, is that women write women’s stories. Erica’s point, though, is that both women and men end up writing men’s stories, men because they’re interested and women because they have to. But if this book isn’t a story, then it can’t really be a man’s story or a woman’s story in any obvious way.

I thought it might be helpful to see a piece of writing that was more obviously a “man’s” take on these themes – the casual cruelty of the grown-up world and the lack of control that naïve children have over their interaction with that world. I asked my well-read-in-comics friend Christopher Keels for an example (Thanks, Chris!), and while nothing set in early childhood came to mind, one selection stood out as a useful contrast. Josh Simmons’ Wholesome, from Kramer’s Ergot 4, also features a world-wise dog and the broad themes of cruelty and vulnerability/control, but the dominant emotion in Wholesome is anger.

Anger is aggressive and grief is passive, so in the most reductive, Pythagorean-opposites type of gender analysis I could say that based on these associations, Vähäm?ki’s book is feminine and Simmons’ story masculine. The comparison with Simmons certainly makes Vähäm?ki’s book feel more feminine than it does on its own, but there isn’t an equivalency. Simmons’ book feels more masculine than Vähäm?ki’s does feminine.

But Erica’s point is that women have to either mime male voices or accept a lower standing, and while it’s debatable whether the feminine perspective is important for reading this book, I can’t find a reading where Vähäm?ki’s miming an explicitly male voice. She privileges neither women nor men – we all experience childhood innocence and we all experience cruelty and grief. The main character is so neutral that Bart Beaty actually got the gender wrong (the English translation identifies her as a girl in the bar scene.)

“Stories” tend to work by invoking ideas and actions and relationships that are deeply embedded within a culture; stories have histories of their own independent of the specific manifestation of them in any given book. In many ways, “story” performs the same function in plot-driven fiction (like most genre) that “metaphor” performs in The Bun Field – it’s the thing that you have to recognize in order to tie the whole thing together and make it make sense.

So thinking about Erica’s point in light of Vähäm?ki’s work raises the question of whether metaphor takes on gender characteristics in the same way that story does – do “women’s metaphors” and “men’s metaphors” exist and work in the same way that men and women’s stories do? I think you have to answer that to determine whether any difference is made by the fact that The Bun Field was written by a woman.

It isn’t really a question that can be answered for myself by reading one book, though. I’ll just have to read some more art comics by women.

Next up: Renee French