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1 5 9 Autobiography withTwo Heads: Quimby the Mouse BenJaMin WidiSS One of the central tenets of autobiography criticism is what Philippe Lejeune terms “the autobiographical pact,” the “contract of identity that is sealed by the [author’s] proper name,” ensuring that author and narrator are one and the same.1 Another position, however, insists that the narrator him- or herself is inevitably sundered, that there is an insurmountable gap between the “narrating I” who “tells the autobiographical narrative” and the “narrated I” who is its subject.2 These are not mutually exclusive claims—the first makes a quasi-juridical promise, the greatest force of which is extratextual, a promise that holds in spite of the internal interpretive complications introduced by the second—but they do together allow for some intriguing questions. Could an author who felt the gulf between earlier narrated experience and the present moment of narration particularly poignantly, for example, find a way to make use of the pact as a suturing device? Would the effects of such a device be limited to the social life of the text, or would they pervade its interior? If the latter, what sorts of rhetorical or representational strategies might they give rise to, and what steps might the author take in an attempt to cement their hold? The original readers of the material amassed in Quimby the Mouse (2003) might have been quite surprised to learn that it would one day occasion such questions. Absurd, surreal, repetitive, and disjointed, sometimes sacrificing narrative almost entirely in favor of intense scrutiny of a single moment or mood, most of the strips—as first published in the University of Texas at Austin’s student newspaper, the Daily Texan, in 1990 and 1991—make no explicit autobiographical claims whatsoever. And as collected in volumes 2 and 4 of The ACME Novelty Library (1994), they remain largely elliptical and elusive, if gaining some modicum of transparency through the process of aggregation .3 But the “reprinted, renovated, [and] redesigned” assemblage that Ware released as a single, expanded volume in 2003 is, more or less literally, a different story.4 The crucial difference arises from the several-thousand-word essay with which Ware introduces the book. While Ware only fleetingly discusses the comics that follow, he expounds at some length on his situation as he created them and grows yet more expansive in relating blissful memories of his boyhood a decade earlier and his thwarted attempts to reconstitute them as a grown man a decade later, at the time of the book’s publication. These autobiographical confidences corroborate, as well, those proffered in a hand- 1 6 0 B E N J A M I N W I D I S S ful of previously uncollected multi-page strips Ware adds in the center of the volume. Thus repositioned, this collection of what Ware grudgingly deems his “earliest ‘publishable’ work” yields an account of personal as well as stylistic origins (1). But considerable tension emerges between the childhood Ware is desperate to recapture and the apprentice comics he is almost as eager to disavow, the former experience obliquely bound up in the latter artwork. The specific genius of the volume lies in Ware’s management of these intercalated personal histories, his savvy application of formal strategies developed in his comics to the book as a whole. The result amplifies not only the autobiographical content of the work, but also the potential of autobiography itself. reading the Strips: Themes and variations Ware’s fascination with modes of representing (and complicating) temporal progress is well known, a logical outgrowth of his highly self-conscious and theoretical approach to the comics medium. Thomas Bredehoft’s discussion of this facet of Ware’s undertaking in Jimmy Corrigan reads the novel as repeatedly demonstrating the ways in which “the architecture of the comics page” may be exploited to “challenge our habit of understanding the narrative line as pervasively linear and sequenced in time.” “In a book deeply preoccupied with the passing of time,” he writes, Ware both employs ambiguous layouts that “allow a single group of panels to be read simultaneously in more than one linear sequence” and offers the reader various cut-out models that “even if constructed only in the imagination, hint at the possibility of altering or even halting the flow of narrative time-sequence” through our intuitive sense that three-dimensional objects endure across the strata of time.5 Quimby, too, evidences Ware’s temporal concerns in a...

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