A Comics Studies Reader

Autobiography as Authenticity

226 Autobiography as Authenticity Bart Beaty A three-page short story by Lewis Trondheim published in Lapin #26 outlines the stakes at play in contemporary autobiographical comics. Trondheim’s autobiographical essay , “Journal du journal du journal,” is a peculiar mise-en-abyme. Trondheim begins by depicting himself reading Fabrice Neaud’s autobiographical novel Journal (III) (1999). On that page, Neaud depicts himself reading Dupuy and Berberian’s autobiographical novel journal d’un album (1994). At that point in Journal d’un album, Philippe Dupuy depicts a momentous intersection in his personal and professional life. Having chosen, with his partner Charles Berberian, to undertake an autobiographical comic book detailing the creation of the third book in their M. Jean series, Dupuy shows a number of early pages to his colleagues in L’Association. Their assessment of the work is rather tough, noting that the work seems to have lost its rhythm and that it could be done more concisely. Returning home, he falls into a despairing dream before being awakened by a phone call from his father informing him that his mother has passed away. The following page encapsulates his mother’s life in just six images, recalling the advice that Trondheim offers in the story: “You could do it in one page.”1 Reading this passage in Journal (III), Neaud is impressed by Dupuy’s work, but finds himself enraged by the comments offered by the members of L’Association. He suggests that their inappropriate remarks may be a displacement of their inability to be interested in the lives of other people. Visually, through the use of a non-diegetic intercut, he associates the intemperate observations of the L’Association artists with the dismissive commentaries on his own work that are leveled at him by his close friend and love interest, Dominique, thereby casting aspersions on their motives. Trondheim’s essay is an exact replica of Neaud’s page, drawn in Trondheim’s style. Visually, the page’s seven-panel grid is recreated, and the figures are placed in identical positions. Further, Trondheim duplicates the narration, shifting the details slightly from Neaud’s commentary on Dupuy and L’Association, to Trondheim’s commentary on Neaud’s commentary on Dupuy and L’Association. Where Neaud was shocked at the opinions offered by L’Association on Dupuy’s work, Trondheim is shocked that Neaud would make such basic judgments about their roles as editors and publishers. On the Reprinted with permission of the publisher from Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 138–51. autoBiography as authenticity 227 second page of Trondheim’s essay, which again visually reiterates Neaud’s page, he rereads his own first page and finds himself shocked that he would make such a rash judgment of Neaud’s work. The work potentially recedes to infinity as Trondheim comments on his own commentary regarding Neaud’s commentary on L’Association’s comments about Dupuy’s self-reflexive work. The game is in play; the text is never finished but always ripe for reinterpretation. Clearly, Trondheim approaches the question of the autobiographical essay in a satiric and toying manner, playing with the similarities between the titles of the books and the closeness of the content initiated by Neaud. At the same time, however, his work contains a few barbs that suggest it is something more than mere whimsy. Where Neaud depicts Dominique dismissing all autobiographical writing with the phrase “The Diary of Anne Frank, that pisses me off. I find it badly written,”2 Trondheim reacts to L’Association president Jean-Christophe Menu’s dismissal of the mainstream genre comics of Jean Van Hamme this way: “XIII, that pisses me off. I find it badly written.”3 This transition re-centers the discussion away from the concerns of autobiography to those of the small press. This is an entirely apt displacement. Since the beginning of the 1990s, autobiography has become an increasingly prominent genre within the small-press and independent comics scene, with strengths in a number of European nations. Indeed, autobiography has become the genre that most distinctly defines the small-press comics production of Europe in its current revitalization. Specifically, a number of cartoonists have made the narrativization of comic book production a central signifier of authenticity in the contemporary European small-press scene. Central to the study of autobiography has been the project of defining it as a genre distinct from biography and fiction. Philippe Lejeune’s...