Thompson starts with a single panel that shows two boys in a large white bed placed in a dark room (2007: 9/1). The verbal narrator, who is going to be absent for most of the book, has a specific role in the first chapter: he is our tour guide and provides consistency. His comment reads: "When we were young, my little brother Phil and I shared the same bed" (9). Superficially, this may seem redundant, but the narrator performs a remarkable feat here: through the use of personal pronouns he invites readers to treat the name on the cover, his 'voice' in the form of sentences written outside and inside of panels *and* a cartoon drawing of a little boy, whom we cannot even see properly, as the same subject. Viewpoint compression in autobiography often involves readers' attempts to conceptually integrate their experiences of various selves into a coherent image of a subject. The next panel (10/1) repeats the first one from a closer and slightly higher angle and even adds labels – 'Phil' and 'me' – to indicate who is who. Visually, there is a stronger emphasis on the room as a 'prison cell', with the incoming light producing a pattern of iron bars across their blanket. This may seem far-fetched, but the narrator's second sentence reads: "'SHARED' is the sugar-coated way of saying we were TRAPPED in the same bed, as we were children and had no say in the matter" (10). The parallelism between 'we were trapped' and 'we were children' strongly suggests an interpretative frame for the entire first chapter: as we shall see, Craig's childhood is presented as a nightmare, which leads to an almost complete lack of agency on the protagonist's part. This theme is introduced here, both verbally and visually, but then repeated throughout chapter I. I find Groensteen's metaphor of 'braiding' very useful to talk about literature and comics in particular, as this thread is going to resurface again and again. On a fundamental level, comics narratives foreground elements and prompt conceptual integration through repetition.

The boys begin to quarrel until their father intervenes in the most dramatic fashion (cf. 12/6). I discussed page 12 in the context of sound effects and typography. The emotions and attitudes of characters are very easy to understand here, as Thompson relies both on standard situations (children who argue and refuse to sleep) and cartoonish facial expressions that change dramatically from one panel to the next to "condense subjective experience into readily recognisable highlights. This exaggeration of feeling, together with a complete absence of awareness and control, also lends a quality of childishness to characters" (Tan 2001: 38). Tan talks about Hergé's *The Calculus Affair*, but Thompson relies on the same principle of maximum transparency. Craig's emotions go from amusement (12/1) to fear of falling (12/2) to rage (12/4) to seriousness (12/5) within seconds. These four states are presented in the most hyperbolic way possible to be instantly recognisable.

Their father's appearance marks a major shift in character configuration and power relations. He has been announced both verbally and through an ominous thumping sound drawing nearer (cf. 12/5). When he gets his grand entrance (cf. 12/6; 13/2; 13/4), Thompson uses a brush instead of a pen to foreground panels 12/6 and 13/4 with thick, black borders. While their father's question "WHAT'S GOING ON UP HERE?!" is presented in capital letters, but still contained within a speech balloon (cf. 12/6), his admonition "**DON'T QUESTION YOUR PARENT'S AUTHORITY!**" (13/4 → Fig. 14) knows no constraints. While panel 12/6 still follows the regular layout of the page, 13/4 extends to twice the size and demonstrates Thompson's willingness to sacrifice any sense of realism in favour of pure symbolic expression. The previous (13/3) and the following panel (13/5) contain Craig's complaints, but they are visually, verbally and symbolically 'crushed' by the exercise of parental power.

In *This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature* Rocco Versaci stresses how "wildly interpretative and impressionistic" (2007: 64) autographic texts can be and foregrounds *Blankets*' status as a work of art instead of a piece of documentary evidence:

To read such a work is to understand at a fundamental level that the "truth" of memoir is something that cannot be tied simplistically to the facts; the power of Thompson's memoir lies primarily in its telling, which is subjectively arranged and presented. As Thompson shows, comics are clearly artistic, and in them we see not the world but a representation of it. (2007: 64)

**Fig. 14:** *Blankets* (13/4). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

The boys' father is presented as a towering giant who is hovering above their bed and trapping the boys in the bottom right corner. In its melodramatic hyperbole it is both easy to read and encapsulates a fundamental experience that transcends the specific context. Like comics in general and *Blankets* in particular, this panel heavily relies on embodied cognition, image schemas and conceptual metaphors. While size and centrality are the two most obvious factors that illustrate Mr. Thompson's overbearing presence, there is also the image schema of verticality (up-down) that is central to depictions of power and related conceptual metaphors (cf. Hanić 2013: 132). Jasmina Hanić convincingly argues that the visualisation of social structures usually involves hierarchies and a pyramid that positions people as topdogs or underdogs. This is then metaphorically extended to moving up and down the social ladder (cf. 2013: 133–4). Accordingly, Hanić defines "control is up" as the "primary metaphor used to understand the concept of power" (2013: 135). The preposition 'over' dominates verbal entailments in such metaphors and can mean a state/status, e.g. "to be over him" and 'overshadow', or a movement, as in 'overthrow', 'overpower' and 'overcome'. This extends to the notion that we can be overcome with emotions (cf. 2013: 143–4). Panel 13/4 is a reminder of how the image schema verticality (up-down) dominates the first chapter of *Blankets*. Another striking and highly symbolic manifestation of the same idea is the bullies' triumph over Craig (24) – a panel to which Thompson dedicates a whole page.

Panel 13/4 is clearly foregrounded as the most salient one on this double-page spread (cf. 2007: 12–13) by being twice as large as any other and framed with a thick black border. Through iconic solidarity it is closely related to panel 12/6, but also to 13/2, maybe to a lesser extent. It establishes an embodied configuration of power, dominance and victimisation that readers are going to encounter throughout the chapter. *Tom and Jerry* (cf. 38/1), for example, is not simply a cartoon that Phil happens to watch on television: it is a reminder that physical abuse is ubiquitous for these children. In the current scene, their father's presence has an immediate impact. The boys are separated (14), which is visualised by a move from 'two-shots' (cf. 14/1, 3) to singles (cf. 14/4). Following a trend of foregrounding panels through variations in framing, Thompson shows Phil's horror in a frameless panel (14/4) and isolates him visually by setting the image of Phil inside the 'prison cell' apart from the regular arrangement of panels at the top of that page (cf. 17/5).

While readers have witnessed a continuous scene up to this point (9–17), page 18 introduces the idea that the episodes are not chronological, but closely related to each other in the autobiographer's mind through powerful feelings, predominantly guilt and shame. On page 18 the narrator states across three panels: "I should have been the one who was locked in the cubby hole that night because I was a pathetic older brother. I neglected my protective role in dangerous situations" (18/1–3). This last thought triggers a memory of passively watching the babysitter take Phil to the next room (cf. 18/3). These episodic memories are linked for a reason, so that their spatial contiguity on the page encourages readers to discover how they are related. Viewpoint compression in autobiographical narratives always involves an awareness of what the presented scenes reveal about the intentions and the global vision of the implied author. While readers may wonder whether Craig and Phil were really sexually abused by their babysitter, which is a valid first reaction to the narrative, Thompson encourages his readership to view these scenes in a larger context of abuse (cf. 29–32).

Craig's self-reproach continues with two highly symbolic images of abandoning Phil when his brother requires a sympathetic companion the most (cf. 19/1–2). The sequence ends with two panels that show Craig towering over Phil and frightening him with the prospect of constant physical abuse in school (cf. 19/3–4). Thompson ingeniously repeats the pattern of body codes which he established with their father's intervention (cf. 13/4) in 19/4 (→ Fig. 15), putting

**Fig. 15:** *Blankets* (19/4). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

Craig in the position of topdog, and mirrors that again in 20/1 (→ Fig. 16), where bullies threaten Craig at school and he finds himself in Phil's place.

Through braiding, Thompson insinuates a history of violence, which affects society at large, but also his family in particular. The transition from 19/4 to 20/1 represents another abrupt shift in contextual frames, which only makes sense in view of the narrator's associations. Visually, this scene (20–5) continues with the

**Fig. 16:** *Blankets* (20/1). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

image schema verticality (up-down) as a basic conceptual metaphor for the abuse of power, which finds a paradigmatic expression on page 24. When Craig looks in the mirror at the end of the scene (25), alone in the school bathroom, he feels exactly like Phil in the cubby hole (cf. 17/5), which is emphasised by reproducing the scratch marks on the wooden door as blood-smeared fingerprints on the mirror (cf. 25/7). These translinear links are at least as important as the content of the scenes themselves. Finding the same patterns repeated across different frames, readers begin to conceptually integrate scenes into larger gestalten. Craig/Thompson feels shame for repeating the pattern himself by victimising his younger brother, although he should know best how this feels at the receiving end. Craig's revenge fantasies involve his oppressors eating excrements (cf. 29/3). We learn that he has (ab)used his creative writing assignment to indulge in such fantasies, which leads to a severe reprimand by his teacher (cf. 28). Triggered by this revenge fantasy, the narrator returns to a memory of the babysitter taking advantage of himself and then of Phil (cf. 31/1). When we return to the classroom on page 32, the "merging of two different moments in time through the association of the intense feeling of shame common to both is conveyed by placing representations of both scenes into the same narrative space of the classroom and onto the same page of the book" (El Refaie 2012: 93). This observation by Elisabeth El Refaie highlights the fact that the medium affords comics creators with a montage technique that places references to various contextual frames side by side and invites readers to draw conclusions.

Narratologically speaking, this memory can be attributed to Craig as internal focalisation, whereas the first time we saw the babysitter it was the narrator who took us there (cf. 18/3). Both transitions prompt a comparison of Craig's experiences across different social settings, which supports Mikkonen's claim that "it does not always matter who speaks or sees in the narrative" (2017: 153). It would be another case entirely if the differences between narrating and experiencing I were foregrounded, but Thompson seems to be more interested in providing readers with a strong impression of how he felt about his childhood many years later. At the same time, chapter I has to be seen in the context of the primacy effect (cf. Sternberg 1978: 94): it serves as an experiential backdrop to the main narrative threads and hints at those thematic concerns that readers should look out for.

What is striking about "The Cubby Hole" is that many scenes have a symbolic and exemplary function, in the sense that depicted events are presented as symptomatic of many other incidences. They seem to be blends rather than based on episodic memories. Following Martin Conway and David Rubin's categorisation of autobiographical memories (cf. 1993), Daniel L. Schacter postulates three levels of compression: event-specific knowledge, which is supposed to retain the level of details and qualia typical of a single event; general events, which are blends of several occurrences into a single memory; and lifetime periods, which are general observations or blended feelings based on years of experience (cf. 1996: 89–90). I would argue that most of the scenes in chapter I are general events for which there are several indications: Thompson compresses the first seventeen years of his life into 58 pages. In comparison, the two weeks at Raina's home span more than 300 pages (2007: 171–482). Secondly, instead of pinpointing exact dates and locations, the verbal narrator introduces many of these scenes in the broadest of terms. The very first sentence reads: "When we were young, my little brother Phil and I shared the same bed" (2007: 9). When he describes his relationship to Phil it reads like a summary: "I was a pathetic older brother. I neglected my protective role in dangerous situations" (18/2–3). His dreams of escaping are introduced with: "Every night I would scheme of running away" (39/1). These introductory sentences suggest that either the scenes we witness have an exemplary status by capturing key experiences of Thompson's childhood or they blend several incidences into one hyperreal, compressed representation that manages to convey basic convictions and feelings in a (melo) dramatic form.

Commenting on a scene in Isabel Allende's *Paula* Schacter observes that the author "is not remembering a specific episode in a particular time and place; she is extracting features and themes that are common to many episodes" (1996: 90). I would argue that Thompson blends, condenses and dramatises recurring events by presenting them as a single experience to foreground essential and symptomatic features of his social encounters in childhood and during his teenage years. This is not to say that they are misrepresentations, as general events "capture a good deal of the distinctive flavour of our pasts, and are readily accessible because they have been strengthened through repetition" (1996: 91). In contrast to event-specific knowledge, which is about singular occurrences, general events are related to the grammatical forms "I used to …" or "I would …", as in "I would constantly threaten him with my discouraging discoveries of the 'real world', as if my three years of seniority made me an expert" (19/2). While these input spaces tend to be generic, the complex links between them are not.

There are about fifteen contextual frames in the first chapter, which are presented in the following sequence: (1) Craig and Phil in bed and their father's intervention (9–17; 41; 61–5); (2/3) two scenes of Craig and Phil out in the country (18–19; 45–7); (4) a generic abuse scene that involves the babysitter (18; 29–32); (5/6) two generic scenes of bullies physically abusing Craig in school (20–5; 33–4); (7) a typical lesson in school (26–32); (8) Craig coming home from school (35–8) and (9) dreaming about escaping (39–44); (10) a lesson in Sunday school (48–51; 61–3); (11) Craig's fall from grace and into puberty (51–2); (12/13) two one-panel scenes of teenage Craig being ridiculed by bullies and warned by a teacher, while telling himself that none of that matters (53); (14) the Pastor's proposal (54–5) and (15) the destruction of all his graphic art (56–61). There are a number of things to notice here: the first scene provides a frame for the entire chapter. The contextual frames are mostly organised according to emotional resonance and metonymy, not following a linear, temporal or causal structure. For the most part, they are blends that present symptomatic and endemic structures of basic social relationships. They are interrelated through braiding and thematic

**Fig. 17:** *Blankets* (53/2). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

concerns, often using layout to foreground emotional contiguity. The most obvious example of braiding is a pattern of body codes repeated throughout the chapter (e.g. 53/2; 55/1 → Fig. 17 & 18). I would argue that the conversation with the pastor belongs to the same group. There is again this overpowering presence of an adult who strongly suggests a particular path to pursue. Suddenly realising that he wants to be guided by God, it is Craig who initiates the final move, but the Pastor's affirmation, "I think God wants you to go into the ministry" (55/4), seems to push the teenager in a very specific direction.

In this last section I want to concentrate on the final ten pages, which set up a new dynamic. Independent of how readers choose to interpret the conversation with the Pastor in church, it marks a first turning point, as Craig suddenly becomes active. We also find more precise time indications in this part of chapter I, which may suggest that the narrative is finally gaining some momentum. The very next scene begins with "That afternoon, I was engrossed in the book

**Fig. 18:** *Blankets* (55/1). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

of Ecclesiastes" (56/1), which is a second indication that the narrative finally adopts chronological time. It may seem that *Blankets* is an extreme example in this regard, but that is not the case. Elisabeth El Refaie, for example, describes *Persepolis* as a "fascinating portrayal of the workings of memory not as a filingcabinet of separate 'incidents,' but as fragments of experiences, thoughts, and emotions that may run in parallel, feed into each other, or occasionally even merge completely" (2012: 129) Earlier in her study on autobiographical comics she considers this to be a general trait of the genre: "It is this idiosyncratic experience of subjective time, with its irregularities, circularities, overlaps, and gaps, which graphic memoirists typically want to 'commemorate,' or share with their readers" (2012: 94). Even within *Blankets* itself braiding continues to be a major concern. Chapter II is based on the contrast between Craig's childhood experiences at church camp and his first meeting with Raina, which I discussed in section 4.4.3.

The most fascinating thing about *Blankets* is that Craig discovers three potential answers to his search for meaning in life: art, religion and love/sexuality. Just a few pages before the scene in Sunday school (cf. 47–50) Thompson reminds us of his childhood passion: "An ENTIRE DAY would be consumed by drawing, interspersed with fits of running around outside expending our energy. These were the only WAKEFUL moments of my childhood that I can recall feeling life was sacred or worthwhile" (44/4). Drawing (cf. 44), dreaming (cf. 41–3) and playing (cf. 46) are closely related and spiritual activities to him. Throughout *Blankets* readers are reminded that Thompson thinks about art and love in religious terms. When he receives Raina's quilt as a gift, he comments that "It's SACRED" (184/1). Neither do I think that this is a coincidence, nor that Thompson uses religious words lightly. The blanket is Raina's successful attempt to weave together the two things in her life that are dearest to her: her art and her long-distance relationship with Craig that is about to become a more direct experience. Craig struggles with his exploration of these different paths – art, love/sexuality and Christianity, which leads to a crisis of faith. As a reader of his own life Craig has a hard time seeing the larger pattern.

This is the context in which the last few pages of Chapter I may become more relatable. After realising that he wants to dedicate his life to God (cf. 55/3), he spends the afternoon reading his Bible outside. There he begins to associate the dead leaves falling from the trees with his childish drawings. As so often in comics the metaphor is visualised and becomes readily accessible (cf. 56/6). In a fit of religious fervour he scours his room for drawings (cf. 57/3–58/3) and sets out to burn them as an offering to God (cf. 58/4–59/3). The "new spiritual pact" (59/1) is based on what looks like a book-burning. Thompson wants to start his new life with a clean slate and therefore he has to purge everything that does not fit the new world order: "I wanted to burn my memories" (59/4). Here, the metaphorical process is reversed: the physical drawings are associated with Craig's memories, the creative potential that is inside of him and his identity as an artist. When they go up in flames, this is mirrored in what looks like an exorcism, driving cartoon characters out of his body (cf. 60). The 'heretic' parts of his identity get burned on the stake. Craig seems to be suffering more than ever in his life, so this visual metaphor can also be read as a comment on the horrible decision he has made and the horrid acts that religious fervour can lead to. Depending on how readers have understood the narrative up to this point, the interpretations are likely to be very diverse, which makes this page an excellent choice for in-class activities.

Both his pain and the purging flames remind him of his former Sunday school teacher, who appears superimposed over the act, preaching the faith: "But if you don't ask Jesus in your heart, you'll spend eternity in HELL" (61/1). Her stories of hell and eternal suffering (cf. 61/1–4) remind him of Phil in the cubby hole, which returns us full circle to the beginning. Thompson lets the teacher continue with her preaching and adds images of Phil being locked up by their father (cf. 61–3). From Craig's point of view, he has condemned Phil to the hellish cubby hole and, while he can hear him sobbing through the wall, there is nothing he can do but despair (cf. 64–5). Again, Thompson demonstrates that everything is connected. This is an ambiguous ending in which religious fundamentalism seems to triumph over art and family relations. Yet, the book readers hold in their hands – *Blankets* – is a triumphant celebration of cartooning and a victory – as it were – of artistic self-expression and self-determination over any doctrine. In this sense, the physical presence of the book promises a perspective that the narrative has not reached yet.

Thompson disentangles and decompresses his complex, emotionally charged memories of his childhood to let readers draw their own conclusions. The verbal narrator's interventions are reduced to a minimum and – for the most part – refrain from explaining what there is to see and understand. Thus, readers are invited to take in the pieces of the puzzle and see the larger picture, as a sum total exceeding the individual parts, which is the key idea of gestalt psychology. Through selection, foregrounding and mise-en-page, this process is guided by textual structures. Instead of relying on a chronological presentation, memories are organised according to their interconnectedness in the autobiographer's mind. The meaning of this first chapter can be found in the complex relations between these fragments, which are artfully arranged to produce visible patterns and suggest correspondences. In this case, many of them rely on the image schema verticality (up-down) and conceptual metaphors, such as control is up. All the social relations seem to be informed by a topdog-underdog mentality. That is why most adults preach and never listen. Raina is the first who becomes genuinely interested in him as a person, which he, ironically and sadly, cannot fully reciprocate. From his point of view, she is so perfect that he persistently fails to recognise her as a real person. His juvenile infatuation is understandable, but it also blinds him from the truth (cf. Thompson 2007: 337). While the facts about his life provide the most basic orientation, Thompson is not interested in a traditional autobiography at all. Readers' tentative blends at the end of chapter I may be varied, as the autobiographer sets the stage for multiple directions. Despite the fact that there is this shaping presence, the absence of a verbal narrator during key sequences and the dramatisation of Craig's worst experiences creates a tension between the particularities of his early life and the promise of any autobiography that life is a journey and has to lead somewhere (cf. Kövecses 2010: 4, 71). In the fifth and final chapter these questions take centre stage.

# **5 Autobiographical Comics**

# **5.1 The Conceptual Ambiguity of Autobiography**

# **5.1.1 A Struggle with Definitions**

In their widely acknowledged introduction to the study of life writing, *Reading Autobiography* (2010), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson associate the term 'autobiography' with the "Enlightenment subject" and the "master narrative of 'the sovereign self ' as an institution of literature and culture" (2010: 3). This usually meant eminent white males looking back at a lifetime of achievement in the public sphere, a concept that was "vigorously challenged in the wake of postmodern and postcolonial critiques" (2010: 3). Accordingly, Smith and Watson treat autobiography as a specific type of "*life writing*" (2010: 4), which is their preferred term for a more inclusive practice that "takes a life, one's own or another's, as its subject" and may as well be "biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore autobiographical" (2010: 4). Alternatively, they speak of "*life narrative*" as "a general term for acts of self-presentation of all kinds and in diverse media that take the producer's life as their subject, whether written, performative, visual, filmic, or digital" (2010: 4; see also 95–6). According to this logic, autobiographical comics are life narratives, as they do not exclusively rely on the written word.

While this classification promotes an openness towards other media, it also introduces categories that combine codes and (sub)genres in extreme ways: 'life writing' is limited to a single code – the written word, but can be anything from historical novel to biography. 'Life narrative', however, can take any (multimodal) form, but has to be autobiographical. These definitions are quickly abandoned on the following page, when Smith and Watson speak of "life writing and biography" (2010: 5) as two distinct practices. There they argue that in "life writing, subjects write about their own lives predominantly", whereas in "biography, scholars of other people's lives document and interpret those lives from a point of view external to the subject" (2010: 5). The term 'scholars' implies that biography is a more academic, evidence-based endeavour that is closer to historical research (cf. 2010: 14), whereas autobiographies can be written by anyone relying on memories alone (cf. 2010: 13). It is a central aim of this introductory part to demonstrate that the neat separation between biographical and autobiographical writing remains questionable. Therefore, I prefer Smith and Watson's more inclusive first definition of 'life writing', which I discuss in the context of Liz Stanley's notion of 'auto/biography'.

Not surprisingly, Smith and Watson find their neat generic distinctions challenged by "texts that combine biographical and autobiographical modes of narration" (2010: 7), as "contemporary practices increasingly blend them into a hybrid, suggesting that life narrative indeed is a moving target and an everchanging practice without absolute rules" (2010: 8). They make a last attempt at clear demarcations in the context of readers' responses, where they associate "a different set of expectations" (2010: 14) with autobiography, in contrast to biography and especially the novel. Michael A. Chaney believes that "the question of whether any given narrative belongs to fiction or autobiography is ultimately one that readers must negotiate" (2011: 4), which implies that the trustworthiness of the auto/biographical text is established in the telling and is not determined by paratextual genre labels. In chapter 3 I am going to introduce Elisabeth El Refaie's 'strategies of authentication' (cf. 2012: 135–78), which foreground the idea that truth is a performance that is negotiated with readers during the transaction with the text. Smith and Watson claim that autobiography predominantly foregrounds "rhetorical acts" that engage readers in a more direct intersubjective communication with the writers, who are "justifying their own perceptions, upholding their reputations, disputing the accounts of others, settling scores, conveying cultural information, and inventing desirable futures, among others" (2010: 13). This is an interesting observation, as it brings the written genre of autobiography more in line with the oral tradition of spontaneous storytelling, Fludernik's 'natural' narratology (cf. 2005) and what Michael Bamberg calls 'small stories' (cf. Bamberg 2007) in narrative psychology. Moreover, Smith and Watson acknowledge a wide range of potential motivations for life writing, which means that 'truth-telling' is not an end in itself, but serves a higher purpose. As El Refaie argues, there is always a "persuasive purpose" for which the auto/biographers have to "draw in" readers (2012: 179). They have to win their trust and entangle them in the negotiations of lives and histories that auto/biographies pursue.

As we have seen with *Blankets*, it already starts with the genre label – 'an illustrated novel' – on the cover and extends to all areas of the front matter. On the credits page Thompson states: "This graphic novel is based on personal experiences, though the names have been changed, and certain characters, places, and incidents have been modified in the service of the story" (2007: n. p.). Here, the line between fact and fiction is hard to draw and ultimately pointless. Following Gérard Genette (1997), Smith and Watson argue that the "peritexts and epitexts" of an auto/biography "comprise a threshold that can dramatically affect its interpretation and reception by variously situated reading communities" (2010: 100). The cultural mediators and gatekeepers, such as teachers, provide a lens through which the narrative is to be viewed. Smith and Watson use James Frey's 'autobiography' as an example of 'reframing', as his "editor persuaded him to recast *A Million Little Pieces* as a memoir rather than a novel" (2010: 101). This caused an outrage when it was first endorsed by Oprah Winfrey and her book club as a paragon of a redemption narrative, only to be reviled later on when it was discovered that Frey invented parts of it (cf. Versaci 2007: 34–6; Miller 2007: 538). As artefacts and handcrafted objects, autobiographical comics are less likely to trick readers into confusing cartoon drawings with a mimetic representation of reality.

Despite the ubiquitous mantra in autobiographical research that this genre operates with constructed realities (cf. e.g. El Refaie 2012: 7; Whitlock & Poletti 2008: xv), a lot of academic discourse is still dedicated to the truth value of these texts, presumably because general readers tend to take Philippe Lejeune's autobiographical pact very seriously. He argues that, "for there to be autobiography (and personal literature in general), the *author*, the *narrator*, and the *protagonist* must be identical", which, of course, immediately "raises a number of problems" (1989: 5). Lejeune is quick to point out the shortcomings of his own proposal: "is it really the same person, the baby who is born in such and such a clinic, in an era of which I have no memory whatsoever – and me?" (1989: 9). While autobiography's "aim is not simple verisimilitude, but resemblance to the truth" (1989: 22), authors are said to metaphorically sign a contract with their readers by putting their proper names on the covers, which guarantees an honest attempt to tell the truth to the best of their abilities. Nancy Miller speaks of "the pleasure that comes from genre satisfaction" (2007: 541), which implies that many readers approach a text with clear expectations – in this case disclosures about an actual life – and appreciate it when writers keep their end of the bargain. Yet, appealing to potential readers involves more than telling 'the truth' and authors' agendas are more complex and varied than stating what 'really' happened.

Marjane Satrapi's decision to begin *Persepolis* with "The Veil" (2007: 3–9) is a personal, political and feminist statement, but it also provides an access point for westerners, who comprise her main readership (cf. Whitlock 2006: 972). The first moral dilemma she offers is a simple decision between black and white, the veil and Marji's face, fundamentalism and freedom. Satrapi actively promotes empathy for or even identification with her younger self (cf. El Refaie 2012: 188), which is important for the readers' acceptance of an otherwise highly unusual or even unorthodox life. At the time of publication France was considering to ban all religious symbols from public life, especially headscarves (cf. Whitlock 2006: 974), which made the text topical, more easily relatable and more likely to be noticed by the press. The book became a phenomenon and "sold a record three hundred thousand copies in France" (Chute 2010: 136) alone, which indicates that the cartoonist managed to attract a broad mainstream readership. However, it seems that the "apparent visual simplicity" (2010: 137) of her graphic style and the alleged universal appeal of the child protagonist, which Satrapi clearly encourages, led to a somewhat superficial reading of the narrative (cf. Chute 2010: 138). While the first three pages present a simplistic black and white scenario (cf. 2007: 3–5), both literally (cf. 2007: 5) and figuratively, the first panel of page 6 shows Marji caught between the two cultures, as she is said to be "very religious" (2007: 6/1). Her parents put her in an impossible position by being leftist, liberal, westernised and upper-class (cf. Chute 2010: 143), so that the two identities do not blend easily. Thus, her transcultural identity becomes a manifestation of larger conflicts, which makes her personal life political. In an article for *The Guardian* from December 2003 Satrapi called the French government's plan to ban the veil "every bit as repressive" as the Iranian regime's law that all women had to wear one in public (Satrapi 2003: n. p.; see also Chute 2010: 137). In both cases young women are treated as if they could not decide for themselves and needed the authorities to determine for them what to think and what to do. Satrapi won over western audiences as a seemingly staunch defender of 'our' liberal ideals and women's rights, a freedom fighter and member of the resistance, but the matter may be slightly more complicated than that. In the introduction to *Persepolis* Satrapi announces that her major motivation to create the comic was a more differentiated view of Iran (cf. 2007: n. p.), using her own family history as an illustration of diverging beliefs and ideologies. Writers – like readers – are all entangled in specific private, social and historical contexts that shape the subject. This aspect of *Persepolis* tends to be overlooked when teenage girls in the west can easily identify with Marji and her problems. That is why Smith and Watson state that every autobiography has an 'ideological I' (cf. 2010: 76–8) next to the identities that readers usually distinguish. There is a tendency to discredit political views as 'ideological' when they do not correspond to one's own convictions, but the entanglement of human beings in a cultural web of ideas and practices makes every point of view partial and historically determined. The ideological content of a text may become simplified or downplayed through paratexts (cf. 2010: 100), reviews and educational framings, in case they provide a single prism through which readers are encouraged to perceive a book.

In her article on graphic novels as a teaching tool in high schools and teacher training courses Carola Hecke discusses a project at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in some detail which involved reading Satrapi's *Persepolis* and Jessica Abel's semi-autobiographical *La Perdida* with a group of pre-service teachers (2008/09; 2009/10). They developed teaching concepts and materials based on these books and then tested them with a group of students from a local secondary school who came to university especially for these lessons (cf. Hecke 2011: 660). In a footnote Hecke warns that "graphic novels, like all other types of literature and cultural representations, never simply show a real world, but always a more or less fictionalized as well as complexly mediated version of this world" (2011: 663). As the following statement implies, additional texts were used to offer more information and different perspectives on the narrative (cf. Vanderbeke 2006: 374):

… the students' comments suggested that due to their greater knowledge concerning the graphic novels' cultural contexts (history, traditions, and social conditions), they may be better equipped to achieve cultural understanding in a real-life situation if they were to meet a member of one of the cultures that appeared in the graphic novels and which they researched in the course. The new insights led to a different attitude toward other cultures in general and to a more differentiated view of Mexican and Iranian people in particular, and they allowed students to identify and overcome some of their prejudices and cultural biases. (2011: 661)

Considering the length and sequential nature of the project, it would have been interesting to know how the reading progressed, which types of activities were used for each stage, which learner texts were created and how the tasks were interlinked. Hecke addresses the importance of enactment, that "students should put themselves, to the greatest extent possible, in a given character's place" (2011: 665), which involves 'perspective-taking', 'aesthetic projection' and 'roletaking' (cf. 2011: 662; Batson 2009: 6–7). This was intended to "allow a closer look seemingly from within" (2011: 665). In view of the procedural nature of reading, the multiplicity of selves in autobiographical texts and the inevitable process of viewpoint compression, it would have been interesting to know whose point of view students reconstructed, based on which particular scene and with what kind of background knowledge (e.g. reading vs. 'having read'). In other words: do these performances serve as learner texts (while reading) that feed into other activities or are they intended as post-reading tasks that retrospectively highlight turning points in the narrative?

I have already indicated the centrality of dramatisation to comics narration, so acting/embodiment is a very helpful way to engage with the medium. Jutta Rymarczyk offers an interesting approach to Shaun Tan's *The Arrival* via pantomime and tableaux vivants, which are intended to bridge the gulf between reception and text production (cf. 2011: 17–19). Students embody the characters to experience what it feels like to be in these situations and then decide which words and phrases they already know or still need to be able to talk about the context. This is vastly different from traditional reading comprehension tasks and more in line with an embodied approach. Although I would read *The Arrival* in parts, this is a great illustration of using drama techniques during a particular stage of the reading process with a particular purpose and a perspective of how the learner text contributes to an ongoing engagement with the narrative. I am sure that Hecke's enactments, which she calls "a welcome variation from the oral or written analysis and interpretation routine" (2011: 662), equally served a particular purpose in the sequence, but the article condenses a lot of information into just five pages dedicated to the project (cf. 2011: 660–5). Since the present discussion is about 'drawing in' (cf. El Refaie 2012: 179) readers, who are asked to role-play characters from a comics narrative, Iser's coordination of perspectives becomes relevant again. Whose experiences and point of view do students believe that they understand better, based on what inputs and insights?

Hecke's students related their increased intercultural communicative competence as much to their own research of the cultural background as to the engagement with the graphic novels. The author states that the overall aim was to obtain a more differentiated view of present-day Mexicans and Iranians (cf. 2011: 661, 663), not of Abel's or Satrapi's unusual life stories. This raises the question what exactly the role of literature – and comics in particular – is in this context. Hecke names "visual literacy" (2011: 653, 657) or "comics literacy" (2011: 659) as a second major concern, without explicitly stating how this influenced lesson planning or whether students had any prior knowledge of or experience with such texts. The project highlights the difficulties of teaching intercultural communicative competence through literature while addressing the specific medium in more detail *and* the literary genre of autobiography, although it does not become clear whether that was an issue at all. Another challenge for teachers is to strike the right balance between aesthetic reading/projection and "analytical tasks" (2011: 663), which require the exact opposite – a critical distance to characters and a certain suspicion towards their beliefs and attitudes.

In *Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives* (2012), an edited volume on the use of comics in university classrooms, one finds two articles that warn against the single-text approach (cf. Delanoy 2015: 24), for example by using *Persepolis* to inform undergraduate students about Iran. Adrielle Mitchell is especially critical of such a procedure:

It probably helps that Satrapi's censorious take on the post-1979 regime change accords with many of our own biases, and further, that she takes pains to Westernize her self-depiction such that European and American young people can exclaim over and over again that 'Marji' seems like everyone they grew up with, and like themselves. The highly problematic nature of this facile identification aside, this empathic response (carefully fostered, I believe, by Satrapi) has ensured that thousands of students […] have 'learned about Iran' through this accessible, just-serious-enough-without-beingdepressing, memoir. The real question raised by examples like *Persepolis*, then, is not why they are so popular, but how to responsibly consume their didactic material. (2012: 205)

Opposing the educational value of 'transportation' (cf. Green 2004; 2008), Mitchell suggests that *Persepolis* would be an ideal text to develop critical thinking: "Graphic memoirs like *Persepolis* work well in pedagogical situations designed to push students to move beyond superficial understandings (of lifestory, of comics, and of places like Iran) into more considered, textually responsive interpretations" (2012: 208). This is seconded by Jonathan D'Amore in "Serial Self-Portraits: Framing Student Conversations About Graphic Memoir", who stresses the importance of genre competence in engaging with autobiographical texts: "Graphic memoirs provide a unique pedagogical tool for illustrating to students the rather complicated interplay of identity, authorship, and creativity in autobiography" (2012: 210). Hecke privileges intercultural communicative competence and visual literacy (cf. Hecke 2011: 653, 660), which are both relevant, but Mitchell and D'Amore also raise an important point in tying autobiographical work in the classroom to critical media literacy and genre awareness. This is perfectly illustrated in *Autobiographies: Presenting the Self* (cf. Hallet 2015a), which offers very useful ideas for autobiographical storytelling in educational settings (e.g. using material anchors, childhood photos, smartphone videos or comic strips), even though genre competence and critical media literacy are not directly addressed in this context (cf. Hallet 2015a: 7). This part sets out to foreground the major links between key concerns in autobiographical studies and critical media literacy and to demonstrate what role autobiographical comics can play in such a context due to their specific mediality. I intend to return to the articles in *Autobiographies: Presenting the Self* whenever possible to highlight how these tasks can serve as practical examples of the points I am going to raise on a more theoretical level. As a starting point, we look at two popular terms that provide a general orientation of how critics conceive of autobiography in the medium of comics.

In her article "Autographics: The Seeing 'I' of the Comics" (2006:) Gillian Whitlock shortens Leigh Gilmore's term 'autobiographics' to 'autographics' (cf. Whitlock 2006: 966), which has become a widely used term for the genre (e.g. Smith & Watson 2010: 168). Two years later Whitlock – together with Anna Poletti – offers a somewhat tongue-in-cheek 'dictionary entry' for her own neologism:

*Autographics, n. Áwtográffiks. 2007: Life narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials. A practice of reading the signs, symbols and techniques of visual arts in life narrative. See also autobiography, biography, testimony, autobiographics, comics, self-portrait, avatar*…*.* (Whitlock & Poletti 2008: v)

Whitlock claims that comics are especially well suited to address difficult, traumatic memories, as they allow the unspeakable to be represented solely through visuals or even left out altogether, only to be recovered by readers in the form of closure/conceptual integration. Comics also make certain real-life contexts more approachable and relatable, precisely because artists often eschew photorealism and build bridges through the mediating power of cartooning. By abstracting characters, actions and locations from their highly specific contexts, comics allow for greater empathy and readers' engagement, of which *Persepolis* is a good example. Due to the artistic stylisation of otherwise horrendous acts of cruelty (cf. e.g. Satrapi 2007: 52/1; 102/1), Satrapi's family history can be made accessible to (younger) readers, who would be greatly disturbed by the same scenes rendered in photorealistic images. The same logic applies to the aforementioned identification with the protagonist. The price of cartooning, however, is a substantial artistic intervention that is more visible and transparent in this medium than in prose.

The term 'auto*graphics*' also stresses an artist's idiosyncratic way of 'perfinking' (cf. Bruner 1986: 69): perceiving, feeling and thinking. I have already discussed 'graphiation' in the context of style and overall design as a unique vision that transcends technical reproduction for the mass market. Whitlock and Poletti argue that "graphic life narrative resists reduction to summary or translation into a single medium [prose], and requires that we pause and explore the sight, the sounds, the sensational feel of autobiographical representations" (2008: v). From this perspective, autographics is more experiential and completely dependent on visual representation, which poses problems to literary critics who "are now called upon to develop more advanced visual and cultural literacies to interpret the intersections of various modes and media and the complex embodiments of avatar, autobiographer, and reader/viewer gathered under the sign of autographics" (2008: vi; see also Whitlock 2006: 968). The various manifestations of the autobiographical selves in the text are a major concern of this part, as they are more varied and more visible in this medium than in prose (cf. Versaci 2007: 36, 38).

'Graphics' as an established technical term, e.g. in 'computer graphics', is very inclusive and could be associated with various forms of visualisation. Yet, Whitlock and Poletti are quick to point out that the term 'graphic' – in the sense of 'explicit' – *does* derive from drawing and visual representation. Due to their heritage, autobiographical comics are prone to show "bodies in pleasure and pain" (2008: vii). This is important because of "the ways that embodiment and subjectivity emerge in strikingly different terms in visual and performance media than in written narratives" (2008: viii). Therefore, comics should be more frequently approached through the dramatic arts, as their close association with prose narratives is usually indebted to critics' academic background. Using photos as a visual medium for autobiographical work in the classroom (cf. Henseler & Schäfers 2015) automatically foregrounds (social) performance (cf. Goffman 1959) and the necessity of critical media literacy.

Another frequently used term for the genre is (graphic) memoir, e.g. in Smith and Watson's book (cf. 2010: 168–73), but especially in the second edition of Duncan, Smith and Levitz's *The Power of Comics*, which extends the original two pages of the first edition (2009) to 34 pages (cf. 2015: 229–62) – a clear indication of how important this genre has become. The authors dedicate a whole chapter to the 'memoir', a term which they explicitly prefer over 'autobiography':

In an autobiography there is an emphasis on documenting one's life, providing facts about events, whereas the writer of a memoir is often more concerned with conveying her or his feelings about events. […] An autobiography usually spans all of the person's life up to the point of the writing. A memoir usually covers a much shorter span of time, and often focuses on particular life-changing incidents and their consequences. (2015: 230)

This is in line with US-American reservations about the term 'autobiography', which seems to be less problematic in a European context. The authors make the important observation that many autobiographical comics take a slice-oflife approach, e.g. in the case of diary comics (cf. Cates 2011) and serialised publications (cf. Pekar 2003), which may put traditional concepts to the test that have been derived from autobiographical studies. In educational settings, there is a tendency to prefer graphic novel memoirs over shorter forms, precisely because they are closer to the literary genre of autobiography and prose fiction in general. I return to this question at the very end of this part, but first I present my preferred term 'auto/biography' for the genre in a general sense, which I use alongside the medium-specific terms 'autographics' or simply 'autobiographical comics'.

Liz Stanley, Professor of Sociology at Edinburgh University, offers a unique view on auto/biography in her 1992 study *The Auto/Biographical I*. She uses the term "to encompass all these ways of writing a life and also the ontological and epistemological links between them" (1992: 3). As a lesbian feminist with a working-class background, a sociologist and a practising biographer, she brings a unique perspective to the discussion of life writing, especially in the form of an ideological and material reading (cf. 1992: 2–3, 92–3). She rigorously opposes what she calls the "realist fallacy" (1992: 8) of modern biography, which attempts "the reconstruction on paper of the essential fundamental person" (1992: 7). Stanley argues that the auto/biographical subject never existed as a person in exactly the form presented in the text, which means that what we encounter in the narrative is one possible way to construct a believable subject that is worth reading about:

Biographers just like autobiographers are writers, albeit writers bound by a perceived duty to produce some kind of factually-located account. They too select, omit, invent a narrative form, direct the reader's interpretation of the subject, interpret, conclude. Biography is not the representation but the re-making, not the reconstruction but the construction, in written form of a life. (1992: 135; see also Halpern 1978: 1, 4; Eakin 1999: 107)

Inescapably, she argues, the biographer is "a socially-located person, one who is sexed, raced, classed, aged, to mention no more, and is so every bit as much as an autobiographer is" (1992: 7). The same socio-historical entanglement applies to the reader: "'Reading' is a contingent activity deeply rooted in our autobiographies and the tools, means and knowledges these provide" (1992: 84). Accordingly, the auto/biographer offers one particular angle among a whole range of possibilities: "The past, like the present, is the result of competing negotiated *versions* of what happened, why it happened, with what consequence" (1992: 7). Wildly different auto/biographies have been written over the years by or about the same person, which attests to the dependence of life writing on particular approaches and specific viewpoints. In the case of Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel's *Quitter* or Liz Prince's *Tomboy*, the titles encapsulate the stances the adult autobiographers take towards their own lives. This is viewpoint compression in the purest form, reducing the meaning of a text to a single word. In both cases the narrators appear 'in person' as characters in the narratives and pursue specific agendas that they ostentatiously announce on the cover and systematically maintain throughout. In these cases the lenses through which they view their own lives determine both the foregrounding of specific incidents and their contextualisation in the form of 'grand narratives' that speak of shattered dreams, on the one hand, and a life-long fight against gender stereotyping, on the other. Obviously, readers are strongly encouraged to adopt the narrators' viewpoints and accept the titles as facts. Here it makes sense to encourage students to unpack the simplistic one-word summaries and look at the decompressed life narratives with a critical eye.

One of Stanley's major arguments concerns the social isolation and foregrounding of individual lives, which Paul John Eakin associates with "the myth of autonomous individualism" (1999: 51). According to this logic, the selfmade (business) *man* overcomes all obstacles, thwarts his opponents and climbs the social ladder – fuelled by his ambition, driven by an iron will and always prepared to make sacrifices for the ultimate triumph. Yet, even more unassuming texts tend to foreground a life severed from all social bonds: "Both biography and autobiography lay claim to facticity, yet both are by nature artful enterprises which select, shape, and produce a very unnatural product, for no life is lived quite so much under a single spotlight as the conventional form of written auto/ biographies suggests" (Stanley 1992: 3–4). The hero either becomes a giant among wo/men and/or a socially awkward loner, while the secondary characters are frequently reduced to mere functions in the text. Stanley claims that the very form of the genre invites such a distorted presentation of a life: "Following the biographical subject in a linear and chronological way effectively trains a spotlight on them and them alone. The effect is that everyone else this person knew is thereby made to have only shadowy existence. Thus is the contemporary role of the biographical subject among their peers misrepresented, for we are shown them as a Gulliver among Lilliputians" (1992: 9; see also 131). The ideal of "Enlightenment individualism" (Eakin 1999: 47) can lead to an "ego-focussed" (Stanley 1992: 132) portrayal that downplays family ties, the role of mentors and forerunners in the field, professional support and cooperation, as much as social relationships in general (cf. Smith & Watson 2010: 86–8). Nancy Miller defines the "model of a relational self at the heart of the autobiographical project" (2007: 544) as essential to feminist approaches, but I believe that it is necessary to accept what Eric Neisser calls the "the interpersonal self " (cf. 1988: 36) as a general fact: "in autobiography the relational is not optional. Autobiography's story is about the web of entanglement in which we find ourselves" (Miller 2007: 544). In the same way that the self is hard to disentangle from its social ties, 'autobiography' proves problematic to sever from its transgeneric affiliations.

As a biographer, Stanley is concerned with the 'genius' of famous people, which is partly created through biographies that have too much in common with legends and myths. Eakin also notes a cultural difference between the Enlightenment subject as a role model of independence in western cultures and other traditions that idealise strong ties to the local communities and even the environment. Instead of the myth of self-realisation, we find anthropological accounts of how the individual fits into the larger picture of tribal life and the narratives told by cultures about themselves (cf. Eakin 1999: 68–85). Stanley's theatrical metaphors of staging and spotlighting are very appropriate. While superhero comics are often ostentatiously melodramatic, which is highlighted, or maybe even parodied in Alan Moore and David Lloyd's *V for Vendetta*, autobiographical comics, I would argue, also have a tendency to borrow theatrical tropes. While Spiegelman's masked performers and re-enactments of the past helped to raise the bar of autobiographical work in the medium, the autobiographical self as a tragic hero, having to overcome social isolation and insurmountable odds, is a tightrope walk between narrativising a life and borrowing too liberally from (Gothic) melodrama: trapped hero(in)es, absent mothers, despotic fathers, terrible secrets, mental illness, a breakdown of communication etc. This raises the question of accountability and truth-telling or to what extent readers are willing to accept deviations from facts in the service of storytelling and personal myths.

Smith and Watson counter the potential allegation of deception by "asking what we expect life narrators to tell the truth about. Are we expecting fidelity to the facts of their biographies, to lived experience, to self-understanding, to the historical moment, to social community, to prevailing beliefs about diverse identities, to the norms of autobiography as a literary genre itself?" (2010: 15). Since the biographer "*constructs* the biographical subject" (Stanley 1992: 9), Stanley asks for an 'accountable biography', for which "biographers should not only make available to readers as much of the evidence, and of different kinds, that they work from as possible, but also an account of what facts, opinions and interpretations they find preferable and why" (1992: 9–10). This, of course, implies a more active and discerning role for readers, who become the co-creators of the auto/biographical text (cf. 1992: 124). Stanley's feminist and clearly political approach demands "a rebellion of the active reader, a common reader who disputes academic insistence upon how texts 'ought' to be read and interpreted, instead trusting their own interpretative powers in the face of theoretical vanguards" (1992: 91; see also 131). This defiant refusal to succumb to any doctrines has to be seen in the context of postmodernist theories dominating the 1990s, on the one hand, and the danger of grand narratives perpetuated in the texts themselves, on the other.

Stanley's notion of a critical edition of life-writing poses the question what kind of genre auto/biography can or rather should be. She clearly wants to see an end to myth-making and an honest approach to historiography. One of the central issues of this part is to explore the reliability and authenticity of life-writing, which cannot be separated from the media in which these auto/biographical acts are performed. As in documentary film-making, the fragmentation and *heteroglossia* of comics autobiographies should make them less likely to be mistaken for 'the truth'. For prose, Stanley sees a particular problem in the stance that biographers take, who "play God, or the great leveller, and reduce such complexity [she means the life of Virginia Woolf] to one omnipotent view" (1992: 11). She is worried that the "conventional power relations existing between authors and readers are among the last to be questioned and convincingly challenged" (1992: 17). Were it for Stanley, the writers of auto/biography should be obliged to "locate themselves as a character within the text", positioning themselves in relation to the sources and the "*processes*, rather than the *product*" of auto/biographical writing (1992: 136). Nancy Pedri argues that autobiographical comics are more likely to succeed in this endeavour: "graphic memoir reminds readers that what they are reading is a very human story, one in which the narrator is not a super, all-knowing being, but rather an ordinary person telling his life in his own terms as best he can" (2015: 136). Yet, this is not good enough. The friendly person next door is not automatically more reliable or trustworthy. One advantage that comics have is that their layout encourages closure and allows artists to enlist readers as fellow detectives instead of presenting streamlined narratives. Past and present, narrating and experiencing I, the autobiographical act and the product, the evidence and the conclusion can all co-exist on the page in a much more fragmentary manner, which is especially true of the most recognised books in the field.

Despite the fact that Art Spiegelman's *MAUS* repeatedly "points to the circumstances of its own making" (Hatfield 2005: 140), the cartoonist felt the need to share his sources and the creative process with the reading public in *METAMAUS* (2011). Spiegelman seems to encourage a comparison between the original recordings/transcripts of his interviews with his father and their transformation into an auto/biography in *MAUS*. In other words: instead of presenting a 'mega-blend' or 'grand narrative', the foregrounded fragmentation of the source material allows readers to make sense of this life and become active contributors to the process of negotiating the meaning of lived experiences and life-writing under specific social circumstances. It is important to note that *MAUS* itself – even without the extra volume of paratexts – effectively uses the visual fragmentation of the medium to foreground tensions and contradictions that cannot easily be resolved.

In this sense, *MAUS* is a perfect illustration of Stanley's two key arguments: it is impossible to separate biography from autobiography as human beings are naturally tied to social environments and maintain important relationships with their significant others. Secondly, both Spiegelman's *MAUS* and *METAMAUS* represent the kind of critical edition or 'making-of ' that she finds more honest and helpful. Commenting on the CD-ROM edition of *MAUS* (1994), a precursor to this volume of paratexts, Eakin finds that this "story of the story", another frame narrative if we count the one included in the book itself, "is much more complete and complex" (2011: 15). This is a fascinating observation, considering that the archival material Spiegelman presents here is in a far greater state of fragmentation. It is less complete in terms of a narrative, but more encompassing and impressive in sheer scope, a testament to "the depth of Spiegelman's commitment to documentary truth" (2011: 14), as Eakin puts it. This highlights the fact that, for readers, the accessibility of archival material increases dramatically with its transformation into a narrative, but usually at the cost of leaving sizeable chunks of a life aside that do not easily blend into the one chosen for publication. This illustrates the necessity of looking behind the curtains of auto/biographical performances and of extending the range of texts to compensate for the myopic view that a single narrative may convey. This is especially necessary in the context of critical media literacy (cf. Stanley 1992: 91, 95). Stanley argues that the "narrative form is highly seductive" (1992: 120), which means that educators should invite "reading against the grain" (1992: 95). Autobiographical comics are an ideal genre to explore the construction and seduction of narratives in various rereading activities. Artists are always forced to compromise or may decide to sacrifice what seem to be essential elements of their lives in favour of a more coherent vision for their books. In an interview with Mike Whybark, for example, Craig Thompson acknowledges that he excluded his sister from *Blankets*, as her presence would have been counterproductive to the type of narrative he wanted to tell (cf. Whybark 2003: transcript 6). This is one of the reasons why the book is called a 'novel' and not a straightforward autobiography, but this is precisely the point: the line is hard to draw.

Stanley highlights the importance of *Bildungsroman* or fictional autobiography as an early success in the novel form and a key factor in the development of auto/biography (cf. 1992: 11–12; 59–60; Smith & Watson 2010: 10, 91). This generic forerunner provided narrative conventions and promoted the idea of a life script that should be followed, which can seem ideological when taken as prescriptive and worth emulating without critical scrutiny (cf. Stanley 1992: 12). Stanley argues that "written lives have an essentially intertextual character" (1992: 14), which is obvious in their complex referentiality to real people, but which is less obvious in their symbiotic relations to medialised, narrativised and fictional(ised) lives, to social expectations and culturally available life course models, or to generic conventions and the institutionalised dissemination of life narratives. These models are going to play a role in the next chapter on blending, where they represent important (generic) input spaces for the construction of life narratives. One important cultural intertext that is frequently overlooked is the genre's own history.

#### **5.1.2 A Brief History of Autographics**

There is widespread consensus that the roots of present-day autobiographical comics reach back to the underground comix movement of the 1960s and 70s (cf. e.g. Witek 2004: paragraph 2; Jacobs 2008: 61–2; Chute 2010: 14; El Refaie 2012: 31), which was closely tied to San Francisco counterculture and the larger social issues of the time. El Refaie is quick to point out the subversive streak of early autobiographical comics: "What these underground-inspired works have in common is the apparent desire of their creators to use brutally honest – even exhibitionist – accounts of personal experiences as a way of challenging puritanical American society and its concept of the 'normal' " (2012: 38; see also Chute 2010: 15). Technological advances in off-set printing made it feasible to self-publish comics and sell them in head shops and 'boutiques', which circumvented the Comics Code, an instrument of self-censorship in mainstream comics, and opened the door for adult content (cf. Chute 2010: 15; Gardner 2012: 120). Gradually, the underground built its own ecosystem and a growing number of artists found a new readership that was willing to embrace the outrageous offerings of uncensored comics. Since art was conceived of as political at the time and tied to a social movement, there was a need to document and report on American ways of life that did not fit the national narrative: "The underground press made its own news; those reporting on the news were not objective journalists but participants of the very protests and rallies being covered, and what they reported often bled, either inevitably or deliberately, into autobiography" (Gardner 2012: 118).

Jared Gardner associates "the official beginnings of the underground comix movement" (cf. 2012: 119; see also Chute 2010: 16) with *Zap Comix* (1968– 2014), which increasingly became Robert Crumb's vehicle or "tool for personal and unfettered expression" (2012: 120). Since then, many feminists have come to object to the chauvinistic, self-indulgent, "unflinching, and often disturbing honesty" (Chute 2010: 16) of these strips. In response to "misogynist and racist fantasies" (Gardner 2012: 125), female artists started their own comic books, such as *Wimmen's Comix* (cf. Witek 2004: paragraphs 25–38), to present a very different view on contemporary life. Hillary Chute's *Graphic Women* begins with the controversial figure of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, whose marriage to Robert Crumb made her a *persona non grata* among feminists, whom she rejected herself on grounds of their simplistic perpetrator-victim-logic (cf. Chute 2010: 37). For understandable reasons, the canon of autobiographical texts for the classroom is heavily selective, and one of the reasons is a long tradition of self-deprecating and sexually explicit writing for an adult audience (cf. e.g. Jacobs 2008). While Chester Brown's *I Never Liked You* (2007) is a comingof-age story that is highly appropriate for the classroom (cf. Hallet 2012b), *Paying For It* (2011) is Brown's paean to prostitution and the great experiences he has had since he gave up on romantic love. Jeffrey Brown's strips are great, but his early work is too explicit for students, judging from the 'parental advisory' warning on the cover of *Clumsy* (2006). I return to the question of canon in the final chapter, where I argue in favour of extending the range of comics that are read in school beyond *MAUS*, *Persepolis* and *Fun Home*.

Justin Green's *Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary* (1972) started a trend of very personal and confessional autobiographies in the medium of comics that has never subsided since then (cf. Gardner 2008: 1; El Refaie 2012: 37–8). Gardner argues that 1972 can be seen as the major turning point in the genre's history: "it was as if someone suddenly turned on the tap, releasing a torrent of autobiographical memoirs within the comics form, to the extent that today one can identify subgenres and historical movements within autobiographical comics" (2012: 141; see also Duncan, Smith & Levitz 2015: 232–3). In his "Introduction" to *Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary* Art Spiegelman acknowledges Green's vital role in establishing autographics as a serious form of self-reflection: "Justin turned comic book boxes into intimate, secular confession booths and thereby profoundly changed the history of comics. […] I readily confess that without his work there could have been no *MAUS*" (Spiegelman 2009: n. p.). Since Green had left the Catholic Church many years before, his confession took the form of an autobiographical text. Howard Sklar's understanding of empathy turns readers into jury members when transacting with texts, which means that they have to decide which pieces of evidence to accept, which perspective to take and when to oppose a dubious statement (cf. 2013: 55–6). Combined with Lejeune's autobiographical pact, which invokes the idea of swearing on the Bible to say the truth and nothing but the truth (cf. 1989: 22), the confessional self-revelation of autobiographical comics takes on the aura of a ritual. Jacobs comments that "for writers and readers of autobiography, the idea of truth telling as a central feature of the genre remains, and in this way shares a central feature of the genres of both legal and spiritual confession" (2008: 81), from which the literary genre may partly derive. "In such a relationship of confession, the writer becomes both penitent and lawbreaker, while the reader becomes both confessor and judge" (2008: 82). In the courtroom, an eye-witness report counts as a form of evidence and the person may even be under oath, but there is no guarantee that what we read in an auto/biography is 'the truth'. As jury members readers have to stay alert and pay attention. If we accept Sklar's conceptual metaphor that reading is jury duty, that some of us are willing to believe the witness, while others are not, role-playing a courtroom scenario, for a change, would shift the focus from 'becoming' characters to performing identities in public *and* critically judging public performances and potential motivations.

When Spiegelman's *MAUS* crossed over from the sub-culture of comics into the literary world, one way for journalists, booksellers, librarians, teachers and publishers to embrace the comic was to emphasise its discontinuity with tradition. In his excellent article "Why Art Spiegelman Doesn't Draw Comics" Joseph Witek addresses early reviews that attributed the invention of a completely new way of telling serious narratives through pictorial means to Spiegelman's genius:

The proposition that *Maus* is an utterly unprecedented work created in a form of Art Spiegelman's own invention is particularly puzzling because even the slightest acquaintance with Spiegelman's artistic career reveals his long and central role in the artistic movement from which not only *Maus* but also a wide array of contemporary comics derive their heritage: the underground comix. (2004: paragraph 2)

Witek suspects a mixture of snobbery and an unwillingness to dive deeper into a suspicious pop-cultural phenomenon that kept critics from recognising Spiegelman's deep entanglement with the comics scene.

For the guardians of elite taste, to acknowledge the forebears of Art Spiegelman's *Maus* is to blur the crucial ideological distinction between high and low art. Far simpler to designate *Maus* as unique and self-engendered while still maintaining that "comics are for kids" than to find a way to discriminate among the huge and bewildering array of comics that exist in the world. (2004: paragraph 5)

Like Spiegelman, Crumb and his fellow underground artists did not appear out of nowhere. They were graphic artists who designed posters and record covers or even worked for one of the humour magazines like Harvey Kurtzman's *Mad* (cf. Witek 2004: paragraphs 16, 23). The magazine's irreverence and satire of mainstream culture was revolutionary in 1950s America and set a precedence for the countercultural output of later decades. Gardner stresses the central importance of Kurtzman (cf. 2012: 114) and his short-lived *Help!* satire magazine (1960–5). Since he could not afford to pay for a whole magazine's worth of content, he introduced "Help's Public Gallery" to reduce the costs and give underground artists a chance to submit their work. So even Crumb went to New York to meet Kurtzman in person and solicit a job (cf. Gardner 2012: 115–6). It was the unique cultural dynamic of the late 1960s and 70s with the attendant promises of sex, drugs (LSD) and revolutionary, avant-garde art that side-tracked commercial illustrators and contributors to humour magazines to try their hand at personal obsessions for a change (cf. Witek 2004: paragraph 24).

Comics artists are usually in touch with previous and future generations of their craft. Spiegelman's *RAW* magazine, which he edited together with his wife Françoise Mouly, saw the publication of *MAUS* in instalments and gave young artists like Charles Burns, Kim Deitch, Ben Katchor or Richard McGuire a forum to experiment with the medium. We can easily detect the origins of Burns's *Black Hole* (2005) and McGuire's *Here* (2014) in "Teen Plague" (Spiegelman & Mouly 1989: 5–25) and "Here" (Spiegelman & Mouly 1989: 669–74). Comics have a history (cf. Oppolzer 2016), often in serialisation, that is sometimes wilfully ignored to emphasise the artistic integrity and unity of their re-packaged identities as 'graphic novels'. Therefore, I agree with Witek "that the brilliance of Art Spiegelman's *Maus* stems not from the artist's transcendence of the comics medium but from a deep understanding of comics traditions and conventions and a fearless reimagining of the medium's possibilities" (2004: paragraph 40).

Spiegelman, in turn, served as a model for many contemporary auto(bio) graphers in the medium. This is little surprising as he won a Pulitzer Prize Special Award for his work, received global recognition and demonstrated how a 'lowly' medium would allow for a complex and serious topic to be portrayed in both an engaging and dignified way. Generally speaking, the 1980s demonstrated a heightened awareness of the medium's potential that came from within the industry/sub-culture and manifested both in production (e.g. *MAUS*, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's *Watchmen*) and in terms of theory. Instead of quoting Spiegelman or Eisner, I turn to Allen Moore, who penned a manual in 1985, entitled *Writing for Comics*, which was republished in 2007. Therein he states the following: "Comics have a capacity for effect that they haven't begun to take advantage of, and are held back by narrow and increasingly obsolete notions of what constitutes a comic story. In order for comics to move forward as a medium, these notions must change" (2007: 6). Thirty years later we are blessed with a wide range of texts that have turned this promise into a reality, but the history of comics reaches back for over one and a half centuries, which is sometimes forgotten when exclusively looking at graphic novels.

Since I introduced Harvey Pekar's *American Splendor* in the previous part, there is no need to revisit it here at length. However, a history of autographics would be incomplete without him. While graphic novelists like Alison Bechdel or Marjane Satrapi are always compared to Spiegelman – in the eyes of many the shining beacon of comics auto/biographers – Pekar focused on slice-of-life narratives that paved the way for John Porcellino's *King-Kat Comics* (cf. 2005; 2007), James Kochalka's *American Elf* (cf. e.g. 2012) and countless other diary and web comic strips afterwards. In his history of autographics, entitled "First-Person Graphic, 1959–2010", Gardner acknowledges Pekar's central role, who became active as an auto/biographer when he met Crumb in Cleveland in 1972 and the two decided to collaborate on some stories. While the first issue of *American Splendor* (1976) still tried to propagate a macho attitude and foregrounded sexual encounters (e.g. "101 Ways To Pick Up Girls …"; "How I Spent My Summer Vacation: 1972"; "Love Story"), this quickly was replaced by "the daily grind of working-class life in middle America" (Gardner 2012: 135). Thus, Pekar established a "tradition of the quotidian" (2012: 137) that turned the ephemera or qualia of daily life into the very substance of autobiographical writing/drawing.

Charles Hatfield's monograph *Alternative Comics* (2005) carries a genre label as its title that he retrospectively applies to the 'art comics' of the 1980s and 90s. These terminological attempts to emphasise continuity within the medium have all been superseded by the marketing term 'graphic novel'. Hatfield specifically lists "Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Lynda Barry, Chester Brown, Dan Clowes, Joe Sacco, and Chris Ware" (2005: xv) as the main representatives. Quite a few names are missing (e.g. Seth) and there are no British artists included (e.g. Al Davidson, Eddie Campbell). What is interesting about this group is their ambivalent relationship to graphic novels as they all started out with the serialised format, even Joe Sacco (*Yahoo* 1–6). While their work has been reprinted as graphic novels, most of it first appeared piecemeal in various forms. Lynda Barry's *One! Hundred! Demons!* (2002), first serialised on Salon.com, has become one of the most quoted and discussed autobiographical texts. On the copyright page and under the table of contents she uses the term "autobifictionalography" (Barry 2002: n. p.) to stress the problem with authenticity in autographics, and her introduction famously begins with: "Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true?/Is it fiction if parts of it are?" (Barry 2002: n. p.).

I discussed my problems with the term 'graphic novel' in the previous part, so I limit my observations to its impact on comics history. There have been a few attempts to isolate 'graphic novels' as a new art form, often by disentangling them from their artistic ties (cf. Baetens & Frey 2015; Hescher 2016), but that would be a misrepresentation of the medium's history. As Joseph Witek demonstrates in his article on *MAUS*, similar attempts were made when the second part of the autobiography won the special Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (cf. 2004: paragraph 1). Despite the brevity of this overview, I have tried to establish that comics do not exist in a vacuum. I am aware of the necessity to occasionally isolate books for the classroom and use them for whatever purposes, but most of the competences that are supposed to be trained in school (e.g. visual literacy, critical media literacy, genre competence, a coordination of different perspectives) require a wider spectrum of texts and some awareness of their (intertextual) entanglements.

# **5.1.3 Autographical Challenges to Autobiographical Genre Theory**

In their introduction to the special issue of *Biography* exclusively dedicated to autographics (31:1; Winter 2008), Whitlock and Poletti observe that "comics are at the leading edge in shaping the autographical turn in criticism to date" (2008: viii). Without context, this may sound like an exaggeration or a blatant case of self-promotion, but the previous three years had seen an unprecedented outpour of highly acclaimed autobiographical comics, such as *Fun Home* in 2006 or Satrapi's bestselling *The Complete Persepolis* (2007) in the wake of the film adaptation. The same can be said about dedicated comics scholarship, such as Charles Hatfield's *Alternative Comics* (2005), Rocco Versaci's *Comics as Literature* (2007), or Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven's guest-edited issue of *Modern Fiction Studies* on graphic narrative (52:4; Winter 2006), which contained some excellent work on autographics. Whitlock's essay (cf. 2006: 965–79) introduced the term 'autographics', Chute's interview with Alison Bechdel uncovered a lot of details concerning the production of *Fun Home* and two essays highlighted the works of Lynda Barry/Marjane Satrapi and Art Spiegelman. What all of these texts have in common is the conviction that autobiographical comics are different. In "Multimodal Constructions of the Self " Dale Jacobs raises six key questions for the study of autographics that all centre on the impact of multimodality on an established prose genre (cf. 2008: 60). He even references the New London Group's essay on multiliteracies (cf. 2008: 64; Cazden et al. 1996) as a general framework, but this provides only the broadest possible form of orientation: "the other design elements are just as important as the linguistic" (Jacobs 2008: 64). Comics as a medium is a very specific configuration of modes and codes with a long history that requires as much "comics literacy", as Carola Hecke correctly observes (2011: 659), as the broader frames of visual literacy or multiliteracies. While all narrative media use foregrounding as an essential strategy, cartooning and mise-en-page are unique ways of achieving such effects in comics. Jacobs's title suggests that even that is not enough, as autobiography as a genre interacts with the medium in unique ways. Therefore, he is interested in "how representations of self and issues of autobiographical meaning-making are constituted in autobiographical comics" (2008: 64). Before we explore Jacob's characteristics in greater detail, we have to look at the broader claims first to get a sense of why artists working in the medium can be said to produce different auto/biographies.

One major argument has already been introduced, which is that the roots of autographics can be traced back to underground comix, which established a new standard of experimentation, irreverence, subversion, tragicomedy, exaggeration and parody (cf. Whitlock & Poletti 2008: ix). By isolating *MAUS*, *Fun Home* or *Persepolis* as graphic-novel masterpieces without a past, critics are prone to underestimate the impact of earlier models. Whitlock and Poletti, for example, point out that readers should not forget about "the epitexts and peritexts that carry the traces of complex textual histories" (2008: x). Like all framing devices, paratexts of this kind point outwards to intertexts, precursors and specific communities, but also inwards, guiding readers through genre labels, endorsements by other artists, cover design, or length – just to name a few factors. Looking at the peritexts of graphic-novel memoirs, it is interesting to see how the artists themselves credit and endorse each other, while the marketing departments of the big publishing houses prefer to see the enthusiastic review of *The New York Times* on the back cover. In Craig Thompson's case, several artists are credited in the 'acknowledgements section' of *Blankets* (cf. 2007: 588), some of which return the favour and praise the book on the front flap (Jules Feiffer, Neil Gaiman, Brian Michael Bendis), while the back cover is dominated by review snippets from *TIME* magazine, *The New York Times Book Review*, *Publishers Weekly* and *Entertainment Weekly*. This is a clear indication that there are two different audiences out there, which necessitates two sets of endorsements.

The second characteristic of autographics is related to Lejeune's autobiographical pact and to what extent readers can trust the auto/biographer that author, narrator and protagonist are indeed the same person. Gardner argues that the constant repetition of the magical word 'I' in prose memoirs helps to maintain the illusion of perfect consistency (cf. 2012: 131), which turns this pronoun both into a narrative anchor and the ultimate blend in autobiographical writing. It is a strong reassurance that the vastly different experiences of all those younger selves can be claimed by a single autobiographical subject. Prose memoirs often start with an excess of 'I's and 'my's to make readers forget how bold some of these claims are. Frank McCourt, for example, begins *Angela's Ashes* in the following way:

**My** father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where **I** was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when **I** was four, **my** brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and **my** sister, Margaret, dead and gone. When **I** look back on **my** childhood **I** wonder how **I** survived at all. (McCourt 1999: 9; my emphasis)

There are at least four 'I's in this short passage: the narrator, the baby at birth, the four-year-old boy, and the child Frank. In the last line we have two 'I's: the 66-year-old narrator (taking McCourt's actual age at the time of publication as an indication, which is speculative) and the child Frank, who could be any age from a few days to twelve years. The close proximity between the two 'I's naturalises identity construction, as readers are likely to take the repetition of the same pronoun as referring to the same person. Despite the fact that we cannot determine how old the two 'I's really are – a newly retired man and a young child – at least we can be sure that it was not McCourt, the narrator, who survived childhood, but Frank. McCourt seems genuinely surprised how 'he' – the boy – managed to survive at all, considering that his – the narrator's – childhood was a constant health hazard.

I started calling the narrator 'McCourt' at the end of the previous paragraph, which should alarm readers – considering what I have already said and what is still to come. However, most readers will not even notice this conflation of (implied) author and narrator, as the appeal of the genre is largely built on this confusion in the first place. Readers want to learn more about the real person, whose name and photo are on the cover. If we ignore the 'implied author' for a moment, to keep it nice and simple, we still have to decide whom the narrator means when he says "When I look back …". Does the 'I' always see the same things when the auto/biographer probes his memory? Did McCourt understand his childhood in exactly the same way as a teenager, young man, middle-aged teacher and retired auto/biographer? The use of present tense seems to suggest that. Would it be more honest to say "When I looked back at my childhood in preparation for this book "? Since McCourt died in 2009, the sentence cannot be literally true for the author at present, but probably was at the time of writing, which returns us to the question of the implied author, whom I have called 'auto/ biographer' throughout. If we accept him as another 'I' in this game of identities, our count goes up to six and reaches a nice balance between three childhood and three adult 'I's that we can discern in these three sentences. However, this narratological complication and multiplication of identities do not bother readers at all, as they effortlessly blend the adults into a narrating I and the children into an experiencing I and gradually all of them into a single 'I', as soon as they understand who Frank McCourt 'really' is, which is the point of reading autobiographies in the first place. Admittedly, this last sentence has an ironic undertone, but it illustrates an important fact: even the most basic distinctions are not clear at all. This is neither the writer's nor the readers' fault. The former cannot be blamed for the fact that our grammar does not distinguish between diachronically different identities of the same individual. The latter cannot be blamed for the ease of reading, when they effortlessly blend this montage of autobiographical facts into a tentative meaning. If anyone is to blame, it is McCourt's parents and their horrible Irishness. This is the next thing readers should be wary of: auto/biographers are always biographers, who present their family, relatives and friends from one point of view and in accordance with the chosen themes of the narratives.

Since emotional truths are central to the study of autobiography, the question arises whose feelings are presented in these first few lines. The narrator says that his sister Margaret was "dead and gone", which is odd, as his twin brothers Oliver and Eugene also died as children. Here, they are still alive and return to Ireland with the four-year-old Frank after having lost their sister Margaret only recently. The experience of a four-year-old boy at the death of his baby sister has to be different from the narrator's retrospective acknowledgement of the fact. When the narrator says "my sister", this is factually true in the sense of genealogy and family trees, but raises questions in every other respect. To what extent can the narrator reclaim her and the loss of her life forty years after the fact? Or maybe "my sister" refers back to the 'I' in "when I was four" and we have a case of internal focalisation from young Frank's point of view or, alternatively, it includes all the boys' reactions. I am still convinced that the three sentences above are easy to understand and that they establish a certain stance of the auto/ biographer towards his own life. They may pose a challenge to narratological analysis all the same.

To return to the initial argument: in prose memoirs personal pronouns obscure the heterogeneity of identities and experiences by facilitating blending. To get a different perspective on this matter, let us consider this extract:

I'm in a playground on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn with my brother, Malachy. He's two, I'm three. We're on the seesaw. Up, down, up, down. Malachy goes up.  Malachy goes down. Seesaw hits the ground. He screams.  Oh, God. Blood is bad.  (McCourt 1999: 19)

Here the narrator playfully pretends to be three again, a case of aesthetic projection. Stylistically, this passage draws attention to itself and represents a case of strategic foregrounding. While readers blindly accepted the beginning of the memoir as a natural way of talking about oneself, McCourt's James Joyce routine startles them and highlights the presence of very different 'I's in the narrative. As much as the beginning of the chapter foregrounds the narrator as a focaliser, here it is the three-year-old Frankie. However, what exactly did McCourt remember? Apart from the street name, which provides the illusion of context, this is a fairly generic children-at-the-playground-script. Children get hurt all the time, as their siblings cannot objectively judge the consequences of their actions. They know that they are going to be blamed anyway and that mothers always overreact – according to the generic script. So what does this scene mean? Does it add flavour? Should readers feel sorry for the boy? Is it an illustration of his mother's failure to care for them? Does it add to Frankie's sense of guilt for all that is happening around him? Who is the experiencing I here? Or in other words: why is the scene important to the narrator? Or should I say auto/ biographer? The sustained presence of internal focalisation may obscure the fact that it is still the narrator/auto/biographer who believes that its inclusion reveals something essential about the way he interprets and feels about what happened to him as a child. Despite this seemingly clear-cut case of internal focalisation, there are two related points I would like to raise: there may be more layering of focalisation in prose auto/biography than is usually acknowledged and Barbara Dancygier's concept of viewpoint compression is relevant here. The question is not so much how this scene works technically, but how to relate the experiences to the various selves in the narrative.

In comics, the narrating and the experiencing selves are not only encoded differently – verbally and visually – but also spatially segregated in many cases in the form of captions and drawings. In addition, the younger selves are usually cartoons, whose bodies often serve the expression of emotional states rather than the authentic depiction of physiognomy. This is a point that Michael Chaney addresses in his introduction to *Graphic Subjects*: "When the 'I' of autobiography is explicitly stylized as a kind of cartoon, the result is a brazen departure from the 'seemingly substantial' effects of realism that traditional autobiographies presume" (2011: 7). There are, in short, several reasons why comics foreground the fragmentation of the autobiographical self and are less likely to be blamed for a violation of veracity (cf. Jacobs 2008: 77). The scene in the playground above establishes the three-year-old Frankie as a distinct character and identity, which has been strategically separated from the domineering 'I' of the narrator. This move is rather unusual, precisely because of its artificiality, and McCourt often uses it for comic relief, e.g. when Frankie, the child, describes heaven as the place "where they have plenty of fish and chips and toffee and no aunts to bother you" (1999: 110). In comics, the split of the autobiographical self into several different characters and 'voices' is unavoidable: "the comics form not only invites the consideration of the fragmented and discontinuous nature of self, but demands we take note of it" (Jacobs 2008: 78–80). This leads Gardner to the following clarification of how autographics relates to testimony, eye-witness report and confession:

The comics form necessarily and inevitably calls attention through its formal properties to its limitations as juridical evidence – to the compressions and gaps of its narrative (represented graphically by the gutterspace between the panels) and to the iconic distillations of its art. The kinds of truth claims that are fought over in the courts of law and public opinion with text-based autobiography are never exactly at issue in graphic autobiography. The losses and glosses of memory and subjectivity are foregrounded in graphic memoir in a way they never can be in traditional autobiography. (2008: 6; see also 12; Versaci 2007: 6, 102)

Implicitly, this statement addresses the centrality, or rather the illusion of voice in prose auto/biography. The concept of graphiation suggests that the personality and character of an artist are manifest in his or her unique visual style, so that the handwriting of the creator communicates directly to the 'reader'. As a cartoonist, Craig Thompson seems to be particularly susceptible to this type of intimate self-revelation. He has Craig respond to Raina's handwriting as an intense form of flirtation. While he dismisses parts of the content of the box he receives from Raina as "high school nothings" (2007: 145), it is her style that speaks to him: "Most revealing was her handwriting – including the indentions traced on each page from the page above./(She must have been pressing her pen hard.)/An alluring line looped her 'I's./Her 'f 's were 'I's that instead of linking with the next letter, fell" (2007: 146). This sets up an intriguing comparison between means of self-expression in the two codes that comics as a medium relies on. For prose autobiography, Smith and Watson use the term 'voice' to capture all those aspects of language that reveal the personality of the writer:

When we read autobiographical texts, they often seem to be "speaking" to us. We "hear" a narrative voice distinctive in its emphasis and tone, its rhythms and syntax, its lexicon and affect. […] Although life writing is published as words on a page, readers experience those words as the narrator talking to them, to persuade or demand, to confess or confide, to mourn or celebrate. […] In those "sounds" we have an impression of a subject's interiority, its intimacy and rhythm of self-reflexivity. Voice as an attribute of the narrating "I," then, is a metaphor for the reader's felt experience of the narrator's personhood, and a marker of the relationship between a narrating "I" and his or her history. […] In life writing, as opposed to the novel, readers may uncritically ascribe the voice of the narrative to the author. (2010: 79)

From daily practice alone, we are much more attuned to the interpretation of 'voices' than of personal drawing styles or handwriting, which are gone from daily communication, together with handwritten letters. In prose autobiography, the 'voice' of the narrator is all there is, so that a consistent tone together with the intimate setting and the overall confidential nature of the content can produce the illusion of a 'real' person honestly 'talking' about his or her life. Taking Fludernik's 'natural' narratology (cf. 2005) as a point of comparison, the voice of the auto/biographical narrator is closer to the model of natural speech than in most other literary genres. This may facilitate the 'naturalisation' of words on a page as if they provided a shared intimacy with a human being who is willing to grant readers access to the backstage areas of a life in performance.

However, as with graphiation/style in comics, 'voice' may explicitly serve a narrative purpose in a particular scene, such as young Frankie's stream of consciousness at the playground. If we associate verbal styles with the voices of particular characters, it may be fruitful to look at the range or "ensemble of voices" (Smith & Watson 2010: 80) and how they express different points of view through style. In the way that readers take a stance towards the narrative in Rosenblatt's sense, so the writer may choose a particular approach, which is evident in Frank McCourt's persistent use of irony or even sarcasm. In a much broader sense, we may find quotations from literature, TV shows, song lyrics or other cultural products that either comment on life in general, the life narrative of the auto/ biographer or the younger selves at specific points in time, or directly influence the course of events. When John Lewis hears Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak on the radio for the first time (cf. Lewis, Aydin & Powell 2013: 55–6), it changes his life in the sense of how to have and be a voice that is relevant in the here and now. In this sense, some auto/biographical texts could also be seen as the history of finding a voice or "coming to voice" (Smith & Watson 2010: 84; see also El Refaie 2012: 15), which is especially important for groups that are underrepresented and are not usually heard. One interesting aspect of *Blankets* is that Craig does not talk much and feels awkward expressing himself in words. Especially in the first chapter, we find many adults talking *at* him as the voices of authority that represent specific discourses. He ultimately finds his own 'voice' in drawing. Other comics auto/biographers have a very distinct voice from the very beginning, such as Harvey Pekar or Alison Bechdel, that unifies the narrative to a large extent.

Having said that, style is usually one important element of a complex interplay of codes and layers of focalisation. Gardner argues that the inability to establish something like Smith and Watson's 'voice' in autographics may be a motivation to turn to the medium in the first place:

The split between autographer and subject is etched on every page, the handcrafted nature of the images and the "autobifictional" (to borrow the term from Lynda Barry) nature of the narrative is undeniable. It is important that this split is not a casualty or regrettable *cost* of the autobiographer's chosen form, but is instead precisely what motivates the drive to tell the self in comics form. (2012: 131)

The fragmented page, the layering of temporalities, identities, voices and styles (cf. Chute 2010: 5), the 'bifictionality' of prose and images are all consequences of some auto/biographers' strategy of laying out voices, perspectives, remediated photos and other memorabilia, doubts and speculations for the readers to study individually, but then to blend them into a narrative. Since these artists cannot exclusively rely on the magical power of the pronoun 'I' to provide unity across heterogeneous matter, comics resemble reader-response criticism's idea of the score or blueprint much more closely. They deliver building blocks, but not the finished building. Despite their status as works, as objects that have been completed, they foreground the autobiographical act as a life in the making. This is reinforced by the necessity of a dual mode of reading, going back and forth between a view of the whole page and the single panels in linear progression, which makes reading a comic recursive (cf. Chute 2010: 8). Hillary Chute argues that comics as a medium, despite its widespread use for escapist adventure fiction, offers "a representational mode capable of taking up complex political and historical issues with an explicit, formal degree of self-awareness" (2010: 9). As in a police procedural, comics put up leads on the board and recruit readers as fellow detectives to scrutinise the evidence alongside the artists. Where this conceptual metaphor ceases to be helpful is the expectation of a neat resolution for the case. Chute describes this formal aspect of comics in the context of *Fun Home*:

At the level of form *Fun Home* stages its own central preoccupation with the nature of revisiting the past, embodying through its word and image composition the fissures and contradictions that are the focus of its plotline. In its comics form we see the *materialization* of epistemological problems. The book does not seek to preserve the past as it was, as its archival obsession might suggest, but rather to circulate ideas about the past with gaps fully intact. (2010: 180; see also 181–2)

The deliberate arrangement of memories and memorabilia as a spatial layout can be compared to Jennifer A. González's concept of 'autotopography' (cf. 1995; Smith & Watson 2010: 44–5). González discusses the role of physical objects, such as souvenirs, trophies, photos, memorabilia, mementos or gifts, as material anchors (cf. Fauconnier & Turner 2003: 195–216; Hutchins 2005), especially the way they can help to retrieve memories and narrate lives: "These personal objects can be seen to form a syntagmatic array of physical signs in a spatial representation of identity – what I call an *autotopography*" (González 1995: 133). She compares these objects to physical extensions of the body, such as clothes, tools or glasses: "Used initially as prostheses (to cover and protect, to extend and support the body), such objects often become, after years of use, integrated so inextricably with one's *psychic body* that they cannot be replaced or removed without a subversion of the physical body itself. The same holds true for objects that function as prostheses of the mind" (1995: 133). Objects of this type cease to be mere tools and become essential parts of our interactions with the world: "It is only because of our own bodily existence, and our relation to the materiality of this body that we are able to become emotionally invested in external objects that represent an important aspect of identity" (1995: 141). They are capable of evoking experiences and memories through metonymic links (cf. 1995: 134), which – in turn – feed into the larger narrative that is suggested by their spatial arrangement. González treats these layouts as autobiographical texts: "Whether consciously or unconsciously, the creation of an autotopography is, in each case, a form of self-representation. Just as a written autobiography is a series of narrated events, fantasies, and identifications, so too an autotopography forms a spatial representation of important relations, emotional ties, and past events" (1995: 134). For people who have been severed from their cultural roots this can become a vital link to the past and their heritage:

… the autotopographies of immigrants, exiles, and minorities often form strong testimony, at the local or even personal level, of an ambivalent representation of identity in crisis. Objects that symbolically or indexically represent a "homeland," whether actual or ideological, in this case serve to support a communal notion of "self." Memories are made manifest in a material form. They obey the logic of decay but also are carefully preserved and located in a semiotic system of placement and display. In this context one could say that memories *take place* in a way that history does not. (1995: 138)

This creates an interesting case of co-dependence between people's minds, bodies, memories, life narratives and personal objects. While the things and their arrangement are essential prostheses to call forth autobiographical narratives, they are equally dependent on the story and its teller to gain importance beyond their worn and tattered materiality. Without that care, they are just debris that washes up at flea markets. Accordingly, people tend to live in 'museums' of their own making. Based on Susan Stewart's book *On Longing* (1984) González describes the homes of marginalised cultures in West Virginia in the following terms:

The interiors of the houses […] are crowded with signs of the past. Rooms are filled to overflowing with "whatnots," and every inch of the walls is covered with nostalgic pictures of the dead and souvenirs of lost moments. The inhabitants seek a continuity in life by always piecing together what is always falling apart. Women piece together quilts from scraps of clothing, and in every scrap exists a memory and so a story. (1995: 138)

Humans depend on the narratives they weave between themselves and their objects for comfort and stability. These are important entanglements and life links, next to daily routines and physical interactions with a familiar environment. Since the mind reaches outward, its sphere of operation includes lived-in and social spaces. Humans constantly arrange physical objects to suit their sense of order and reflect their mental processes. According to the same logic autotopographies collect 'pieces of evidence', but these objects are then artfully arranged and deliberately framed: "Autobiography thus becomes an act of collection, arrangement, and authentication of objects as much as the construction of narrative that accompanies these activities. In this case, there is an equally strong demand upon an object to both provide historical 'proof ' of a particular occurrence and to allow for an imaginary development of narrative" (1995: 142). Thus, the transaction between human minds and autotopographies opens up a space in which human creativity wins over fragmentation and the deterioration of mind and matter:

… an autotopography is a combination of "fictional" memory and "actual" history embedded in a material object. But more important, it is the representation of an identity that is also between fiction and history and between past and present that makes the autotopography a powerful tool of 'evidence' – linking time, space, and event in a material manifestation of "self." (1995: 147)

It should not surprise, then, that artists find this spectrum of readings – from meaningless junk to tightly arranged auto/biographical texts – and the creative potential of autotopographies for the exploration of subjectivity inspirational.

Mieke Bal offers a fascinating reading of Louise Bourgeois's installation *Spider*, which transforms the auto/biographical text into a literal space that can be physically explored (cf. 2002). Returning to comics for a moment, the spatial arrangement of panels on the page – the medium's architectural dimension – resembles this idea of autotopography to a certain extent. This becomes apparent when Bal defines 'exteriorisation' as a key feature of installation art: "Unlike traditional psychoanalytical metaphors of depth, this is instead an exteriorization, for which the term 'autotopography' is more suitable than 'autobiography.' This movement outwards makes the subject's thought yield available to the work's viewers" (2002: 187). This literalisation of mind-maps, of showing cognitive links through the contiguity of images on the page, is evident in most graphic memoirs and I have already demonstrated how this works in *Blankets*. Bal's observation can also be brought in line with Hatfield's claim that "cartooning ostensibly works *from the outside in*" (2005: 115), by which he means that the inner lives of characters have to be externalised and dramatised, so that readers can draw conclusions about the complexities of a person's inner life through the metaphoric devices of comics. Bal distinguishes between autobiography and autotopography, but it could be argued that comics meld the two together. As in Dewey's example of the cathedral (cf. 2005: 229) two ways of reading are possible: we can take in first impressions all at once and/or follow a more linear path in our experience and reading of the intricate details. It makes sense to understand the Catholic cathedral or other places of worship, such as churches and temples, as autotopographies of these religions. The display of 'personal objects' from the Church's history, from artworks to relics, embedded in meaningful spatial arrangements may make more sense from this point of view.

*Blankets* contains an interesting example of literal autotopography in the form of Raina's quilt that becomes a metaphor for how comics can be read in a similar way. Using the medium of fabrics, she 'inscribes' Craig into her life by combining textures that have a personal meaning – such as her "spit-stained baby blanket" (Thompson 2007: 183 → Fig. 19) with fabrics that remind her of Craig. By stitching them together, she materialises and externalises in the form of art what only exists as a growing awareness in her mind – that these patterns are all related. Since she presents it as a gift to him, it becomes a material anchor of their relationship and a narrative anchor in the production of the auto/biography. For Thompson the object has a metonymic relation to past events (cf. Bal 2002: 192): it works like a key that grants access to past memories. Through the quilt Thompson discovers a similarity to his own art as a comics creator and auto/biographer (cf. 2007: 565–7; Stevens 2010: paragraph 52). He includes a blend in which Raina 'walks him through' her memories and hopes for the future in the form of a topographical exploration of the quilt. Thus, Raina literally and figuratively shares her memories with him. The act of stitching such patches together into a meaningful text that bridges past and present as a basis for a potential (shared) future clearly resembles autobiographical projects in general. The topographical logic of contiguity that breaks with linear patterns (cf. Bal 2002: 190) is typical of Raina's quilt, autotopography and graphic memoir, where weaving/braiding constitutes a narrative logic that can be more important than a chronological arrangement of events.

This explains Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle's fascination with 'the tabular' (cf. 2014) and Thierry Groensteen's emphasis on 'iconic solidarity' (cf. 2007: 17–20) and 'braiding' (cf. 2007: 145–9, 158). Despite the absence of physical objects, which have to be remediated in autographics to allow for their inclusion, the topography of the double page spread allows for spatial arrangements and the contiguity of seemingly unrelated matter that is similar to material autotopographies, but more difficult to achieve in prose. Together with embodiment/dramatisation,

**Fig. 19:** *Blankets* (183). © 2003 by Craig Thompson. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

this represents a second important narrative resource in comics and autographics in particular, next to the more prose-related notions of emplotment and verbal narration.

In the classroom, this can have a number of practical consequences for autobiographical work in general and approaches to autographics in particular. While it is unlikely that all students can draw autobiographical comic strips that live up to their own expectations, they can work with material objects – such as photographs or personal things – and create autotopographies in the form of (digital) collages or 'museums in a shoebox' (cf. Zack 1995: 115–9). The same applies to the design of a personal tattoo, a (family) coat of arms, or of real or simulated social media profiles, which present multimodal self-representations in the form of a spatial arrangement. As learner texts, they can serve as material anchors for oral storytelling and life narratives (cf. Georgakopoulou 2007; Bamberg 2007), but also as mysteries for other students who attempt to guess what these arrangements mean. This can be extended to biographical work, in the most primitive form based on interviews in class and involving the presentation of another student, which automatically raises awareness of imperfections in human communication and the necessity of interpretation.

These activities contribute to and raise awareness of a number of important things that have been addressed throughout this study: that auto/biographical texts require selection, foregrounding and active construction; that modality, mediality and materiality play a central role by imposing limitations, but also allowing for unique forms of self-expression; that these narratives always depend on the translation and externalisation of inner thoughts, feelings and convictions; that auto/biographies do not tell 'the truth', but rely on a certain perspective – literally and figuratively, but also on foregrounding to convey 'a truth' etc. This is why I find the contributions in *Autobiographies: Presenting the Self* (cf. Hallet 2015a) so helpful, as they link autobiographical work to critical media literacy, but they also foreground the close ties between memories and personal objects.

# **5.2 Life Writing & Blending**

### **5.2.1 The Autobiographical Act as Blending**

In his essay "Narrative and Self-Concept" (1991) Donald Polkinghorne uses Paul Ricoeur's 'emplotment' as a starting point to explore the ways people make sense of their lives. As a psychologist he was directly confronted with his patients' problems to integrate troubling or even traumatic episodes into their selfconcepts (cf. 1991: 136). Talking about them and assigning them a meaningful place in one's personal (hi)story can mark a significant step in regaining control over what seem to be random acts of cruelty. Like all narrative psychologists, Polkinghorne embraces the restorative power of storytelling: "Narrative is the cognitive process that gives meaning to temporal events by identifying them as parts of a plot" (1991: 136). This raises the question where the plots come from.

According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the conceptual metaphor life is a story is "rooted deep in our culture. It is assumed that everyone's life is structured like a story, and the entire biographical and autobiographical tradition is based on this assumption" (2003: 172). They use the word 'assumption' wisely, as the source domain (story) only highlights certain aspects of the target domain (life) and obscures others. 'Story' makes us think of protagonists and antagonists, turning points, character development, the restoration of equilibrium and a happy ending – just to name a few potential associations. Zoltán Kövecses discusses the life is a journey metaphor as a potential alternative (cf. 2010: 4, 71), which turns the protagonist into a traveller or even adventurer, maybe on a quest, who has a clear goal or destination in mind which, despite detours and obstacles, he or she intends to reach. Metaphors help to reduce the complexity of actual circumstances, for "thinking about the abstract concept of life is facilitated by the more concrete concept of journey" (2010: 4). Yet, if we believe that "All the world's a stage,/And all the men and women merely players" (Shakespeare, *As You Like It* 2.7.140–1), then we conceive of people's lives again in very different terms (cf. Kövecses 2010: 85). Lakoff and Johnson observe that, "when we construct life stories, we leave out many extremely important experiences for the sake of finding coherence" (2003: 175), which, in turn, is determined by the metaphor we choose. Stanley argues that "the use of tropes is important in the structuring and impact of auto/biography" and a single "metaphor can drive an entire factual narrative" (1992: 129). Eakin goes one step further and proposes that "autobiography not only delivers metaphors of self, it *is* a metaphor of self " (2008: 78; see also 121). If we accept life is a story or life is a journey as a meaningful way to make sense of one's experiences, then all autobiographical narratives work according to the same logic: the configurations of signs and symbols are a blueprint that scaffolds the evocation of a human life, but cannot be that life itself. Emplotment, narration, embodiment/dramatisation, layout/tabularisation, iconic solidarity and metaphors are all important strategies of foregrounding in autographics that reduce the complexity of real life and facilitate blending and viewpoint compression. Metaphors can operate on all levels of autobiographical writing/drawing, from the minute details of specific events to the entire structure of the narrative, which becomes evident in the conceptual metaphors discussed above. They also dominate myths of all kinds (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 2003: 185–6), which are highly metaphorical stories that "provide ways of comprehending experience" (2003: 185) by tying human lives to the major conceptual metaphors of a culture. They seem inherently objective and true, as they directly mirror cultural ways of thinking. This suggests that basic plots and ways of understanding are provided by our social environments.

In "Life as Narrative" Jerome Bruner takes a clear position on the spectrum between cultural determinism and free forms of self-expression: "The heart of my argument is this: eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very 'events' of a life. In the end, we *become* the autobiographical narratives by which we 'tell about' our lives" (2004: 694). Despite Polkinghorne's approval of plotting and temporal structuring, he treats the process of autobiographical reasoning like any type of reading – as a dialogue: "emplotment is not the imposition of a ready-made plot structure on an independent set of events; instead, it is a dialectical process that takes place between the events themselves and a theme that discloses their significance and allows them to be grasped together as parts of one story" (1991: 142). Under the influence of gestalt psychology (cf. 1991: 136–7) he acknowledges that there are other ways to conceive of one's life than linear progression: "Although emplotment can consist of a single thread that serves to draw elements together, it often consists of multiple threads of subplots woven together into a complex and layered whole" (1991: 141). This process of synthesis breaks with a simplistic temporal sequence and organises experiences according to themes and/or feelings. Polkinghorne also observes that, if readers replace the narrative pattern in the generic space of their cognitive network, they get a different blend based on the same input spaces: "More than one plot can provide a meaningful constellation and integration for the same set of events, and different plot organisations change the meaning of the individual events as their roles are reinterpreted according to their functions in a particular plot" (1991: 142). Applying this logic to auto/biography he comes to the following conclusion: "Plot lines used in the construction of self-narratives are not usually created from scratch. Most often they are adaptations of plots from the literary and oral stories produced by one's culture" (1991: 147). The concept of 'adaptation' that Polkinghorne ascribes to autobiographical reasoning acknowledges the appropriation of existing patterns, but it also stresses a certain amount of creative freedom and independent thinking.

The introduction of new structures to reconfigure a reading of one's own life is the ultimate aim of any therapy based on self-narration: "Therapists working with clients as they reconstruct their self-concept through 're-emplotment' must understand the operation and power of narrative configuration in the creation of stories of self-identification" (1991: 136). Based on a strictly narratological understanding of 'plot', the meaning of a narrative would be "an interpretation of the causal relations among a chronologically ordered sequence of events" (Kafalenos 2006: 25). I would argue that this applies to certain types of narratives at best and auto/biography may not be one of them. The point of a cancer memoir is not to find causal relations between events in a temporal sequence. That may be the story the doctors are interested in, e.g. how chemotherapy halts the cancerous growth, but then turns out to be ineffective as metastases begin to develop in other organs etc. Cancer patients, however, have to make sense of their new situation. They review their entire lives and all their social relationships from the perspective of impending death, often as outsiders caught in a liminal sphere (e.g. hospitals). In such cases, autobiographical reasoning and writing is likely to deviate from established patterns.

Returning to Fauconnier and Turner's vital relations (cf. 2003: 93–102, 312– 5), time and cause-effect are obviously central to blending, but so are change, identity, space, part-whole, representation, role, (dis)analogy, property, similarity, category, intentionality and uniqueness. Maybe a few examples can help to clarify the limitations of the conceptual metaphor life is a story. The central challenge of autobiographical reasoning is to compress the identities of the younger selves into uniqueness in the blend. Fauconnier and Turner use auto/ biography to explain what that means:

… identity is taken for granted as primitive, but it is a feat of the imagination, something the imagination must build or disassemble. We connect the mental spaces that have the baby, the child, the adolescent, and the adult with relations of personal identity, despite the manifest differences, and we relate these identity connections to other vital relations, of Change, Time, and Cause-Effect" (2003: 95).

For a more specific example of how analogy, intentionality and part-whole become compressed, we can turn to Liz Prince's *Tomboy*. The book starts *in medias res* with a young Liz screaming blue murder, as she refuses to wear the pretty dress that she received from Grandma (cf. Prince 2014: 9–11). Then we are presented with an idealised self-portrait as a four-year-old with trousers, baseball cap, a blazer and sneakers (cf. 2014: 11/3). Finally, the narrator appears, labelled "Liz Prince, Tomboy, Age 31" (2014: 12), and shares her family photo album with the readers (cf. 2014: 13–14).

Looking at various pictures she observes: "The bulk of my dress-wearing took place before the age of two, when even if I had wanted to complain, I didn't have the capacity to" (2014: 13/4) and explains two pages later: "Once I was old enough to object, dresses became a thing of the past" (2014: 15/1). A number of interesting things can be observed here: Prince reads a power struggle between herself and her parents over the appropriate dress code into different contexts and situations, represented by the photographs she includes as remediated drawings. This allows her to compress analogy (similar situations) and intentionality (a refusal to wear dresses) into uniqueness in the blend (tomboyish nature), which is expressed in the statements quoted above. Prince rejects, selects and blends experiences depending on how well they fit into her attempt to naturalise her quirky, tomboyish nature by finding evidence in the past for her retrospective reading. According to the logic of autotopography, she selects and arranges these photos in such a way that they provide both material anchors for and powerful evidence of the life narrative she has chosen to tell.