Parille, Chelsea, and POV

Ken Parille (the most interesting writer at Blog Flume) writes about David Chelsea, autobiography, and point of view (p.o.v.). He summarizes Chelsea’s comments in 24×2:

He argues that that well-known autobiographical comic creators like Crumb, Pekar, Paley, and Spiegelman “get it wrong.” They falsify experience by employing what could be called an “objective camera” point of view instead of a “subjective camera,” which would truthfully represent experience by showing only what the artist saw when he/she lived the events of the story.

He goes on to comment on the idea of p.o.v. and falsification of narrative, noting that “subjective camera” has no more claims to truth than something more “objective” and that the use of square panels are themselves contrary to the actual way people see (more amorphous, blurring out at the edges). I find it interesting, though, that using the term “camera” to discuss these p.o.v. decisions does turn one back to rectangular framing (which most cameras have). The camera itself is a mediation between viewer and viewed, similarly to the way the act of narration becomes a mediation between experience and product.

I wrote an article, which I am awaiting the appearance of, talking about p.o.v. in comics. The “camera” terminology has always bothered me, as to the vagaries of “subjective” and “objective”. I adopted terminology from literary and film theory to discuss issues of p.o.v. and the “camera eye” so to speak. More on that soon, I hope.

Personally I think it is absurd to think that a “subjective camera” is any more truthful than any other narrative strategy. I don’t go into an autobiographical work expecting unvarnished, unmediated truth. Choices are made, most often, the very banality of everyday life is excised from autobiography in an attempt to create a dramatic arc of some sort. Something I touched on in my review of American Elf last year.

Something else:

This [character seemingly looking "out" at the reader] can create a jarring sensation (though an interesting one in many cases), like when an actor accidentally looks into the camera. So a strategy that avoids this situation might appear as more realistic/truthful to most readers, even though it rejects the primacy of the cartoonist’s perspective.

This aspect of the “subjective camera” (what I would call “internal ocularization” after Francois Jost) is an important part of Brian Ralph’s Daybreak (which I am going to write about one of these days) which makes it such an unusual comic. Though in Ralph’s case, he is clearly not going for “truth” but for a sense of reader identification.

Tags: autobiography, narrative, ocularization, point-of-view

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