Frames and Gutters of Narrative and Retelling: Reading Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (Part 1)

“And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it/

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it”

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Bob Dylan.

The ground research phase that constituted the making of Footnotes in Gaza occurred roughly in the same continuum in history which witnessed the no-delay transmission of war visuals of devastation of Iraq and the subsequent horrors of the Abu-Ghraib prison atrocities. The dissemination of ground-zero actions, the acute visuality of personal and cultural trauma, “if it bleeds, it leads” mode of reportage shook up debates in social and academic circles – of the power of images to relay affect and invoke moral and ethical responsiveness in the viewer, of how to recognize the frames through which discourse and representation should proceed, and thus the very nature of visual and verbal studies in proscription of violence and terror. Sontag (2004) observed the momentary effectiveness of photographs to overpower the nascent sensitivities of the viewer; but doubted if they have the power and narrative coherence to build an interpretation or an alternative understanding. Photographs, which are empowered to “generate documents and create works of visual art” (Sontag, 2004), cater to global circulation, mediated consumption and translation (intercultural transformation of meaning). Butler (2009) remarked that the frames partake in picture-making by enforcing a prescriptive delimitation through their role of containment, and thus “the photograph itself becomes a structuring sense of interpretation”. The frame often fails to convey what it contains, and the expressivity of verbal-visual texts can act as a mediating modality to offer context. This shift and synthesis of representative modalities are sources of tension, as expressed by Sontag (2004, pp.20):  

“In contrast to a written account – which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership- a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.”

Journalistic practices of reportage rely on authenticity by “an emphasis of personal experience and artistic metaphorization [which] challenges the notions of accurate representation” (Vanderbeke, 2010) or bears the style of “newsroom’s dispassionate prose” which prefer plain language style “to protect the readers from the seductions of rhetoric, of art” (Williams, 2005). It is in this contention that the factual retelling in the verbal modality and image blocks in artistic imagery work in congruence in graphical narratives. As observed by Marianne Hirsch (2004), the intent, content and the context of representation in the comics form attains certain ‘biocularity’ as lent by “the visuality and thus the materiality of words and the discursivity and narrativity of image.” 

A discourse towards reading Joe Sacco assumes a logical starting point by analyzing the ontology of ‘frame’, from the war-conflict photographical considerations voiced by Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Marianne Hirsch et al. vis-a-vis framing theories as placed by comic book theorists such as Scott McCloud and Thierry Groensteen. The trajectory of comics journalism has had a major shift with the publication of Sacco’s accounts of Palestine in mid-1990s, and thereafter, the graphic narrative reportages from eastern Bosnia, post-industrial United States, Dalit hamlets of India and on the Israel-Palestine conundrum. This form of correspondence with its overlay of subjective and objective storytelling has since gained momentum and is widely observable in form of daily newspaper stories, investigative books and most recently, 360˚ sketch stories (Christoph Niemann’s “My Trip to the DMZ” for New York Times), the emergence of direct market for comic sales, and plethora of styles and genres. Sacco’s preponderance in the field merits critique for his employment of photographs as the basis of creation of comics frames. He has a specific mode of intervention in the lives of the interviewees or informants – his notebooks, audio recorder and camera working in unison to capture and pursue a story or memory. When he is not permitted to click photographs or the interviewed prefers not to appear before the lens, he sketches the scene so as to recreate it later in pen and ink. Thus, there occurs a process of mediated refraction – the immediacy of transmission of written words are checked by the process of rendering frames, as multifarious objects of vision, appearing stereoscopically and affecting organically. Rosenblatt and Lansford (2010) observed the following:

“Sacco’s most detailed drawings, particularly landscapes, often approach photography in their intense realism. Because they are not photographs, however, but rather drawings done painstakingly with pen and inkwell, they become as much a record of Sacco’s own obsession for getting as close to the truths of war as possible as they are of the wars and conflicts he has followed.” 

Here, the frames of photographs do not present themselves as singular moments of truth; the authority of freeze-frames as quick and compact mode of apprehension and memorization is lost. The complicity and responsibility of witnessing and interpreting events demands an ethical involvement of the ‘framer’. Sacco’s method ingrains an appeal to ethics by a method of delay, in reproduction of the artefacts in a mediated and conflated structure – a narrative, a comic story - thereby allowing a temporal distancing from the moment of the frame capture. A sense of contemplative development escapes the clutches of preconceived framing of photographic journalism and inclines towards attitudes where the snapshots are products of subjectivity and evolving point of view. This temporality allows context to seep in - the self-reflexivity of a distinct frame permeates through the aperture of the hyperframe. The author is able to define the verbal-visual conjunctions over paged multiframes braided in an organization of panels that “exists, potentially if not actually, in relation with each of the others” (Groensteen, 2007). The panoptical spread affords to capture greater landscape, for they “visually transmit the living conditions as background without having to use excessive descriptions” (Vanderbeke, 2010). 

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(To be continued, Part 1 of 4)