War Comics: A Postcolonial Perspective [1° ed.] 0367533154, 9780367533151

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War Comics

This book focuses on non-fictional, visual narratives (including comics, graphic narratives, animated documentaries and online interactive documentaries) that attempt to represent violent experiences, primarily in the Levant. In doing so, it explores, from a philosophical perspective, the problem of representing trauma when language seems inadequate to describe our experiences and how the visual narrative form may help us with this. The book uses the concept of the ineffable to expand the notion of representation beyond the confines of a western, individualist notion of trauma as event based. In so doing, it engages a postcolonial perspective of trauma, which treats violence as ongoing and connected to several incidents of violence across time and space. This book demonstrates how the formal qualities of visual non-fiction may help fill the gap between representation and experience through the process of ‘dark’ writing. Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is an academic in the field of Cultural & Literary Studies at the University of South Australia. Her abiding interest in exploring how communication about difficult experiences can occur through art in contexts where language cannot capture all we want to say, has led her to focus primarily on non-fictional, visual narratives. Living and working in contested states with violent histories such as Apartheid South Africa, North Cyprus and Australia throughout her life drives her engagement with the postcolonial world.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature













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War Comics A Postcolonial Perspective

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Jeanne-Marie Viljoen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Viljoen, Jeanne-Marie, author. Title: War comics : a postcolonial perspective / Jeanne-Marie Viljoen. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book focuses on non-fictional, visual narratives (including comics; graphic narratives; animated documentaries and online, interactive documentaries) that attempt to represent violent experiences, primarily in the Levant”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020013082 | ISBN 9780367533151 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003081364 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Documentary comic books, strips, etc.— History and criticism. | Documentary films—History and criticism. | Animated films—History and critcism. | War in literature. | Violence in literature. | Psychic trauma in literature. | Arab-Israeli conflict—Literature and the conflict. Classification: LCC PN6714 .V55 2020 | DDC 070.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020013082 ISBN: 978-0-367-53315-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08136-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

This book is dedicated to Daniel Arthur and Isabella Sophia, the bravest people I know; & to my father, for his steadfast confidence in me.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements Glossary List of Abbreviations

xi xiii xv xvii

Can We Share Painful Experiences? 1 Including the Ineffable in Representations of Trauma 4 ‘Dark’ Writing Violent Experience 6 The Experience-Representation Complex 6 Indirect Representation of Trauma through Images 10 ‘Dark’ Writing 11 Forensic Aesthetics 12 Conclusion: Towards an Ethical Representation of Violence 13 1

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms Introduction: Accommodating the Ineffable to Share Experiences of Violence 19 What Is the Ineffable? 20 What Is ‘Dark’ Writing? 21 Approaching the Ineffable through Aesthetics 25 The Relationship between the Ineffable and the Ethical 27 Painterly Aesthetic Forms 30 Approaching Violence through Images 32 War Photographs 33 War Drawings 35 Conclusion 39

19

viii Contents 2

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable Introduction: ‘Dark’ Writing in the Graphic Narrative Form 41 Graphic Narratives, Graphic Novels and Comics 42 Graphic Narratives, the Body and Ethics 45 Graphic Narratives, ‘Dark’ Writing and the Ineffable 49 Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009), Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky 2009) and the Historical Context of the Graphic Narrative Form 51 The Five Frames Approach 54 Frame 1: The Frame of Accuracy 54 Frame 2: The Frame of Words and Images 56 Frame 3: The Frame of the Logic of Panels 57 Frame 4: The Frame of the Gutter 59 Frame 5: The Frame of Violent Associations 61 Conclusion 61

41

3

‘Dark’ Writing the Khan Younis Massacre Introduction: Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) 63 Sacco’s Frame of Accuracy 67 The Politics of ‘Dark’ Writing 68

63

Sacco as Witness Who Does Not See 71 Khamis as Witness Who Does Not Know 84

The Witnessing Relationship 89 Framing Associations of Further Violence through ‘Dark’ Writing 99 The Beam of Numbness 101 The Shaft of Shame 106 Conclusion 111 4

‘Dark’ Writing the Sabra and Shatila Massacre Introduction: Waltz with Bashir 113 Framing Accuracy in the Graphic Narrative Form 117 The ‘Dark’ Writing of Memory 127 Framing Ethics through Shame 137 Framing the Gap between Words and Images 145 Framing Gutters and Panels 151 Conclusion 158

113

Contents  ix 5

‘Dark’ Writing Violent Experiences in New Aesthetic Forms Introduction: From Graphic Narratives to Other Visual Aesthetic Forms 161 How Do Films Share Experiences? 165 Applying ‘Dark’ Writing to Waltz with Bashir and Animated Documentary 168 A Spectrum of Non-Fictional, Visual Narrative Forms between Experience and Representation 175 Online Interactive Documentary 177 Applying ‘Dark’ Writing to Online Interactive Documentary 183 Summary 186 Why This Book Matters 187 References Appendix A: Images referred to in Chapter 3 Index

161

189 199 205

Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A7

Khamis, Omm Nafez and Abu Antar as imperfect witnesses (Sacco 2009, p. 116) Sacco as self-conscious, fallible narrator and protagonist (Sacco 2009, p. 63, panel 5 and p. 64, panel 4) Differing accounts (Sacco 2009, p. 117) Khamis as imperfect witness who does not know (Sacco 2009, p. 115) Haptic depictions of Khamis (Sacco 2009, p. 114) The shadows of knowing (Sacco 2009, p. 5) Numbness (Sacco 2009, p. 123) Carmi’s dream sequence (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 23) The flashback where Folman first identifies himself in his own experience (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 12) Folman’s memory of his own experience (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 115) ‘he was a young boy’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 57) ‘…it was as if his camera had broken’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 59) Interactivity index of non-fictional, visual narrative forms by linearity (mediums indicated by shade). Page 384 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) Page 385 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) Page 111 Panel 3 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) Page 113 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) Page 110 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) Page 388 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) Page 389 of Footnotes in Gaza a(Sacco 2009)

69 73 78 79 81 92 102 121 128 129 147 155 178 199 200 201 202 203 204 204

Acknowledgements

While the ideas for this book have only crystallised in the last couple of years, it has been in so many ways years in the making. Therefore, I am personally indebted to more people than I could ever appropriately recognise here. But to try to focus on some people and organisations who deserve especial thanks, the book could not have been written without the personal and professional support of the University of South Australia, and in particular I would like to thank my intellectual mentors, colleagues and friends Katrina Jaworski and Saige Walton for their encouragement, rigour and deep engagement with the words and ideas in this project as it developed beginning with my doctoral studies. The final stages of writing, and refinement of the ideas presented here, were undertaken with support from Paula Geldens and the School of Creative Industries, and I am particularly grateful for both the thinking space and time that she provided for me to work on this project. I presented various iterations of much of the material in this book to staff and students at a number of institutions while writing this book, and I am immeasurably grateful for their critical feedback, encouragement and ideas on earlier on sections of this book. Magdalena Zolkos and Simone Drichel have been particularly encouraging and stimulating in providing practical opportunities for engaging in wider conversations about this work. I am also grateful for the inspiration provided by my colleagues Ahlam Mustafa and Mohammad Sulaiman and their engaging conversations. Thank you too to my teachers Ivan Rabinowitz, Greg Graham-Smith, Alan Weinberg and Pal Ahluwalia and to Ricky Snyders, John Horowitz and Danie Du Toit for your vision and starting me out on this course of thinking all those years ago, at a time when I thought I would never think again. I am also grateful to Miriam Lephalala, Lesibana Rafapa and the University of South Africa for the administrative support they provided to set me on my way and for the encouragement and inspiration I received from Allyson Kreuiter, Beschara Karam, Zodwa Motsa, Sira Dambe and especially Deidre Byrne at the outset. I also remain deeply grateful for the ongoing friendship and inspiration provided by colleagues near and far, and I have to particularly

xiv Acknowledgements acknowledge here Michelle May, Rupa Ghosh and Johann Uys. After Charl Schutte and Gerhard Viljoen, my intellectual touchstone remains my colleagues and doctoral students (especially Toni Walsh and Yuwei Gou) at the University of South Australia, and I am incredibly indebted to them for their warm collegiality and building my knowledge through conversation: Ron Hoenig, Chris Hogarth, Kit MacFarlane, Dino Murtic, Ian Hutchison, Jonathan Crichton, Min Pham, Kathleen Heugh, Jess Pacella, Kerrilee Lockyer, Amelia Walker and Daniel Biro. I would like to expressly recognise the support and friendship of my fellow members of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Group and their immensely generous and stellar leader Susan Luckman from whom I have learnt so much not just about ideas but about bringing humanity into professional practice. There are wonderful artists whom I need to thank for their help and assistance in granting image permissions: Joe Sacco and Ari Folman, without whose stirring work the world would certainly be a paler place. Thanks for showing the way. Thanks is due too to Alona Schory for smoothing the administrative processes around this amid so many other competing demands. At Routledge, I would like to thank Jennifer Abbott for her consistently encouraging and enthusiastic support for this book project, and Mitchell Manners for his patience and guidance during the last stages of the process. To my Watu friends for keeping me sane; your ceaseless reassurance, practical kindness and profound interdisciplinary perspectives remain immeasurably valuable. Finally, I am exceedingly grateful for the loving support of my family – both dead and alive, far and near – but especially for my long-suffering children, Daniel and Isabella, without whose love, support and scanning of images none of this would be possible.

Glossary

Graphic narrative Graphic narratives are creative, complex, non-fictional (although obviously non-realistic), aesthetic representations in the comics form, often of violence. They are distinct from graphic novels, which are fictional. Gutter The gutter is the gap often left around the edges of the square frame of each panel/frame in the medium of comics. Panel Also sometimes called a frame. It is generally the square or rectangular frame which outlines the picture in the medium of comics.

Abbreviations

Footnotes in Gaza (2009) (graphic narrative) Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (2009) (graphic narrative) Waltz (film) Waltz with Bashir (2008) (film) Footnotes Waltz

Introduction Towards a Postcolonial Understanding of Violence

Can We Share Painful Experiences? 1 Including the Ineffable in Representations of Trauma 4 ‘Dark’ Writing Violent Experience 6 The Experience-Representation Complex 6 Indirect Representation of Trauma through Images 10 ‘Dark’ Writing 11 Forensic Aesthetics 12 Conclusion: Towards an Ethical Representation of Violence

13

Can We Share Painful Experiences? What if, contrary to what we have learnt in the west,1 we can share some horrific experiences with and of others. Kafka seems to suggest that this kind of sharing is not only possible but may be tangible, when he bids us share in the tortuous process by gazing at the writing which is being cut into the flesh of the ‘Condemned Man’ in In the penal colony. Indeed he invites us to: … watch the inscription taking form on the body. Wouldn’t you care to come a little nearer and have a look at the needles?… The long needle does the writing and the short needle sprays a jet of water to wash away the blood and keep the inscription clear. (Kafka 1949, p. 147) Throughout history, humans have inscribed pain onto other human’s bodies, whether deliberately or accidentally, sometimes in view of others and sometimes in secrecy. Particularly when these experiences constitute trauma or physical pain and occur in the context of the collective assault of war, we tend to view them as unspeakable and therefore unable to be shared. But what if we are able to share them? Perhaps being able to share them with others, being able to express some of them, whether we read them off our own bodies or the bodies of others, may stop us in our tracks.

2

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence

Furthermore, if we can imagine that this is possible, we need to confront several uncomfortable questions, which may not be immediately obvious: do such traumatic experiences have discrete beginnings and endings or do they continuously bleed into each other as they are lived unremittingly, becoming indistinguishable; do they simply manifest on individual bodies and psyches or should we expect to see them conjoined in complex associations that sometimes make them unrecognisable and may perhaps make boundaries between victims and perpetrators vague; do we need to alter our views of what sharing is so that we can come to understand what kinds of engagement can act as conduits for distributing such experiences. For while there is a sense that traumatic experiences are all encompassing and supremely isolating for the victim, there is also a sense in which some traumas are experienced by many of us (though in different ways). These questions take us to the verge of what it means to share experiences, to the very edge ourselves and others, to the very brink of the known. One of the aims of this book is to contribute to the decolonisation of trauma studies and to break the stranglehold that psychoanalysis has had on the western understanding of trauma. This is because in seeing trauma (and particularly the trauma of the subaltern) as an event with a definite beginning and end and conceiving of violence as an unable to be disclosed, personal pain has political consequences that mitigate against shared responsibility and collective healing. In the west, the dominant conception of what constitutes trauma is an event-based model according to which trauma results from a single, extraordinary, catastrophic event, and recovery takes the form of the ‘talking cure’. Indeed, Christian Jambet (2006) identifies the event as a most basic property of the universe, which sometimes breaks into experience. However, in some ways, this is not a helpful way to think of trauma, especially where it appears to be ongoing, collective and systemic. This is not only in keeping with a shift away from early trauma scholarship but is also in keeping with the need that more recent trauma scholars such as Stef Craps et al. (2015) have identified to actively explore the cultural production of non-western minority groups that bear witness to painful stories. Moreover, the west’s insistence on pathologising trauma along medical lines, rather than allowing that it often encapsulates appropriate reactions to particularly horrific circumstances, sets it up as a distinctively, negative response that may be identified in a broad class of traumatised individuals. Trauma studies currently suffer from a form of psychological universalism. As another recent trauma scholar, Alan Gibbs (Gibbs cited in Craps et al. 2015), argues, diagnoses based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III (for example, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) are far too readily applied in a neo-colonial way, as universal theoretical models, to explain everybody’s trauma, without cognisance of the context or structure of trauma. Scholars such as Pierre

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence

3

Nora (1989) and Giorgio Agamben (1998, 1999) have also helped to break the stranglehold of such universalism by depathologising the role of memory in sharing trauma and take it out of the straight-jacket of the medical model, allowing it to include for example, transgenerational memory. They do this by shifting their focus from the mimetic accuracy that memory is supposed to deliver in its representation of the past to the shared value of its organic performances and effects. These scholars thus help us re-imagine the ultimate goal of representation entirely: it needs no longer to achieve mere accurate description. It may instead engage in the accommodation and preservation of the ineffable. In order to re-imagine the goal of representation, we need to challenge the basis for the lingering pervasiveness of the psychanalytic understanding of trauma in the west as it relates to the way that representation has historically been seen as mimesis, an always lesser copy of an objective reality, something that some people have more access to than others, depending on their proximity to the action, ability and education. Adopting a mimetic view of representation makes us believe that trauma is unshareable. If we do not accept that we cannot identify and represent trauma as accurately as we expect and as a defined, universal, often personal, negative response, then at first it may seem that we must conclude that trauma can ultimately not be shared. It is this trajectory in western thought that has also led us to believe that, as Griselda Pollock (2013) puts it, trauma is the irreducible other of representation. Indeed, early trauma scholarship has popularised the notion that trauma is unrepresentable. Several founding theorists of trauma in the west, who deal with Holocaust (Shoah) trauma (Caruth 1995; Steiner 1967; Van Alphen 1999), display an epistemological bias that insists that if trauma is not directly represented, it cannot be represented at all. This trajectory of thought broadly responds to the crisis that trauma presents for representational knowledge with the western notion that it is the individual or psychic integrity/memory that is flawed when accuracy and direct representation of trauma do not/cannot occur. This is not only potentially unsound but also politically dangerous, because it constitutes victims as voiceless and undermines or even dismisses their testimony from the outset unless it can be articulated in a certain way that enables it to be known by others and understood as accurate by those outside their circumstances. In calling for a way for us to move beyond the concept of trauma as pathological and unspeakable, this book is arguing that although trauma may be difficult to articulate in the usual way, we should also admit that holding onto the notion that it cannot be represented too steadfastly reifies a false binary between subject and object, body and mind. This allows us to see horrific political violence as somehow separate from us, and its devastating political consequences as something we can do nothing about, whether these consequences play out on our own bodies

4  Postcolonial Understanding of Violence or the bodies of others. The danger is that if we cleave to the notion that horrific violence is somehow unrepresentable we run the risk that it and its opposite (icy indifference) remain unchallenged and hidden.

Including the Ineffable in Representations of Trauma So, if trauma may be represented in some way and it is important to seek this out, then this begs the subsequent question, ‘in what way may trauma be represented so that it is shareable?’ This book aims to provoke a re-imagining of representation as a process that I will call ‘dark’ writing, a process that opens the door to a particular kind of sharing of traumatic experiences. The pursuit of the goal of pathologising and conceiving of trauma as unspeakable in western trauma theory has meant that accuracy and direct representation (often through forms of realism) have come to dominate to the exclusion of imagination, memories and modes of representation which not only accommodate but also preserve the inexplicable. It is thus these forms of indirect representation that will inform the scope of enquiry for this book and it is these forms of indirect representation that constitute ‘dark’ writing. The violence and trauma of war and conflict are often represented in a non-fictional form in an effort to pursue historical accuracy. As a result, there are many representations of war that show graphic details of experiences of suffering. However, documented cases of traumatic memory loss suggest that some experiences are too traumatic to represent. It thus seems as if something about the experience of violence falls through the cracks of representation, if we understand representation in the usual derivative sense. Many representational forms (such as journalistic accounts of massacres) that strive for historical accuracy do not accommodate ineffability. Insisting on a direct and ‘accurate’ approach to violence that approximates ‘the truth’ restricts us to the realm of representational knowledge. This plunges us into the persistent problem of the inadequacy of language to represent extreme experiences. To address this problem of the deep and often inexplicable interconnection between representation and experience, I argue that ineffability should be included in our representations of experience, and that we need to engage with the ineffable in the process of reading/viewing such representations. This means that at the heart of the book’s argument is a redefinition or expansion of the notion of representation to include the preservation of what seems indescribable or unrepresentable, at least in any direct sense. This expanded view of representation to include the ineffable, I will call ‘dark’ writing. I propose the method of ‘dark’ writing as a way to reconceptualise representation and respond to the problem that accurate representation of trauma does not seem to fully capture the experience of trauma, ‘Dark’ writing is a way not only to represent violence but also to transfer

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence  5 some of the ineffable experience of violence itself without merely providing a mimetic copy of it. Inspired by Paul Carter’s (2009) notion of ‘dark’ writing used by him to think through the design of public spaces to facilitate chance meetings between the people who use these spaces, I reinterpret ‘dark’ writing and apply it to the context of sharing violent experiences of war and conflict. I regard ‘dark’ writing as a dynamic way of facilitating the performance of the effects of violent experience and simultaneously triggering the interpretation of these. At the heart of this process is the accommodation and sharing of the ineffable part of the experience of violence. I propose that ‘dark’ writing provides a new way of representing violence and trauma that enables us to come to grips with what is propelling seemingly intractable cycles of systemic violence, especially in situations of ongoing violence. The reason for this is that ‘dark’ writing potentially allows us to transfer or activate some of the experience of violence, whilst still containing it, rather than merely representing it in the ordinary sense. Slavoj Žižek (2008b) is one scholar who has referred to the experience of violence as having a profoundly incomprehensible aspect and the important role that aesthetics has to play in facilitating our access to this part of experience. This book addresses the role that aesthetics may play in re-imagining representation to include the ineffable by demonstrating a visual and literary analysis of two graphic narratives in the experience of violence and trauma in situations of war and conflict: Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) and Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky 2009). Through this focus, this book aims to contribute to the case for ineffable violence being accommodated in particular visual aesthetic forms (specifically the graphic narrative and animated documentary forms) that do not try to approach violence directly but rather lend themselves to an understanding of the experience of violence as performative, dynamic, material and with a potential to facilitate a rich encounter or sharing of traumatic experiences. Hillary Chute notes that graphic narratives are a medium that is ‘always already self-conscious as an interpretive, and never purely mimetic, medium. Yet this self-consciousness, crucially, exists together with the medium’s confidence in its ability to traffic in expressing history’ (Chute 2016, p. 198). For this reason, the experience-representation complex is ideally investigated through graphic narratives which blurs the line between interpretation and expression so effectively. The ineffable aspects of violence in these texts for analysis are investigated by applying ‘dark’ writing to the graphic narrative form. Applying ‘dark’ writing to graphic narratives includes systematically identifying: the structural frames of accuracy; words and images; the logic of panels; the gutter, and violent associations in the texts. In developing this method of identifying and applying ‘dark’ writing, this book not only helps us to re-imagine the concept of representation but also contributes

6  Postcolonial Understanding of Violence to scholarship that puts aesthetics forward as a real solution to helping us understand and share experiences in situations of violence and trauma in war and conflict. It suggests that our traditional notion of representation needs to be altered to prompt a transmission of the inexplicable aspects of violent experience without explaining them away. In order to enable this sort of understanding applying the method of ‘dark’ writing will show that we cannot effectively represent violence and trauma merely by transmitting the content of what is represented. Rather, it suggests that we must also pay attention to the form in which the experience is expressed. This book thus calls for an understanding of a representation of violence that is indirect, affects the body, is of necessity fraught with tensions and, above all, preserves the ineffable aspects of the experience of violence. This book will discuss how the indirect representation of trauma in drawn graphic narratives and animated documentary may constitute ‘dark’ writing and thus an analysis of these may lend impetus to the argument that trauma may be represented, as long as we extend the definition of what representation is so that the ineffable is preserved. At the moment, the ineffable is a hot topic in philosophy; memory and trauma studies currently enjoy significant attention in the fields of cultural and literary studies; and comics study is coming into its own as a legitimate sub-discipline within the academy across the globe. In this book, I wish to acknowledge, combine and extend this line of thought by applying it to content of devastating international significance – situations of ongoing violence in the Levant.

‘Dark’ Writing Violent Experience The Experience-Representation Complex The western notion of representation as mimesis has a long history in the west that may lead us to conclude that trauma is unrepresentable. A deep shift in our understanding of representation is thus required to expand our definition of it to include the ineffable. In western philosophy, the person who provides us with the tools to make this shift is Martin Heidegger. It is Heidegger (1962), who helps us to re-imagine the notion of representation into a phenomenologically robust concept that is not so quick to divorce it from experience as we have become. Indeed, Heidegger (1962) places experience at the heart of reality and challenges the traditional boundary between representation and real life. He turns our attention towards concepts inbetween body and mind, presence and being rather than merely representation and reflection and in this way provides us with a way of bridging the body, mind; subject gap. The schism in the western tradition between aspects such as action, presence, being, experience, memory, dynamism and the body, as opposed to distance, representation, reflection, history, what is fixed and the mind, have long

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence  7 been established. According to this binary, the subject is either separate from the world such that they can reflect upon it and represent mimetic copies of it to themselves or the subject and the world are not separate but mutually co-constructive. Thus, it is through the subject’s presence in the world that he/she becomes aware of it, but equally it is through the subject’s awareness of the world that the world becomes present. According to Heidegger (1962), an understanding of being is only possible by a particular kind of entity that can understand being, thus locking being and entities, experience and representation, into a reciprocally dependent relationship, in which neither can exist on its own. Furthermore, Heidegger’s (1962) understanding of being indicates that our world is not simply reducible to what is immediately visible or present to us, but always exists rather as the possibility that things can come into presence because of who we are. This is because reflective beings experience the presence of the world as they necessarily reflect on it in comparison how it appeared to them at another moment in time, through memory. It is this dynamic relationship between experience and reflection that our traditional notion of representation is not fully able to capture when it pits subject so neatly against object; indefiniteness against accuracy; representation in such complete opposition to real life. Yet Heidegger (1962) claims, the very being of reflective entities holds within itself this deep relationship between experience and reflection, in its relations with the world context. What I am arguing here is that it is this then that we need representation to be able to apprehend and this too then becomes the job of ‘dark’ writing as ‘dark’ writing extends our understanding of representation beyond mimesis. Shifting our understanding of representation to expressly include what is difficult to describe means that we turn our attention to more shadowy and indirect representations that we may have overlooked in the past. For example, it is memory and the relation of experience/s to the temporal and shifting that needs to be accommodated and shared in a representation of violence and this is what ‘dark’ writing, with its link to the ineffable, is able to address. Moreover, if, as Heidegger (1962) asserts, language carries the traces of being inside itself and is able to capture some of the dynamism of the co-construction of subject and world across time, then it is not just that we may be able to share experiences but that we already do and that our experiences are co-constructed by those of others, and perhaps we just do not yet have a way of capturing this. In fact, it is likely that paradoxically it is the pursuit of accuracy and of representation as mimesis that hides this understanding from our eyes. When more recent French thinkers built on the Heideggerian tradition of encapsulating an extended view of what representation is, as part of experience, rather than distinct from it, these scholars, such as Jacques Derrida (1997), Michel Foucault (1994) and Gilles Deleuze (2001), formulated an understanding of the necessity of the construction of presence

8  Postcolonial Understanding of Violence in terms of language. According to them, knowledge of the world is not merely represented by language, but language carries traces of being and presence inside itself. This implies that our ‘representations’ do not refer to the ‘truth’, but only to a horizon of possible experiences; and so it may be possible to imagine and perform the experiences of others, even if we cannot wholly understand them or access their accuracy. It seems that in terms of this way of conceiving of the experience-representation complex, it is possible to see reality as deeply interpretive and as part of our fundamental relationship to the world which is already mutually constructive, whether we can articulate this or not. And even though what we understand as being or representation may always be limited (or shall we rather say will always contain the ineffable) what we need is an exemplar that accommodates the co-constructive nature of being and subject; experience and representation for this purpose. This is part of what ‘dark’ writing brings to the representation of trauma. In elucidating the experience-representation complex, Derrida still seems to favour representation and sees the experience of Being a S/subject as entirely dependent on difference, which must be shown up to our consciousness in language (Derrida 1997, pp. 202–3). Although Deleuze is also committed to the merging of representation and experience, he still cannot overcome the allure of placing representation and experience in binary opposition and ends up privileging of experience. For Deleuze (2001), there are immanently present activities that escape representation because immanence does not have to be fettered by self-consciousness. He claims that these kinds of activities also have the additional quality of a kind of pure determination/existence, apart from their representation or apprehension by consciousness. Both Derrida and Deleuze’s positions on the experience-representation complex demonstrate the persistence, even in recent western thought of placing representation and experience in binary opposition in the process of mimesis. The understanding of representation and experience that this gives rise to is inadequate and structurally inaccurate for supporting the sharing of experiences. Yet, the possibility remains that if the gap between representation and experience is bridged, by a reconfiguration of our understanding of their interdependence, then we might be able to share experiences. However, to bridge the gap between representation and experience or to see that there is no gap in the first place, we need to augment our concept of representation and this is what the role of ‘dark’ writing is. If we use Deleuze’s tendency to privilege experience over representation in his discussion of the experience-representation complex for another purpose, then we may see it as a stimulus for imagining what we are not initially able to see because of the oppositional way in which we view experience and representation. Indeed, in this regard, Deleuze (1994, p. 304) goes even further by asserting that even the distinction between the bodies of individuals is merely formal and ‘not a real distinction’.

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence  9 He makes the point that in spite of single bodies making us appear as if we are individual entities, we are actually intimately implicated in each other’s outcomes and combinations in ways which are primal, embodied and yet not always visible to us. If we apply this general understanding interdependence to a more specific scenario, then we could hold that imagining one’s own pain or the pain of others affects not only the mind but also the body and experience of the imaginer. At first glance, Deleuze’s apparent privileging of experience and the body may seem similar to Elaine Scarry’s (1985) decidedly more Cartesian claims in her momentous work The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. This is because although Scarry does begin to hint at how the imagination may bridge the body-mind gap in this context, she maintains that trauma is primarily in the body, that physical pain cannot be shared and that pain in fact resists representation in language. She contends that ‘[w]hen one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have a remote character’ because they are not available to sensory confirmation by the onlooker, which tends to make them invisible and unreal to others (Scarry 1985, p. 3, my emphasis). Yet, if we look more closely at Deleuze’s (1994) contention, we see that Deleuze is in fact offering us a way to get beyond the privileging of the body in relation to experience. It is as if body-mind and individual-collective binaries are no longer set in opposition but become complexes of dynamic and necessarily inter-related concepts that we have not been able to see for what they are before because of our tendency to cast them in opposition to each other. Subjects are thus not only embodied and self-reflexive but also simultaneously intimately related and not clearly distinguishable from each other in the reality of their experience. In light of the way of imagining that Deleuze thus opens up for us, the notion of pain as a discrete, packaged singularity or event with a beginning and end as well as the notion of singular bodies with private interior states become visible as a construct rather than a given reality. It is this bringing into view of what we usually hold in binary opposition – experience and representation – that is the work of ‘dark’ writing in helping us to represent and share traumatic experiences. In the context of pain, especially pain caused by ongoing violence, ‘dark’ writing may thus give us the means to represent pain as a collective experience of a community, across generations, across body and mind as a complex of representation and experience. Furthermore, it is not only on the point that minds and bodies are not necessarily discretely distinct that one may take issue with Scarry but also on the point of what constitutes language, when she claims that physical pain cannot be shared because it resists representation in language. Robin Collingwood (1938), John Dewey (1980) and Susanne Langer (1942) remind us that representation is more than just accurate

10  Postcolonial Understanding of Violence description. In fact, accurate description on its own may damage expression and thus the transmission of experience, instead of enhancing it. Of course, language in the broad sense of representation does not have to be merely descriptive and this is precisely what I would like argue here. For if language allows us to exceed the merely descriptive, then it may allow us to share experiences. It is this excess that ‘dark’ writing captures in its preservation of the ineffable. While we may agree with Scarry (1985) that pain may resist and even destroy accurate description, if we have ‘dark’ writing at our disposal, then we may posit that pain does not necessarily escape language per se but may be darkly written. Scarry (1985) claims that it is the utter rigidity of pain itself that makes its resistance to language part of what constitutes it (Scarry 1985, p. 5). I would refine this and apply it to the context of violence and trauma and state that it is the quality of violence itself that makes accurate description alone thoroughly inadequate for sharing it. And it is because of this that we need the ineffable. This is because if the ineffable, the chaos, the irrationality, the changeability and the confusion of pain can somehow be preserved in the way we represent pain and trauma, then, in trying to share some of our experience of its opacity, we do indeed have some hope of transferring some of our experience to others. This ineffable part of painful experience may indeed be a crucial aspect of its reality. And while we may not be able to (and it may not be useful to) give an accurate description of pain to convey its reality, the ineffable aspect of the experience of violence may be capable of being captured through ‘dark’ writing. Scarry’s (1985) idea that communicating the reality of physical pain to those themselves not in pain is vital to make an impact on the practices of torture. This helps to drive the point home about how important it is to find a way to share such experiences (Scarry 1985, p. 9). In fact, Scarry (1985) goes so far as to claim that ‘showing the way the compelling reality of the injured bodies is being used at the end of war to lend the aura of material reality to the winning construct (as well as to the concept of winning itself)’ is also often a driver of trying to find a way to share the reality of pain with others (Scarry 1985, p. 21). The only problem is that such attempts to share the reality of pain with others are doomed to fail if they are only pursued through direct and reductively descriptive representations, leaving only winning and the winning construct they support visible. Indirect Representation of Trauma through Images So, if ‘dark’ writing is necessary for expressing and sharing painful experience; includes the ineffable and somehow exceeds our ordinary notion of representation to include an experience-representation complex, then the question remains as to whether we can instigate ‘dark’ writing. And if so, in which forms of representation is it more likely to come into

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence  11 play? Many of thinkers who believe that trauma may be represented suggest that our notion of what constitutes language in this context needs to be extended to include images as a means of expressing pain. Deleuze’s (1985) contention that the image is utterable, describable and interpretable, even though this may not be enough to restore to the image its semantic richness, is relevant here. This implies that unlike the historical conflation in the certain cultures (including the west) of seeing and knowing, there is in fact a gap between seeing an image and knowing its semantic richness and that there is potential for us to bridge this gap by accommodating the ineffable. If this fissure between seeing and knowing is itself to be represented, yet remain an opening, then the best way to do this is by insisting on the accommodation of the ineffable within the system of representation itself. In the meantime, since I am planning to explore representations of pain and the ineffable in graphic narratives and animated documentary, a closer consideration of the link between images and the body is necessary. Whereas writing has long been linked to reflexivity and the mind, images are the form of expression that some have linked more closely to the body, especially in the context of representing war. And in this regard, some pain that may be regarded as beyond words may still possibly be shared through images. Nicoletta Vallorani’s (2009) account of how the tradition of war reportage relies on images to carry reliable meaning ‘directly’ to the body of the subject is pertinent here. The more precise and reliable representation claimed on behalf of war that images is ostensibly an avenue for physiologically arousing a response in onlookers so that they can share an embodied experience of the pain inflicted on other bodies in the images viewed. If the physiological response that images sometimes arouse in the reader/viewer may be considered a symptom of a reliable perception of the conditions of war, then images give us access to embodied aspects of war that are not otherwise lie beyond words. Agamben (2000) considers the notion that perhaps it is through images that we can begin to accommodate the ineffable and so approach the pain of others. Agamben (2000) particularly favours silent images as an effective form of expression to accommodate the ineffable. According to Agamben and De la Durantaye (2012), images are a way of preserving access to mystery and augmenting the range of what may be represented. Agamben (2000) claims that such images (and especially moving ones) are an exemplary medium for evoking the gestures that lie beyond words and are so crucial for expression. Such gestures form the interface between the ineffable and the body of the representing subject. ‘Dark’ Writing It is the dynamism, performativity and embodiment of the experience – and the fact of the pain, in combination with the conscious and rational

12  Postcolonial Understanding of Violence reflection on it that specifically needs to be imagined and captured to close the gap that we perceive between representation and experience. This is where Carter’s notion of ‘dark’ writing (2009) becomes a useful construct when applied to the field of aesthetics and specifically to images. ‘Dark’ writing is used by Carter (2009) to design and communicate the intricacies of the ineffable yet determinable, participatory space between subject and world. In doing so, it alters and augments our notion of representation so that it becomes more akin to performing or enacting experience than to merely ‘representing’ it. An important effect of accommodating the ineffable is that, as Carter (2010) remarks, when the subject embraces the excessive, the ambiguous, the ineffable, the subject gives up the insistence on being autonomous. What was indistinct can then become sensible as a medium of exchanges between the subject and the world. This is significant for it implies that sharing our painful experiences (by accommodating the ineffable) makes us less independent, less distinct. Carter (2010, pp. 4, 5) borrows Joseph Hillis Miller’s term ‘anastomotic’ to describe what ‘dark’ writing can do. It connects two distinct vessels in a way that preserves ambiguity and mixing, so that both the mixing and the distinct vessels remain inherent in their constitution. This makes ‘dark’ writing a salient way of working across binaries such as experience, representation; text, context; body, mind; subject, object and perpetrator, bystander. In this book, I speculate that the process of ‘dark’ writing in graphic narratives of violence and trauma both accommodates the ineffable and allows more to be represented than could have been represented otherwise. One of the ways in which this is done is by involving the reader/ viewer in the text both physically and cognitively. The graphic narrative does so by combining the viscerally intense and abstract elements of the representation of experience, and by visually attempting to frame the chaos without forgetting that some aspects of the representation of violence must remain outside of the panel. Forensic Aesthetics This book establishes that an adequate representation of violence is not really a representation of violence in the ordinary sense at all, but a ‘dark’ writing that instigates or transmits some of the experience of violence to the reader/viewer. It is in discussing the experience-representation complex in relation to weighing up what specific representational forms might best capture as much of someone’s subjectivity that Eyal Weizman’s notion of forensic aesthetics (2011) is useful. Weizman explores the still images of photography as the language that he feels is best able to represent or trace the subjectivity that is left in exhumed human remains, often after the trauma of war. Instead of claiming that such photographs represent subjects or help us to share the experience of

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence  13 subjects, Thomas Keenan and Weizman (2012) describe these images as ‘instigating’ the presence of subjects after their death in a most authentic way, a way that he argues can only be done through aesthetic language. They consider this ‘instigation’ process the most adequate and effective way of ‘representing’ what is left of the embodied yet dead victim of violence and trauma. This portrayal is intimately tied to the body of the subject, yet it is also necessarily composed of the subjectivity of the interpreter. It is thus supported by a process of distanced, yet very personal, engagement between the ‘original’ subject/object and a witness. Instigating is also the process or portal through which the ‘original’ subject/ object and the witness/interpreter may meet, suspended between subject and object. ‘Instigating’ is a useful word to describe this process needed to help us share experiences of violence and trauma, because it links up to the Heideggerian tradition and emphasises that the subject and the world are not separate but mutually co-constructive. Instigation also underlines the fact that it is the presence or experience of reality itself in the images, rather than the process of trying to copy or reflect upon the experience, that helps to express the subject in the image. Instigation is opposed to the mimetic tradition of representation which suggests a one-to-one relationship between the world and its expression, in which we start with the world and try to share our experiences of it as if it is something external to us. Instigation instead implies a dynamic practice of participatory ‘representing’ from which the ineffable emerges during a dynamic and interdependent interplay between the subject and his/ her context. Weizman’s notion of forensic aesthetics also helps us to see that aesthetics and specifically images and the body may have a special connection which might be explored to help us get closer to representing or sharing experiences of trauma. In this book, I will argue that the ‘truthfulness’ that Keenan and Weizman (2012) identify in the process of exhuming human remains in order to ‘represent’ someone may be approached in other representational processes too which accommodate the ineffable and that this may be approached though ‘dark’ writing.

Conclusion: Towards an Ethical Representation of Violence However, the instigation of the ineffable also has another role: to address the sometimes exploitative relationship between those who express pain and those who heed that expression. For if one assumes that pain is inexpressible, then it can easily be ignored or co-opted by corrupted forms of power. Instigating the ineffable in this context thus helps to work against the apparent inexpressibility of pain and closes the door to such exploitation. Thus, instigating the ineffable in representations of war and conflict becomes a way to represent violence ethically. Such an ethical position is one that facilitates the profound and impossible

14  Postcolonial Understanding of Violence connection between a witness and a victim through the ineffable. Such ethical representations of a massacre should provide a code from which we may decipher the witness, or may exhume the bones of the victim, so to speak. In other words, ethical representations of violence and trauma require both the witness and the victim to be witnessed, as they mutually constitute each other. This introduction and preface sketches the need for opening up a way of sharing experiences of trauma and violence if we are to reach a postcolonial and ethical understanding of violence within the western tradition. It also begins to suggest the possibility of doing this through a modified understanding of what ‘representation’ means that includes the ineffable, traced particularly in the language of images. Rok Benčin’s (2019) recent assertion that the western notion of representation as mimesis can best be challenged not by opposing representation to ‘the pure presentation of what it fails to take into account’ but rather by an augmented understanding of representation as something that undermines our understanding of a regime of representation as simply mimetic (Benčin 2019, p.  96). As Benčin notes, ‘[t]here is nothing to express beyond representation, and this nothing can itself only be represented’ (Benčin 2019, p. 110). I argue that the way to express this nothing is by accommodating the ineffable in our expanded conception of representation. Extending our understanding of representation into what I have called the experience-representation complex, where this complex now includes an understanding of the ineffable as being part of what is represented, helps to achieve an expanded conception of representation, such that more experiences may be shared, rather than merely being explained away. This notion is also in keeping with Alain Badiou (2005) and Jacques Rancière’s (2004) most recent expansion of the concept of representation where they build on the Heideggerian tradition of exploring the relationship between ontology and representation, but primarily in the realm of aesthetics. For both Badiou (2005) and Derrida (1997), aesthetics is an expanded understanding of the representation of experience that may give rise to its own truths in the moment/process of representation. However, Badiou (2005) rejects an interpretation of aesthetics as either merely referential or merely expressive and locates representation through aesthetics firmly between the referential and the expressive, representation and experience. Similarly, Rancière’s location of aesthetics between making and thinking (Rancière 2004, p. 10) also helps to amplify our understanding of representation as part of an experience-representation complex. Furthermore, he argues strongly that an ethical approach to representation necessarily requires aesthetics, something that is critical in the establishment of a postcolonial understanding of the representation of violence. Chapter 1 of this book will expand upon the broad process of what this ‘representation’ entails by discussing the details and benefits of the

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence  15 ‘dark’ writing process more closely. It will especially set out how ‘dark’ writing accommodates the ineffable and how this enables the communication of what may have been hitherto inexpressible. A key element of ‘dark’ writing is its application in the field of aesthetics. Thus, this chapter will also set up the argument that a postcolonial understanding of violence and trauma requires attention to the aesthetic. Within the field of aesthetics, visual expressions in particular will be put forward as a means to expand the ambit of what violent and traumatic experiences may be expressed. This chapter will end by suggesting that the graphic narrative form is a good example of such an image-rich, aesthetic representation of violence. Following the first chapter, in Chapter 2, I delve into the history of the graphic narrative form in some detail and state why this form is particularly adept at representing the ineffable aspects of violence. I do this in order to show that aesthetic forms such as graphic narratives have a vital role to play in helping us to find avenues to express what seems to be too horrific for words, particularly in situations of ongoing violence, involving subaltern subjects. I start the chapter with a discussion of imagistic forms that have historically been responsible for documenting war to show how graphic narratives have developed from this tradition of war drawing, a subjective form of representation that leaves traces of the artist’s hand in the representation of war. I also point out how graphic narratives have historically been used to depict contested political events from multiple perspectives. I then relate this to the unique way in which graphic narratives go about representing war: performatively, dynamically, with careful attention to detailed material traces of both the war and the hand of the artist doing the depicting. This is accompanied by describing the rich potential for connection between artist, reader/viewer and subject, always accommodating what are often considered to be ineffable aspects of the experience of war. I also explain how the method of ‘dark’ writing is perfectly suited to highlight each of these specific aspects of representation in the graphic narrative and helps us to reframe them in a way that allows us to transmit or instigate experiences of violence in this way, rather than merely representing them. In this regard, I briefly identify my model of the five-frame approach to how the graphic narrative form may use ‘dark’ writing to interpret violence. In Chapter 3, I analyse the ineffable violence in Joe Sacco’s (2009) graphic narrative Footnotes in Gaza in order to demonstrate what this method of analysis can reveal about sharing the experience of violence that we may not have known before. Indeed, in this chapter, I go some way towards taking up the task that James Hodapp (2015) voices when he challenges postcolonial literary studies to apply itself to Sacco’s work, which in many ways may be seen as a study in representing the voice of the subaltern. In Footnotes in Gaza, I concentrate on the depiction of the Khan Younis massacre in 1956, widely held to have sown the

16  Postcolonial Understanding of Violence seeds of the intractable violence that still goes on in Gaza today. In order to identify and explore the ineffable aspects of violence in this graphic narrative, I demonstrate how one may utilise the five frames approach, which I have developed to operationalise the method of ‘dark’ writing in application to graphic narrative texts. Accordingly, I identify the way in which accuracy, words and images, the logic of panels, the gutter and further violent associations are framed within Footnotes in Gaza. In both this chapter and the next, I use these frames to guide my analysis of particular aspects of ineffable violence. I discuss the frame of accuracy and the frame of further associations of violence on their own in relation to Footnotes in Gaza, whereas for the frames that grapple with the structural mechanics of the graphic narrative form – words and images, the gutters and logic of panels, I discuss these in combination. I argue that the two graphic narratives that I will analyse are specifically constructed to foreground the violence of the representational process itself in the narrative form. This makes these texts effective vehicles of process knowledge, a part of knowledge that is often less visible than the discernible content of what knowledge conveys. Through this focus on process knowledge, this form allows up to make out that the violence of the representational process mirrors the violence of the content and we are able to differentiate further instances of violence in ways that we might not have been able to before. Examples of these aspects of ineffable violence that I discuss in this book are the contributions of the imperfect witness – both in terms of the witness who has lived through the violence; the case of protagonists in the text who has experienced violence themselves and in the case of the ‘uninvolved’ bystander such as Sacco in Footnotes in Gaza (2009). I also consider the ineffable aspects of violence that are involved in inaccurate accounts of contested events. I discuss how haptic visuality (Laura Marks 2000) and a particular version of affect theory may help to preserve the ineffable in Sacco’s text, without explaining it away, thus offering us a demonstration of how ‘dark’ writing might work as a performative, dynamic and embodied form of representation. As far as factual accuracy of the wartime violence depicted is concerned, I discuss whether the representation of certain content measures up to the demand to see (and show) what is objectively there in ‘reality’. With regard to words and images, I consider the particular combination of words and images in the process of transmitting or instigating the experience of violence employed in the graphic narratives in my illustrative examples as a meta-frame for constructing further understanding. This is done by actively including the reader’s/viewer’s body and mind in this process of representation. As far as the logic of the panels is concerned, I argue that graphic narratives differ from other media in which only one frame is available at a time for the viewer’s consumption. This gives graphic narratives an immediacy absent from these other media (except multi-screen gallery works or some experimental films that make

Postcolonial Understanding of Violence  17 more than one frame available to the viewer at once). I apply the notion of the gutter in the graphic narrative as an example of ‘a visual depiction of the ineffable’. Graphic narratives clearly depict the absence through the ineffabilities of the gutter, to the point of almost being jarring. This implies a visual depiction of the ineffable at the heart of the way they construct meaning. Finally, in this chapter, I claim that multiple associations of violence are often instigated in what initially seems like one single instance of violence. Chapter 4 contains my analysis of the ineffable violence in Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s (2009) graphic narrative Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story in order to demonstrate what ‘dark’ writing as method of analysis can reveal about violence that we may not have known before. This graphic narrative depicts the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. It is very closely based upon a striking animated documentary film, Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) to be discussed in Chapter 5. The genesis of the film affects the different style of the graphic narrative that is the focus of this chapter. In order to identify and explore the ineffable violence in this graphic narrative, I again apply the five-frame approach which I identified in the second chapter and began to apply in the third. I identify the way in which accuracy words and images, the logic of panels, the gutter and further violent associations are framed within Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story. After discussing how accuracy is framed in the graphic narrative under analysis in this chapter, I pick up where I left off in the last chapter with a discussion of the ineffable aspects of violence embedded in memories of violent and traumatic historical events. I then proceed to discuss what it might mean to have knowledge of an experience one has lived through but forgotten, as Folman, the main protagonist in the graphic narrative under discussion in this chapter has. I end the chapter with a discussion of how my approach to accuracy and contested events might be melded into an ethical approach to the instigation of the violence and trauma of war through ‘dark’ writing, especially in cases where the violence is ongoing. The sixth chapter is the concluding one. In it, I summarised my findings and made further suggestions for how this five-frames approach of identifying and representing the ineffable aspects of violence – especially in situations of ongoing violence – may be more widely applied across other non-fictional visual aesthetic forms, such as animated documentary and online interactive documentaries. I will briefly discuss how the animated documentary film form preserves the ineffable and is thus able to help us share aspects of the experience of violence that live-action footage cannot. I will also mention how in preserving the ineffable, the Waltz (film) is able to help to destabilise the binaries between perpetrator and victim; personal and collective; experience and representation and thus facilitate an ethical approach, despite having been previously criticised for its ethical bankruptcy. I then also discuss

18  Postcolonial Understanding of Violence how the interactive online documentary form, which in some ways builds on and extends the animated documentary form, is part of a continuum of non-fictional visual texts which support interactivity. I explain how such texts support the ineffable and affective knowing in different ways, making them effective avenues to explore the sharing of violent and traumatic experiences. Finally, I affirm that this book matters because we need to re-orientate our epistemological stance on the representation of violence and trauma in war and conflict to enable us to approach the instigation and sharing of such experiences. I reiterate that this may be done through the method of ‘dark’ writing which expressly includes the ineffable in the way it transmits experiences of violence and trauma and thus may help us to do this in a more complex way.

Note

1

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms

Introduction: Accommodating the Ineffable to Share Experiences of Violence 19 What Is the Ineffable? 20 What Is ‘Dark’ Writing? 21 Approaching the Ineffable through Aesthetics 25 The Relationship between the Ineffable and the Ethical Painterly Aesthetic Forms 30 Approaching Violence through Images 32 War Drawings 33 War Photographs 35 Conclusion 39

27

Introduction: Accommodating the Ineffable to Share Experiences of Violence In the introductory chapter, I briefly outlined the inadequacy of language and words alone to transmit or instigate the experience of violence itself if we want to go beyond merely representing it. I then briefly contextualised the problem of representation in the west, which comes about as a result of an over-emphasis on the distinctions between subject and object; mind and body; representation and experience. I suggested that the notion of mimetic representation of an object to a subject paradoxically perpetuates a way of thinking that takes us further and further away from being able to share experiences. I also suggested that it might be more useful to speak of an experience-representation complex, where experiences and representations are thoroughly interdependent rather than binarily opposed. I also started to discuss how certain representations (that use images) may be more effective in bridging the gap between representation and experience and transmitting presence rather than merely representing it. I proposed that a way to show the merger of experience and representation and thus share experiences of violence is by accommodating and preserving the ineffable in our representations. I also recommended that this could be done in the realm of aesthetics by expanding our view of what representation is to such an extent that

20  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms we might better call it something else, ‘dark’ writing. Julia Kristeva reminds us of the power of literature to go beyond mimetic representation ‘[a]ll literature is … rooted … on the fragile border … where entities do not exist or only barely so, double, fuzzy… altered…” (Kristeva 1982, p. 207), making it a potential channel for ‘dark’ writing. In this chapter, I will discuss in more detail how ‘dark’ writing operates in the aesthetic realm and in particular with regard to the role of visual representation in expressing trauma. I do this so that later in this book, I may apply ‘dark’ writing to the specific visual form of the graphic narrative that uses both images and text to enable several lines of representation to be pursued and juxtaposed to support a complex and ambiguous reading of violence and trauma. In doing this, the book aims to show that graphic narrative accounts of war can increase the ambit of what it is possible to apprehend of the experience of the violence of war. The need for a more developed aesthetic perspective on the problem of the representation of violence has become apparent because factual accuracy – the political mission that is served by the traditional mimetic structure of representation in the west – has increasingly been shown to crowd out the pervasive, ineffable aspects of the experience of violence.

What Is the Ineffable? In this book, I think of violence as a specific and extreme instance of experience. This is because I conceive of violence as an aspect of experience that contains an ‘invisible’ dynamic, which may help us to infer the presence of the ineffable. I contend that the ‘representational’ method of ‘dark’ writing allows us to accommodate the ineffable in violence and trauma in this way. Most forms of violence whether they are caused by earthquakes or bombings take the same form because they give rise to the same effects. According to Žižek (2008a, p. 11), the only aspect of the process of violence that allows us to distinguish different types of violence from each other is not the apparent origin of each but instead whether the violence is ongoing, or whether the victim has the luxury of escaping it, and then revisiting it or having flashbacks. If a victim cannot escape constant trauma, the victim tends to survive the perpetual cycle of violence by living as if the trauma itself were ‘invisible’ (which is the more limiting term he uses instead of ‘ineffable’). It is particularly this kind of ongoing violence that requires the concept of the ineffable to make it more visible, because attempting to access and represent it directly often does not work. This is because its boundaries are difficult to discern as it seems to have no beginning or ending, although it may be punctuated by moments of more and less intensity. The ‘ineffable’ is a key concept throughout this book. As I demonstrate, several authors, in closely examining the process (as opposed to emphasising merely the content) of representation, are moving towards

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  21 including the concept (though not always the exact same term) of the ineffable into their understanding of what it means to represent experience. Jan Zwicky (2012) is one such author who expressly uses the term ‘ineffable’ and identifies the ineffable as addressing the persistent problem of the inadequacy of representation. Zwicky (2012) explicitly links the ineffable to an understanding of shared experiences, asserting that the ineffable is part of experience and consists of a complex of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories and is a process that one claims to undergo in various enriching contexts. Hence, my discussion of representation through aesthetics as a conduit for the ineffable includes both the idea of art as product, and the process of representing and reflecting upon representation itself. Carter (2009), from whom I adapt the concept of ‘dark’ writing and apply it to the field of (visual) aesthetics, is another author who refers to the concept of the ineffable though does not often use the term itself. Carter (2014, personal communication) describes the workings of the ineffable in communication and encounters between people as the element which provides the basis for the possibility of real sharing of experiences, an opportunity in which participant selves may rub up against each other momentarily, in a dynamic relay, to achieve an encounter. He states that the language of the ineffable works as if ‘a mimetic relay allows both parties to “discover” “shared” signs, symbols, gestures’ that are ‘liberated from previous social significations and become the site of a new, improvised “language” of exchange’ in the moment. ‘This “language” does not exist apart from its performance. The communication of this situation occurs on the edge of disappearance/appearance. Everything depends on its perilous negotiation. If it is allowed, it can furnish the basis of a “meeting place”’ or sharing. Carter’s views (2009, 2013) thus sharpen the notion of the ineffable in his challenging insistence that the ineffable resides in ‘dark’ writing, a process or performance that is not akin to simple representation, or to recording something that can be witnessed.

What Is ‘Dark’ Writing? Carter’s (2009) notion of ‘dark’ writing is powered by his (2013) complex consideration of the possibility of meeting as a drive towards an ethical position. The closest Carter gets to defining ‘dark’ writing is describing the entwined relationship between representation and experience, language and encounter. … ‘dark writing’ is not simply a figure of speech for what is left out of enlightenment-inspired descriptions of space. It is a method, a poetic praxis that works outwards from a perceived anomaly, absence or oversight toward its marking. (Carter 2009, p. 228)

22  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms I maintain that the trace of such anomaly may be approached or instigated in an aesthetic representation of experience. Understanding ‘representation’ in this way requires expanding what it means to represent experience by considering key features of ‘dark’ writing. ‘Dark’ writing is an indirect approach to sharing violent experiences that accommodates the ineffable, which may be approached through aesthetics, to help represent these experiences more adequately. ‘Dark’ writing is not representation in that it does not pit representation against experience but operates within the experience-representation complex. I see ‘dark’ writing as a method of transmitting parts of experience that significantly broadens our concept of representation and goes some way towards closing the gap between representation and experience because of its accommodation of the ineffable. For me, the ineffable is the lynchpin that holds the potential to enable the sharing of experiences and encountering others, and it is ‘dark’ writing that is the means of expression that accommodates the ineffable. Carter’s (2009) conceptualisation of ‘dark’ writing is that it is a process that operates in a liminal space between the material and the abstract. Simply put, the concept of ‘dark’ writing must address both the representational process, and the opacity and ambiguity of meaning. To address the former, in the context of philosophy and the design of ‘meetings’ between subjects, ‘dark’ writing operates in the transitory moment. This emphasises at once the unpredictable dynamism and the embodied nature of ‘dark’ writing as a liminal concept. Carter refers to ‘dark’ writing as a dynamic movement form being able to capture the fleeting moment, ‘the instant between two strides’ (Carter 2009, p. 1). This description emphasises the dynamism, mutability and embodied nature of the ineffable in the experience-representation complex rather than its content and points out the challenge that we have if we want to represent a process we have undergone or are undergoing. It also implies that ‘dark’ writing is more akin to performing or enacting experience than to merely ‘representing’ it. As such, it must occur in a fundamentally participatory space (Carter 2010, p. 5). Viewing ‘dark’ writing as an enriched instance of the representation of experience (as I do) allows a nuanced understanding of the representation or transmission of experience and allows the connections it sets up to become visible. To address the impervious aspect of ‘dark’ writing, Carter analyses the shady and marginal environment of ‘dark’ writing. He asserts: The dark is… the interest of the phenomenal environment, its tendency to fall into movement forms, but for which stable ideas could not take shape… (Carter 2009, p. 232) In general, because ‘dark’ writing preserves the ineffable, one may view the kind of knowledge that ‘dark’ writing creates as something that does

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  23 not necessarily clarify content or enlighten. Instead, it is an indirect, shadowy process that brings into the frame what would usually be considered to be in the background or to be inaccurate. It is in these shadows that the ineffable resides, often occluded by ‘accuracy’. The knowledge that the ineffable gives us is the knowledge of how knowledge is formed. This kind of knowledge helps us to disentangle the seemingly inevitable correlation between seeing and knowing. Thinking in this way allows for the exploration of the possibility of knowing in other ways than just contending with what is visible. Jill Gibbon (2011, p. 105) reminds us that in the English-speaking world, we tend to assume a very close correlation between knowing and seeing. This correlation may form a precondition to our efforts to represent the violence and trauma of war and conflict. Sometimes, it lets us presume that what we do not see (directly and first-hand) cannot be represented or even lies outside of the frame of experience. This may lead the pursuit of accuracy to limit what we think can be represented to such a degree that we assume the inadequacy of the representation to be a result of violence and trauma. Alternatively, ‘dark’ writing may give us a way to know what cannot usually be represented or shown. It may assist us to experience and represent content that is often obscured in the pursuit of ‘accuracy’ alone. Thus, the operation of ‘dark’ writing allows us to see and know violence differently because it accommodates the ineffable. If we begin to understand the ineffable in this way, then in accommodating it in the process of sharing experiences of violence through ‘dark’ writing means that we are able to transmit more of the experience of violence itself rather than merely representing it. This is because ‘dark’ writing has the key features of performativity, dynamism, indescribability, materiality, and the potential to facilitate sharing of experience itself. These features are more closely based upon the Heideggerian notion of being as the basis for reality rather than the more Anglo-phone empiricist notion of the subject simply experiencing objects through his/her senses as a basis for reality. According to Heidegger (1962), the interdependence of subject and object is the foundational structure of reality because something only comes into being as an object once it is engaged with by a subject who cannot be independent of it. This does not necessarily mean that the subject and object have the same experience of a moment of being but merely that the moment of being that each has is interdependent and may blur into one another. We need a concept to describe some of this process without explaining it away, and this is the job of the ineffable as it operates in ‘dark’ writing. Therefore, in this regard, I argue that ‘dark’ writing is a process which differs markedly from mimetic representation. Mimetic representation assumes that subjects try to get to know substance, which is primal; in ‘dark’ writing, by contrast, epistemology is fundamental and it is ontology that is derived. This means that ‘dark’ writing leads us to an emphasis on the process

24  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms of representing or encountering violence and then pays attention to the particular form that it takes, rather than trying to be merely a close and accurate representation of the content of discrete violent events. Furthermore, I suggest that in studying the violence and trauma of war through the lens of ‘dark’ writing, we are able to engage with the performative and ineffable qualities of the transmission or instigation of the experience of violence itself, rather than merely recording its content. Thus, ‘dark’ writing of war and conflict provides us with a way of coming to grips with violence that seems (initially) overwhelming, unshareable and too horrific for words. By actively including the ineffable aspects of the experiences of war and conflict in our representations, we acknowledge that there are parts of this experience that can never be explained away and that these must be preserved and communicated in order to share more about such experiences. I suggest that through ‘dark’ writing, we can indeed share some of the chaos, dynamism and performativity of the experience of those who experience ongoing violence and trauma and we can indeed express some of our own experiences of ongoing violence in this way too. Adopting this indirect approach that accommodates the ineffable and does not slavishly pursue accuracy at all costs, we may ‘learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly “visible” violence…’ (Žižek 2008b, p. 1). To do this, ‘we need to perceive the contours of the [invisible] background’ which generates the visible. These contours are those of the ineffable, as it ripples out into effects that become visible aspects of the process of representing violence and trauma from which we can infer the ineffable. These effects or ripples are pieces of knowledge that do not necessarily represent particular content. Rather, they allow us to trace the processes and impenetrability which constitute experiences of violence. It is in the realm of aesthetics that we are particularly able to trace some of these contours, and sometimes, these become most literally visible in visual expressions of violence and trauma such as graphic narratives or animated documentaries of war. In the next section, I will argue that the ineffability of trauma is best represented by applying ‘dark’ writing to aesthetic forms that not only support our imagination of the embodiment of pain but also actually demonstrate the organic flux and performativity of the experiences of trauma in their own structure. It is appropriate to apply ‘dark’ writing to the realm of aesthetics because as Carter (2009) himself asserts that ‘dark’ writing includes a focus on story rather than merely description. This leads me to infer that the ineffable resides in story rather than description; indeed, description may sometimes occlude the ineffable or may attempt to explain it away. Preserving and transmitting the ineffable in our stories of violence allows us to perceive the shadows of what is not directly visible in conventional, merely descriptive accounts that

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  25 aim primarily for ‘accuracy’, or for a simple liner and logical sequencing of events. This is why I use the concept of ‘dark’ writing as an expanded version of representation to argue that violent experiences can best be approached through such storied accounts that accommodate the ineffable, rather than through accurate descriptions. As such, ‘dark’ writing is a storied form of knowledge, rich with ambiguities, situated between linear and non-linear accounts in embodied enactments that may be traced sequentially in the graphic narrative form.

Approaching the Ineffable through Aesthetics So, why is aesthetics a good channel for transmitting violent experiences? The performativity of aesthetics is an important way to bridge the gap between representation and experience. Aesthetics is also a realm in which to trace the ineffable. For Alain Badiou (2005), aesthetics itself is an expanded understanding of the representation of experience, and it necessarily gives rise to its own truths in the moment/process of representation. For him, the aesthetic approach (in contrast to the philosophical approach) is itself a producer of its own performative truths. Derrida considers a similar notion in his work The truth in painting (1987), which I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter. However, as noted in the previous chapter, Badiou (2005) rejects an interpretation of aesthetics as either merely referential or merely expressive. In so doing, he is able to reconfigure our notion of representation and place it squarely in between experience and representation. In a similar fashion to which Carter (2009) emphasises the accommodation of the ineffable in ‘dark’ writing as a movement form, Badiou (2005) asserts that the performative aspect of representation is activated in the realm of aesthetics by aesthetics being an operation or dynamic process which mixes the concrete and abstract. For Badiou (2005), once one is inside an aesthetic regime (such as that of the graphic narrative), then aesthetics (unlike the mere thinking about aesthetics that is done in Philosophy) can give rise to its own truths in the moment. The attention to form that aesthetics facilitates helps to overcome the inadequacy of language. For example, unlike more traditional trauma theorists, some authors, notably those working in the arena of representing violence and trauma through the aesthetic form (for example, Agamben 1999; Hillary Chute 2008; Žižek 2008b; Zwicky 2012), maintain that the problem of the inadequacy of language to share experience can be at least partially overcome. They note that language may not be as inadequate to represent experience as we first thought. This dynamic, ineffable space, alive with irresolvable tensions, leaves formal traces. According to Zwicky (2012, p.  197), ‘experiences of resonant form lie at the root of many serious ineffability claims’. This lends credibility to the argument that the form of the ineffable captures something of the context of violence

26  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms and conflict in a specifically rich and resonant aesthetic form that is considered part of its substance. The dynamism of the ineffable throbs at the heart of the experience-representation complex and is glimpsed through a focus on form. Content or descriptive knowledge by itself is limited, and it becomes imperative to consider the form of the representation as well. In the context of violence, Žižek (2008b) suggests that the experience of violence may best be understood by paying attention to that which is not immediately visible, the aesthetic form in which violence is represented. Doing so may enable us to see aspects we might overlook if we focus elsewhere. A useful representation of an experience (of violence) cannot merely be a realistic description but should include a focus on aesthetic form. This is because content knowledge by itself is limited, and it becomes imperative to consider the form of the representation as well. Studying the aesthetic form that violence is represented in allows us to see the effects of the ineffable, which is accommodated in a form that facilitates seeing previously concealed aspects of violence that cannot be glimpsed when gazed at directly. Aesthetics is simultaneously able to facilitate experience and representation, expression and reflection, and this is what makes it such a good forum for sharing experiences. Rancière (2004) defines aesthetics as a system which simultaneously represents experience, arranges representations of experience, and reflects on these representations in ways that make the form of such representations visible. Thus, reflecting on the system of aesthetics in general, and the specific aesthetic form in itself helps us to develop a better grasp of how the process of representing and sharing experience may occur. Another way that aesthetics may help us to bridge the gap between representation and experience and include the ineffable is by foregrounding self-reflexivity. An example of this way of thinking is media theorists David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s (1999) description of western aesthetics as permeated by the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy. They point out that the logic of immediacy has long influenced western aesthetics – since the identification of linear narrative perspective in the Renaissance. The logic of immediacy implies that we become less aware of the medium when we feel that the representational process moves us closer to an accurate depiction of reality. However, I argue that aesthetic forms that primarily enhance immediacy may also occlude our appreciation of the ineffable since the ineffable is best espied in form. By contrast, hypermediacy, which has gained ascendancy in western aesthetics since modernism, implies that we expect to be aware of the medium in the process of representation. In our times, it is our awareness of form and our sense of being close to an accurate depiction of (unmediated) reality together that enhances our judgement of representation as being realistic.

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  27 Self-reflexivity has permeated many representational forms since the advent of modernism in the twenty-first century. In setting up a tension between being able to immerse ourselves in reality and being selfconsciously aware of form, we can accommodate the ineffable. This suggests that the kind of form we should study to observe the ineffable is one in which both hypermediacy and immediacy are present. When we read/view forms that show both immediacy and hypermediacy, we tend not to judge the awareness of form (as we did in modernism) as experimental, provocative or surprising, or as a method that helps us to interrogate reality. In fact, we have come to value awareness of form as a hallmark of reality itself. We now seek out what shocked and jarred us before as a mark of truth. In other words, today, this self- consciousness is part of our experience of reality – we do not even think about it. This has two consequences. Firstly, it shows us that we need a concept that will enable us to integrate the ambivalent and the unknown into the quality of our reality. Secondly, we need to approach the ever-more shocking reality that we seek as truth from an ethical position. The self-reflexive aspect of knowledge that a focus on aesthetic form may help to support brings us to a discussion of the relationship of aesthetics to the ethical. Rancière’s (2004) conception of aesthetics as a way of sharing experiences underlines the fundamental link between aesthetics and ethics that he insists upon. Rancière’ s refined understanding of the aesthetic regime, distinguishes it from an ‘apolitical’ poetic, so that aesthetics so defined necessarily engages with politics. The link between aesthetics and ethics is also supported by Chute’s (2008) claim that the graphic narrative form can be an avenue for political intervention. This will be discussed further in the next chapter. For now, I will briefly clarify my understanding of ethics in the context of my deliberately bringing the fields of ethics and aesthetics together as a way of accommodating the ineffable in representing experiences of violence and trauma.

The Relationship between the Ineffable and the Ethical I do not conceive of ethics as normative or metaphysical. My understanding of ethics is influenced by Foucault’s (1990) insistence that it does not make sense to speak of an ethical subject outside of a system of practices and learned techniques designed to induce a constant process of change that creates the self. However, Foucault (1990) also notes that these practices of the care of the self have gradually come to be taken out of context in the west. They have become over-valorised and have instead become a cultivation of the self. This cultivation of the self has become an institutionalised pre-occupation with the self and now constitutes both social and organisational practices. These have structured the relationships between individuals. They have also given rise to a mode of

28  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms scientific knowledge that relies on people’s seeing themselves as abject, in need of care, education and cleansing. This is the very kind of knowledge that objectifies the self and stops it from having the kind of transformative relationship with itself that may give it ethical substance. Instead, I posit that we may cultivate an ethical position by accommodating the ineffable and a not-knowing position in representing experience, and by insisting on keeping open the possibility of remaining ethical and outside of a paradigm of scientific and accurate knowing in which we are in total control of what we see. Cultivating representational practices that accommodate the ineffable allows us to approach violent and traumatic experiences ethically. Such an approach takes into account that we do not, and cannot, know, see or share everything about violent and traumatic experiences. Accommodating the ineffable in aesthetic representations of violence and trauma and cultivating self-critical representational practices that enable the performance of freedom and subjectification (as opposed to objectification by the scientific discourse) may allow us to approach an ethical representation of violence and trauma. Constant self-criticism, driving the narrative and its climaxes, is evident in the graphic narratives and animated documentaries that I analyse – in each of these narratives, such self-criticism forms part of the trace of selfreflection by the author in his/her work. Furthermore, I note Agamben’s (1999) assertion that an ethical position sets up a connection between a witness and the victim of violence through a representational process that is facilitated through the ineffable. Additionally, Agamben (1999) incarnates this ineffable aspect (which may be expressed through silent, moving images) as operating in the ‘gray zone’ of the witness, suspended inexplicably somewhere in the continuum between subjective experience and objective reality. He denies that the aim of his work in this area, interviewing Shoah survivors is to uncover more historical facts about the violence and trauma of Auschwitz. Rather, he claims that his objective is to provide points of reference from which people might orientate themselves ethically in terms of how they understand war and conflict and to increase possibilities of listening to ‘what is unsaid’. From his argument, I extrapolate that in carving out a space for and articulating the ineffable, an ethical position may be approached in the context of representing violence and trauma through images. Moreover, throughout this book, I draw on Agamben’s (1998) suggestion that shame is the affective sign that a witness (as an ethical subject) realises the importance of representing violence and trauma, and at the same time, knows that such representation is impossible in the sense that it can never be objectively accurate. I show that the presence of such shame in the graphic narratives I analyse also demonstrates the presence of the ineffable, from which an ethical position in the texts may be inferred. A consequence of a clear link between ethics and aesthetics in the context of violence is that a study of certain aesthetic forms that purport

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  29 to transmit the experience of violence rather than descriptions of violent content per se may increase our understanding of the ethical capacity and limitations of human beings. In this regard, Žižek (2014) goes so far as to claim that there is a direct connection between certain aesthetic forms and political violence and that as such, a focus on representation may allow us to measure how violent humans can be. Another consequence of linking ethics and aesthetics as a process which includes the ineffable is that it is through a study of aesthetic form that we may begin to produce knowledge of how adequate representations of violence and trauma can provide a sound basis for ethical action. Roxanna Baiasu (2014) has argued for the ineffable as a form of non-representational or process knowledge that enables ethical action. Non-representational knowledge focuses on the performance or process of relating or sharing experiences rather than on how these are structured or on the specific content that fills them. This focus on the process of sharing experience supported by the ineffable is required to support the link between politics and representational form, and ‘dark’ writing provides an appropriate tool to entwine aesthetics and ethics in this way. This brings us full circle to where we started in this section, that some scholars identify that aesthetics gives rise to (the process of ethical) experience itself as well as representing and reflecting upon it. If the notion of ethics is embedded in aesthetics and the notion ‘aesthetics’ is embedded in my conception of ‘dark’ writing, then ‘dark’ writing becomes a method of representing that holds then potential to initiate an ethical view and the concepts of ethics and the ineffable start to become co-incident. What emerges is a way to share experiences that is embodied and performative; invites participation and brings the political and aesthetic processes of violence together into a highly reflective and self-conscious whole. Chute (2008, p. 459) refers to the intertwining of the ethical and aesthetic in graphic narratives in particular and argues that the graphic narrative form uses innovative ‘textual practices’ to accommodate the problem that the ‘unspeakable’ elements of violence and trauma often remain ‘invisible’ in various other representational forms. These innovative textual practices carve out a platform that enables action. Including the ineffable in these innovative textual practices means that they may thereby become an avenue for ethical action. In ‘dark’ writing, the textual practices convey knowledge that is not always direct content knowledge but encapsulates a dynamic process of shifting perspectives, ambiguities and the position of not knowing. These are initially ‘invisible’ aspects of the process of representing violence and trauma from which we can infer the ineffable. They are a way of using the violence inherent in the representational process itself to register and transmit part of the quality of the initial traumatic experience and its effects, without losing the possibility of representing extremely horrific experiences.

30  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms

Painterly Aesthetic Forms In the previous section of this chapter, I mentioned that Badiou (2005) emphasises that the aesthetic approach to experience is itself a producer of its own performative truths and that Derrida considers a similar notion in his work The truth in painting (1987). Derrida is especially drawn to the notion that material presence can be most deeply signalled through images. He asserts that painterly forms of representation produce performative truth. By painterly forms of representation, Derrida means aesthetic representations or literary texts that may use images and/or words. What distinguishes these forms of representation is that they are aesthetic forms and that no matter whether they use words or pictures they convey something that is also beyond words or ineffable. Derrida describes the ‘truth in painting’ or the ineffable as being ‘situated between the visible edging and the phantom in the center’ (Derrida, 1987, p. 12). This demonstrates that even when an idea is written down in words, it sometimes remains beyond our grasp. Rather than capturing an idea or an origin, words are part of an infinite palimpsest of traces. Meaning remains deferred and we do not have any centre beyond the layers of traces. Furthermore, he claims that these forms of representation are constantly performative. That is, they themselves bring truth into being (often violently) in each moment of their representation (Derrida, 1987). The origin of these truths is thus infinitely deferred in the palimpsest of traces and the promise of an always absent presence. This notion is similar to Badiou’s suggestion that ‘[a]rt itself is a truth procedure’ that gives rise to its own immanent truths as it is performed (Badiou 2005, p. 9). This truth is present in the process of representing (or performing) it, and no careful excavation of historical truths can uncover its further source. Careful attention to the moment of representation in terms of its process, to its material and painterly form, its context and background, thus enhances the accessibility of truth. And this is why aesthetics is a fruitful area to probe in terms of enabling the sharing of authentic experiences. However, after making the case for painterly writing (or writing that accommodates or performs the ineffable), Derrida (1987) makes a further point which propels the aesthetic firmly in the direction of the use of images to accommodate the ineffable. He boldly declares that there is something about the image (as distinct from the written sign) that makes representation through images (in the ‘pictural mode’) work differently in respect of how such representations relate to truth: That which pertains to picturality…of the representation… is done in painting: and not in discourse… literature, poetry, theatre…nor in …music…architecture or sculpture. (Derrida 1987, p. 6; my emphasis)

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  31 Obviously, graphic novels, comics and graphic narratives may be considered literally pictural forms. However, in accommodating the ineffable in their construction (and in their combination of words and images), they may also be considered painterly, and thus performative, an aspect of representation which ‘dark’ writing enables. Christine Sylvester (2011) argues that it is essential to disseminate the experience of the violence and trauma of war (as opposed to its mere representation). She maintains the importance of the link between an understanding of what war is and where the sources of one’s representations of war lie. She argues that in trying to represent war through art and fictional accounts, we may broaden our understanding of war in a crucial way because these forms allow different ways of knowing to be accommodated. These different ways of knowing are not always recognised in more ‘accurate’ or conventional representations that focus solely on content knowledge. Similarly, Sean Gaston (2009) notes that Derrida – writing in 2000 before the global wars on terror – declared that in the present times, there is a good chance that the concept of war will no longer match even the maps and illustrations of war. In fact, contemporary representations of war exceed or remain disproportionate to war itself. Gaston pertinently asks what signifiers there can be for a new reading of the discourse of war (Gaston 2009, p. 111). In other words, how can experiences of war be represented adequately or shared today? Once again, I want to suggest that this begins to highlight the need for the ineffable in the representations of war. In his scholarship on Derrida and war, Gaston (2009) has traced in some detail the history of narrative and war in the history of British philosophy and literature. He identifies the notion of the rencounter, a useful concept through which the representation of conflict can be read. At its core, rencounter suggests the idea of a chance meeting between armies and individuals. However, this concept is both subtle and elusive, since it tries to capture both the philosophical and the lived nuance that might occur if enemy armies or individuals just happened to meet. Studying rencounter is a valuable way to study war. It takes into account the unpredictable and ineffable circumstances in which wars and conflicts seem to come about. It may also influence our content knowledge of war. Gaston (2009) is careful to note that through facilitating the understanding of different perspectives, storied accounts of war enhance literature’s capacity to represent more than is otherwise possible. Here, Gaston (2009) comes up against the same problem we face when we consider only content or descriptive knowledge of war. Gaston (2009) also insists on a concept akin to the ineffable and suggests that storied accounts of war should not attempt to explain chance away in the service of artificially ‘organising’ the accounts of war and conflict. If they do so, they destroy the element of ambiguity in them.

32  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms In this book, I go further and investigate how painterly forms or writing are combined with pictural representations consisting of images in two graphic narratives. These forms are able to accommodate the ineffable. Thus, these forms allow us to represent more than solely written forms of representation (which do not accommodate the ineffable). Consequently, I argue that only painterly forms of representation harbour The truth in painting (Derrida 1987). Furthermore, later in the book, I shall explore whether forms which also include images in addition to being painterly have special potential for accommodating the ineffable. The crucial point for Derrida in advancing this argument is that the ‘truth’ that is represented in painterly forms (whether these are pictural or not) is a performative truth. It is distinguished from established truth by being able to bring something into being for the first time in the aesthetic moment, this loosening itself from accuracy while strongly supporting a shared understanding a transmitted experience. Writing and language that do not accommodate the ineffable limit our ability to represent violence and share experiences of trauma. Other forms of representation (particularly animated documentary film and graphic narratives) can extend these limits by preserving the ineffable in their representations.

Approaching Violence through Images Thus far, I have developed the notion of accommodating the ineffable in a representation through particular aesthetic forms that may assist us to bridge the gap between experience and representation. In this, I have conceived of the ineffable as a non-representational concept that is largely visible through its form and context. I have thus pondered the representational form in which the ineffable is to be represented. Next, I consider the particular context of the representation of the violence and trauma of war and how this might best be shared through images. It is Agamben (2000) who stresses the form of representation in accommodating the ineffable in the context of violence and trauma. He proposes that some aesthetic forms are more effective for this purpose than others. The notion that form is a defining characteristic of the ineffable too permeates my thinking in this book. As proposed in my introductory chapter, the particular aesthetic form that Agamben favours as an effective form of expression to accommodate the ineffable is the silent (moving) image. Agamben (1999) does not simply examine what representation makes visible in the field of content knowledge and leave the rest to remain either an unexplored ‘silence’ or an ‘unsuccessful’ experience. Instead, Agamben begins to investigate this darkness or ‘invisibility’ itself to see what it shows up. It is because Agamben links this ‘invisibility’ to a particular form that he is able to distinguish it. I will end this chapter by detailing two literary representations of war that employ images or pictures – war drawings and photographs.

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  33 Both of these forms may contribute to accommodating the ineffable in experiences of violence and trauma and to transmitting experiences of war in an embodied way. These visual forms of representing war are a precursor to the next chapter, which is about graphic narratives of war. War Photographs The most commonly used form of images since the mid-nineteenth century to represent war and conflict may be war photographs. Traditionally, in war reportage, photographic images are treated as evidence. In my introductory chapter, I have already commented on Keenan and Weizman’s claim (2012) that such images (along with exhumed human remains) somehow give us more direct access to bodily experience than writing or witnessing. However, the danger of simply focusing on the apparent accuracy of photographs to resolve issues of contestation and culpability is that important ‘invisible’ aspects remain outside the frame. This may impoverish our understanding of what is being represented. And this is why we need the concept of the ineffable to help enrich our ability to share experiences of violence and trauma, without explaining them away. In this regard, Judith Butler (2009) cautions that when we simply focus on the spectacular deaths in war that mass media photographs give us access to, the lives of the victims of war remain invisible. Such an approach perpetuates a view of those who die in war as mere victims. It must be added that this sustains a view of the media as omniscient and powerful, whilst hiding the fact that their apparent ‘accuracy’ occludes other less visible lives and powers. Butler (2009) argues that war photographs tend to uphold the unfortunate power differential between victims of war and those who valiantly bring these stories to an audience (journalists, authors and photographers). For example, photographs of Palestinian deaths (on their own) signify and/or embody a mere fragment of Palestinian lives, namely Palestinian deaths. Butler (2009) points out that because photographs of the dead do not include what lies outside of the frame or lens (the people’s lives), they cannot provide anything except a very limited and often dangerously limiting view of the subject. This view often aids in continued oppression of the person(s) photographed. This makes it imperative that representations of war include the ineffable as a way to represent ethically. Both the form and the context of representation become vital. (I discuss the importance of such photographs and their relation to accuracy and the ineffable further in Chapter 4 in terms of the photographs of the Sabra and Shatila massacre by Robin Moyer that Folman and Polonsky (2009) include in their representation of the Lebanese War in 1982). In Camera lucida: reflections on photography, Roland Barthes (1981) provides a pertinent analysis of the same issue from another angle.

34  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms He considers what is visible and invisible in the frame of the photograph, distinguishing between types of photographs that either accommodate the ineffable or do not. He suggests that in the end, although certain images may be particularly appropriate for accommodating the ineffable, the ineffable is by no means the sole preserve of pictural texts. Barthes (1981) admits that photographs which do not accommodate the ineffable (such as news photographs and pornographic photographs) may be ‘accurate’ (in terms of content knowledge). This is in accordance with Susan Sontag (2003), who argues that unlike drawn images, photographs provide direct evidence that something happened precisely because the subjectivity of the photographer is kept out of the frame. However, in being tied so closely to a specific moment in the past and away from the confines of subjectivity, the news photograph is unable to transcend the past and join the viewer in the present. However, they are limited in terms of the process knowledge they can convey since, unlike experience which is ever made anew, they are shackled to one moment in time. According to Barthes (1981, p. 41), this is because such photographs are literal – they shock; they traumatise. They shout but do not wound. They are received all at once, with sharp clarity, without setting up further associations to dwell upon later. Everything happens within their frame, numbing us to their full meaning and leaving nothing invisible. Barthes (1981) goes on to discuss the power of art photographs that do accommodate the ineffable in their process of representation. He uses a concept that overlaps with the notion of the ineffable, the ‘punctum’. He describes this variously as ‘a little hole’ (Barthes 1981, p. 27) and as a ‘roll of the dice. It is something that is subtly beyond that which we are permitted to see’ (Barthes 1981, p. 59). It is a blind spot, something that we know is there precisely because we cannot see it (Barthes 1981, p. 57). Some small detail of such photographs functions as this ‘punctum’ or the ‘point of effect’ (Barthes 1981, p. 55). It cannot be contained, and fills the whole picture. Such details are likely to be associated with something else we remember, and we add this to what is initially all that is visible in the photograph. Barthes describes the ‘punctum’ as ‘what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there’ (Barthes 1981, p. 55). Barthes declares that the representational process that such photographs set up make them more than motionless images. They function as a portal which spills over the frame to the viewer to set up a mutually animating relationship between the viewer and the photograph (Barthes 1981, p. 57). Furthermore, the ‘punctum’ itself is uncoded; it is immediate and incisive, but cannot accommodate scrutiny. It cannot be adequately analysed or described in words (Barthes 1981, p. 55). I have described the qualities of the ‘punctum’ that overlap with the ineffable in order to further extend our conception of the ineffable as being able to be accommodated in art images (as opposed to shocking photographs). If we recall Carter’s (2009) conception of the ineffable discussed

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  35 at the start of this chapter, that the workings of the ineffable as the key element which provides the basis for the possibility of sharing of experiences then it is this ‘punctum’ in art images (rather than shocking photographs) that may be the fulcrum for the sharing of experiences of violence because somehow the ‘punctum’ in these photographs in giving rise to its own performative truth sets up the possibility of a meeting between the viewer and what is represented. Using the notion of ‘dark’ writing as a bridge between experience and representation built upon the accommodation of the ineffable thus provides a lens, which may bring the aspects of the ‘punctum’ immediacy an indescribability into the frame. War Drawings Of course, photographs are not the only pictural way of depicting war. War drawings are another long-standing tradition of pictural portrayals of war. This tradition is particularly relevant for graphic narratives. Historically, government committees, museums and the armed forces have regularly commissioned artists to create art from the battlefield, often in the form of drawings (Gibbon 2011, p. 103). Such drawings, usually coupled with either written or heard words, emotively captured the machinations of power and misery in war. They were strongly defined by power structures of victory and defeat. Sometimes, they also approached the tension between gritty reality and what went beyond words. Observational techniques facilitate content knowledge. By contrast, expressive representational techniques that may facilitate process knowledge use exaggeration, metaphor, idealisation and distortion to highlight an artist’s subjective interpretation(s) (Gibbon 2011, p. 107). In the context of the legacy of observational drawing, these clearly subjective representations continue to be offered as war truths. Significantly, reviews by critics of such expressive and subjective representations of war have continually hailed them as ‘authentic’. Moreover, they are often seen as essentially true depictions of both what is observed and the deeper reality of the experience of war that is now assumed as part of the stock understanding. Gibbon (2011) makes the critical point that as casualties in modern wars began to soar, accurate ‘observational drawing became inadequate to the task of representing war’ (Gibbon 2011, p. 106). Such comments challenge prevailing notions of ontology, accuracy, evidence and truth in obvious ways. They also raise the question of what and why something remains ‘invisible’. Perhaps because of this, since the First World War, observational drawing and apparently ‘objective’ representations of war, although still reified, have begun to fall into disuse. One could even argue that war art – as it includes ‘representations’ or traces of engagement with the ineffable – has taken their place. Sacco’s journalistic works of war art are an important interjection into this tradition. Moreover, and

36  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms most significantly, his work has also allowed war drawings to be seen as crucial to the representation of war, even though they are only partially ‘accurate’ representations of war. Gibbon (2011, p. 104) suggests that ‘the tradition of sending artists into war zones has an ideological function’. Until the First World War, art was routinely commissioned to commemorate famous battles and was produced by artists away from the front. From the First World War on, this changed, and war drawers were sent to the front with a specific purpose. Their own proximity to battles has since become a defining feature of their art. The war art that is currently commissioned includes drawings, paintings, interactive animation and other new media. But in all cases, the formula is that ‘artists are dispatched to war zones to make art. The rationale is that they should be eyewitnesses of war’ (Gibbon 2011, p. 104). The word ‘witness’ originates from the Anglo-Saxon verb witan, meaning ‘to know’ Gibbon (2011, p. 105). In its old usage, the knowledge derived from witnessing included inner knowing, conviction, observation (perhaps reflected in our close association of knowing and seeing in the English-speaking world), wisdom and skill. Witnessing meant giving testimony of such knowledge, and witnesses themselves were the evidence, or a piece of testimony of the knowledge. However, it is also worth noting at this point that Chute notes that both in Arabic and in Ancient Greek, the words for ‘witness’ and ‘martyr’ are linked too (Chute 2016, p. 212). This suggests a deep understanding that buried under the notion of witnessing is an immersive and embodied understanding of pain, as if the witness becomes a vehicle for sharing experiences as expression and interpretation, experience and representation come together in the figure of the witness. The pre-positivist idea of knowledge through conviction (which often included process knowledge) has become marginal in the (still) modernist west. But the knowledge of a witness, obtained through observation (content knowledge), is still dominant. This strain of the definition survives in official war art today. Gibbon (2011) points out that the prevalent dictum in representing war only counts when the artist him/herself is the witness. It does not count when the artist is representing what another witness tells him/her. Gibbon (2011) mentions the powerful example of Peter Howson’s painting of a rape in the Bosnian war – it was excluded from an official exhibition at the Military War Museum as it was not based on what Howson himself saw, only on an account of the victim. This is an extreme example of prising the apparent ‘accuracy’ of representation of the messy experience of war so far that it may occlude what actually happened. It emphasises how in the reception of representations of war and conflict the zone of the witness is expected to be that of an eyewitness. A re-presentation of witness testimony is unacceptable, as if it is assumed that only what has been seen (and not what has been heard) is the true origin of experience.

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  37 Drawn images of war have been canonised and accepted as true representations. They are believed to reflect the apparent objectivity of a witness of war and the describability of war through pictures drawn from this perspective. In this instance, there is a simple relationship between representation and experience, and a relatively simplistic notion of accuracy applies. This perpetuates the notion of an apparent one-to-one relationship between representation and reality in this context. However, paradoxically, Gibbon’s (2011) example suggests that the kind of knowledge that Sacco exhibits (which I discuss in detail in Chapter 3), in which he comes to know without having experienced seen himself, may be valuable in the context of war and conflict. It also shows the necessity of studying a body of literature that represents war as engaged with the ineffable, in order to open up new avenues for representing and understanding war and conflict. These new avenues may be opened up by an increased focus on the process of representation itself, its form and context, rather than merely on the content of specific war and conflict situations. War drawing, a genre that Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) draws upon heavily, has been seen as particularly objective in the tradition of representing war. Here, interpretation has been underplayed and ‘marks are made to represent what is seen rather than express a feeling or opinion about a subject’ (Gibbon 2011, p. 106). As with any other representational technique, the system of signs or marks is taken from an already established stock of ‘old masters’. In this stock, the illusion of being up close and personal is always a fabrication. An eloquent argument for accommodating the presence of the ineffable in drawn representations of war is made in Julian Stallabrass’s (2004) review of John Keane’s exhibition of paintings of Desert Storm. Stallabrass (2004) notes that it is only when the ineffable is included, and when there is a realisation of the impossibility upon which witnessing is based (Agamben 1999) that vital aspects of process knowledge and context can emerge. He states: ‘The artist who is confined to acting as a witness is powerless to reveal those things hidden from the video’ (Stallabrass 2004, p. 106). Nonetheless, expressive representational techniques in the context of pictural representations of war have sometimes been encouraged for their greater ‘authenticity’ and ability to move the viewer emotionally. The understanding that pictures may readily facilitate certain emotions does not rely only on a western positivist understanding of objectivity, but it also includes a Romantic notion of ‘art as a source of essential, authentic values’ (Gibbon 2011, p. 108). Gibbon believes this position is derived from nineteenth-century Romanticism in Europe and from its impact on art and notions of aesthetic value. In this school of thought, an emphasis on deep, sensual feeling, extreme experience and self-expression became significant, and was understood in an idiosyncratic sense that endures in western war art today.

38  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms The coincidence of Romantic aesthetic feeling and truth raises the dilemma that something can be both subjective and universal at the same time, an anomaly in modern positivist western notions of truth and representation (Gibbon 2011, p. 108). Gibbon argues that this paradox was partially overcome by relegating aesthetic value in the west almost exclusively to the internal characteristics and qualities of art, and largely ignoring its social and political consequences. Thus, ‘art’ came to refer to a very limited and circumscribed category of cultural production. Hence, art began to be seen as an individual pursuit in the west (with some notable exceptions) and as something separate from society. Artists (along with psychologists and the like) were thus distinguished from general artisans as specialists in feeling and in representing the inner world. The ‘higher’ aspects of art were even seen in some parts of the west (and further afield) as being in opposition to capitalism. Art became a world of autonomous value that could easily be universalised by an increasingly powerful bourgeoisie, hungry for a vehicle to justify and solidify the prevailing order. According to Gibbon (2011), in the west, war art has become associated with the higher, transcendent and universal values of art and intense feeling, in some sense unsullied by the world and society. Aside from implying that a war artist might be able to provide viewers with a special insight into war based on his/her especially sensitive artistic vision, this might also imply that war art arising from this individualist western tradition is rather idiosyncratic or even eccentric. According to the lingering precepts of the Romantic tradition, great art is considered to emerge from intense feeling, and war artists are thought to use their own experience of war to develop and hone their representational skills. This fuels the prevailing contemporary and ideologically loaded notion that war invigorates and defends a vaguely defined set of higher and universal values (as opposed to specifically western values). This has in fact made contemporary war art a dangerous link between universal values and the violent interests of partisan wars (Gibbon 2011, p. 110). One of the notable exceptions to this individualistic war art is war art made with an explicitly political agenda, namely propagandist war art. Yet ‘far from making a break from the propagandist function of official war art, the evocation of higher values refines that function’ as war becomes transformed into art (Gibbon 2011, p. 109). Thus, both the positivist idea of the witness and the Romantic idea of art have severely restricted the representational capacity of contemporary war art. This book analyses war art on the basis of texts that explicitly aim to challenge these notions and use the ineffable to attempt to overcome some of these restrictions. In the pictural texts under examination in this book, possible idiosyncrasies of the authors of these texts are counteracted by the fact that these texts are woven together by the perceptions, interviews, pictures and words of many individuals and groups in combination. In these

‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms  39 texts, the ineffable comes about in associations outside of the frame, in the gutters and the unknown spaces between the myriad perceptions framed by the narrative, and not simply inside the mind of a single individual artist. Gibbon (2011) addresses restrictions placed on herself as a war artist by the western Romantic Tradition of art and the positivist notion of witnessing by ‘reversing’ war art. She has changed the content of what she depicts: she now depicts the arms trade, not war itself. This adds a meta-interpretive layer to what can be brought into the frame in the context of war and conflict. Parody (exaggeration, distortion and caricature, influenced by Dadaism and graffiti) and close observation have both come to constitute the reality represented, and have carved out a space for themselves as ‘legitimate languages of representation’ (Gibbon 2011, p. 109). This kind of parody explicitly avoids the ‘higher’ universal values of academic art. In this arena, the subjective and the universal still jostle each other, but in a new dance that surpasses binaries and sometimes comprehension. Relegating the experience of war to a knowable, expressible, stock understanding continues to exclude the ineffable even from more expressive and subjectivist representations of war. It may be that Derrida’s notion of painterly representations is also relevant here. If we study and encourage pictorial representations of war and conflict, this opens another avenue for the representation and experience of war. The ineffable may become a powerful conduit to allow the flow of different knowledges that was formerly restricted.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have suggested that accommodating the ineffable holds the potential to enable the sharing of experiences of violence and conflict. I have suggested that altering our view of representation into something called ‘dark’ writing not only allows us to accommodate the ineffable aspects of violent experience in our representations without explaining them away but also facilitates us bridging the gap between experience and representation that has long plagued the western tradition. I have also contended that it is in the realm of indirect representation and aesthetics that the ineffable really comes into its own and starts to create traces of aspects of our experiences that may have remained hidden in other contexts and thus have previously seemed unrepresentable. I also developed the related link between politics and representational form. This link serves as a pathway to the consideration of how a more adequate ethical political participation may be made possible through innovative representational practices such as ‘dark writing’, especially when applied to painterly forms of representation that produce their own performative truth and to literary forms of ‘representation’ of war and violence that make use of images in order to represent war more

40  ‘Dark’ Writing Violence in Aesthetic Forms adequately, not accurately. I ended the chapter by discussing how pictorial forms of representation may be a particularly rich way accommodating the ineffable aspects of experiences of violence. War photographs and war drawings were also mentioned as forms of representation that might accommodate the ineffable and facilitate the ‘dark’ writing and thus sharing of violent experiences. These specific pictural forms have been examined as they form precursors to the graphic narrative and animated documentary forms, which will be investigated more closely in the following chapter.

2

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable

Introduction: ‘Dark’ Writing in the Graphic Narrative Form 41 Graphic Narratives, Graphic Novels and Comics 42 Graphic Narratives, the Body and Ethics 45 Graphic Narratives, ‘Dark’ Writing and the Ineffable 49 Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009), Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky 2009) and the Historical Context of the Graphic Narrative Form 51 The Five Frames Approach 54 Frame 1: The Frame of Accuracy 54 Frame 2: The Frame of Words and Images 56 Frame 3: The Frame of the Logic of Panels 57 Frame 4: The Frame of the Gutter 59 Frame 5: The Frame of Violent Associations 61 Conclusion 61

Introduction: ‘Dark’ Writing in the Graphic Narrative Form In the previous chapter, I discussed war drawings and war photographs as pictural forms of representation that may be a particularly rich way accommodating the ineffable in experiences of violence and thus sharing of violent experiences. These specific forms are precursors to the graphic narrative and animated documentary forms, which will be explored more closely in this chapter and in the concluding chapter. To help refine the argument, in this chapter, I identify specific aesthetic forms that appear to accommodate the ineffable. These include graphic narratives, some kinds of film and graphic novels. Some examples of these forms deal specifically with the ineffable in the context of the violence and trauma of war and conflict. It is particularly from this tradition of war drawing, a subjective form of representation that leaves traces of the artist’s hand in the representation of war, that the notion of ‘dark’ writing in graphic narratives may be distinguished. If graphic narratives can be read as examples of the

42  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable operations of ‘dark’ writing, then paying attention to the specifics of their form may reveal the presence of the ineffable. In this regard, Spiegelman identifies his struggle to represent his experiences of violence and identifies the ineffable as part of this experience. In Maus, he laments: ‘Reality is too complex for comics […] there’s so much I’ll never be able to understand or visualize […] [I] feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams’ (2003, p. 176). Nevertheless, he succeeds (at least to some extent) in transmitting some of his experiences of trauma in his powerful representation by expressing his historical account in the graphic narrative form, with its empty gutters between densely illustrated panels of drawings. Spiegelman achieves this precisely because he shares his awareness of the complexity and incomprehensibility in the experience of violence he depicts. He preserves both of these aspects in the graphic narrative form, where the gutters become the clearest visual depiction of the ineffable. They are an avenue to channel the reader’s/viewer’s active participation in the text. I shall use Maus (2003) as a punctuation point to delve into the history of the graphic narrative form in some detail in this chapter and shall discuss why this form is particularly adept at representing the ineffable aspects of violence. In Spiegelman’s autobiographical graphic narrative of events leading up to and ensuing from the Second European War (1937–45) Maus (2003), the Poles are drawn as pigs, the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats. In it, Spiegelman (2003) also draws his father’s historical escape from Auschwitz and flight to America. Although he did not actually witness any of these events, they all form part of his life experience. As graphic narratives purport to be non-fictional works, when they deal with the ineffable, they do so in a particularly interesting way. I also point out how graphic narratives have historically been used to depict contested political events from multiple perspectives. I then relate this to the unique way in which graphic narratives go about representing war: performatively, dynamically, with careful attention to detailed material traces of both the war and the body of the artist doing the depicting. This facilitates the rich potential for connection between artist, reader/ viewer and subject, always accommodating what are often considered to be ineffable aspects of the experience of war. I also explain how the method of ‘dark’ writing is well suited to highlighting each of these aspects of representation in the graphic narrative and helps us to reframe them in a way that allows us to transmit or instigate experiences of violence, rather than merely representing them. In this regard, I briefly identify my model of the five frames approach to how the graphic narrative form may use ‘dark’ writing to interpret violence.

Graphic Narratives, Graphic Novels and Comics I use the term ‘graphic narrative’ to refer to a form that is distinct from ‘comics’ and ‘graphic novels’. I adopt Chute’s (2008, p. 454) description

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable  43 of the genre as book-length ‘rich works of nonfiction …in the medium of comics’. Both graphic narratives and comics use a narrative architecture ‘built on the establishment of or deviation from regular intervals of space’, as they are arranged around a ‘grammar’ of panels with gutters of white space between them. However, I do not refer to Sacco’s (2009) Footnotes in Gaza and Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (which I shall analyse later in this book) as comics because they are not mass-produced or popular entertainment. I also prefer not to use the term ‘graphic novel’ for works by Sacco, Folman and Polonsky or Art Spiegelman, Maus (2003) as the term ‘novel’ implies fiction, and these works are all published as non-fiction, albeit non-fiction reconsidered. A forerunner to the split between fictional and non-fictional works in the comics form was the rise of fictional comics, first marketed as graphic novels after Will Eisner’s (1978) publication of A contract with God (cited in Chute 2008). Chute (2008) argues that in Europe, Töpffer (1799–1846) is regarded as inventing modern comics. Töpffer drew on the novel and on ‘picture stories’, adding woodcuts serving socialist agendas. He deliberately incorporated the experimental practices of literary modernism. Goethe is said to have extolled the mass cultural potential of these types of publication. Their potential for mass popularity and production was eventually achieved in America (Chute, 2008). There, they began in 1895 with The yellow kid (1895–98), a bald, skew-toothed boy in an oversized yellow nightshirt who hung around in a slum alley that typified the squalor in parts of late nineteenth-century New York City (Chute, 2008). The term ‘graphic novel’ was coined by Eisner (1978). The term only gained popularity with the publication of what prominent comics scholar Roger Sabin (1993) dubbed the big three in 1986: Spiegelman’s Maus (2003), Miller’s Batman: the dark knight returns (2002) and Moore and Gibbon’s Watchmen (2008). It was used to refer to what were considered ‘long and demanding comic books’ (Di Liddo 2009, p. 4). Note that what I have termed graphic narratives may thus also be seen as a subdivision of graphic novels. However, the term graphic novel is contentious and coloured by an old yearning for comics to gain critical acclaim and more canonical status within literary studies specifically and the term traces this history even more than it denotes a specific representational form. There is some slippage between the terms comic, graphic novella and graphic narrative. Comics may be considered an umbrella term for all of these aesthetic forms, as all these forms have in common a number of structural features. Charles Hatfield (2008) acknowledges that ‘serious’ and complex topics (which may include ineffable elements) are often explored in sophisticated ways in comics. He suggests that comics should be taken seriously as places from which to glean data. Hatfield argues that ‘the rise of comics studies represents a fortunate crisis in knowledge production, and, methodologically, we will need to be more nimble and inclusive to face that challenge’ (Hatfield 2008, p. 147).

44  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable Comics are distinguished from graphic novels and graphic narratives in that they may also include cartoon strips. They are generally much shorter works than either graphic narratives or graphic novels, which are often treated as more complex and more worthy of critical acclaim. The biggest distinction I make for the purposes of this book is that comics, graphic narratives and graphic novels (in combination) set themselves up differently on the continuum of fiction and non-fiction. Graphic narratives claim to be non-fictional forms, unlike graphic novels. This makes the topic of accuracy pertinent particularly in relation to the graphic narrative form, especially in graphic narratives about violent and traumatic events that are often contested in the context of war. However, there are similarities between graphic narratives, graphic novels and comics as sequential, pictural forms that allow them to represent what may otherwise remain unseen. McLuhan (1994) points out that the modern comic strip and comic books ‘provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. Thus, the viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines’ (McLuhan 1994, 161). Consequently, in reading comics (and graphic novels and graphic narratives), the reader/viewer is forced to become intimately involved with the text. As Scott McCloud (1993) puts it, the panels assist the comics creator, who ‘asks us to join in a silent dance of the seen and the unseen. The visible and the invisible’ (McCloud 1993, p. 92, panels 1–2). Including and engaging the reader/viewer in the form of the representation in this way is part of the process of accommodating the ineffable. Furthermore, panels are arranged differently in time and space than the images in motion pictures that take up the whole screen and are presented to the viewer. ‘Film frames inhabit the same space of the screen whereas each panel occupies a series of spaces on the page that the reader can trace visibly through time and space’ (Walton 2009, p. 100). This manipulation of space and time allows this representational form to represent the complexities of movement in a very nuanced way. At the Stanford Film and Philosophy conference, Scott Bukatman (2011) discussed the logic of the comics panel, rooting its development in the tradition of chronophotography and the modern obsession with movement which is addressed in cinema and comics. In recent years, comics have become the dominant medium in which causal relationships of movement through time have become a preoccupation. Bukatman (2011) claims that comics have done more than any other form to allow readers/viewers to visualise movement. He associates visualisation of movement with regulation of movement. This is the same trace of movement that Carter (2009) refers to when he explains ‘dark’ writing as a provider of process knowledge, a dynamic, movement form being able to capture the fleeting moment in ‘the instant between two strides’ (Carter 2009, p. 1). It is for

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable  45 this reason that I argue that comics capture a performance that would otherwise remain invisible: the physical body navigating a modern space of calculation. In distinguishing the comic’s aesthetic form from that of film, McCloud (1993) places the comics form at another very particular juncture between process and content knowledge. McCloud (1993, p.  20) defines comics as juxtaposed pictorial and other images arranged in a deliberate sequence in space, intended to convey information and/or evoke an aesthetic response in the reader/viewer. Aside from referring to ‘other images’ like words, his definition emphasises that the reader/ viewer becomes intimately involved in this sequence. The term space is understood in comics to refer to a spot on the page. It is one of the dimensions (along with time) that creates meaning and propels the narrative. One way in which comics manipulate space is by altering scale. This technique relies heavily on the reader/viewer in the construction of meaning. Although ‘comics have often been designated “cinematic” because of their alteration of image scale’ within panels, they include the reader/viewer in the construction of the story even more than films do (Walton 2009, p. 100). Unlike in film, readers/viewers of comics (graphic narratives and novels) are able to turn pages back and forward as they read, selecting the order of the panels and the pace of the story through time and space. The panel structure of comics, graphic narratives and graphic novels is an instance of Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) notion of hypermediacy (mentioned in the previous chapter) and the ‘windows’ logic it employs. Comics are a printed form to which this logic of ‘windows’ or frames may be applied. By this logic, it is within the frames that aspects become visible. Hypermediacy combines being immersed in what becomes visible through the ‘window’ and being aware all the time that what we are seeing is mediated. According to Bolter and Grusin (1999), it is this combination of intensity and mediation that we come to view as a defining feature of reality. However, as I have indicated, it is also this tension that houses the ineffable; the fragmentary characteristic of reality that the comics form of graphic narratives exploits as a means of making its representations credible.

Graphic Narratives, the Body and Ethics A further point of consideration of the graphic narrative form as a conduit for sharing experiences of violence is understanding whether and how ethical representation is possible in this form itself. I have chosen to locate my investigation in this form because the ineffable is well accommodated by the aesthetics of the graphic narrative. Moreover, the graphic narratives under scrutiny cultivate an ethical approach by creating a textual situation in which the reader/viewer can bear witness to

46  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable the suffering survival of themselves or another in a situation of violence and trauma. These narratives do so by instigating both painful intensity and clear abstraction. I identify how this is facilitated by the graphic narrative form. To do that, I use five analytical frames that ‘dark’ writing calls into play in these texts and I have chosen these as my tools to excavate the presence of the ineffable in the graphic narratives I analyse. These five frames are: the frame of accuracy, the frame of words and images, the logic of panels, the frame of the gutter and the frame of violent associations. I also discuss how graphic narratives come out of the tradition of war drawing (discussed in the previous chapter), a subjective form of representation that leaves traces of the artist’s hand in the representation of war. Graphic narratives are also an example of an aesthetic form that intimately involves the reader/viewer in constructing the narrative. It is a form that relies on embodiment for its representations – the hand of their creator(s) can be traced throughout the pages of these narratives, just as the eye of the reader/viewer must continually scan the panels to drive the narrative forward. Furthermore, if we recall Vallorani’s idea mentioned in the introductory chapter that images of war have a close connection to the body, then in terms of their content too, the images in graphic narratives of war are essentially experienced via a physiological and physically arousing process (Vallorani 2009, p. 446). Aesthetic forms such as graphic narratives have a vital role to play in helping us to find avenues to express and share what seems to be too horrific for words, particularly in situations of ongoing violence and involving subaltern subjects. More specifically, I will assert that several examples of formerly ‘invisible’ aspects of such violence are (re)presented in graphic narratives. Firstly, they can (re)present situations that initially appear to be single instances of violence, but are experienced as if they are associated with other instances of violence. Secondly, they can (re) present situations where over-commitment to ‘accuracy’ may have occluded some of the complexities of the relationship between seeing and knowing. They can do so in ways that accommodate some of those intricacies. Thirdly, the involvement of the reader/viewer in arranging the panels and gutters allows the reader/viewer to approach an ethical position in (re)presenting war and violence, and to engage with the affect of such violence. Lastly, representation through words and images may combine abstraction and immediacy in ways that increase the range of what can be represented. In the previous chapter, I began to suggest that accommodating the ineffable would enable a more adequate and ethical representation of violence and conflict. This is a notion that I will build on in this chapter as I explore the connection between images and ethics in more detail. In the previous chapter, I mentioned Agamben’s (1999) related claim that the ineffable is accommodated in silent, moving images and thus links

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable  47 us to an ethical form of representation. Chute (2008) maintains that the graphic narrative form fulfils a similar role with static images. Chute (2008) contends that the graphic narrative and its increased capacity for representation may help us represent more than we had previously thought we could. This helps to develop the robust connection between aesthetic form and ethics introduced in the previous chapter. It forces readers/viewers to reconsider the process of representation and the link between the process of representation and political action. Chute argues that graphic narratives with their engagement with diverse examples, styles, methods and modes ‘focuses attention on …reconfigured political formalism’ that compel a reconsideration of ‘the problem of historical representation’ in the reading process (Chute 2008, p. 457). Following Chute (2008), I suggest that graphic narratives are potentially a particularly ethical way of representing violence and trauma. They employ an aesthetic approach to provide an avenue for political intervention. As instances of the operation of ‘dark’ writing, the form accommodates the ineffable, partly because of the mirroring of the content and its violent process of representation. As discussed in the introductory chapter, I argue that the meaning that graphic narratives are able to share is specifically constructed to foreground the violence of the representational process itself. This makes these texts effective vehicles of process knowledge, a part of knowledge that is often less visible than the discernible content of what knowledge conveys. Through this focus on process knowledge, the graphic narrative form allows us to make out that the violence of the representational process mirrors the violence of the content. It is Derrida (1997) who uses the strikingly violent metaphor of the rape of presence to describe the process of representation. His notion of the violence of the letter in his early work defines the violence of representation as occurring at the moment when the intimacy of proper names can be opened to forced entry... And that is possible only at the moment when the space is shaped and reoriented by the glance of the foreigner. (Derrida 1997, p. 113) Without analysing that comparison in detail, this metaphor at least suggests that the sharing of experiences occurs at a point of excess where the representational process and the content of the representation coincide – at that point there is the potential for an intimate connection between reader and author and the possibility of a violent comes into being. The suggestion is also that representation necessarily breaks open and fragments meaning and experience and forces these to be distinct, binary. This same point of excess is approached in graphic narratives when the violent process of representation mirrors some of the violent content of the narratives of war itself. In such situations, graphic narratives often

48  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable invite the reader/viewer to sequence the narrative without imposing a particular structure on the reader/viewer. As such, they are an aesthetic form that defies linear logic and includes an even more embodied interaction in their very structure. This enables their formal qualities and narrative structure to be particularly adept at engaging such points of excess and transmitting the experience of violence. This also underlines the intimate connection between the form and content of representation in ‘dark’ writings such as these which are then able to bridge the gap between representation and ‘instigating’ presence. Furthermore, such points of excess in the narrative make the reader/viewer complicit in an act of brutal violation as he/she becomes enlightened or comes to see or know what is being represented. As such, in some sequences, the reader/viewer may seem to come dangerously close to the violence of representation itself. Paradoxically, the violent process of representation is inscribed into the text itself and becomes the point of coalescence of an ethical position, where the reader/viewer, through a process of conscious reflection supported by the narrative, comes to know how violence happens. A further implication is that there may, by contrast, also be some ethical value in the position of not knowing and not seeing, and this tension between simultaneously coming to know and not knowing engages the ineffable. In this regard, Chute (2008) notes that Spiegelman’s (2004) comic book, In the shadow of no towers, opens a pressing question: ‘What is the texture of narrative forms that are relevant to ethical representations of history’ (Chute 2008, p. 462). I argue that an adequate representation in this context is not an ‘accurate’ representation, but a darkly written ethical representation that captures the ineffable in the representational process in a way that leaves a violent and embodied trail for us to sometimes grab onto. Thus, I conceive of the inclusion of the ineffable through ‘dark’ writing as an avenue that may allow us to see and know the violence and trauma of war and conflict differently. When the ineffable is accommodated in the weave of the text, the process of how violence happens becomes the focus rather than only its content. This emphasis on process and the new knowledge it brings then form the basis for establishing an ethical position. I therefore regard graphic narratives about the violence and trauma of war and conflict as particular instances of ‘dark’ writing, and thus as potentially ethical vehicles for representing this kind of violence. I posit that in applying the method of representing violence and trauma through ‘dark’ writing to aesthetics, the link between ethical form and the form of representation comes into its own. In this regard, Chute (2008, p. 462) claims that the ‘rigorous, experimental attention to form’ in graphic narratives makes it an effective mode of political intervention. In Chapter 1, I discussed ethics in a Foucauldian sense, as fundamentally also a relational process, closely tied to self-reflexive representation. Foucault’s (1994) point is that representation is always a relational activity, an active process of engaging the self in a web of shared constructing

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable  49 and constructions. This is in line with his statement that the ethical ‘search should not be for the secret of one’s identity but for how to invent new modes of relationship’, a basis for the sharing of experiences (Foucault, cited by Rabinow 1994, p. xxxvi). ‘Dark’ writing is ethical in this relational sense too. It offers a means to accommodate the ineffable in representation, and is characterised by embodied, dynamic performativity, which may provide the potential for meeting. The graphic narrative’s invitation to the reader/viewer to participate in the text supports the notion of relational ethics. Thus, the ‘dark’ writing in graphic narratives supports Chute’s (2008) claim that such narratives have the potential to be an ethical form of representation. In the ongoing transformative and relational practices of ‘dark’ writing, new ways of seeing and knowing may be developed. These allow us to see hitherto ‘invisible’ aspects of the representation of violence by accommodating the ineffable. My method of bringing initially invisible aspects of violence into the frame is thus predicated on the understanding that ‘dark’ writing is the practice of a kind of representation which performs the ineffable. Thus, in the context of representing violence in graphic narratives of war, ‘dark’ writing may be understood as a meta-method of representation which mirrors the form of the content investigated and brings points of excess into the frame. As such, it allows us to speculate about which particular invisibilities of content are made visible in ‘dark’ writing especially when our experiences have been forgotten or might be considered too violent and traumatic to represent.

Graphic Narratives, ‘Dark’ Writing and the Ineffable Reading/viewing my particular illustrative examples of comics as instances of ‘dark’ writing highlights the complex relationship between accuracy, the ineffable, ethics and the body. These comics are graphic narratives, that is, comics that claim to be situated nearer the non-fiction end of the fiction/non-fiction continuum. These graphic narratives purport to deal in personal, non-fictional accounts of the violence and trauma of specific wars. In consequence, the investigation of representation through these texts should take on ethical overtones. This suggests that by viewing these narratives as instances of ‘dark’ writing, the individual reader/viewer of these graphic narratives joins an ethical process of performance around the content of violence. This enables/forces the reader/viewer to share the witness-bearing responsibilities with the author and sometimes even with a protagonist or protagonists. This performance entangles the reader/viewer in all the passion and complexity of accuracy and contestation, in turn carried by the content of these graphic narratives and by their form of representation. The inclusion of the ineffable holds the potential for developing an ethical position from which to share experiences of the violence and trauma of war. A defining

50  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable characteristic of ‘dark’ writing is its accommodation of the ineffable and thus its facilitation of the ethical perspective. Therefore, the way that the ineffable is structurally included in the graphic narrative form is also of relevance for defining an ethical position. The way the ineffable is structurally included in the graphic narrative form involves the interaction of the reader’s/viewer’s body with both the content and the process of representation. Thus, in the graphic narrative form, an ethical position from which to share experiences of violence is embodied. It is the gutters of the graphic narrative that not only represent the ineffable but also perform it in relationship to the co-constructing reader/viewer of the narrative itself. All comics are structured into panels and gutters, sometimes in very varied permutations. The gutter acts as an obscure and liminal space, in which the panels are suspended. All comics thus have some claim on being able to represent what may be ‘invisible’ in other forms. Admittedly, all comics have panels and gutters, and thus involve the reader/viewer in the ineffable. In this book, however, I focus only on graphic narratives that deal with violence and war and how sharable the pictural form of the graphic narrative makes these experiences. As referenced at the start of this chapter, McCloud (1993) elegantly sums up the link between comics and the ‘invisible’. He explains that what is between the panels (the gutters) is the only element of comics that is not duplicated in any other medium. He suggests that ‘the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics’ (McCloud 1993, p. 66, panel 3). The comics form is visually configured not only by what is represented but also by what is absent. Put differently, all comics, to some extent, may be said to visually depict the ineffable in their gutters. Thus, they include the reader/viewer in the participatory space (and in an embodied way) outside the frame and in the very structure of their narratives. Merely identifying that comics use gutters in their representational process does not help us much in identifying the ineffable. It also does not tell us much about the ineffable in the context of violence. Nor does it expand much upon the blank, unframed nature of the ineffable. However, an analysis of non-fictional comics of war, as ‘dark writings’ of violence and trauma (where form and content intensify each other), reveals further aspects of the ineffable. In particular, the performative nature of the ineffable, its potential for accommodating politics, approaching ethical representations and facilitating the sharing of traumatic experiences become manifest. This reveals how the ineffable can fulfil its part in constituting historical reality. If ‘dark’ writing is used as a way of reading/analysing the graphic narrative’s representation of violence, then the gutter may be seen as a visual depiction of the ineffable in this context. Furthermore, ‘dark’ writing, as illustrated in the graphic narrative form, once again demonstrates the concept of the ineffable as being at play in the process of representation.

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable  51 Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009), Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky 2009) and the Historical Context of the Graphic Narrative Form I am offering ‘dark’ writing as an alternative way of representing and analysing the representation of violence and trauma in graphic narratives after having questioned the adequacy of representational systems in general. According to Michaela Schäuble (2011), questioning the adequacy of representational systems, memory and factual photographic documentation enables us to uncover a hidden, more real truth than the representations are themselves able to give us. This is the reason that the central focus of this book is a visual and literary analysis of two graphic narratives that capture the experience of violence and trauma in situations of war and conflict: Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) and Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky 2009). I argue that these two graphic narratives provide glimpses of the ineffable and are self-conscious about their attempts to represent more than the merely historically ‘accurate’. The representations in these narratives are different, but I interpret them as complementary texts. Choosing these texts addresses the concern to decolonise literary trauma studies. Recent literary trauma theorists suggest that ‘there has been too much of an emphasis in trauma studies on identification with victims and too little emphasis on identification with perpetrators’ (Craps, in Craps et al. 2015, p. 200). Footnotes (2009) appears to identify with the victims, but it also problematises the notions of a detached narrator and the west as an innocent bystander in the conflict in Gaza. Waltz (2009) overtly allows its readers/viewers to identify with Folman as a perpetrator. The works are connected by the fact that both are influenced by Spiegelman’s Maus (2003). Folman and Polonsky claim that both Spiegelman’s Maus (2003) and Sacco’s Palestine (2003) were a direct influence. Folman says the following of Sacco: The way he illustrates says everything about the writing — it’s so unique, there is nothing quite like him... I feel from his work that we share exactly the same opinions about what’s happening in the Middle East... (Folman, in Brogdan 2009, n.p.) Both provide perspectives on massacres in the middle east in which large numbers of Palestinians were killed. As Noam Chomsky argues, both massacres are also still deeply embedded in the politics of the region today (Chomsky 1999). Both narratives allow aspects of the representation of these massacres to be apprehended in ways that would not have

52  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable been possible in more direct, ‘accurate’ and less self-conscious forms. As such, these graphic narratives are both deeply embedded in the American graphic narrative tradition. Chute notes that American comics from the 1950s to the 1970s established a rigorous self-reflexivity, deeply concerned with comics’ aesthetics. Their content reflected fundamental cultural changes produced by political discrimination or war. Indeed, it has been argued that American graphic novels have always used the form of visual narrative to bring issues of ignored politics and economics to the forefront (Scanlon 2014). The concerns around form and content have carried over into the more contemporary graphic narrative form. These now also reflect an obsession with both fluidity and accuracy. It is out of this more popular (at first overtly fictional) trajectory that ‘serious, imaginative works [emerged] that explored social and political realities by stretching the boundaries of a historically mass medium’ (Chute 2008, p.  256). Spiegelman’s Maus (2003) heralded the beginning of serious, non-fictional comics on political themes. The term ‘graphic narrative’ encapsulates this focus. Thereafter, graphic narratives of war began to proliferate – significantly, just after what has been called ‘the first mediated war’ by the United States of America against Iraq in 1991 (Bolter & Grusin 1999, p. viii). This may be more than a coincidence. It may reflect growing acceptance of the notion that wars are mediated, and that they therefore cannot be fully understood (particularly from an outsider perspective). This may have facilitated acceptance of attempts to gain knowledge of wars by using aesthetic means rather than traditionally ‘news-worthy’ sources, such as news programmes. Sacco’s journalistic works on various political conflicts are probably the best-known examples of graphic narratives. These works explicitly push the non-fictional form to its limits. Other texts in this wave include comics memoirs (sometimes also made as films) such as Marjane Satrapi’s (2004) Persepolis: the story of a childhood, about the Iranian revolution, Folman and Polonsky’s graphic narrative Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (2009), based on the acclaimed film Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008). Mine Okubo’s (1946) Citizen 133600 about the detainment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War also fits into this category. This tradition has become richer and more established, and has given rise to recent photojournalistic comics, such as Emmanuel Guibert’s (2009) The photographer, or travel writing such as Ted Rall’s (2002) To Afghanistan and back, and Guy Delisle’s (2008) The Burma chronicles. The trend is for such works to draw on avant-garde, autobiographical, surrealist, anti-narrative aesthetics that are popular and populist, and produce works that are ‘complex aesthetically and politically in ways [that are] specific’ to graphic narratives (Chute 2008, p.  456). Molly Scanlon (2014) explicitly names Sacco’s graphic narratives and Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) as part of an alternative

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable 53 to the sometimes ostentatious and sensationalist forms of news story, because these narratives attempt to engage with less conspicuous aspects of violence than the mass media do. Chute (2016) also mentions that ‘[i]n the years since Sacco started both writing and drawing from the Middle East, there has been a steady growth of comics about the region in Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English…’ (Chute 2016, p. 254). Since the ‘first mediated war’ in the Levant (Bolter & Grusin 1999, p. viii), there have been several graphic novels, narratives and cartoons that depict the violent politics in the Levant. Some of these texts criticise the relationship between the west and the middle east as an explicit contributing factor to the ongoing conflict in the region. As I have indicated above, in recent years, graphic narratives have become a popular way to record the violently contested nature of Israeli-Palestinian politics in particular. There are two possible reasons for this. Firstly, since its inception, the graphic narrative form has self-consciously explored the value of subjectivity, the active position of the narrator as onlooker and the artifice of fiction in mediating violence (including the violence of war) (Chute 2008). Hence, it is well placed as a form to capture these expressions. Secondly, graphic narratives have always dealt with social and political perspectives that are marginalised by the mainstream (Scanlon 2014). So, it is well suited to express the subaltern perspective. In this context, graphic narratives engage with both the narrator and the protagonist (if they differ at all) as active participants in the text. These narratives also represent diverse narrative perspectives on conflicts, often without resolving tensions between these perspectives. These texts thus depict what appear to be mere onlookers and seemingly passive victims as active contributors to the narrative. Thus, I argue that perhaps the graphic narrative is an appropriate form to record the ‘messy’ inaccuracy of what is ‘observed’ by (western) onlookers and of lived subaltern (Palestinian) lives. This ‘record’ stands in often stark contrast to the images of almost constant Palestinian deaths that we have become accustomed to being confronted with in more traditional ‘accurate’ news reports. I make this claim in view of Butler’s (2009) argument that repeated depictions of oppressed people(s) or victims as merely victims eventually render them invisible, as their agency falls outside of what we expect to see. The points above may explain why several graphic narratives of the Levantine (and Israeli-Palestinian) conflict in particular appear to be written from a pro-Palestinian perspective. It seems as if they are deliberately trying to render the invisible more visible (however, this is in itself a contentious claim that I hope to problematise further below). Examples of graphic narratives that could be considered pro-Palestinian include the anti-Zionist graphic novel by Harvey Pekar, Not the Israel my parents promised me (2014, banned in Israel); a graphic narrative by Leila Abdelrazaq, Baddawi (2014); the cartoons of well-known Palestinian

54  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable artist Naji al-Ali, who was killed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for his works of dissent; and the works of Mohammad Saba’aneh, who has recently frequently been arrested by Israel for his work. There are also several recent graphic narratives (mostly published after 2008) that depict the politics of the Levant from a more nuanced perspective. Such a perspective may often be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause but is not simply pro-Palestinian. It deliberately seeks to include the Israeli perspective in a contemporary re-engagement with history that takes both Israel’s and Palestine’s perspectives into account. Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman and Polonsky 2009) is an example of this aesthetic trajectory, which is another reason I have chosen to analyse it as a counter-balance to Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (2009), which may be considered pro-Palestinian. Other recent graphic narratives that build on this reappraisal of history include Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik! An American girl’s adventures in the Israeli army (2008) (written in response Sacco’s Palestine); Sarah Glidden’s How to understand Israel in 60 days or less (2011); Boaz Yakin and Nick Bertozzi’s Jerusalem: the story of a city and a family (2013) and Nina Fischer’s Graphic novels explore an (un-) holy land (2013).

The Five Frames Approach Having established graphic narratives as a site where we might see ‘dark’ writing and the ineffable in situations of violence and trauma at play and thus as a system of visual representation that may assist us to share experiences of violence, I will now turn to a discussion of how to read such ‘dark’ writings. I suggest that such ‘dark’ writing may effectively be read through the five frames approach. In this approach, the notion of framing is borrowed, in part from the graphic narrative form itself, and in part from Butler’s (2009) notion of framing in the context of war photographs (discussed in Chapter 1). My own analytical frames thus draw in the ineffable, inviting the reader of this book to participate in an experimental and dynamic method of speculation as he/she peers through them at the process of representing violence and trauma. Frame 1: The Frame of Accuracy ‘Accuracy’ in this book refers to the criterion often used to indicate whether the representation of certain content measures up to the demand to see (and show) what is objectively there, in ‘reality’. But when we attempt to enter the realms of process knowledge or ‘knowledge how’ that enables action, then ‘accuracy’ and ‘inaccuracy’ accumulate further meanings. These additional meanings might include a sense of genuine involvement with the story celebrated by a community, even if such a

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable  55 story is ‘unofficial’ or partially forgotten, fabricated or excluded from accessible narratives. Treating such meanings as part of the frame of accuracy may allow us to see more than we did before. Agamben’s (1999) view of accuracy is also pertinent here. He claims that his reason for attempting to analyse representations of the experiences of Holocaust (Shoah) survivors is not to produce accurate representations of experience at all. Indeed, ‘accurate’ representations may obscure his higher purpose. He declares this to be helping people to orient themselves ethically in terms of how they understand war and conflict when they engage with these representations. His proclaimed agenda opens the door to an expanded view of what the ‘representation’ of violence might entail, and which is suggested by the construct of ‘dark’ writing. This expanded view of what representation might be holds the potential for us to make our experiences more shareable. This view of representation would allow an ‘understanding’ of violence in a different, less direct way and thus enable us to ‘listen to what is unsaid’ rather than merely accurately recalling the facts (Agamben 1999, p. 14). This also reveals a way in which ‘accuracy’ might operate against an ethical perspective in accommodating the ineffable. An analysis of representations of violence, enabled by the lens of ‘dark’ writing, suggests a continuum between knowing facts at the one end, and seeing relationships or experiencing involvements at the other. There are many shades of meaning in between. We can thus use ‘dark’ writing to give accuracy a more nuanced meaning, as it enables us to engage in and with the space in between seeing and knowing, where these two concepts merge. The dynamism of ‘dark’ writing helps us operate in a similar way to what Michel Serres (1982) suggests and I quoted at the start of the introductory chapter, a way that locates knowledge in the darkness, and the invisible moving shadows outside of the apparent outlines. Serres’ advice enables us not to be distracted by the obvious and the accurate. He proposes that instead of understanding experience as merely the embodied part of representation, and representation as the disembodied part of experience, experience and representation are actually two, integrally related and mutually dependent sides of the same coin. Understanding accuracy from within this frame enables us to operate in the space between representational and non-representational knowledge. However, the relationship between seeing and knowing, experience and representation is hard to pin down. It is as if there is a gap between them that cannot quite be described, and that is not fully accounted for if they are set in binary opposition. For this reason, in this book, I sometimes apply the terms ‘vision’ and ‘envisioning’ to refer to a combination of seeing and knowing, experience and representation – the space between representational and non-representational knowledge that appears to be appropriate to describing how understanding

56  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable coalesces under the lens of ‘dark’ writing. This type of envisioning includes sensing the presence of a shadow, as well as clear empirical experience of what is felt to be present. This frame enables the scrutiny of the construct of accuracy by means of the lens of ‘dark’ writing to help us to envision what accommodating the ineffable makes visible; and what (ethical) actions it enables. Also, this approach challenges some of the common assumptions about seeing and knowing that limit what we can know, see and do. To envision what has before been ‘invisible’, we need to invent new possibilities of seeing and new ways of building or representing knowledge. ‘dark’ writing is thus both a way of ‘representing’ or writing and a way of reading or analysing and thus holds open the door for new visions, embedded as they are in new ways of seeing (and not-seeing). McLuhan (1994) notes that the emphasis on accuracy and precision in viewing representation that we have inherited from scholars, is not a benign matter of identifying aesthetic style. It also has a pernicious political element. Accuracy is often a political stance that militates against inclusion and a participatory space (part of why the relationship between ethics and aesthetics has been brought into the discussion in this book). We might even describe it as a kind of representational fascism. It foregrounds someone’s ‘objective’ and hegemonic view, and hides shadow, dynamism and imprecision. The graphic narratives I will be analysing in the next chapters of this book allow these non-fictional graphic narratives to be constructed out of shadows and invisibilities. Therefore, they become a natural space for historically disallowed or contested tales, not sanctioned as by the clarity and authority of a singular author, or a mainstream political position or publishing house. The frame of accuracy can help to bring these narratives back into consideration. Sacco’s graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza, is a clear example of such a narrative, poignantly entitled ‘footnotes’ because his narrative was ironically only allowed into ‘mainstream’ history under that title. Frame 2: The Frame of Words and Images In the next chapters of this book, I shall consider the particular combination of words and images in the process of representing violence employed in the graphic narratives as a meta-frame for constructing further understanding. This is done by actively including the reader’s/viewer’s body (eyes and hands as discussed earlier in this chapter) and mind in this process of representation. McCloud (1993) defines comics as belonging somewhere in between reality and language. Furthermore, he claims that by merging words and images, comics can draw the reader/viewer into a particularly intense and reflective experience. This is one of the ways we might argue that comics (in general) are able to incorporate the ineffable in their representational

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable  57 system. Furthermore, in incorporating images and words, all comics may be seen as painterly forms of representation, which are particularly good at accommodating the ineffable. Chute (2008) argues that they force the reader/viewer into a situation where their meaning is difficult to consume because their words and images are not synthesised. This suggests that all comics accommodate the ineffable and may even be said to show potential for cultivating an ethical stance. However, it is my argument that ‘dark’ writing brings to the fore further dynamism; in other words, a re-evaluation of accuracy and sophisticated self-reflexivity if we read and write texts depicting the historical violence and trauma of war and conflict in this way. The interplay of words and images so distinctive in the graphic narrative form provides a concrete picture for exactly what ‘dark’ writing does in the context of violence. It allows us to observe the process of representation accommodating the ineffable in action as it is negotiated between the reader/viewer and the writer. Furthermore, as comics have multiple ‘authors’ or creative contributors, meaning is necessarily negotiated and the reader/viewer becomes one of the contributors in their chain of meaning. The ineffable can only be accommodated as the ineffable, and with the participation of the reader/viewer who has to keep it obscure. Thus, even a rudimentary understanding of ‘dark’ writing in the comics form enables us to observe the operations of the representational process as they rub up against content. This may also justify speculation about how this might influence the content that is represented in ways we may not have been aware of before. The texts by Sacco (2009) and Folman and Polonsky (2009) chosen as illustrative examples combine their demand for intimate bodily involvement by the reader/viewer with an urgent and intense portrayal of violent subject matter. This demand is all the more poignant because these graphic narratives are non-fictional. This creates a dynamic (sometimes uncomfortable) interaction between the reader/viewer and text when the content is violent and the process is so intimate. This interaction is intensified through the use of images. This is also why readers/viewers of graphic narratives are often referred to as readers/viewers. They experience access to the seeming immediacy of experience that film offers viewers. However, in addition, they are also intensely involved in constructing the narrative through the reading process. Frame 3: The Frame of the Logic of Panels McCloud (1993) describes the peculiar relationship between the representational form of comics and a single moment in time: ‘In comics, as in film, television, and “Real Life”, it is always now’ (McCloud 1993, p.  104, panel 3). Graphic narratives differ from other media such as film, television and photography. In these media, usually only one frame

58  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable is available at a time for the viewer’s consumption. This gives comics an immediacy absent from most other media (except multi-screen gallery works or some experimental films that make more than one frame available to the viewer at once). This point is stressed by McCloud (1993). He claims that through the logic of panels, ‘…both past and future are real and visible all around us! …at the same time your eyes take in the surrounding landscape of past and future’ (McCloud 1993, p. 104, panel 4). In the concluding chapter, I will discuss even more detail of the comics form, when I contrast it with film in general and animated documentary in particular with regard to the presentation of time in the specific visual form. At this point, it suffices to say that due to the arrangement of a comic into panels, its inclusion of the reader/viewer and the way it portrays movement, the comics form presents the reader/viewer with many present moments and that the reader/viewer is unable to pin-point a single present moment. This induces an experience of simultaneous immediacy and abstraction in the reader/viewer. It stages a boundary between content and process knowledge in a very similar way to what ‘dark’ writing does in the graphic narratives I will analyse in the next chapters, because of the logic of the panels. I will show in my texts for analysis how the representer and subsequently the reader/viewer of the graphic narrative engage with the present and the future (and sometimes past) moments of violence at the same time. This is because of how time is represented in each panel. This gives the reader/viewer and representer of these graphic narratives access to a peculiar experience of time that is situated between the ordinary exclusive categories (past, present and future) out of which time is constructed. Comics, in the logic of their panels, exemplify how ‘dark’ writing can operate to accommodate the ineffable as a dynamic and dynamically embodied form of representation. At the start of this chapter, I mentioned Bukatman’s (2012) claim that comics have done more than any other form to allow readers/viewers to visualise movement and capture a drama that would otherwise remain invisible. He links this closely to the embodied way in which movement is depicted, almost caricatured, in discrete elements. He asserts that in comics, movement is epitomised by showing particularly vigorous ‘vital figures possessed of nearly uncontainable energy’; as emotional, physical bodies navigating space. He describes them as representing ‘little embodied utopias of disorder’ (Bukatman 2012, p.  22). This idea may be closely allied to Carter’s (2009) description of ‘dark’ writing as representing the movement between two strides. This movement is perfectly suited to the graphic narrative, especially as a non-fictional form, which often depicts bodies in the throes of violent historical wars and massacres. Through these narratives’ representation of this movement, they allow the reader/viewer to

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable  59 measure the onset of both movement and chaos, and to participate in it. This is why these graphic narratives are able to depict historical violence and trauma so effectively. Studying them through the lens of ‘dark’ writing, we discover the process of adequately representing violence. Edward Saïd (2003), the Palestinian-American cultural critic and an avid reader/viewer of comics, elaborates on the distinctiveness of comics’ representational process. He believes comics are distinct because they are organised into a series of panels, which allow them to escape the ordinary linear logic of books. In his introduction to Sacco’s graphic narrative Palestine, Saïd (2003, p. ii) remarks that ‘[c]omics play[ed] havoc with the logic of a+b+c+d and they certainly encouraged one not to think in terms of …the expected’. In the case of these graphic narratives, I suggest that the logic of panels makes the unexpected an integral part of reality. Saïd (2003) also reveals a way in which the graphic narrative form in general may be said to exceed expectations in an unusual leap of logic that he ascribes to this kind of panelled representation in his word-image text After the last sky: Palestinian lives. Saïd (1989) posits that these interstitial fragments are the best way to represent a people politically. He asserts: ‘I believe that essentially unconventional, hybrid and fragmentary forms of expression should be used to represent us’ (Saïd 1989, p. 6). He moreover declares that in order to be adequate in their representation of Palestinian lives, such texts should not be objectively accurate. This applies directly to seeing graphic narratives of war through the lens of ‘dark’ writing and suggests that by accommodating the ineffable rather than a slavish commitment to accuracy is the best way to construct a representation that is able to support the sharing of experience. Saïd further suggests that another advantage of this approach is its potential to uncover ways to trace violence and trauma that support political representation, or at least brings them into the frame. We can only see the ineffable through a lens that itself performs a dynamic process of representation such as the logic of the panels brings into the frame. Frame 4: The Frame of the Gutter In the next chapters, I apply the notion of the gutter in the graphic narrative as an example of ‘dark’ writing. This is a visual depiction of the ineffable. McCloud (1993) points out that comics use sight to represent all the senses. Nonetheless, the specifics of how Sacco (2009) and Folman and Polonsky (2009) depict historical violence through panels, pictures and words and engaging with accuracy come together distinctively to create a powerful vision of reality and more than a merely visual experience. Part of the way in which graphic narratives achieve this is not only through what is present in the representational form but also through what is absent (McCloud 1993, p. 89).

60  Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable Comics clearly depict these absences, to the point of almost being jarring. This includes a visual depiction of the ineffable at the heart of the way they construct meaning. Different types of panel-to-panel transitions have an impact on what the reader/viewer sees, and does not see. While it seems as if the reader/viewer focuses only on what is shown in each panel, he/she is actually constantly filling in the gaps between each panel with his or her own imagination (McCloud 1993, p. 74). Comics are thus unique in the way in which they accommodate the blank, unframed quality of the ineffable and require the readers/viewers to take an active part in what they are looking at. The gutter’s depiction of the ineffable comes into its own when we view non-fictional comics of war as ‘dark writings’. This approach makes manifest further aspects of the ineffable, such as its performative nature in the context of violence, and particularly its potential for accommodating politics and approaching an ethical representation and its necessary part in constituting historical reality. In the context of ‘dark’ writing, I return briefly to Carter’s (2010) characterisation of this ineffable yet measured space. He remarks that when the subject embraces the excessive, the ambiguous, the ‘invisible’ or the ineffable, the subject gives up the insistence on being autonomous. What was indistinct can then become sensible (Carter 2010, p. 5). This suggests that the use of the gutter and the inclusion of the ineffable are both full, and empty; both are part of the representation, and outside the frame. Carter’s (2010) notion might thus be fruitfully applied to the gutters in the graphic narratives of my illustrative examples. In the case of these gutters, ‘dark’ writing might be used to describe the mechanics of this ‘representational’ process further as a meeting. In this case, it is a meeting that works with what both the text and the reader/viewer bring to the process. It also creates its own new truth in their combination. Gutters are ‘vessels that also act as channels and channels that contain and separate’ (Carter 2010, p. 6). I show in my texts for analysis what Carter refers to as a medium of exchanges. Carter (2010, p.  4) borrows Hillis Miller’s term ‘anastomotic’ to describe what such media do. They connect two distinct vessels in a way that preserves ambiguity and mixing so that both the mixing and the distinct vessels remain inherent in their constitution. This makes ‘dark’ writing a salient way of working across binaries such as reader/viewer, representer; experience, representation; similarity and difference; representational and non-representational knowledge in graphic narratives. It suggests that construction or performance in such a participatory text is never really completed. It is always flowing or changing into something else. Thus, it is also a way to emphasise their dynamism over stasis and their performance over production.

Graphic Narratives, Framing the Ineffable 61 Frame 5: The Frame of Violent Associations We may use the lens of ‘dark’ writing to contemplate the representation of the process of violence in graphic narratives. We then see that multiple associations of violence are often instigated in what initially seems like one single instance of violence. The two graphic narratives that I will analyse are specifically constructed to foreground the violence of the representational process itself in the narrative form. Only looking at them through the lens of ‘dark’ writing enables us to see this. When we are able to see that the violence of the representational process mirrors the violence of the content, we glimpse further instances of violence in ways that we might not have been able to see before. This stacking of multiple instances of the process of violence in the ‘real’ and the symbolic realms occurs because ‘dark’ writing facilitates a loose weaving together of representational and non-representational knowledge. Reading through the lens of ‘dark’ writing gives these depictions of violence maximum and personal impact.

Conclusion As I have suggested, ‘dark’ writing (in its dynamic, performative and embodied accommodation of the ineffable) invites participation and supports the sharing of experiences by facilitating the coming together of ethics and aesthetics. I have suggested that by accommodating the ineffable as a form of non-representational or process knowledge, ‘dark’ writing can enable ethical representation. I thus developed the link between politics and representational form in this chapter. As I traced the history of the graphic narrative in this chapter and distinguished it from comics and graphic novels, I explained how its form could help to support the sharing of experiences and channel political interventions. I suggested how an expanded view of representation through ‘dark’ writing could be seen to be operating in the graphic narrative form and as such how graphic narratives of violence and war might offer a more adequate, ethical route to political participation through innovative representational practices. I also explained that one of the ways in which ‘dark’ writing works in the graphic narrative form is by functioning as a lens through which to observe five aspects of the process of representing violence and trauma in war and conflict. These five aspects are based on the notion that graphic narratives – in their interrogation of historical accuracy and their attention to both innovations of form and political content – manage to instigate reality and thus support the sharing of experiences. The following five aspects or analytical frames have been identified: the frame of accuracy, the frame of words and images, the logic of panels, the frame of the gutter and the frame of violent associations. I also explained that I will

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use these frames to further elucidate the ‘invisibilities’ that show up in the graphic narratives, which I briefly introduced as Sacco’s (2009) Footnotes in Gaza and Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story to be analysed in more detail in the next chapters. These graphic narratives that I will analyse are able to accommodate significant tensions between what is visible and invisible, experienced and represented, accurate and ineffable. I have also argued that the lens of ‘dark’ writing may enable us to see what was formerly ‘invisible’. More specifically, it allows us to see the process of representing the violence and trauma of war and conflict itself. Hence through viewing ‘dark’ writing as operating within these frames, we are able to investigate how we may represent these topics more adequately and ethically.

3

‘Dark’ Writing the Khan Younis Massacre

Introduction: Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) Sacco’s Frame of Accuracy 67 The Politics of ‘Dark’ Writing 68

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Sacco as Witness Who Does Not See 71 Khamis as Witness Who Does Not Know 84

The Witnessing Relationship 89 Framing Associations of Further Violence through ‘Dark’ Writing The Beam of Numbness 101 The Shaft of Shame 106 Conclusion 111

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Introduction: Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009) In Sacco’s (2009) Footnotes in Gaza, an attempt is made to share experiences of violence experienced in the 1956 Khan Younis massacre, from the perspective of various victims and bystanders. The Khan Younis massacre is widely held to mark the beginning of the relentless violence that still pounds Gaza today. While I will show that there is a sense that traumatic experiences are overwhelmingly intense and supremely isolating for the victims, there is also a sense in which this trauma is still rippling out to be negatively experienced by more than just its direct victims. This ongoing and often imperceptible fluidity of this experience of violence may be traced through a focus on ‘dark’ writing as it shows up the presence of the ineffable in these experiences. Chute notes that Sacco is ‘interested in …historical conflict – and how it intersects with the individual body in pain’ (Chute 2016, p. 200), which makes his work ideal material to study to when we wish to explore the possibilities and limits of sharing experience. Analysing the operations of the process of ‘dark’ writing in this text, and the way that this text is specifically constructed to foreground the violence of the representational process itself, allows me to concentrate on particular aspects of the representation process that make the sharing of these violent experiences possible in the narrative form. I probe the operations of ‘dark’ writing by using the five frames approach, which expedites my focus on particular aspects of the representation

64 ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre process. This approach frames accuracy; the unique interaction of words and images; the logic of panels; the use of the gutter; and the way that further associations of violence are captured within this text, thus allowing us to recognise (ineffable) aspects of these experiences that may not have been visible before. One example of a way I look at aspects of ineffable violence in this chapter is by bringing accuracy into the frame and discussing whether the representation of certain content measures up to the demand to see (and show) what is objectively there in ‘reality’. Another example of the way I explore the ineffable through the frame of accuracy is by bringing the contributions of imperfect witnesses into the frame. I do this in terms of examining witnesses who have lived through the violence of these contested events and were interviewed by Sacco for his narrative. These fallible and traumatised witnesses are Khamis, Omm Nafez and Abu Antar, who have experienced the violence of Khan Younis directly, as survivors of the massacre in which their family members were killed. I also scrutinise an ‘uninvolved’ bystander, Sacco himself, the author and a protagonist in his text. In this chapter, I also look at aspects of ineffable violence through the claim that multiple associations of violence are often instigated in what initially seems like one single instance of violence in this graphic narrative. To do this, I examine a section of the narrative entitled ‘The Story Is Dead’ (Sacco 2009, p. 123) where the effect of one story of violence reminding journalists so much of other similar stories is that it numbs them to what is actually visible. Another way the frame of associated violence works is through the affect of shame, where shame is associated with one particular aspect of experiences of violence in such a way that it may cause someone who has experienced violence (a bystander of a victim) to experience the shame that they associate with other instances of violence. In this chapter, I treat the frame of the gutter, the frame of the logic of the panels and the frame of words and images in combination. With regard to the frames of words and images, I consider the particular combination of words and images in the process of transmitting or instigating the experience of violence in a way that actively includes the reader’s/ viewer’s body and mind in this process of representation. As far as the logic of the panels is concerned, the availability of several frames at once for the viewer gives graphic narratives an immediacy unique to this from. I apply the notion of the gutter in the graphic narrative as an example of ‘a visual depiction of the ineffable’ and literally a way of bringing absence into the frame and using it as a way to frame the content of violence depicted in the panels. I use these frames in combination to reveal that such a focus on the form of the graphic narrative demonstrates that ‘dark’ writing may achieve an expanded form of representation of the Khan Younis massacre of 1956 by uniquely combining the abstract and the intense, the bodily and the reflective, words and images. Using discursive strategies of narrative, juxtaposition and metaphor, Sacco (2009) presents readers/viewers with an alternative discourse

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on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Reading this text through the lens of ‘dark’ writing facilitates the sharing of the experiences of violence in and around the Khan Younis massacre by expanding our understanding of the experience-representation complex. As Molly Scanlon (2014) notes, the ‘dark’ and ineffable ambiguities in such situations of violence have been all but silenced by the narratives presented in the unavoidably direct and present global mass media. This, coupled with the dogged historical insistence that such violence cannot be expressed at all has all but shut down the possibilities for accommodating the ineffable. In his text, Sacco (2009) traces the Khan Younis and Rafah massacres of Palestinians in Gaza in 1956. These massacres occurred during the Suez Canal crisis, ‘when Israeli forces briefly occupied the Egyptianruled Gaza strip’ (Sacco 2009, p. ix). Sacco lived in Gaza for a number of months, interviewing survivors. Sacco first became aware of these massacres – until that time relatively unknown in the English-speaking world – during the early part of the second Palestinian intifada in 2001. At that time, he accompanied journalist Chris Hedges to the Palestinian village of Khan Younis to illustrate the story of a more recent uprising in Gaza for Harper’s Magazine (Munayyer 2010, p. 1). The editors at Harper’s did not find the information about this massacre relevant and subsequently cut it from the published version of their account of the uprising. This is particularly startling when one considers that the atrocities at Khan Younis have been declared ‘seemingly the greatest massacre of Palestinians on Palestinian soil, if the UN figures of 275 dead are to be believed’ and are widely believed to have sown the seeds of the apparently intractable violence in Gaza today (Sacco 2009, p. ix). Sacco’s glimpse of the massacre at Khan Younis left him feeling uncomfortable. Significantly, his account is entitled Footnotes in Gaza, because it did not make it into the official representation of the massacre and was relegated to a footnote in history. He felt that he had seen aspects of this history that remained hidden from other eyes, and that this experience had augmented his ability to see and to visualise. He found himself in a place where he both saw and did not see a situation that can only be apprehended by accommodating the ineffable. He worked with this tension by creating a long and self-conscious graphic narrative account of the Khan Younis and Rafah massacres. Footnotes took seven years to make (four of which were spent drawing) (Chute, 2016). This indicates the slow process of integrating, interpreting and expressing as it poured out of Sacco’s body and onto the pages. Sacco’s account of the massacre is sometimes portrayed in lurid journalistic detail and sometimes flecked with doubts and seeming inaccuracies. In an interview with Al-Jazeera reporter Laila El-Haddad (2010), Sacco argues that objectivity is performed in American journalism as if it is just reporting what is going on, when in fact it is highly politically and ideologically loaded, and deliberately unreflexive about this, ironically

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making it inaccurate. He counters this with his own avowal of the place of subjectivity in non-fictional writing. It is because of sentiments like these that Sacco’s work has been described as ‘comics journalism’, visual storytelling combined with writing in the new journalism paradigm. Sacco states: ‘I don’t believe in objectivity as it’s practiced in American journalism. I’m not anti-Israeli. … It’s just I very much believe in getting across the Palestinian point of view’ (Sacco, cited in Brogdan 2009, n.p.). This is the frame that Sacco uses for his narrative. Isaac Kamola (2009) argues that works such as Footnotes give readers/ viewers precisely what they are denied in mass media foreign reporting. Kamola (2009) maintains that Sacco (2009) presents violence in ways previously unseen in mass journalism. He asserts that the gaps in the ways the mass media routinely represent violence create an exclusionary discourse. In this discourse, those who produce knowledge about violence – often journalists and academics – are neither those committing violence nor the victims of violence except in rare cases. Moreover, the intended audience for such knowledge is often neither the victims nor the perpetrators. It is policymakers, academics and audiences that consume foreign news. Sacco’s approach allows his audience to view conflict indirectly, yet simultaneously as a lived reality – a reality that is both represented and experienced by Sacco himself and by those participating in it. It also preserves the ineffable as part of that reality, an aspect that the lens of ‘dark writing’ accommodates. Michael Pickering (2008) notes that we gain two types of knowledge from lived experience which broadly correspond to Baiasu’s (2014) process and content knowledge. Pickering (2008) suggests that process knowledge gives a subject a sense of being carried forward into the future. From content knowledge alone, by contrast, the subject gains a sense of the fullness of reality against which losses can be assessed. Sacco’s (2009) approach accords with this. For him, a sense of loss is associated with accurate representational knowledge. Such knowledge does not accommodate the ineffable. If we pay attention only to this type of knowledge, we may be overwhelmed by the loss, and miss out on the opportunity of finding a way to feel ourselves carried forward into the future. Sacco’s (2009) text is then an attempt to forge a way for the representational knowledge of the tremendous losses of Khan Younis to project itself into the future by accommodating the ineffable. This view corresponds with the understanding that first-hand experience is not ‘unimpeachably self-validating’ (Pickering 2008, p. 21). This is because knowledge is not only gained from lived experience. It also functions as a discursive construct that has in tow corresponding social practices, forms of subjectivity and power (Foucault 1980). To facilitate the overlapping of discourse and lived experience in the construction of knowledge, a space for the ineffable may be opened up within discourse. On the other hand, and contrary to the way that propositional knowledge is often defined, experience may also frame knowledge and

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sometimes conceal non-representational knowledge from us. We can engage with this problem by critiquing accuracy and the politics of knowledge. This is in line with my argument that ethics should be interpreted as both a lived experience of approaching the other and a constant process of critique, manifest in rigorous ‘representational’ practices that set up co-dependent relations between self and other. This understanding may reveal that a relentless and exclusive pursuit of ‘accuracy’, particularly in the context of contested narratives of war and conflict, is at best inadequate and at worst unethical.

Sacco’s Frame of Accuracy In the previous chapter, I mentioned that Saïd (1989) has claimed that the best way to capture life in a representation is to accept that the representation should be fragmentary, not objective and hybrid like the graphic narrative form so that it may accommodate the ineffable elements of our experience. He goes on to suggest that this kind of representation should be broken, chaotic and detailed. It is these aspects that the five frames of ‘dark’ writing applied to the graphic narrative form can help us to see. Furthermore, a focus on the frame of accuracy may support a more adequate representation of experience. As I have already indicated, one of the aims of this book is to consider ways to achieve an ethical representation of violence and trauma in the context of war and conflict. To do so, I engage with the ‘invisible’ elements such as the shortcomings of witnessing and memory, shame, numbness, absence and the ineffable, aspects of experiences of violence often ignored or hidden when we simply approach violence directly or primarily pursue ‘accuracy’ in our representations. I demonstrate how ‘dark’ writing performs a valuable political function in representing violence by including such narrative ‘inaccuracies’ in the representational frame. This achieves more adequate and ethical representations of violence and trauma than ‘accurate’ accounts by bringing into the frame what was disallowed before. Žižek’s (2008b) notion of violence is that it is composed of an objective and subjective part; the former often remains invisible but is fundamental in perpetuating the cycle of violence. I not only draw on this conception of violence but also frame it in this chapter by its ineffable aspects such as guilt and grief. Such affects and effects of violence should be taken into account and should be allowed to shape representations of violence and trauma. In Sacco’s (2009) case, guilt and grief are affects of violence that Sacco comes to know, and he can infer invisible effects of violence from these felt affects and the specific process of their representation. Such affects should be actively accommodated in representations of violence by sanctioning what appear to be the inaccuracies inherent in some accounts of violence, and allowing ourselves to become entangled in the ambiguity of such brutal representations. This

68 ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre is a crucial way to nurture an ethical perspective and to nourish living memories, rather than just to support archived history. Since the millennium, various authors have tried to express the inexpressible in an ethical way. Affect theorists such as Marks (2000), Sarah Ahmed (2004), Brian Massumi (2001) and Elspeth Probyn (2005) are useful in helping us pay attention to invisible aspects of representation such as the body, our senses other than sight and the ethical stance that is hidden in the emotion of shame. However, Massumi (2001) suggests that emotions are socially displayed. Ahmed (2004) concurs with this in her discussion of the politics of emotions. Ahmed (2004) suggests that the display of emotions may be forcefully altered by either the subject or his/her community in order to fit in with what is culturally expected or considered proper. This suggests that we should not trust sight alone as evidence of accurate witness. However, this does not go far enough in combining the hidden aspects with other more obvious aspects of representation, such as the abstract and the symbolic, and the nexus between form and content. All these aspects in combination help us approach an adequate representation of violence and trauma (and ‘dark’ writing keeps them all in play in the graphic narrative form). What is ethical or adequate is not to be confused with accuracy and includes the ineffable in violence and trauma without explaining it away. As noted in the Introductory Chapter of this book, Heidegger’s (1962) understanding of ontology indicates that our world is not simply reducible to what is immediately visible or present to us. Our obsession with accuracy as a yardstick of truth located outside of the subject limits our notion of representation. Heidegger’s (1962) view implies that it is instead through the acknowledgement of the dynamic relationship between experience and reflection, which extends our notion of representation beyond mimesis, that we are able to capture the inaccuracies and ambiguities of experience and approach a more adequate means of sharing experiences. This is the job that ‘dark’ writing does as it allows us to shift our understanding of representation to expressly include what is difficult to describe and what is unable to be neatly disentangled from our experiences. The Politics of ‘Dark’ Writing Agamben (1999) believes that the broken witness can only give an imperfect and impossible (grey) account on behalf of the victim, because the surviving witness must give an account of a death that they did not experience directly themselves. Although this may affect the accuracy of the witness’ account, it does not make the account inadequate, but rather more so. This position accords with that of the characters of Khamis (the only brother out of Ibrahim, Subhi and Abdullah who survived the massacre), Omm Nafez (the wife of the dead brother Abdullah) and Abu Antar (Khamis’s nephew) in Sacco’s text (Sacco 2009, p. 116,

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Figure 3.1). Khamis, Omm Nafez and Abu Antar are all survivors of the Khan Younis massacre who tell Sacco their stories of the massacre and whose accounts do not accord with one another.

Figure 3.1 Khamis, Omm Nafez and Abu Antar as imperfect witnesses (Sacco 2009, p. 116).

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Each of these protagonists lives a memory of the massacre that is partially inaccurate in its reflection of historical events. This implies that Khamis, Omm Nafez and Abu Antar, all survivors of the Khan Younis massacre, both see and do not see, as is suggested by the close-up images of their eyes in Figure 3.1. Neither Khamis’s, Omm Nafez’s or Abu Antar’s eyes appear to be properly open at first. Khamis stares off into the distance with half open eyes, while Omm Nafez and Abu Antar’s eyes appear to be closed as part of bodily expressions of grief. Sacco’s admission that he ‘cannot untangle the twining guilt and grief’ or ‘explain’ what has happened (Sacco 2009, p. 116, see Figure 3.1 previously) thus also become Khamis’s words, and together these two become the graphic iteration of the limit or threshold figure of the necessarily imperfect witness in Agamben’s (1999) ‘gray zone’. Thus, this representation of violence in Sacco’s work is premised upon the impossibility of representation and the ineffable. It may be understood as a position in which, while some things are experienced with particular clarity, the representation of others may be distorted. In this position, the onlooker is close to the violence without necessarily having experienced it themselves. This position is exemplified by Khamis and Sacco himself in different ways. Sacco’s position is different from that of Khamis, in that he is not himself a survivor of the massacre. Nonetheless, Sacco (2009) finds himself in a similar position to Khamis, in that he must give an account of deaths that he did not experience himself. Sacco can only bear ‘witness’ through the accounts of those who survived the massacre. A representation of these contestations and confusions is an important part of both Sacco’s and Khamis’s accounts of the massacre. This indicates how adequate representation of violence and trauma cannot be binary, direct, entirely visible or enlightened. Instead, they must be dynamic, sullied with present realities which may run counter to, or be interwoven with, past violences and traumas. Adequate representations of violence are necessarily fraught with tensions. ‘Dark’ writing is inclusive of inaccuracies and flawed testimony. Furthermore, ‘dark’ writing (as both a process of representation and an interpretive lens) accommodates the ineffable to help us see and know differently. Sacco actively includes obscurity in his own representation from the beginning of his narrative. He leaves many aspects of his text deliberately unresolved. This does not imply that the kind of knowledge that accuracy precludes cannot be represented. In fact, in Sacco’s (2009) text, aspects of non-representational knowledge become visible. This is because Sacco’s text self-consciously reflects upon its own excesses and inadequacies. It performs its own ambiguities. It does this by providing readers/viewers with a salient example of the unfolding of the representational process. As Chute notes about non-fictional comics: Comics brings first and third-person perspectives to the surface of the reported narrative simultaneously… Comics journalism embodies

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and performs that duality by enabling the journalist both to inhabit a point of view and to show himself inhabiting it. (Chute 2016, p. 208) This gives us a glimpse of the operations of ‘dark’ writing, which crafts a lens enabling us to view the ineffable, focused as it is on both representational and non-representational knowledge. The self-conscious struggle of Sacco’s (2009) text to come to grips with the differences between representation and experience constructs an active self-reflexivity that drives his narrative. Indeed, Chute mentions that Sacco’s work confronts key epistemological questions, using the word- and- image form of comics …his work is openly reflective about itself, actively acknowledging the instability of knowing… (Chute 2016, p. 198) This is also an attempt to keep open the self-conscious and unfinished performance of ambiguity that is part of ‘dark’ writing. Furthermore, the performative ambiguity of ‘dark’ writing contributes an ethical approach to the representation of the experience of violence and trauma. Sacco as Witness Who Does Not See Sacco (2009) builds on the ethical approach of the imperfect witness by placing himself into the text, both as disembodied narrative voice and as an embodied, witnessing participant. Wherever he draws himself in(to) his text, he is always in distinctive owl eye-glasses that hide his eyes. Scholars such as Gillian Whitlock (2017) note that this is a typical way for Sacco to draw himself throughout his work. It is also a constant reminder to us of his position as seer. It also suggests that he does not have perfect vision and that what he sees may not be entirely accurate. A salient example of how Sacco constantly places himself into his narrative as a self-conscious and fallible representer is in the ‘Fedayeen Part 2’ (Sacco 2009 p. 63, panel 5 and Sacco 2009, p. 64, panel 4), see Figure 3.2 below. Despite Sacco’s assertion in Figure 3.2 that he aims to represent the individual stories of those he interviews for his narrative ‘I am looking for your experiences as an individual’ (Sacco 2009, p. 63, panel 5), his opaque glasses that hide his eyes and the assertion of his interviewee that the interviewee does not like to speak about himself but prefers to speak about collective political events self-consciously problematise the notion of Sacco as an infallible representor of (his or other’s) experiences. The suggestion is that although he may be in the know as interviewer, he may still not be able to see. This idea is further emphasised on Page 64, panel 4 (Sacco 2009) in Figure 3.2 when Sacco draws himself in close-up, focusing our attention on this perspective even more closely. Just as we think we as readers/viewers may be getting to know who he is, his face is further obscured, not only by his

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glasses this time but by the word balloons that cover his face. Significantly, these words are about knowledge and once more present the notion that there might always be those who know more and see more than Sacco does

Figure 3.2 Sacco as self-conscious, fallible narrator and protagonist (Sacco 2009, p. 63, panel 5 and p. 64, panel 4).

(Continued)

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or than we as reader/viewer do. In Figure 3.2 above, we are thus presented with the striking picture of a self-conscious but fallible narrator, who is witness to something that he knows about but that is not entirely visible to him. This is an instance of Sacco as representer and protagonist in his own text taking ownership of the ineffable in his own experience of knowing and accommodating it in his narrative without explaining it away. It is thus an example of ‘dark’ writing, a mechanism which may help us to approach an ethical representation of violence, precisely because it registers the fallibility and incompleteness of knowledge as we experience and represent it. In the realm of aesthetics, knowledge is shown not to belong to a single pole in the apparent binary of knowing/seeing, reflecting or

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experiencing. Sacco admits early on in his narrative that his position as witness is inadequate both in terms of knowledge and experience, even though he knows more about the events he is representing than those who experienced them themselves. This problematic positioning forms part of the ‘dark’ writing process as it captures traces of the operations of the ineffable. Sacco declares his complex position thus: Suddenly I felt ashamed of myself for losing something along the way, as I collected my evidence, disentangled it, dissected it, indexed it, and logged it onto my chart” [see Figure A1 Page 384, panel 6 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009)]. And I remembered how often I sat with old men [witnesses, survivors] who tried my patience, who rambled on, who got things mixed up, who skipped ahead, who didn’t remember the barbed wire at the gate or when the mukhtars stood up or where the jeeps were parked, how often I sighed and mentally rolled my eyes because I knew more about that day than they did. (Sacco 2009, pp. 385, panel 5 my emphasis see Figure A2) Sacco’s lament about knowing more than the survivors foregrounds the apparent discrepancy between experience and representation in a novel way. While these words reveal that it is possible to know without everything being visible, they also acknowledge the limits of the witnessing position. Sacco’s (2009) words acknowledge that something significant is lost or not seen, even when he has distilled or accurate knowledge of events. For Sacco (2009), shame at his own narrative process and at his over-commitment to accuracy at the expense of capturing the ineffable in the narratives of others is this emotion that alerts him to the loss of these invisible aspects of knowing violence. Sacco claims the space of a witness for himself in terms of what he knows about the massacre but realises that in representing what he knows he also needs to express the limits of the adequacy of his representation, and it is shame – to be discussed later in this chapter– that alerts him to this limit to his witnessing. Furthermore, in reading these words, the reader/viewer feels that they are participating in the representational process or been invited into a kind of complicity that is supported by the structure of the graphic narrative. The invitation to participate with the representer and reader/viewer is sustained throughout Footnotes. It is also one of the main techniques through which the reader/viewer becomes privy to Sacco’s gnawing doubts and the confusions that drive the experience- representational process. Self-depiction by the author in the space of representation is common in many texts of Modernist fiction. Literally drawing the representer into the narrative in this way is a common feature of graphic narratives of violence and trauma. It is a strategy that is also found in Maus (Spiegelman 2003), Persepolis: the story of a childhood (Satrapi 2004) and Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman and Polonsky 2009) to name but a few. When these authors represent

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themselves in their own work, it is a special case of the representation of the experience-representation complex for the reader/viewer, where the reader/viewers share the authors’ experience of doubting what they experience. It is also a case of each of the author’s borrowing from previous representational stocks. Bolter and Grusin (1999) refer to this as refashioning. This process draws attention to the medium and to the process of representation without violating its sanctity as a contributing component to the author’s performance of self-doubt. It is self-reflexive in that it sets up a tension between being able to immerse ourselves in reality and being self-consciously aware of form. In this tension, the ineffable accommodates in the form of representation. Bolter and Grusin (1999) refine our understanding of this kind of Modernist self-reflexivity, reminding us that in more contemporary representational forms, this kind of self-reflexivity has altered our expectation of what authenticates a narrative. We have come to accept that such self-reflexivity authenticates a work more than its accuracy. However, in a work that purports to be non-fictional, it is interesting that Sacco (2009) overtly includes inaccuracies and also appeals to this device to authenticate his narrative. This shows up the limits of the binary categories of fiction/non-fiction as labels for categorising Sacco’s text. The complex kind of knowledge that Sacco claims for himself as witness is not enough to help him ‘untangle the twining guilt and grief’ or ‘explain what might induce a traumatized individual [Khamis] to recall a brother’s death if he[Khamis] was not there’ (Sacco 2009, p. 116, see Figure 3.1) is also notable because this admission is the only unframed text on a page that contains both speech and written narrative. Visually, the words on this page are striking because they are mostly not direct speech, but snippets of Sacco’s narrative voice. These are strewn across the page, jockeying for position as he throws out possible explanations for the inaccuracy of the stories of survivors of violence. This is something he is ultimately unable to explain, an aspect of the ineffable which his text preserves. However, the quotation above seems to dominate because in contrast to all the others, it is unframed. This gives the impression that the frames leading up to this section are background information for this central abstraction. The lack of a frame for this section of text is a visual display of Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) notion of immediacy (mentioned previously in Chapter 1 of this book), where the reader/viewer encounters an unframed panel and is thus less aware of the medium at this point. It is thus particularly difficult for the reader/viewer to distance him/herself from this abstraction and he/she tends to be subsumed by it. Given the striking detail in which Sacco displays the lives of his characters, the reader/viewer becomes aware that this detail may be part of Sacco’s own complex perspective. Sometimes, Sacco’s narrative voice does not wholly accord with the images it accompanies as in the striking example of the first ‘panel’ in Figure 3.1 (Sacco 2009, p. 116) which depicts Khamis’s calm, authoritative face as he tells his affecting (yet inexplicable) story.

76 ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre This image of Khamis’s face in the first ‘panel’ is the only other unframed section of the page (aside from the unframed words expressing Sacco’s gnawing doubt in his narrative voice ‘I cannot untangle…’ on the right hand centre of page 116, see Figure 3.1). The first unframed image of Khamis on this page draws the reader in close, in sympathy with Khamis, whilst the framed words help the reader to maintain a distance at the same time. This is a compelling and bewildering combination, echoed by Sacco’s narrative perspective. Sacco’s framed words accompanying the unframed image of Khamis in the first ‘panel’ draw attention to the fact that Sacco does not know where to place himself in the text, as he can neither discredit nor claim Khamis’s narrative. His solution is to include the problem of his own doubt in his representation. Placing this quotation in the centre of the page indicates that despite all the detail and accuracy of his images, as a narrator his overarching sense is that he ultimately ‘cannot untangle’, and cannot ‘explain’. Sacco’s doubts thus become the predominant perspective, the clearest reality. It is at these moments that the frame disappears, as these emotions take over and are expressed visually as unframed and unspoken words. This statement of Sacco’s, which pervades the others on the page, also becomes a statement of the ineffable and of the confusion it causes. This point is made all the more strong because it is not contained by including Sacco in an image in the narrative at this point, or by putting his thoughts into a word balloon. Sacco’s narrative on page 116 (see Figure 3.1) is presented in smaller separate and disjointed frames, the last section of which is displayed against a black background and above a picture of dead bodies. In this section, Sacco goes on to proclaim, ‘I only want to acknowledge the problems that go along with relying on eyewitness testimony in telling our story’ (Sacco 2009, p. 116, see Figure 3.1). Here, the reader/viewer also recalls the close-ups of Khamis, Omm Nafez and Abu Antar (on page 116 of Sacco’s text) and is reminded of that their eyes are not fully open and that this in itself is part of their intense experiences. This explicit acknowledgement is one of the devices Sacco uses to draw the reader/viewer into the construction of accuracy in the story. He declares his deep involvement with the story but he does not claim it for himself. When he calls it ‘our story’, the implication is that it belongs to him, his readers/viewers and the witnesses whose stories he has used as sources. It is as if, for everyone involved, the story has a life of its own that is best expressed in the ineffable. The story has already become ours, through the text’s deliberate blurring of the boundaries between the stories of Sacco, Khamis (see Figures 3.4 and 3.6 to come) and Abu Antar (see Figure A4 Page 113, panel 3) and Omm Nafez (see Figures A3 and A5). So far, on page 116 (see Figure 3.1), the reader/viewer has had to work hard and reflect on what is being represented. Other than its added emphasis, another effect of the black background in the last section of this page is that there is no figure-ground or three-dimensional perspective.

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This is a visual echo of the fact that at this point in the narrative and unlike the other sections on this page, there is no other perspective to compare to Sacco’s contemplations at this point. The reader’s/viewer’s eye is pulled in close as it brushes over the textured heap of lifeless bodies in the last panel, coupling them with Sacco’s musings. For a moment at least, the viewer/reader is exposed, and is overwhelmed by Sacco’s experience of self-doubt and the death of others. This abrupt change of proximity of Sacco and the reader/viewer to the narrative is one of the many examples throughout the text. It is accommodated by ‘dark’ writing, which keeps ambiguity in play, and thus leaves the ineffable alive and unresolved as content and process rub up against each other and keep the reader/viewer open and vulnerable to the story and the difficulties of representing it. If the goal of representation is accuracy, as positivists or those with political agendas claim, then it becomes easier to disqualify contested and apparently inaccurate accounts. However, if the goal of representation is to preserve gaps between seeing and knowing, experience and knowledge, and accommodate the ineffable, then both the form and the process of representation are of paramount importance. This is what ‘dark’ writing accommodates in being both a means of interpretation and a trace of the representational process. This is why apparently inaccurate and idiosyncratic accounts that are self-reflexive in the way described above become useful and rich repositories of knowledge. Sacco continues to probe what it might mean to know without seeing when he visually incorporates parts of another text, an official report of the massacre he is representing (2009, p. 117, see Figure 3.3 to come), namely the ‘Special Report of the Director of the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency’. Sacco includes parts of the report and comments on the report and its reception in the English-speaking world in his text. He also shows a picture of the report itself in his narrative. This inflects the notion of accuracy with a further dynamic complexity. It also allows Sacco’s text to capture aspects of the massacre that may have fallen through the cracks of other more accurate depictions of the same events. Sacco continues to depict his struggle as an imperfect witness with accuracy in this section of his graphic narrative entitled, ‘Document’ (Sacco 2009, p. 117, see Figure 3.3). Sacco’s narrative weaves in the jarring contrast of the different accounts of ‘the Israeli authorities’ and ‘the refugees’ in its commitment to accuracy. The words that accompany the last two, contrasting panels, visually depicting the refugees are quoted directly from the report. The implication is that in the report, these words appear without these images and not as two panels set in opposition to each other, unlike in Sacco’s narrative where two collective narratives are set up against each other. The first is that of the Israeli authorities who claim that they are justified to protect themselves against armed attackers (although even in the report, those killed are depicted

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Figure 3.3 Differing accounts (Sacco 2009, p. 117).

as civilians and refugees). The second is that of the refugees themselves who depict themselves as vulnerable and unarmed. By setting these contrasting narratives up alongside each other in pictures (and words) and in panels separated by a neat, thin gutter, it is easier to see that each of these narratives represents more than just the clinical words of the UN report that sets their stories in opposition. Issues of justification and

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vulnerability, agency and the initiation of violence are brought into the frame in ways that are not possible in the UN report. Furthermore, the last two panels on page 117 of the document section (Sacco 2009, p. 117, see Figure 3.3 previously), the official UN report and the last three panels on page 115 of the ‘Memory’ section (Sacco 2009, p. 115, see Figure 3.4 below) all capture different accounts of the same events.

Figure 3.4 Khamis as imperfect witness who does not know (Sacco 2009, p. 115).

80 ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre Weaving in the comparisons between Palestinian collective memory, individual interviews with survivors and official written accounts into his narrative, Sacco can take a meta-perspective on representation and sharing of experience. Whilst still building in his own doubts and concerns about accuracy throughout, he is able to capture ineffable aspects of the massacre that the UN report is not able to represent. Taken altogether, Sacco’s text is dynamic and does not offer closure. Instead, it serves as a portal to pain and conflict that appears to have a life of its own. In Sacco’s depiction of his struggle with accuracy in the memory section (Sacco 2009, p. 115, last three panels, see Figure 3.4 above), two different accounts of what happened after the massacre are recalled by two different survivors, Khamis (see Figure 3.5 to come) and Omm Nafez (see Figures A3 and A5). The account in the central panel is recounted by Omm Nafez. The blackness of the background suggests that this is the stuff of ‘dark’ writing as it is employed by two witnesses in the ‘gray zone’ (Agamben 1999). Their accounts do not match but Sacco includes both their assertions and his impenetrable confusion in his narrative. Each of these competing perspectives or truths takes up its own panel. They are set side by side in a row, directly adjacent to the others, to indicate that there is no way to evaluate one account as more true than the other. Sacco’s confusion is accommodated in the third panel, yet only in an abstract (in words) and not in an embodied way. This suggests that at some level, he is able to extract some ‘truth’ from the survivors’ testimonies that is present beyond their words. This truth is the ineffable, and it changes the narrative and inflects it with contours that the report does not have (even though the report also includes competing accounts). Sacco (2009) notes that his own narrative (through which we can glimpse the invisible aspects of violence) is mirrored in the official UN report of the massacre. This is especially significant because there were, at that time, no other official documents in English – other than the UN reports that Sacco (2009) mentions – that registered the atrocity at all. Sacco self-consciously notes that ‘the report indicates [that] “there is some conflict in the accounts given as to the causes of the casualties”’ (Sacco 2009, p. 117, Figure 3.3). The UN report provides incompatible versions of the incident, as many ‘non-fictional’ historical documents do. It also gives fewer clues about how to resolve these discrepancies or bring them into dialogue with each other. As this thesis argues, such a dialogue is only possible in ‘dark’ writing. However, he hints that this situation may perform a truth function in his own narrative. One may read it as an instrument to detect aspects that would otherwise have remained indiscernible. The incompatible versions of events represented by the UN report are of interest in terms of the criterion of accuracy. Its inclusion of discrepant versions may be designed to create the impression that the UN takes

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Figure 3.5 Haptic depictions of Khamis (Sacco 2009, p. 114).

its responsibility to report objectively and accurately on human rights abuses in Gaza seriously. However, accuracy can be claimed in the service of various purposes of power, by those in power who wish to bolster their position, possibly by absolving themselves of further responsibility, or by those who wish to make a case for the victims themselves. It is

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therefore a construct that may be co-opted to enhance the credibility of any argument and need not be the goal of the representation at all. Furthermore, the last panel on pages 115 (see Figure 3.4 previously) and 388 (see Figure A6) is entirely black as is the whole last page of the narrative, page 389 (see Figure A7). These opaque spaces provide a striking visual depiction of – what knowing without seeing might look like and how it might be inadequate to depict experience without accommodating the ineffable and especially solely by depicting experience through the sense of sight. Sacco’s (2009) text grapples with accuracy by widening the frame to bring in survivors’ memories and competing narratives. It seems clear that the UN’s quest to document the Khan Younis massacre accurately could not accommodate the ineffable, the point of excess where what happened seemed to exceed the confines of language. The report struggled to register doubt, contestation and the ‘invisible’ aspects of language within the given sign system. By taking into consideration the competing versions of events in the UN report and not slavishly committing to the goal of accuracy, the self-conscious cracks in Sacco’s (2009) narrative arguably preserve an awareness of the seen and the unseen simultaneously. This is something that ‘dark’ writing supports. In Agamben’s (1998, 1999) work on Holocaust (Shoah) witness testimony, he argues unequivocally for the central importance of witness testimony, even of witnesses who did not themselves have the experience they are witnessing to. He maintains that we need to suspend judgement while we listen to them, and must render their accounts visible. In this process, the ineffable can play a valuable role, because in locating the ineffable, we can take the role of witnesses seriously, and not focus primarily on the content of what they are saying. Agamben (1999, p. 52) states that the value of testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its centre it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority. The survivors of the Khan Younis massacre ponder the notion of accuracy (and inaccuracy, and the possible reasons for this). To them, these accounts are well known and crucial. I explore the idea that eyewitness accounts of violence are vitally important, precisely for what their anomalies might (or might not) reveal. This notion is illustrated in the two images in Figure 3.3 (Sacco 2009, p. 117, last two panels), which reveal Sacco’s depiction of his struggle with accuracy in the ‘document’ section of his narrative. It is also evident in the ‘Memory’ section (Sacco 2009, p. 115, last three panels, see Figure 3.4). There, the third ‘image’ contains only the blackness that seems to threaten to engulf the small frame that houses Sacco’s words of doubt. This emphasises Sacco’s

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confusion itself and includes it in the narrative. Thus, one of the aspects that the anomalies of these competing accounts reveal is the addressee’s own confusion (in this case, Sacco’s and ours, as readers/viewers). As already suggested, the anomalies in Figure 3.3 (Sacco 2009, p. 117, last two panels) expose issues of justification and vulnerability, agency and initiation (what the UN report was not able to bring into the frame). It is through ‘dark’ writing and its accommodation of the not-knowing position of the ineffable that we may allow for a re-evaluation of inaccuracy. The dynamism inherent in the process of ‘dark’ writing supports such a re-evaluation of accuracy, and ultimately opens up the possibility of an ethical position. What is significant is not so much the fact that there are incomplete and competing stories about a traumatic event, but how Sacco represents this anomaly. The self-conscious manner in which he voices his own doubts as representer exposes a fissure in the apparently unassailable edifice of visible violence and objective representation. In this way, Sacco uses his own ambiguous and shadowy position as a way of approaching what would otherwise be invisible. Sacco (2009) repeatedly refers to his own understanding of the way in which violent events are reported and experienced as a process of ‘entanglement’. Aside from containing a connotation of touch, the term ‘entanglement’ suggests a constant selfreflexive loop and robust involvement that supports an ethical stance, but such an entangled loop will probably not sustain a single objective viewpoint. This is suggestive of the ineffable and ‘dark’ writing. Sacco (2009) also mentions how this shadowy process of understanding allows him to come to know about ‘guilt’ and ‘grief’. This implies that perhaps neither would have been apparent to him if he had not recognised what he could not initially describe, and the effect that this inability had on his subsequent descriptions. Sacco can only know of violence without seeing it first-hand. He too is not an eye-witness. He is also aware of the difficulty of using hearsay accounts such as his to understand historical events. This may be an indication that Sacco approaches ‘dark’ writing from the representational realm. As he represents the emotion of shame, repeatedly, he shows how he began to be intensely affected by the representation of violence and conflict, and to move into the realm of non-representational knowledge. It is in this realm that he uses ‘dark’ writing to represent Khamis and Omm Nafez, and the embodied intensity that they experience when they see the Khan Younis massacre but do not (accurately) know it. Despite living through the violence, in contrast to Sacco, Khamis and Omm Nafez do not seem to be able to know or represent their experiences accurately. However, in being able to preserve the representational and non-representational, knowing and seeing, in his narrative as a whole Sacco allows his, Khamis’s and Omm Nafez’s perspectives to rub up against each other, and in so doing, the ineffable part of this experience

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of violence is accommodated and shared, without being explained away. As Chute notes: [i]n so many ways, Footnotes in Gaza is about sentience, expressing sensation…. it is about pain, and exploring how one might open access to the subjectivity of another. (Chute 2016, p. 250) It is as if Sacco’s knowing without seeing is channelled through ‘dark’ writing to give a more adequate, though less accurate account of what occurred. This is an instance of ‘dark’ writing increasing what we are able to represent and allows us to begin to represent ethically and share some of our experience with each other. Khamis as Witness Who Does Not Know Even as Sacco as narrator knows without seeing, so Khamis provides a different perspective on events when he seems to see without knowing. Both of these perspectives, though somewhat inaccurate, appear to approach a more adequate representation of experience and extend our understanding of the experience-representation complex. It is this possibility of adequacy as being occluded by accuracy that I will probe further at this point. This notion has an inherently political dimension. Saïd (1978) argues that the west’s obsession with accuracy and facts in its response to the east has left the east little option but to speak from a position of humanist apology – which forces the east to be defensive or accept its defamation – if it wants to be heard and seen by the west. Moreover, Saïd (1978) claims that the west’s preoccupation with accuracy and facts in responding to the east is ironic, considering that the west’s notion of the orient is based upon fictions which are often obscured by the fixation on accuracy and facts. Saïd (1978) goes further, claiming that since the Middle Ages, the west has not been able to see Islam outside of a framework of prejudice and political interest. Saïd’s (1978) view accords with Marks’s notion (2000) of the disempowering effect of relying too heavily on sight alone as the basis for knowledge creation. Marks (2000) proposes that scholars in many fields advise an alternative way of knowing from beyond the confines of accuracy and sight. She argues that these scholars have begun to posit an epistemology based on touch and knowing through the body (haptic knowledge), rather than knowing through sight. Marks (2000) explains that haptic perception is understood to rely on touch and the movement of the body in space; it is perceived on and inside as well as the outside of the body. She claims that in haptic visuality, the eyes themselves can function like organs of touch, brushing the skin of the image. She expresses this notion by explaining how this might be visually expressed in the language of cinema through expressing the inexpressible by invoking senses other than sight. Marks claims that this shift back towards haptic visuality is designed to counter

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a Cartesian privileging of sight (largely in Europe, although she notes a parallel hierarchy in China), the most cerebral of senses. This privileging of sight comes with a destructive desire for control of the object that is gazed at. Marks (2000) points out that the emphasis on sight gives rise to a specifically western way of looking and building knowledge that objectifies others and attempts to master them. She argues that western ways of looking that separate subject and object in representation came about in times of territorial domination and the subjection of vanquished peoples. Marks’s (2000) view is in line with Foucault’s (1994) argument (mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book) that although self-criticism and cultivation of the self are necessary for the ethical subject, the cultivation of the self has become overvalorised in the west, where subjects have become objectified. Foucault (1994) advocates countering this trend by refocusing on the relational construction of the ethical subject and of representation. This is where theories of haptic knowledge, and to a lesser extent, other theories of affect, might be useful. Although on their own they are confined, they can refocus our attention (in different ways) on how the relational structure of representation might operate on an embodied level which exceeds our abilities to describe an event accurately. Haptic knowledge is an additional aspect of representation that ‘dark’ writing also takes into account by accommodating the ineffable in the context of representing violence and trauma in an embodied, dynamic and performative way that opens up the possibility for meeting, and thus for ethical encounters. Probing the inadequacies of knowledge as vision, Marks warns that many important aspects of culture or stories remain invisible and thus trouble the relationship between vision and knowledge. This suggests that we cannot know another’s story or culture through visual information alone. We should include in our system of representation the ability to get information from other effective sources, and also from the senses of smell, touch and taste. Applying haptic visuality to comics such as Sacco’s is useful but not new; Rebecca Scherr does this eloquently in relation to Sacco’s work when she declares that the comics genre is in many ways as much of a haptic form as it is visual; in order to process the image-text relationship, readers must draw on various sensory and cognitive modalities that render the reading experience as physically intimate. (Scherr 2013, p. 21) ‘Dark’ writing, in its support of embodied aspects of knowing through haptics, is able to capture some of what may be invisible in experiences of violence. This is demonstrated in the haptic depictions of Khamis (see Figure 3.5). In the centre of this figure, Khamis is shown lying down, as he tries to share his experience of what happened to Subhi, his brother. This is an especially embodied depiction where he mirrors what he

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witnessed happening to his brother by performing its movement with his own body. This image thus strongly suggests that the reader/viewer not only sees what happened to Khamis’s brother’s body but also reaches out and touches its three dimensions in Khamis’s performance too. In the second last panel this haptic depiction continues when Khamis is shown saying ‘he started gurgling’ (Sacco 2009, page 114) in a visceral representation that evokes the sense of the sound of blood flooding the dying victim’s throat. As noted, Omm Nafez also tells a story of these events. Hers is a story that registers at once resignation, profound disappointment and searing pain, but her blow-by-blow narrative of trauma turns out not to be entirely accurate. Her affecting story includes an intimate account of the death of her husband and his brothers, Abdullah, Ibrahim and Subhi, and the escape of their only surviving brother Khamis, long etched into the memory of Khan Younis survivors. According to Omm Nafez, it was Ibrahim’s and Subhi’s deaths that triggered Khamis to try to escape (Sacco 2009, p. 109). Yet Sacco unearths evidence that Khamis escaped even while exhorting his brother Subhi to flee with him. This is in keeping with Abu Antar’s (who is Subhi’s nephew) account (Sacco 2009, p. 113, panel 3). However, Omm Nafez does see the immensity of pain of her community’s suffering which has remained unacknowledged in the English-speaking world. This is thus another example of how the specifics of this visual medium might operate to help us access the invisible parts of this experience by evoking our senses other than sight, through the visual that one might come to know an experience intimately even though we may not have experienced it ourselves (whether this is Omm Nafez or Khamis who have escaped the experience of death or Sacco as interviewer who has not seen the massacre himself or us as reader’s/viewers that are coming to know of the massacre through Sacco’s text). In this way, we are all examples of Agamben’s (1999) broken witnesses who, as survivors, can only give ‘gray’ accounts in ‘dark’ writing on behalf of the victims who have died, because we did not experience (death) directly ourselves. Yet, these ‘gray’ accounts do allow the sharing of experiences if we accept that such experiences must contain an ineffable element that cannot be explained away. However, as powerful as Omm Nafez’s representation of her grief at the deaths of her family members is, what is most interesting about it from the perspective of examining Khamis as imperfect witness is that her account of her husband’s and brother-in-law’s deaths differ from Khamis’s own vivid memory of the same events (see Figure 3.5). While Omm Nafez claims that Khamis was not present at Subhi’s death (see Figure A5 Page 110 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009), Khamis remembers the agony of his dying brother Subhi’s body as if he were there. Indeed, in Figure 3.4, Sacco writes: ‘Khamis’s version of Subhi’s death

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generally matches those of Abu Antar and Omm Nafez except on one crucial point. Both of them say Khamis was not there’ (Sacco 2009, p. 115, panel 4). It is as if Khamis experienced something without knowing it. If Khamis’s experience of Subhi’s death is inaccurate, it still helps to give us a more adequate understanding of the experience of the experience of the massacre, one that is not captured by official documents. His account also evokes our other senses through the visual and in this way helps to extend our understanding of the experience-representation complex. Sacco’s graphic narrative Footnotes introduces the reader/viewer to the unusual position of Khamis, one who so obviously sees or experiences, yet does not know. This unique position acts as a frame for what he is able to see. Khamis is depicted as experiencing extreme grief. At places in the graphic narrative, this is not mentally reflected upon but experienced as a bodily intensity. At moments such as the embodied memory of his brother’s death (Sacco 2009, p. 114, see Figure 3.5) and the smearing of the ash by Omm Nafez (see Figure A3), it is as if the person depicted experiences pain pervasively, in a way that overwhelms his/her capacity for reflection (perhaps because he/she does not know it cognitively). Yet this may also be described as a kind of non-representational knowledge. If captured by ‘dark’ writing, this may tell us more about aspects of the representation of violence that we do not ordinarily see. On page 114 (Sacco 2009, see Figure 3.5), Sacco suggests that Khamis manages to see past the blinding practicalities. As I described earlier in this book, Khamis’s most striking physical features are half open and vacantly staring eyes. This immediately establishes him as a protagonist who both sees and does not see. This feature embodies ambiguity. It allows sections of the narrative to operate within the interstices of a hybrid and non-binary space. In capturing Khamis’s and Omm Nafez’s paradoxical and varied reactions to the violence and trauma, Sacco manages to show up some of the invisibilities of such traumatic experiences. For example, Sacco implies that Khamis’s identity will be affected by this violence for the rest of his life. Although the narrative is by no means decisive on this point and manages to preserve ambiguity, an implication is that Khamis might have run away or escaped before or after he saw or imagined he saw the death of his brother. In any case, through preserving what we can never know in his narrative, Sacco manages to undermine the sense of sight as the sole basis for sharing experience. In the third panel in Figure 3.4, Khamis, with his hands deliberately shown closing his eyes, claims ‘every time it comes to my head, I see it like a video’ (Sacco 2009, p. 115). This part of the narrative paradoxically proclaims both that seeing is believing and that the lack of sight (depicted by Khamis’s hand over his eyes) as an experience to be accommodated in its own right, which may bring further knowledge through ‘dark’ writing. Butler’s (2009) notion that some lives cannot be properly grieved because they are not fully recognised as lives at all seems an applicable

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considering in trying to form adequate knowledge not only of what may have happened to Ibrahim, Abdullah, Subhi and Khamis but as a way of approaching and sharing some of what Khamis may have experienced. In this instance, Khamis seems to be struggling with a grief and guilt not only his own but also one that he has witnessed in his community as a whole. This breaks the boundaries of accuracy and the grief allowed for one known life. It is as if the full story of the lives of his community has never yet been witnessed (certainly not by the English-speaking world, except in the confines of the UN report). Their complex experience of living with ongoing violence is not widely known or recognised. It is as if Sacco’s graphic narrative text allows the fragments, the ambiguities and illogical aspects of the story finally to come out. I suggest that the claim of accuracy may be upheld for vastly differing political agendas and that this deserves more attention. Representations that claim accuracy should not simply be regarded as portals of truth or real experience. Instead, they should themselves be gathered up and interrogated for what they may reveal and occlude. In other words, the form that signs of experience may take is available to be co-opted. For example, a claim of accuracy may deliberately occlude by seeming to reveal, or it may be used to absolve agents or perpetrators from further responsibility. A claim of accuracy might also be used to shield a victim from the pain of ‘what really happened’. This may be the chosen explanation for what happens to Khamis, when the way he remembers his brother Subhi’s death seems to deflect attention from his own possible absence and survival. However, if this version of events is adopted as the only accurate one, then our access to the depths of Khamis’s embodied despair is occluded and our understanding of his experience is limited. In this sense, the function of accuracy may change according to who coopts the sign system in which it functions. Due to Sacco’s text simultaneously preserving ambiguity, sustaining multiple perspectives on events and maintaining the interrogation of the experience-representation complex, the last panel in Figure 3.4 thus does not only allude the blackness of Khamis’s experience. It also suggests the darkness of Sacco’s confusion. All these are essential elements to include if we are to share in an adequate understanding of this experience. If experience and representations are seen as distinct binaries (just as if the goal of representation is seen as positivist accuracy) then Khamis, Omm Nafez and Abu Antar all come across as a somewhat confused people, irreparably damaged by traumatic experiences. They are not credible as witnesses in the sense that we expect witnesses to be accurate in the west. They might even be pitied, diagnosed with the aid of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) or dismissed as people who cannot actively contribute to the official and rational Palestinian voice that many feel still needs to be written into the discourse on these massacres. Despite the possibility that their

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inaccurate narratives display that may cause them to be ridiculed, these contested narratives may also be seen as acts of defiance. These may not be narratives that are told for their historical accuracy, so much as motivated by a desire to hold onto other truths about the complex experience of ongoing violence that would be destroyed by an exclusive focus on accuracy. These may be attempts by a community to adequately share the enormity of their experience of finding a way to continue living with ongoing violence and the destruction of relationships and identities, in a discourse which often only makes them visible as trapped victims. Substituting the traditional western notion of representation with ‘dark’ writing supports the sharing of these possibilities. On the whole, Sacco’s (2009) text encourages the reader/viewer to adopt a sympathetic view of the stories of these imperfect witnesses as those of people suffering but going on living and deserving of attention. It does so by explicitly demonstrating that the story of the Khan Younis massacre is being gathered by Sacco from imperfect witnesses. Sacco details the struggles he has to document accurate information gained from his interviewees in an attempt to persuade his audience of the credibility of his narrative and document his own doubts as part of the knowledge creation process. This contrasts with the approach to representation and accuracy taken in archival material such as the UN report. Sacco nonetheless demonstrates that he has also consulted such material. However, in doing so, he demonstrates that although such material assumed to be historically correct and sanctioned by authority (even though it contains inconsistencies), it is severely inadequate for the sharing of experiences of violence. The Witnessing Relationship Serres (1982) explains vision in a way that not only emphasises the importance of the visible for knowing but also explains that what is seen/ unseen is a result of a dynamic process of envisioning. This process is different from just seeing what is objectively there, such as seeing the conspicuous violence that is so obvious in the media. Serres’s (1982) description of seeing stresses that it is the relationship between the subject and the object that is of prime importance for knowledge. This is similar to Agamben’s (1998) assertion that an ethical witness of violence experiences shame on witnessing the object of violence and that this shame serves as evidence for the relational structure of ethical subjectivity. This is in contrast to Massumi’s (2001) concept of affect, which is more limited and runs the risk of favouring the body over the mind. Ruth Leys (2011) points out that such radical affect theorists who insist that sentiments are merely corporeal, non-intentional and as such unrelated to objects, tend to ignore the effects of rationality entirely in a blind privileging of the body. This risk may be overcome by coupling the

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understanding of affect to Serres’s notion of relational seeing (1982 cited in Viljoen 2015b) and the inclusion of shadows in the envisioning process, which accords with my conception of ‘dark’ writing and relational ethics as a way to more adequately represent experiences of violence. Affect, understood in this way is a useful concept because it gives us a clear description of a part of the intensity involved in the experiencerepresentation complex which might be included to expand our ability to know and to share experiences. Thus, adding this conception of affect to ‘dark’ writing and the ineffable enables us to explain that although non-representational knowledge and the experience-representation complex may include affect, it is more than merely affect. The rubbing up of representational and non-representational knowledge that ‘dark’ writing keeps in play includes important aspects of affect, such as its intensity, ineffability, embodiment and dynamism, which would not otherwise be visible. This envisioning relationship through affect establishes a continually shifting understanding of oneself and the object of vision in relation to what is seen/not seen, something that the dynamism of ‘dark’ writing accommodates, something that a blind commitment to accuracy may occlude. My focus on the contested stories of Khamis, Omm Nafez and Sacco helps me probe the question of accuracy and its relationship to representation and experience. One may argue that in not being constrained by accuracy, both Khamis and Omm Nafez reveal some truths. Both Khamis and Omm Nafez are affected and indeed changed by violence, just as the story of violence they tell in their community is changed by each of them. If Khamis’s haptic depiction of his experiences of violence may be regarded as a graphic indication of him living out this process, he is operating in a liminal space between subjectivity and objectivity, within an interstitial or ‘gray zone’. As a result, he is able to engage to some degree with both visible and invisible violence, even as he pours this out in an intense and embodied performance of how a beloved body is placed as it dies. However, the cloudy meaning of the ineffable is still captured in this moment of experience-representation of violence (indicating that it contains both representational and non-representational knowledge). The possibility of a dynamic, shadowy meeting between reader/viewer and representer, that this process facilitates, we can consider an instance of ‘dark’ writing. The significance of considering this moment as ‘dark’ writing allows us to scratch the surface of visible inaccuracy allowing us to see more of Khamis’s experience of violence. This allows the reader/ viewer to escape a rigid seeing/not-seeing binary and explore the blurry, participatory space into which his/her understanding of representation may expand and the possibility of sharing experiences may be explored. Khamis’s performance at the dying Subhi is an intense example of a specific kind of embodied envisioning (which includes but exceeds affect) that Serres (1982 cited in Viljoen 2016) defines as the in-between

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of knowing by touch and knowing by sight. This embodied envisioning amounts to a kind of ‘knowledge’ that (although it may not contain an accurate explanation of how something came about) physically re-enacts an aspect of representation that has been concealed by accuracy. This embodied envisioning is different from the quest for visual mastery and knowing something by sight alone. Serres proposes that this type of envisioning seems to detain …the transition from touching to seeing…. We are dealing less with the story of how something came about than with the dramatization of a pre-existing form. (Serres 1982, n.p.) This kind of ‘seeing’ suggests ‘dark’ writing and Walter Benjamin’s ([1933] 1999) embodied notion of mimesis, which contrasts with the general western notion of representation as largely an accurate and mimetic copy of the real (discussed in the Introductory Chapter). It is this common notion of representation as mimetic that may lead us to conclude that trauma is unrepresentable. However, in adopting an understanding of representation that is more akin to ‘dark’ writing, we are able to come to understand that experiences are representable at least to some extent. Benjamin’s notion of mimesis ([1933] 1999) stresses how mimesis emphasises the body and emotions. He does not see representation as merely a rational process but claims that all language functions mimetically, even though it is the most non-sensuous form of mimetic activity, and has thus lost some of its magic. He explains that in representing through language, we proclaim our difference through a series of transition moments or glimpses of the underlying process of mimesis, which we are able to express. This is similar to how ‘dark’ writing gives us glimpses of the process of the representation of violence by allowing other aspects into the frame, and by demonstrating the process of representation itself. ‘Dark’ writing also accommodates embodied aspects of representation. For Benjamin ([1933]1999), mimesis and the recognition of patterns of similarity and difference involve both a mechanical and a playful aspect. The threshold concept of accuracy and adequacy which ‘dark’ writing frames in my texts for analysis, appears to house the transition moments between these mechanical (content knowledge) and playful aspects (process knowledge), where experience and representation, body and mind, meet. It is these moments that ‘dark’ writing is able to trace. Furthermore, this is a kind of ‘seeing’ that both evokes senses other than sight, is embodied and does not merely show a copy of reality but is itself constitutive of reality may physically give one access to something that is there but cannot immediately be seen. The relationship between touch and vision to re-envision trauma often shows images of trauma to

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be very unclear and shadowy, half known and half seen. An example of such shadowy knowing and seeing is Sacco’s (2009) last panel on page 5 (see Figure 3.6 below). This panel functions as a bridge in Sacco’s narrative between the story of Sacco’s arriving in Gaza with other journalists and looking for interviewees and the story of the Khan Younis massacre. Its haziness serves to indicate to the reader/viewer that the narrative is beginning to reach back into the shadows of memory.

Figure 3.6 The shadows of knowing (Sacco 2009, p. 5).

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This is also done because it is in the shadows that we may know. It is through the ineffable that we might best engage with the experience of violence, rather than by directly illuminating it. Marks (2000) understands mimesis in a way akin to Benjamin ([1933] 1999). She explains how in some kinds of (international) cinema knowledge is created through mimesis rather than representation, where mimesis is a bodily encounter and representation is a reflective reconstruction. Marks claims that mimesis acts like an object in the world that is based on a material contact or embodied encounter at a moment, rather being than merely inferred from sight. Mimetic representation (unlike more symbolic or abstract forms) thus relies upon a responsive relationship between reader/viewer and text, one in which the body of the reader/ viewer can be affected or aroused each time the story is retold. Through mimesis, the subject comes into being through involvement and not abstraction. This holds its object in compassion rather than domination. Marks (2000) also describes mimesis as able to capture everyday knowledge that tends to elude verbal and visual records because it is stored in the other senses and in memory. I contend that ‘dark’ writing and the graphic narratives I analysed combine both mimesis and representation; a direct and indirect approach that is so vital for representing violence and trauma. ‘Dark’ writing as supportive of haptic and relational knowledge creation is demonstrated when analysing the visual quality of graininess in images such as the last panel on page 5 (Sacco 2009, p. 5, see Figure 3.6). Marks (2000) claims that when appeals are made to our sense of touch, knowing by sight moves towards knowing through touch, to recreate memories. She claims that in the cinematic medium, this appeal is made when films allude to other senses by using particular kinds of images. She conjectures that the sense of touch could be even more strongly evoked in a medium which does not use sound at all, only images. This makes her work potentially relevant to the form of representation in Sacco’s graphic narrative. Marks (2000) points out that images achieve a haptic function through a change in focus – sometimes expressed as a graininess which gives a tactile quality discourages the viewer from distinguishing separate objects. Instead, the viewer engages with the texture as a whole. She claims that such images encourage the use of senses other than just sight and its interpretation. Furthermore, such images are not easily connected to the rest of the narrative by the viewer. The viewer is affected before he/she engages with the narrative. The last panel on page 5 (see Figure 3.6) of Sacco’s text is dark and, at first, indistinct. It is textured like a linocut or a scored carving or a rough engraving. The viewer/reader cannot immediately distinguish the forms in the image. Once the reader/ viewer stops taking in the texture – zooms out, so to speak – and contemplates the image, he/she is able to fit it into the narrative and starts

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reading again, in the ordinary sense. It is both these kinds of ‘reading’ that ‘dark’ writing is able to include; it gives us access to both a kind of unexplained encounter with the image and a contemplative representation. Such viewing/reading leads to incomplete knowledge and thus accommodates the ineffable. Marks (2000) interprets this to mean that this kind of reading/viewing cannot lead to the possession of an image but merely facilitates the desire for it. This kind of embodied relationship between object and subject is essential for an ethical representation of violence and trauma, something that ‘dark’ writing also facilitates. According to Serres (1982), vision presupposes a site or a point of view, a source of light and finally the object, which is either luminous or in shadow. We are actually able to see or register objects within our frame of vision by what Serres (1982) calls acts of transporting. These are reductive ideas that are imposed onto the objects that we see that allow these objects to come into our field of vision, and without which we would not see these objects, even if they were before our eyes and light was present. These reductive ideas are actually acts of creating a viewing perspective, even though they seem like an uncovering of what is really there (hence the imperative of focusing on process knowledge). These acts function as gnomonic projections, transporting information to us as well as translating this information and making it appropriate for seeing instead of touching. Thus, the process of reduction or ‘translation’ that must happen when one sees changes the stability of objects in space. The stable contours and textures which are apparent to touch are seen as more variable, shadowy and are glimpsed bit by bit as a viewing perspective is built up over time. In doing this, the variable plane of time comes to dominate, with sight, over the more stable plane of space, which touch can apprehend. In this way, it is time that becomes a decisive factor in what one is able to see. This may be especially true in viewing violence and trauma. Great intensity can be apprehended (as with touch) at first, without the distancing effect of time, which is the mechanism that sight uses to reduce stimuli so that we are able to see. The grainy image at the end of page 5 (see Figure 3.6) is a textured image which encourages touch rather than sight. We struggle to reduce it sufficiently so that we can see it clearly. Sacco facilitates this awkward vision by also deliberately not including any other images from 50 years ago on this page. The rest of the violence depicted on the same page is more recent violence from the story of Sacco’s arrival in Gaza. In terms of the content depicted, we are not given visual cues that enable us to distance ourselves from this last panel and so see it over time. We are just jarred by it, its graininess and its apparently being out of the time and sight sequence on the page. In the graphic narrative, this has the effect of making us repeatedly page backwards and forwards for a few pages as the story from present time slips into the story of the Khan Younis massacre. Thus, by the time we get to the beginning of the Khan Younis massacre narrative, entitled

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‘Footnotes’ (Sacco 2009, p. 8), we are already engaged in working hard to decode the story in an embodied way, we are actively paging back and forth with our hands and scanning the various clear and grainy images for their significance. This embodiment of reading/viewing is facilitated by the process of ‘dark’ writing. This embodied reading/viewing emphasises the role of process knowledge in framing the visible. It also recalls the particular immediacy of the comics form (McCloud 1993), as it simplifies process knowledge of time even further by making all moments seem temporally present. This may be a reason why comics are such an effective form to show us what previously seemed to be invisible. Comics also act as gnomonic projections. They reduce what we see in time to make invisibilities more conspicuous. For Serres (1982), knowledge resides in the shadows, even though the object is not the shadow. However, this knowledge of the object is fundamentally constituted not by the object itself, but by its shadow. This understanding intimately connects and also distinguishes, seeing and knowing. It does not set them up against each other as binaries. They are complementary layers of understanding. In this analysis, Serres’s (1982) shadow might be called the ineffable. It is this that graphic narratives are so deftly able to accommodate, enabling us to see aspects of violence that would otherwise remain hidden. By the time we meet Khamis on page 114 and Omm Nafez on page 111 (see Figure 3.5), we are already fully submerged in the narrative of the Khan Younis massacre. It is then that the striking moment (a point of excess in Sacco’s graphic narrative) becomes apparent. At this point, grief and guilt seem to momentarily manifest with a particular intensity. Violence seems to be approached almost directly. Khamis re-enacts Subhi’s death and Omm Nafez’s smearing ash on the wall of a broken building (Sacco 2009, p. 111, panel 3 and Figure A3). Both acts appear to exceed the decipherability of sign systems. These are acts that take place when experience is not able to be fully expressed (beyond words). These are the acts of imperfect witnesses operating in the ‘gray zone’ between representation and experience and attempting to share their experiences of trauma. It is in paying attention to their representations that do not claim to see clearly or to know perfectly we are able to attend to the invisible parts of these experiences. Sacco’s narrative poignantly traces the (g)ashes of Khamis’s and Omm Nafez’s experience and preserves the ineffable in them. These acts embody material metaphors of representation because in each of them, Khamis and Omm Nafez use their bodies to share the intensity and chaos of their experiences. As a viewer/ reader, one can almost feel Subhi’s last gurgles and feel the roughness of the broken wall under one’s her hands. In both of these images, bodies become the conduits of expression, and some of this is transferred to the reader/viewer whose eyes and hands brush the pages. The images make these sensual metaphors palpable. Their tangibility is further increased

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because they echo and incarnate the trace of the hand of the comics artist. It is this trace of the comics artists’ hand and the tender strokes of his pen that make up these affecting images, which are in turn brushed by the reader’s/viewer’s eyes. Scherr, in writing about Sacco’s Palestine, concurs and emphasises again how reading graphic narratives haptically may help us share painful experiences: [t]he affective charge of the bodily image is primary in our apprehension of the narrative, and Sacco depends on the reader’s encounter with bodily gesture in order to express the emotional “realness” that is key in persuading us to engage with the pain of others. (Scherr 2013, p. 23) The reader/viewer scans such central panels (for example, see Figure 3.4, panel 4) more slowly than the rest of the page. This panel is large and centred so it draws the eye to it first. We brush against it intimately, before sending ourselves off again to look for explanations in the other panels on the extremities of the page. This way of representing facilitates a momentary promise of meeting between the artist, the reader/viewer and the object (Khamis). It is in this moment that more of the experience becomes visible than before. Furthermore, Marks (2000) claims that aside from drawing attention to texture, haptic vision tends to call attention to images in isolation, as apart from the narrative as a whole. Such images often look like as if they stand alone (for example, Figure 3.5, panel 4). In this case, the effect is exaggerated because panels 1 and 4 are large, centred and unframed (unlike the other panels on the page). They draw the eye to them first, stopping the reader for a moment and affecting the body of the reader/viewer intensely before the reader/viewer thinks about how these two panels fit into the broader narrative. Thus, in viewing Figure 3.5, panel 4, the reader/viewer participates in the embodied dynamism of the representational process. We are thus able to read (or touch) such moments or bodies in the narrative, and these moments become collaborative performances. In participating in this process, the space of participation between reader/viewer and representer and object of representation is opened, through ‘dark’ writing. Marks (2000) argues that haptic vision creates images of such detail and with such a proliferation of figures that a distanced view is difficult. There are many examples of this in Sacco’s graphic narrative. Pages veritably burst with detail, and each page must be pored over (rather than scanned) by the reader/viewer in order to take it all in. It is an exhausting read. Furthermore, the details of the many bodies and many faces and facial expressions throughout the graphic narrative preclude a distanced view. But the reader/viewer of this graphic narrative must live out this closeness to the text, not merely by being affected on an intensely

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sensuous and bodily level. He/she must also reflect deeply on the detailed images in combination with the words. ‘Dark’ writing as representation and interpretation captures this dual processing in a way which neither haptic vision nor affect theory is able to do effectively on its own. Marks (2000) proclaims that haptic vision is more inclined to movement than to focus, yet the representation of violence and trauma requires both frenetic energy and deep focus in order to become adequate. Elements of haptic vision must be included in ‘dark’ writing, because haptic vision is necessary in situations of the contestation of war and conflict. It is the kind of vision in which the relationship between the subject and the object of vision is particularly intimate, but not possessive. It also does not give rise to complete knowledge. As discussed previously in this chapter, Marks (2000) claims that in the west, much vision has a purely instrumental purpose and is bent on mastering and controlling the object of vision, rather than allowing it to remain partially mysterious. She argues that a vision that is not merely cognitive but acknowledges its location in the body seems to escape the attribution of mastery (Marks 2000, p. 132). I have previously argued (Viljoen 2016) that this is also true of knowledge that accommodates the ineffable, and cultivates an ethical position. However, I would not vest the ineffable or the ethical solely in touch or bodily encounter, although bodily encounter is a necessary part of a relational ethics. Marks (2000) argues that language comes into being through the body and is inseparable from the sounds and gestures that bears it forth. However, I am cautious to allow such a notion of the body to subsume a system of signs in which abstract meaning also vests. It is this desire to maintain a rigorous combination of the two that influences my construction of ‘dark’ writing. One might conjecture that as imperfect witnesses who inhabit the ‘gray zone’ between experience and representation, Khamis and Omm Nafez embody Agamben’s (1999) notion of the tensional. This would suggest that they embody an aspect of process knowledge in their performance of their grief. The tensional is an aspect of process knowledge that arises when something or somebody (for example, Khamis or Omm Nafez) has the potential to do or become two apparently opposite things (for example, reflect on and be affected by violence). These disparate potentialities are housed in what Agamben (1998) calls a zone of indistinction. They run into each other, and as such, both exist and are kept in play because they coincide, overlap and are related, not as substance but as processes of mimesis and representation. ‘Dark’ writing is particularly adept at capturing this interplay. Significantly, the interplay of these processes through ‘dark’ writing gives Khamis and Omm Nafez close proximate knowledge (Pickering 2008) without first-hand experience. Put differently, they have knowledge of intense, embodied pain, without sight, but through their other senses (as Marks (2000) would argue). This is something that may be possible for readers/viewers of the narrative

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too, to some extent. Khamis and Omm Nafez work out an anomalous situation through a particular form or act of representation. Their embodied acts of re-enacting Subhi’s death and smearing ash on the wall of the broken house hint at their untenable situation and at the violence this does to them. Their acts demonstrate their own operations of ‘dark’ writing and reveal some of the ‘invisible’ violence that they are engaged with. To capture some of this, the ineffable has to be accommodated in the process of representing violence and trauma. Here, some of the obscurity, dynamism and these fraught tensions may come to the fore. One interpretation for Khamis and Omm Nafez’s actions (coupled with what one knows about their fabricating a ‘false’ story of the massacre) is that behind their words lies a need for intimate and overwhelming connection to their communities and to their losses. According to Katrina Jaworski (2014), a sense of loss dismantles meaning, but in doing so, paradoxically helps us make sense of trauma because we become more able to apprehend the potential for meaning that the ineffable offers (Jaworski 2014, p. 83). Such loss may give Khamis and Omm Nafez access to the ineffable that might otherwise have been obscured. The spectral shadow that the ‘inaccurate’ words of Khamis and Omm Nafez’s stories conceal is also revealed in their embodied image of the performance of Subhi’s death and the smearing ash on the wall of the broken house. Sacco’s Khamis and Omm Nafez’s authentic stories are defined and enriched by their doubts and possible inaccuracies, which are preserved to enrich the narrative. They are included as inaccuracies or ambiguities and might have been left out of the narrative. For Agamben (1999), the testimony of the subject can only take place against the background of ‘its possibility of not being there’ (Agamben 1999, pp. 145–6). This makes the subject and not the accuracy/inaccuracy ‘the decisive question’. Focusing on the subject rather than on the product or representation allows us to assign a positive value to fallibility and inaccuracy and enables us to strive instead for adequate and ethical accounts. These patterns of seeing and knowing create a tapestry of accuracy/inaccuracy and of the shadows of what is remembered/forgotten. The patterns of knowledge and ‘nonknowledge’ within knowledge (Jaworski 2014) also create a recognition of the performativity of Sacco, Khamis and Omm Nafez’s as they each engage in instances of ‘dark’ writing to help instigate and share their experiences. They allow us to glimpse what would otherwise be invisible in violence and trauma as we associate these with other instances of violence or different perspectives on the same instance of violence, which although distinct contain echoes of each other. Characters such as Khamis and Omm Nafez, who have memories of the massacre, are shown to nourish these memories by re-telling their seemingly inaccurate and competing stories repeatedly to their community members. They each gain credibility by doing this, though not in a

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way that resolves the fact that their narratives compete for the reader/ viewer of Sacco’s narrative. Thus, the meaning of their stories is inferred in the process of telling and retelling them, and they are not found in their content or historical accuracy. This is a different model of value to the one held by the journalists (Sacco 2009, p. 5, see Figure 3.6). Again, the lens of ‘dark’ writing keeps both content and process in play yet emphasises non-representational knowledge that is able to reveal these discrepant ethics. The representation of the constructions of ‘story’ and ‘news’ on page 5 (see Figure 3.6) tugs at the distinction between representation and experience itself in a potent way. This is precisely because through it, Sacco has brought the power of eschewing accuracy and accommodating loss into the spotlight. In doing so, Sacco’s narrative suggests to his readers/viewers that meaning may be most closely related to ethics and not accuracy. He encourages us to embrace gaps in knowledge to allow into the frame once precluded knowledge, as we operate within a ‘gray zone’ between experience and representation.

Framing Associations of Further Violence through ‘Dark’ Writing Sometimes in situations of trauma, affects such as numbness or shame may initially conceal experiences of violence, making them difficult to represent or share. This is because our methods for both representing such violence and recognising it are sometimes inadequate. The more we insist on direct and accurate representation of these experiences, the less we are able to dislodge their cover of numbness and shame to reveal the experience of violence underneath. In fact, it is often the flaws in historical accuracy and the vicissitudes and self-consciousness of memory that alert us to the fact that there is anything more concealed at all. When we notice such fallibilities, it is then that we need to activate modes of representation, such as ‘dark’ writing, which not only accommodate but also preserve the inexplicable so that we may access what is initially hidden from view. In Chapter 1, I made the point that in cases of ongoing violence accommodating the ineffable allows us to discern the violence, which is otherwise difficult to detect as it seems to have no beginning or ending and may overwhelm the boundaries of the frame. For example, when we keep looking at it directly (through news photographs), we are unable to see the invisible and ineffable aspects that perpetuate such violence. We may become numb to its effects, rather than engaged by them. We may fail to allow the violence to affect us and instigate some political action in us. Both the affect of numbness and the affect of shame may not be probed for their associations with further violence that does not all initially come into the frame. We thus need to be primed through ‘dark’ writing to make this connection when we identify these affects and to accommodate the ineffable that may not initially be visible to us.

100 ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre In terms of both form and content, the associations of further violence we can see are also a matter of politics and what has been included/ excluded from the frame. In Chapter 1, I have discussed Chute’s (2008) observation that graphic narratives have a potential to support political intervention. This is because they facilitate an ethical stance. This ethical stance is a relational and self-critical stance that may bring aspects into the frame that were earlier disallowed. According to Marks (2000), graphic narratives of violence that preserve the ineffable do not encourage mastery or completely accurate vision. Saïd (1978) also mentions that the fragmentary and surprising nature of the logic of comics allows them to bring into the frame what we do not expect. They help us to go beyond political discourses of prejudice and exclusion and to represent identity adequately. This general notion also applies to how the panels of a graphic narrative literally frame what is seen/drawn/written, and what is left in the gutter as part of the ineffable. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Butler (2009) takes up this issue of framing representations of lives in war and violence and explains that subjects are constituted through normative frames which, in their reframing and selecting process, produce and shift the terms through which subjects are recognised. Thus, ‘[t]he frames … differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot’ (Butler 2009, p. 3). For Butler, frames are spectacles (or lenses of ‘dark’ writing) that ‘delimit the sphere of appearance itself’ (Butler 2009, p. 1). Her point may be demonstrated in this text for analysis. She argues that when we are repeatedly shown images of (Palestinian) deaths, we come to expect that this is what Palestinians are and we see only what we expect to see becoming numb to representations of Palestinians that lie outside of our expectations. However, in the panels on the bottom half of page 5 of Sacco’s narrative, we are not only shown indistinct panels of Palestinian deaths. These panels are juxtaposed with animated wailing and furious protesting by the Palestinians of what is presented directly above (Sacco 2009, p. 5, see Figure 3.6). This perturbs our expectations and keeps them open to life and death, as the tumult of passivity, affect, emotion and vigorous initiative is stimulated through the representation. Although Sacco’s graphic narrative contains arresting graphics of Palestinian deaths throughout, these are dwarfed by the grinding details of the Palestinian lives he makes visible on almost every page. As Mark Braverman (2010, p. 22) explains: In Footnotes in Gaza the pictures of what happened at Khan Younis and Rafah in 1956 alternate with the present scene of crowded cities bursting at the seams with restless energy and seething rage. Sacco depicts the grinding desperation of families attempting to make ends meet under forced resettlement and occupation. He reports on the late-night gatherings of aging, exhausted freedom fighters

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and unemployed young men. And, always, there are the [present] memories—of dispossession, humiliation, loss—and the [present] ineradicable hope of return to the land itself and to a condition of dignity and visibility. (My emphasis) The seething hope of a return to visibility and dignity becomes visible when Sacco allows the ordinariness and vigour of daily Palestinian life into his frame, as he lifts the veil on our expectations of only seeing dead Palestinians. It is this content that ‘dark’ writing makes visible. This is one reason why the mass images of death that he portrays are so affecting. This notion of framing may explain why Harper’s Magazine and the tastes of mass media did not see the relevance of Sacco’s story of the Khan Younis massacre when he first tried to publish it. The publication’s response inadvertently framed Palestinian lives as if they were not worth grieving for. By contrast, Sacco frames the massacre in a way that includes his and his protagonist’s doubts, shame and inaccuracies. Thus, he registers some of the contestation of Palestinian lives and thus lends a further ethical imperative to focusing on stories which accommodate invisible violence and the ineffable and going beyond the numbness that we might experience from seeing so many Palestinian deaths in news photographs. The Beam of Numbness With regard to numbness, the graphic narrative form of representation packs a double punch because it uses drawn images instead of photographs. Although these are visceral and immediate, they still trace their own construction and thus lack the numbing effect of the still photographic images of war that we are so used to. I suggest that although the violence of war and conflict is repeatedly represented (especially through ‘accurate’ news photographs), we cannot understand it. This is because, as discussed in Chapter 1, according to Barthes (1981), such photographs are too direct an approach to violence and repeated exposure to them simply numb us to what violence is, concealing rather than shining a light on experiences of violence. By contrast, In Footnotes, the frame of numbness that allows us to see associations of further violence through the lens of ‘dark’ writing as it is craned on Sacco’s drawn images plays out in interesting ways. One of these ways is evident in the section entitled ‘The Story Is Dead’ (Sacco 2009, p. 123, see Figure 3.7 to come). In this section, Sacco focuses on the journalistic fraternity and their cynical view of representing stories of violence, because they have done this so many times. These journalists are the proximate but secondary witnesses of multiple incidents of violence. Their level of involvement

102 ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre

Figure 3.7 Numbness (Sacco 2009, p. 123).

with such violence varies from being relatively detached observers to (for example) having to do chemical warfare courses to enable them to handle a more involved position. In this section, a distinction is made between ‘nasty stuff’, ‘news’ and ‘the story’. The laconic comments of these hardened representers, bemoaning the fact that there seem to be no stories, reveal that ‘nasty stuff’ is not always the same as ‘news’.

‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre  103 The ‘story’ in this context seems to share some features of ‘news’. However, a further distinction is made under the category of ‘story’, namely between ‘old stories’ and new stories. Sacco defines the pursuit of ‘old stories’ as ‘playing it safe…. Because old stories are always good ones…. Old stories are a sure thing’ (Sacco 2009, p. 124). When examined through the lens of ‘dark’ writing, this section significantly enriches our understanding of the process of the representation of violence and trauma. To begin with, the term ‘story’ (as used by the journalists) is multifaceted. It suggests the interplay between representational and non-representational knowledge, and the messy way that these often rub up alongside each other in this context. If we recall Carter’s (2009) description of ‘dark’ writing as storied rather than as descriptive discussed in Chapter 1, then we notice that the journalists are obviously using this term to refer to both aspects of story. In their often relentless and cynical pursuit of ‘news’, the commodification of the right sort of ‘nasty stuff’ is foregrounded. However, the story seems to exceed news; as a concept, it takes on a life of its own in their conversation. The comments wind up with ‘long live the story’, followed by Sacco’s declaration that old stories are ‘good’ and ‘sure’ (Sacco 2009, p. 124). His claim is interesting because he and his colleagues’ understanding of story comes out of their repeated observation and representation of violence and trauma across multiple contexts. Therefore, their understanding presumably results from a close knowledge of the content of such stories and what makes them newsworthy or ‘nasty’. Sacco (2009) comes out strongly on the side of identifying stories which are presumably less saleable than news. The implication is that these stories are the ones he pursues in his narrative (even if these are not the ones that his publishers are primarily interested in). The repeated mention of old stories, with an accumulation of descriptors, means that the process of representation (as opposed to just the content) is emphasised in Sacco’s approach to evaluating representation. In drawing attention to the process of representing itself, the content knowledge of what is told to the reader/viewer is not just seen/heard but is experienced by the reader/ viewer not as a mimetic copy of reality but as a reality itself (Benjamin [1933] 1999). This makes Sacco’s representation a powerful vehicle of experience. Sacco’s positive evaluation of representations of violence and trauma is reserved for those stories that have been repeated more than others. His evaluation thus seems to value the process of representation and seems to accommodate the ineffable. Thus, the stories he is after are stories of ‘dark’ writing – the ones that go beyond mere descriptions of ‘nasty stuff’. Indeed, it seems as if Sacco’s notion of story concurs with Adriana Cavarero’s view of narrative (2000, p. 3) that ‘the meaning that saves each life from being a mere sequence of events, does not consist in a predetermined figure’ but must accommodate both the familiar and the ineffability inherent in experience. He declares that such stories are

104  ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre identifiable only because they have been seen before and are associated with previous similar incidents of violence. It is therefore not only the association of the content with previous incidents of violence but also the process of repeatedly representing them that enables Sacco to enrich his understanding of the process of representing violence and trauma, and recognise what makes a good story or a dynamic piece of ‘dark’ writing. At the start of the graphic narrative, there is another conversation between Sacco and his journalist colleagues. This conversation is represented after close-ups of bored journalists ordering news items, as if off a folded menu card in a restaurant (Sacco 2009, p. 5, panel 5, see Figure 3.6). The impression created is that the waitress is selling them ‘bombings’, ‘assassinations’ or ‘incursions’. They only need to take their pick and then casually consume these. As discussed in Chapter 1, according to Butler (2009), the subject has to navigate the easy consumption of violence on the one hand and the struggle to engage with violence on the other in order not only to construct him/herself ethically but in order to see all that violence is. As a journalist, Sacco foregrounds precisely this issue from the very first page of his graphic narrative. Not far into the narrative, he begins to challenge the easy consumption of violence directly by the panels immediately below the menu card of ‘bombings’, ‘assassinations’ and ‘incursions’. By contrast, these panels (Sacco 2009, p. 5, panels 7–13, see Figure 3.6) show what these ‘menu items’ mean from the perspective of those directly involved in violence. Significantly, Sacco brings victims of the process of violence on opposite sides of the political spectrum into the frame in these panels – both Zionists and Palestinian nationalists. Panels 7–9 are all placed in black gutters, near the centre of the page. The words on these images translate the menu items of ‘bombings’, ‘assassinations’ and ‘incursions’ into ‘two dead’, ‘five dead’ and ‘20 dead’. The images show open-mouthed wails in almost all of the figures in the images – as opposed to the bored closed mouths of the journalists depicted at the top of the page. The insertion of the disrupted and affected lives of people into the story in panels 7–9 also stands in stark contrast to the ‘news’ items. These only contain burning cars and tanks but no people. The last four panels on the page (Sacco 2009, p. 5, panels 10–13; see Figure 3.6) retain the focus on the victims of violence. They show the aftermath and the effect of the recurrence of violence on those who must bury the bodies, in contrast to those who merely write about them, who are depicted at the top of the page. The blackness of the panels containing the wailing people is picked up in the last panel, showing the aftermath of the Khan Younis massacre 50 years previously. This silent visual comment forms a brutal contrast to the bored journalists ordering news items depicted on the top half of the page. Something of the pervasive constancy of violence is suggested, without being mentioned in so many words. The intensity and jarring nature of the images on this page hurtle

‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre  105 from one scene and perspective to another. The effect is mostly underscored by Sacco’s words, making them even more intense. On this page, Sacco (2009, p. 5) makes a number of observations. In this case, the ‘oldness’ (presumably ‘old’ in terms of repetition of content and form) of the stories is what makes them indistinguishable. He asserts, ‘[t]hey could file last month’s story today – or last year’s for that matter – and who’d know the difference’ (Sacco 2009, p. 5, panel 5; see Figure 3.6). This sentence suggests that the term ‘story’ is used in exactly the opposite way to how Carter (2009) uses it to distinguish ‘dark’ writing from ‘light writing’. Sacco (2009, p. 5, panels 6–13) explains that this inability to distinguish the context or content of the ‘nasty stuff’ in the Levant comes about [b]ecause they’ve wrung every word they can out of the Second Intifada, they’ve photographed every wailing mother, quoted every lying spokesperson, detailed every humiliation – and so what. Two dead! Five dead! 20 dead! A week ago! A month ago! A year ago! 50 years ago. This implies that a new way of representing this violence is necessary. This page forms part of the ‘Glimmer of Hope’ (Sacco 2009, pp. 3–7) preamble to Sacco’s going on to tell exactly that same story again, in a far more meaningful way. He entitles this story ‘Footnotes’ (Sacco 2009, p. 8). This implies that Sacco’s story exceeds the notion of a news story. Instead, it is darkly written and accommodates the ineffable. Sacco’s story performs a disjuncture between content and context, and draws attention to itself as the point where the ineffable is located. It approaches what remains beyond words. As discussed as an example of a haptic image previously in this chapter, the last panel in Figure 3.6 is dark and grainy, shadowy and difficult to make out, yet striking at the same time (Sacco 2009, p. 5, panel 13). Its texture is reminiscent of the fine lines of engravings used in war illustrations from an earlier era. This panel may be interpreted as an example of ‘dark’ writing. Even looking at an old story through this lens may reveal aspects of the representation of the violence and trauma in the past that the present has not seen before. This last panel, unlike the others on the page, does not have a frame around it. It powerfully and formally seems to exceed the boundaries of previous iterations. It seeps towards the black gutters in the frame above it and the white gutters in the frame alongside. This foregrounds not only the content of violence but the representational process itself in which this graphic narrative accommodates the ineffable and so breathes new life into an ‘old’ story. The graphic narrative achieves this by allowing us to distinguish the pain of the victims (now invisible to the journalists) and the reality of what pervasive and continuous violence might mean to those living in

106 ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre it. This is not just a boring repetition of the same ‘old’ story in terms of both form and content. It is the direct and detailed representation of the same content, over and over again, alongside the distrust and satiation that its proliferation also causes that makes this ‘nasty stuff’ more visible. This reveals that it is not (only) the proximity to the violence but the repetition of the same story or the content represented that enhances our ability to understand the process of representing violence and trauma. This again suggests that the richness of the representation emerges from a combination of its form and its content. The Shaft of Shame Although shame also often conceals the full meaning of an experience of violence, it may also be used as an indicator of the ineffable, a shaft of light that may be shone on what is not immediately visible. After examining testimony of Auschwitz survivors, Agamben (1999) concludes that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. Shame features strongly in Sacco’s subjectivity and guides what he is able to see. Sacco’s emotion of guilt in his own narrative process may be taken as an invisible effect of the violence of representation. It conceals the hidden structure of the ethical position. However, Sacco also claims that he is affected by the inaccuracy of Khamis’s, Omm Nafez’s and Abu Antar’s stories. Far from dismissing them or wanting to explain these inaccuracies away, he is haunted by the ambiguity that endures in their accounts and feels deeply involved in it. He senses this to the point of feeling shame at the fact that he cannot see what he thinks this inaccuracy may indicate. He is ashamed that he can neither ‘untangle’ the survivor’s guilt nor ‘explain’ the ensuing inductions and assumptions about the violent deaths of intimate others (Sacco 2009, p. 116, see Figure 3.1). Guilt and grief mixes in Sacco’s doubts and burgeoning critique of accuracy. These emotions are similar to what Probyn (2005) identifies as shame. She argues that shame is positive and productive. Shame can drive an examination of its causes, giving rise to an ethical re-examination of ourselves. This implies that we may use shame as an ethical imperative to compel a critique of ourselves and the relationships that our representations of violence and trauma set up in the context of war and conflict. Knowledge of how our representations come about (violently) in a climate of shame, and how this shame compels an inclusion of the ineffable, may form a sound basis for ethical action (Baiasu 2014). In representations of violence and trauma in the graphic narrative form, the emotion of shame may thus form a basis for political action, particularly if it is also associated with a pre-conscious affect, a bodily intensity, which lies outside of the confines of language (Chute 2008). ‘Dark’ writing captures glimpses of the operation of shame and how it keeps us productively vulnerable to the narrative. Shame becomes a way for the imperfect witness to know what

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is not immediately visible. Affect theory is a useful theoretical frame to impose on Sacco’s declaration of being ‘enveloped’ by guilt and grief which exceeds mental reflection (Sacco 2009, p. 116, see Figure 3.1) because it enables us to see that more is going on than merely an emotion of shame. There is also the associated and even more direct reference to the poignantly engaging affect of shame that Sacco feels entwines him, even though he cannot explain it (2009, pp. 384–5). This argument is in keeping with the definition of affect given by Massumi (2001). Massumi (2001) follows Benedict de Spinoza ([1677] 1997) the original source of most contemporary theories of affect in defining affect as an intense bodily flow and distinct from emotion, which by contrast also involves a cognitive process. Spinoza ([1677] 1997) claims that human bodies are primarily affected by a mode of extension of other bodies and not by thoughts, which spring from the mind. Massumi (2001) refines this notion, claiming that affect occurs at the level of the non-subjective in terms of exchanged energies and affective flows. Most importantly, according to Massumi (2001), affect cannot be realised in language. This is what links affect to the ineffable (when we approach the ineffable from the realm of representational knowledge). Massumi (2001) even describes affect as the body’s way of preparing itself for action. I would add that this is another point at which the ineffable links to non-representational knowledge how, in that we may see it as the body’s way of preparing itself for ethical action. This suggests that ethics cannot merely be self-criticism (an analytical and self-conscious process). It also involves the relatedness of bodies. However, this does not mean that affect is personal. Indeed, according to Massumi (2001) and Spinoza ([1677] 1997), it is not. They believe that to affect and be affected by other bodies is a general sentiment. Massumi (2001) explains that the embodiment of affect is a kind of unreflective ‘seeing’ or being intensely moved. It implies that the body always simultaneously affects and is affected by what it experiences of other bodies’ violence and trauma. We might also think of this point at which bodies affect each other as another point of excess, which may be registered in ‘dark’ writing. However, Probyn (2005) also argues that we can only feel affected by shame when our interest has been piqued as a result of being able to associate what engages us with our own (often insufficient) response. Probyn proposes a more embodied view of the affect of shame, where shame may be seen as a result of arousal between proximal individuals, where shame may stand for a zone of contact. In this way, shame provides a prospect of new ways of relating that may perturb us, on both a personal and a political level. Vallorani’s (2009) notion mentioned in the introductory chapter is relevant here. She claims that images of war have a striking effect on the body and give rise to arousal even before a reader/viewer can think about them is relevant here. It seems that images of war may be able to

108  ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre induce affect – to instigate it, if we recall Keenan and Weizman’s (2012) argument in the introductory chapter on the use of photographic images of war. If this is so, then this way of capturing affect through the ‘dark’ writing of graphic narratives adds intensity to the understanding of the experience of violence and points of excess where meaning exceeds words. By contrast, an emotion also involves mental reflection indicated by Sacco’s declaration of being unable to ‘explain’ what he is being told (Sacco 2009, p. 116, see Figure 3.1). As ‘dark’ writing operates between representational and non-representational knowledge, it is able not only to capture emotions but also to suggest intensities of affect before we know or mentally register them. This understanding is useful in my argument because it links affect to the ineffable, through ‘dark’ writing. Furthermore, it also illustrates how the affect of shame, through its association with the ineffable, may facilitate an ethical stance. In Sacco’s (2009) text, Sacco (and other fallible narrators including Khamis and Omm Nafez) is shown to be ashamed. Sacco seems to feel shame for knowing without seeing, as well as for his commitment to accuracy when he knows that something invisible has been lost. Neither Sacco nor Khamis nor Omm Nafez is a direct perpetrator of violence. Yet, shame drives each to transcend representational and discursive boundaries and seek new relations in which they transcend community expectations that they care more about themselves, their stories and their own survival than the other people who are represented by them in their stories. In addition, shame allows Sacco to construct an ethical and captivating narrative that may potentially change relations between the English-speaking world and Palestinians by providing a basis for more intimacy. Furthermore, it is as if the performance of shame and doubt in Sacco’s narrative becomes a ripple from which we may infer the presence of the ineffable, or what Jaworski (2014) has called a ‘signpost of nonknowledge within knowledge’ (Jaworski 2014, p. 81) an association of what we cannot now explain, with what we once thought we could. When a not-knowing position is acknowledged in the realm of content knowledge, an ethical position begins to be constructed. These signposts ‘of nonknowledge’ (Jaworski 2014, p. 81) may be seen as an instance of the gutter (as a visual depiction of the ineffable) spilling over its (non-representational) boundaries or momentarily erasing them. In other words, this is a moment when one of the major cues of the comics, namely the gutter, is erased, and readers/viewers experience immediacy, as occurs with Sacco’s declaration of being ‘enveloped’ by grief and guilt (Sacco 2009, p. 116, see Figure 3.1). However, this does not happen on a full splash page but only on one small part of the page (the third section) on which panels and gutters otherwise largely remain intact. The effect is that insight is gained into how representation does/does not take place in relation to the experience of violence. Paradoxically, more is made visible

‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre  109 as the not-knowing seeps into what is visible. Sacco (2009, p. 116, see Figure 3.1) asserts his recognition that he cannot explain why people cannot express their ‘experience as experience’ (Jaworski 2014, p. 81). And it is experience as experience that is gestured towards in the accommodation of the ineffable. Sacco suggests that recalling something that did not happen may be the effect of an experience that remains ineffable to some extent. It is this matter of trying to express ‘experience as experience’ (in all its dynamism, performativity, ineffability and embodied relatedness) that ‘dark’ writing point us towards. In Sacco’s narrative, we can ascertain that where gutters fall away in some places on the page (coupled with Sacco’s words of confusion), something is going on: the ineffable is altering the representation of violence and trauma. His doubt occurs at a point where words and accuracy in the realm of content knowledge are no longer adequate for what he is trying to express. Representing this important realisation helps him to express more than he otherwise could have. Agamben (1998, p. 25) theorises such excess. He comments: ‘[T]he fact that a word always has more sense than it can actually denote corresponds to the theorem of the point of excess’. Jaworski (2014) asserts that this point of excess may be where we find the ineffable. Jaworski (2014, p. 79) also points out the difficulty of locating the ineffable when its intelligibility depends on conditions of operation that cannot be anticipated in advance, something best captured in non-representational knowledge. This is another reason why we need ‘dark’ writing to help us share experiences of violence, because ‘dark’ writing both preserves and locates the ineffable in the realm where representational and nonrepresentational knowledge rub up against each other. This is how the point of excess becomes a potential source of further meaning, and not a point where we explain meaning away. Jaworski (2014) also proposes that this occurs when we cannot translate or express our experience in words, and when it feels excessive because it is beyond our imagining, prediction, preparation or interpretation. As stated, Jaworski proposes that when meaning is undone through loss, we become more able to apprehend the ineffable (Jaworski 2014, p. 83). This notion may again be related back to Sacco’s narrative (2009, p. 384) when he declares his shame, which alerts us to his sense of loss wherein the ineffable lies, [s]uddenly I felt ashamed of myself for losing something along the way’. As quoted earlier in this chapter, this declaration of Sacco’s ends when he asserts that his knowledge has in fact caused the meaning of people’s stories to be undone for him ‘...I knew more about that day than they did (Sacco 2009, p. 385). The meaning of Sacco’s representation exceeds many of the words he is using, although the words ‘disentangle’, ‘ramble’ and ‘skip’ gesture towards the process rather than the content of representation.

110  ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre On page 116, Sacco tells us that ‘in moments of calm, he [Khamis] says he can remember the names of all the dead’ (Sacco 2009, p. 116). This is Khamis at the point of excess, on the brink of the chaos of indescribability. It is the loss that Khamis experiences (which is hidden by but also manifest in his shame) that allows him to embrace and wield the ineffable at the point of excess, even though, or perhaps because, he is not able to fully name this loss in so many words. His false memory may thus also be located at this point of excess, where something that is beyond words has been awkwardly fitted into words that do not adequately express it. This is where the ineffable is located. It is an example of ‘invisible’ violence becoming visible, but still remaining unspeakable and not revealed for what it is, or entirely in words. According to Jaworski (2014), the recognition of the ineffable materialises in performative doing. Khamis’s grief-stricken re-enactment of Subhi’s death (see Figure 3.4) is a prime example of her performance of the ineffable at a point of excess, where words alone do not suffice. That is, the performative power of his embodied re-enactment materialises the (in)visibility of the ineffable. This is also the point where it becomes useful to examine Sacco’s expression of shame even further to see whether it may not be only an emotion but also a bodily intensity that he struggles to describe. It is an indication of the ineffable at this point of excess (Sacco 2009, pp. 384–5) Sacco’s declaration about his shame is the last word in the book, but it is not the last expression of this sentiment in the book. After his expression of shame at having more knowledge of the massacres than the victims he interviewed, there are three unnumbered pages of clear and detailed drawings of the historical happenings of the massacre. These drawings, in contrast to much of the rest of the book, are on a perfect grid: all with carefully measured gutters of exactly the same size. It is as if when the words leave the pages, the confusion subsides and searing truthfulness takes over. This is seen when clear, distressing close-up images of men being rounded up, beaten with rifles and shot with precision come into sharp focus. Also, from this point on, the gutters are pitch black, and in stark contrast to the images and the gutters in most of the rest of the book. On the last page, the last (sixth) panel in the grid is entirely imageless and black, enveloped by opaque shadow. The last page is simple, unmistakable, yet utterly dark. It is entirely black. Sacco’s expression of the emotion of shame arises from his struggle with accuracy. This causes him to lose sight of the ineffable, to know more and see less. It is the expression of this shame that is the last word in the graphic narrative a few pages before. Thus, this blackness on the last page may be read as a visual depiction of the point of excess, at which there is no more to be said, yet so much meaning is preserved. The blackness itself acknowledges and represents this. It allows us to glimpse the intensity of the moment when Sacco’s emotions starts to slip beyond cognition and into affect. The graphic narrative depicts this point being

‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre  111 reached in Sacco’s initial emotion of shame (see Figures A2 and A3), which we now realise was inadequate to express all the intensity he felt, and all that he and his readers/viewers become acquainted with in the wordless pages (see Figures A2 and A7) thereafter. Ahmed (2004) unpacks the interstitial concept of affect still further by tracing how it is related to, or may slip into, a social display of emotion. This may solidify or loosen the boundaries between selves and others so that intensities can either flow between them, or not. According to Ahmed (2004), emotion affects the surfaces of bodies and functions as an organising principle. It arranges marked bodies within communities or excludes them from communities. In this way, emotions bestow value upon bodies and help to organise their relations. Ahmed (2004) also explains that in the constant and reversible interplay between emotion and affect, affect does not have to be primary. It can be performatively ‘constructed’ from repeated emotions that accumulate value, producing affect through reiteration on a fundamental and bodily level. This is perhaps the best explanation for the end of Footnotes (Sacco 2009, pp.  384–5), where the final unnumbered pages end with a completely black page where page 389 should be. Sacco’s repeated affects and emotions of guilt and shame, registered at various points in his narrative, eventually seem to reach a performative point of excess by the end of the narrative. They slip over into the opacity of ‘dark’ writing, still registered but beyond any further realisation of language.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have analysed Footnotes as a text that enables a unique envisioning of violence. As a graphic narrative, it is able to reflect adequately the experience of violence. This is because it accommodates the ineffable at the point where experience exceeds words. My analysis has located this excess in the form of Sacco’s, Khamis’s and Omm Nafez’s stories where the meaning of their experiences of violence seems to exceed the accuracy of describing events. It is at these points of excess that haptic visuality and affect allow us to approach the ineffable and incorporate it in our ‘dark’ writing, a more adequate way to convey the meaning which lies beyond what we can describe or see, but which forms an integral part of experience. It is the affects of numbness and shame as well as what appears as inaccuracies in the narrative that are shown up by the ‘dark’ writing to be indications of a point of excess. An accommodation of these affects rather than a slavish pursuit of accuracy can be seen as a way to help us to more adequately represent the difficult experience of ongoing violence. Sacco himself expresses this idea: What I show in the book is that this massacre is just one element of Palestinian history … and that people are confused about which

112  ‘Dark’ Writing: Khan Younis Massacre event, what year they are talking about,” … “Palestinians never seem to have had the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next is upon them. (Sacco, cited in Brogdan 2009, n.p.) My approach to Sacco’s text has demonstrated the framing of accuracy; the unique interaction of words and images; the logic of panels and use of the gutter; and the way that further associations of violence are captured within this text allow us to recognise the ineffable aspects of experience. I have argued that these frames within the text are accommodated by the embodied, performative and dynamic lens of ‘dark’ writing. Examining Footnotes through the lens of ‘dark’ writing reveals that an examination such as this is as much about the process of representation and the way we reconfigure our understanding of this as it is about the content and context of a particular massacre. In fact, the ostensible journalistic goal of uncovering the ‘facts’ (newsworthy content) of the massacre is not achieved. The narrative is at pains to provide reasons for this and for what is achieved instead, through Sacco’s musings on the representational process. I contend that the specifics of the massacre are only presented in the context of these abstractions. This brings representation and experience together in a sometimes seamless and sometimes awkward way, but one that reveals much about the process of representing violence and trauma.

4

‘Dark’ Writing the Sabra and Shatila Massacre

Introduction: Waltz with Bashir 113 Framing Accuracy in the Graphic Narrative Form 117 The ‘Dark’ Writing of Memory 127 Framing Ethics through Shame 137 Framing the Gap between Words and Images 145 Framing Gutters and Panels 151 Conclusion 158

Introduction: Waltz with Bashir Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) graphic narrative, Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story is very closely based upon Folman’s animated documentary film from the previous year Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) both in terms of content and animation style. Folman is an author and the main protagonist of the Waltz (film) and graphic narrative. The hand-drawn images in Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky 2009) are presented in mostly uniform panels and use a style more reminiscent of coloured photographic images because they are based upon the Waltz (film). As such, they suggest permanence and objectivity. This is in contrast to the images in Footnotes (Sacco 2009), which are black and white. Sacco’s images are more obviously drawn by a shaky hand, subjective, embodied and changeable. This emphasises that overall the graphic narrative form itself is rich enough to overtly portray some of the infinitely complex relationships between the poles of the fiction and non-fiction and that this may be interrogated differently in texts of different styles. This chapter will concentrate on the graphic narrative and the Waltz (film), and the animated documentary form will be discussed further in the next chapter. In both these texts, an attempt is made to share experiences of violence in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, from the perspective of various perpetrators and bystanders. The Sabra and Shatila massacre has been condemned by the United Nations as an act of genocide. Survivors still living in the Shatila refugee camp walk past mass graves from the massacre daily and despite the Waltz text, second generation of

114  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre people are being born and likely to die in the Sabra and Shatila camps. This is because this massacre took place within the context of the ongoing trauma of national exile, dispersal and disenfranchisement that defines the enduring Palestinian experience. The continued statelessness of Palestinians in Lebanon still defines the lives of those who survived the massacre and dictates their movements, access to jobs, education and property ownership. Thirty-five years after the massacre, about two thirds of at least 10,000 residents of the Shatila camp are young people who were born there. ‘Denied the right of return to their homes in Palestine, they are not only born refugees, but they will grow up and die refugees’ (Ang 2017, n.p). For them, the experience of war associated with this massacre is ongoing. For Folman, retrieving these memories is not simply a matter of personal fulfilment or a reason to produce a text. Folman and Polonsky’s narrative is presented as Folman’s story primarily offered as the account of someone who has experienced war, lost his memories of his involvement in the massacre and is struggling to recover them. In addition to making a film and creating a graphic narrative about these events, Folman initially engaged in this project as part of a historical process. In this process, he was allowed to leave the IDF on condition that he remembered his involvement in the contested events ‘correctly’ and in enough detail. The IDF is presumably concerned with the facts and contestations of history. This places strictures on the types of memories and knowledge allowed and the subjective/objective way in which they are represented. In this sense, it leaves the subject (Folman) to navigate the violences of the representation process in order to reclaim his experience. While I will show that there is a sense that such traumatic experiences are undoubtedly overwhelmingly intense and supremely isolating for those directly involved in the violence, there is also a sense in which this trauma is still rippling out to be negatively experienced by more than just those directly involved. This, ongoing and often imperceptible fluidity of the experience of violence may be traced through ‘dark’ writing as ‘dark’ writing accommodates the presence of the ineffable in these experiences. As the theorist of animated documentary, Anabelle Honess Roe states of Folman that ‘the truth of the experience is, for Folman, as much about its incomprehensibility and his amnesia as about what actually happened’ (Honess Roe 2013, p. 168, my emphasis). Analysing the operations of the process of ‘dark’ writing in Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) graphic narrative, Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story allows me to concentrate on particular aspects of the representation process that make the sharing of the violent experiences possible and the way that this text is specifically constructed to foreground the violence of the representational process itself in the narrative form. In doing so, I engage with the ‘invisible’ elements usually ignored or hidden when we appear to have forgotten events that seem too traumatic to

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  115 represent. I show how including the ineffable in the representation via ‘dark’ writing allows us to share some of the experience of violence. In accommodating the ineffable, ‘dark’ writing not only provides us with a way of increasing the range of what may be represented but also provides an avenue for an ethical representation. In this chapter, I explore the operations of ‘dark’ writing further by using aspects of the five frames approach introduced in previous chapters, albeit in a looser way than in Chapter 3. This allows me to keep a systematic focus on the representation process itself without being unduly constrained by this methodology. This also allows me to build on my discussion of shame in the previous chapter and use it to build out my framing method to explicitly support an ethical stance. In this chapter, my approach thus frames accuracy, ethics and the formal qualities of graphic narratives (such as words and images; and gutters and panels) to allow us to share some traumatic experiences. Using these frames allows us to recognise (ineffable) aspects of these experiences that may not have been visible before. In this book, I discuss framing in a number of ways, both with regard to the formal qualities of graphic narratives (with regard to images, words, gutters and panels) and as an analytical device to explore aspects of the ineffable. This complex notion of framing is useful to explain the operation of graphic narratives and is drawn from Butler (2009). In Chapter 1, I discussed Butler’s notion that an over-emphasis on accuracy may lead us to only consider photographs of Palestinian deaths, which occlude human agency and thus impede an adequate representation of the experiences of violence and trauma. In the previous chapter, I also mentioned that Butler’s view that some lives cannot be properly grieved because they are not fully recognised as lives at all. This suggests that we need to look for a way to include human agency and vibrancy in our representation of Palestinians in order to give a more ethical and adequate account of Palestinian lives that facilitates grieving of the myriad of Palestinian deaths that are represented. I do this later in this chapter (see discussion of Figures 4.2 and 4.3 and the discussion of the final photograph in Folman and Polonsky’s text of a distressed Palestinian woman). As discussed in previous chapters, in placing so much emphasis on our interpretation of reality as opposed to reality out there, Heidegger (1962) fixes our focus on representation as the driving force for reality and blurs the boundary between representation and experience. Indeed, as Pickering notes ‘experience is only understood in the … forms in which it achieves expression’ (Pickering 2008, p. 26). This is why it is important to study the detail of representational forms whilst paying attention to our notion of representation and extending it beyond mimesis and towards the idea that reality is in fact a dynamic relationship between experience and reflection, and thus composed of visible and invisible parts. We thus need a lens for looking at reality that helps us to see reality’s

116  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre invisible parts and how we are implicated in constructing, representing and experiencing these parts. Heidegger’s position is also a warning that a fixation on accuracy may conceal these parts from view. ‘Dark’ writing through its accommodation of the ineffable and attention to the form of representation is able to help us capture the inaccuracies, invisibilities and ambiguities of experience and approach a more adequate means of sharing. Both the graphic narratives I analyse as illustrative examples of the operations of ‘dark’ writing in this book function in a similar way. They frame and include or exclude certain ‘truths’ within their panels. However, I argue that because these graphic narratives also include (different) visual representations of the ineffable in their structure, they preserve a space for the unknown and the undecided in the representation of the violence and trauma of war and conflict by including the ineffable within their frames. Thus, when the ineffable is preserved and included in the frame of the representation of the violence and trauma of war and conflict, we may know more, even when we see less. Focusing on how accuracy, ethics and the formal qualities of graphic narratives may act as framing devices allows us to unpack specific aspects of ‘dark’ writing as they apply to Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) work, and bring what may have hitherto been invisible about Folman’s experiences of violence into the frame. My analysis of the way that framing works in graphic narratives helps to contest narratives of conflict and assists readers/viewers to become involved in the process of narrating the contested events of history and the violent events of war. I maintain that the form of representation and the way that the ineffable is accommodated in the graphic narratives in my illustrative examples allow the reader/viewer to become involved in and to see what may otherwise be politically invisible. This is in accordance with McCloud’s (1993) view mentioned in Chapter 2, that comics, through the distinctive feature of gutters, engage all the reader’s/viewer’s senses and thus allow him/her to perceive what would otherwise be invisible. As in the previous chapter, I use the notion of accuracy and memory as a route into these issues. In this chapter, I discuss accuracy in terms of Folman’s initial lack of any memories, and him having to piece together other people’s memories (including already established historical narratives in the public domain) until he discovers his own involvement in the massacre so many years ago. I continue my consideration started in the previous chapter of approaches to history and memory in terms of their relationship to seeing and knowing, of which I have begun to scratch the surface in previous of my work (Viljoen 2015a). I discuss seeing without knowing, as Folman does, as a way of including the ineffable in the representation of experiences of violence. In this way, ‘dark’ writing helps us achieve an expanded method of representation by accommodating the ineffable in the formal elements of the graphic narrative form. I also examine some of these formal elements – the gutter and panels, words

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  117 and images and associations of further violence – to reveal aspects of the representation of violence and trauma that may have been previously invisible. I show how representational and non-representational knowledge rub up against each other. I adopt this approach to extend my analysis of issues of accuracy and the inclusion of the ineffable, and to analyse how this enables Folman to represent what was once too painful to remember. This allows showing up the ineffable at the disjuncture between context and content. I continue my excavation of shame begun in the previous chapter, as Folman and Polonsky (2009) depict shame from a perspective that differs from Sacco’s (2009). In this chapter, I will also discuss how ‘dark’ writing makes Folman’s shame visible and how Folman uses his shame as a tool to help him to re-orientate himself ethically as a perpetrator of violence as he shares this part of his experience with the reader/viewer.

Framing Accuracy in the Graphic Narrative Form The animated documentary film form as well as non-fictional graphic narratives foregrounds the matter of accuracy and its function in the sharing of experiences. To begin with, I want to flag a number of matters that are important to this chapter and the further elucidation of accuracy. Waltz depicts a war during which the Lebanese Phalangist militia perpetrated the now infamous massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in 1982. This massacre was characterised by the rape, decapitation and bodily mutilation of victims (mostly civilian Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese women and children). A detail recalled by survivors is that the massacre was eerily quiet, because the Phalangists preferred to use axes rather than guns (O’Toole 2015). The shocking nature of these contested events and the politics of representing them means that there is both an abiding interest in keeping these traumatic acts hidden, just as there is an enduring interest in revealing them (Chomsky 1999). At the time of the massacre, Ari Folman, the maker of the film Waltz with Bashir (2008), and co-author of the graphic narrative, was a young officer in the IDF stationed in Beirut. Through a series of flashbacks and the narratives of others who were involved, he slowly discovers that he helped ignite illuminating flares fired into the night sky, allowing the Phalangist militia to kill with greater precision. For Folman, this trauma was initially invisible. Later, it coagulates around his association of the horror and shame of this incident, with his parents’ treatment as victims at Auschwitz four decades earlier. Framing the atrocities in Auschwitz as an invisible aspect of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Folman and Polonsky (2009) bring previously invisible aspects of these experiences of violence into view. Folman’s subsequent flash of identification with the perpetrators of his parents’ misery induces traumatic memory loss

118  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre in him. This makes the massacre too traumatic for him to recall, and initially too horrific to represent. Folman overcomes this conundrum by sometimes representing the same details over and over again, through the narratives of different characters. He stitches these accounts together into an intricate overlaid trace, until his representation helps him remember and becomes his experience. One of the other narratives Folman uses to create his own representation-experience of the massacre is that of Ron Ben Yishai, a celebrated Israeli journalist. Ben Yishai – a character in the text – was the first person to be allowed into the camps after the massacre. Another narrative that Folman uses to construct his representation-experience of this is Moyer’s archival photographic account. Moyer’s version of the aftermath of events was known long before Folman and Polonsky’s text was published, when Moyer won world Press Photo of the Year for an image included in Folman’s text (on page 116 of the graphic narrative). These photographs are included as the final part of Folman’s representation of his own personal (and sometimes surreal) experience of the massacre in the text. As Chute notes, this is typical of graphic narratives, as non-fictional comics, which often address political themes by including memoirs, works of photo journalism and travel writing (Chute 2008). This weaving together of multiple narratives reveals how complex the relationship between representation and experience; self and other is in the context of violence, when accuracy is brought into the frame. Both Sacco’s and Folman and Polonsky’s texts fall into this genre, and both are ‘complex aesthetically and politically’ (Chute 2008, p. 456). The inclusion of the author himself and other real-to-life characters (for example, Ariel Sharon and Ben Yishai), known to the reader/viewer ‘outside’ the text in the graphic narrative, sets up a self-conscious interplay between the fictional world of the narrative and the real world. When we consider that the graphic narrative form works in the space between fiction and non-fiction, we are able to see how the speculations of the characters in the text become as much a part of the reality of the representation of Folman’s experience of the Sabra and Shatila massacre as the real people they represent ‘outside’ the text. This alters the structure of the reality of Folman’s experience itself, carving out a space for the in-between and the unknown part of reality to be accommodated within the text itself. Graphic narratives also carve out this space between the text and reality through their formal qualities as they provide content cues about the process of coming to know in discrete panels. Graphic narratives make it possible to digest a complex arrangement of narrative temporalities quickly, especially where words are not used (see discussion later in this chapter). When the reader/viewer can skip backwards and forwards quickly between panels, filling in the black gutters with his/her own sense of continuity, then form and content are synchronised in the reading/viewing process. This strengthens the effectiveness of these formal

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  119 qualities as they facilitate the rubbing up alongside each other of text and context, which is made visible by ‘dark’ writing. Thus, the content of the narrative is actually performed by the reader/viewer and the author as a protagonist within his own text. This fades the boundary between the abstract and the immediate, representation and experience. It makes the representation not merely a representation of violent content. Reading/viewing it also involves the reader/viewer in a performative process of representation, where s/he experiences or drives the narrative and the process of representation too. This could be said of many literary engagements. What makes the graphic narrative form particularly performative is the way it combines and replicates so many of the performative styles of other forms of literature simultaneously thereby packing a punch all its own. The embodied meeting of the reader/viewer with both the author and the protagonist(s) is facilitated by the gutters and how the reader/viewer projects an intensity into this space in the text while encountering what or who has been created in the panels. There is also some leeway to rearrange the order in which the reader/viewer engages with the narrative. Thus, the reader/viewer of a graphic narrative must actively involve him/herself sensuously on several levels. He/she also encounters the body of the author in the traces of the hand in the drawings of graphic narratives as he/she runs his/her eyes over the drawn strokes. In this graphic narrative, accuracy comes into the frame through a careful exploration of the mechanics of memory. A story illustrating the nature and psychology of memory is recounted early in the narrative by Folman’s friend, Ori Sivan – a psychologist and now also a renowned film director in his own right (Folman & Polonsky 2009, pp. 15–7). This vignette vividly stages the perceived difference between competing categories of past and present, memory and history. At the same time, it declares that accuracy cannot be used as a criterion to distinguish between them. This is typical of a graphic narrative sequence in that it depicts a series of moments as if they were in the present. This representational structure facilitates a tangible intensity. However, the reader/ viewer is simultaneously aware that all moments cannot be present. His/ her powers of reflection are thus stimulated at the same time as his/her intense experience of the present that he/she feels able to participate in and control. Accuracy thus palpably takes a back seat to interpretation in the way the reader/viewer of the graphic narrative experiences coming to know. In the graphic narrative (and several animated documentary forms), the emphasis on violence and a personal (yet non-fictional) story often brings the reader/viewer up close to the author’s account. This is because the author is also often a character in the narrative. Arguably, many literary forms use doubles of the author to emphasise the process of representation. However, this strategy is particularly arresting in graphic narratives of war that claim to depict the violent and traumatic content

120  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre of non-fictional events that necessarily place the author’s perspective alongside that of many others, instead of imbuing authorship with any particular authority. The strategy facilitates the depiction of political realities as fractured and multi-faceted. Often, confusion arises from a depiction that is left unresolved (or ineffable). This ineffability may then be used as a basis for political intervention (Chute 2008). This securely links representational to non-representational knowledge as it unfolds in the representational process itself. Coupled with the way that graphic narratives facilitate an embodied meeting between reader/viewer and author, and the way in which they engage both intensity and reflection, this makes them particularly suitable to represent the violence of contested events more adequately and ethically. Admittedly, the fact that Folman was both a protagonist and witness of the massacre does not authenticate his representations of war as an author. Folman as the author cannot remember what Folman as the protagonist experienced. In depicting this puzzle, Folman goes against the prevailing emphasis on the accuracy of war representations in his text. He undercuts representations (for example in war drawings) authenticated by a witness who reports ‘accurately’ on what he/she has seen by placing them alongside other accounts of the same events. In war drawings that purpose to be accurate, the artist may not judge or advocate but must simply be seen to act as an ‘uncorrupted witness’ and vessel of truth (Gibbon 2011, p. 106 as discussed in Chapter 1). Instead, Folman demonstrates how the war he took part in is necessarily constructed by what several others did/saw/felt/experienced. This suggests that the boundaries between what we represent and what we experience, not only shift and are permeable, but are often beyond our control. This is why I consider Folman’s text to be a striking example of ‘dark’ writing. Another of Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) approach to getting beyond the confines of accuracy is to use the textual strategy of surrealism to displace the emphasis on non-fiction and the irrevocable nature of violence and trauma. Figure 4.1 (to come) is a clear example of this textual strategy, where Carmi has a lurid, erotic dream, which may be interpreted to get beyond the limits of the horror of seeing his friends being blown up before his eyes during the Lebanese War. For Sacco (2009), the ostensible drive towards accuracy in his narrative allows him to entertain the notion that the perspectives of some of the survivors/protagonists (for example, Khamis) in his text are ‘inaccurate’. In other words, Sacco knows about violent events that were experienced without seeing them for himself (Viljoen 2015b). By contrast, as I have previously argued (Viljoen 2015a), Folman ‘sees’ or experiences violent events initially without knowing ore remembering them. This sightless knowledge or unknowing envisioning enables the representation of aspects of violence that would otherwise have remained invisible until

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  121

Figure 4.1 Carmi’s dream sequence (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 23).

122  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre they are laid bare: in Carmi’s words, ‘right before [our] eyes’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 23, see Figure 4.1). In both Sacco’s (2009) and Folman’s (Folman & Polonsky 2009) cases, there is an ineffable scenario in which the graphic narrative form profoundly involves itself. The graphic narrative, poised as it is between the imaginative and the Realist, accommodates each of these nuances on the accuracy/inaccuracy continuum. The exploratory process which ‘dark’ writing inscribes into the representational process allows these invisible nuances to be glimpsed through the graphic narrative form. Thus, paradoxically, it is the content and formal qualities of Carmi’s dream sequence (see Figure 4.1) that provide a conduit for remembering more realistic aspects of the war. According to Chris Baldick (2004) surrealism attempts to ‘reach beyond the limits of the “real”’ and to ‘break down the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, exploring the resources and revolutionary energies of dreams, hallucinations, and sexual desire’ sometimes using bizarre imaginative effects (Baldick 2004, p. 250). A surrealistic textual strategy is in evidence throughout this text in the unusual palette used. Figure 4.1 forms part of a larger surrealistic dream sequence (see Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 22) which, in the original is depicted predominantly in blue tones, with two jarring, almost garish orange panels in between. This sequence appears in the narrative when Folman goes to see Carmi, the only person he can recall sharing his traumatic experiences with, and who is revealed to Folman in his own initial flashback of the events surrounding the massacre. Carmi recounts this ambiguous dream sequence to Folman in response to Folman’s search for facts and clues about the reality of their past. The dream sequence includes an exploration of the revolutionary energy of sexual desire as it uses surrealism to portray Carmi getting ‘laid’ by an attractive, blue-green (in the original), giant, naked woman floating on her back in the sea. Carmi is depicted as lying face-down on her lower abdomen, between her splayed thighs, which, from her perspective, may be a position somewhat reminiscent of the aftermath of giving birth. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, this sequence is strongly gendered, and suggests that Carmi may have just had sex with a mother figure who has given birth to his adult self. In the three subsequent panels on this page, Carmi is shown presumably relaxing after the fantasy of intercourse, lying calm and satisfied, with his head turned to the side. One of the things his sees whilst reclining in this way is his friends being slowly blown up in the boat from which the colossal woman has rescued him. The first thing Carmi sees when he is liberated and comes of age is the annihilation of his friends ‘right before my eyes’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 23, panel 4, see Figure 4.1). The implication is that the obvious fantasy in cool blue tones of getting ‘laid’ provides a vehicle to approach the shocking orange panels in which he sees the appalling spectacle of his friends getting blown up. Folman’s narrative suggests that Carmi can face the deaths of his friends through

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  123 a surrealistic dream sequence in which death, arousal and renewal are entwined aspects of the same experience. This interplay of fantasy and reality, experience and representation registers the fact that the reality of the experience exceeds an accurate description of it. The graphic narrative as a non-fictional (yet not merely realistic) form, and as an example of ‘dark’ writing, is able to embed this through the notion of the ineffable, accommodated visually in this case. In this case, ‘dark’ writing employs the textual strategy of surrealism to accommodate the ineffable in an attempt to help the protagonist navigate both the non-fictional and ineffable as aspects of reality. Carmi’s dream may be read as a foray into irrationality in an attempt to get beyond the irrevocable horror of the violence and trauma that he was exposed to. Both Waltz and Footnotes are based on newsworthy information in the annals of official history. Yet, these are narratives in which neither author is in control because neither has a memory of the events himself. In Waltz, the author believes himself to be implicated in events he does not remember and he is seeking a way to construct a perspective that he will be able to face of his own involvement in the events. This is in contrast to Sacco, cast in the role of the observer-author. Yet Sacco is not a dispassionate observer or one that does not suffer secondary trauma because of what he is recording. Unlike Sacco’s (2009) text, Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) text constructs for Folman the role of an involved author (with a twist). Folman initially has no memory of the events he is attempting to represent. Thus, in one sense, Folman is like Sacco, an observer-author who comes to investigate events after the fact, events which he cannot remember being directly involved in. I posit that it is precisely the highly subjective nature of Folman’s narrative that allows him to see what would otherwise have been too painful for him to approach. Arguably, this sequence seems out of place, certainly indirect, in a non-fictional narrative about a war survivor. Carmi’s fantasy of getting ‘laid’ also suggests nurturing and protection by a massive mother figure. It is as if this experience and the representation of it allows him to give birth to his own painful memories of the war, which he has forgotten or blocked out. The deliberate inclusion of this dream sequence as a way to increase the ambit of what Folman is able to represent suggests how ‘dark’ writing operates. It focuses on the background and the process so that other (unexpected) aspects may come into view that would otherwise be left out of a purely accurate or realistic account. Some of the events, their relationships, context and background contours would have remained invisible if Folman had simply pieced together the official narratives of others to make a clear, linear one of his own. In this sense, paradoxically the imprecision which Folman’s use of ‘dark’ writing allows helps him to construct a more adequate narrative of his own involvement in these events as it facilitates the expression of his ‘experience as experience’ (Jaworski 2014, p. 81 as discussed in the previous chapter).

124  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre This sequence depicts Carmi involuntarily shooting a civilian family who are sheltering in their car as Carmi declares that ‘even after two years of training, there’s nothing but uncontrollable fear. And then silence, the horrific silence of death’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 25, panel 1). As the dream sequence lurches from affect to emotion, it gives us access to this moment of excess (as discussed in the previous chapter, where what has happened seems to exceed language). The words in this sequence reveal the very process of affect spilling out into life. It draws the reader/viewer into what it is like to ‘start shooting like maniacs. I have no idea at what’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 24). Acting simply out of an intense, bodily fear of the unknown, without thinking or knowing what you are doing. Thus, in this section of the text, the process of representation and the content rub up against each other and intensify each other in a powerful display forcing the reader/viewer to become invested in the representation of violence to such a degree that he/she may come to know aspects of violence that may before have been hidden. This implies that in moments when our bodies (like Carmi’s) are affected by violence, we may only begin to know what we have done after some time has elapsed or we have begun to represent the situation. Such sights are encoded into memory in such a way that they cannot be unlocked through accuracy. Then the reader/viewer needs ineffable aspects of both content and process to create a kind of tumultuous representational process that involves both the reader’s/viewer’s and author’s body and mind. This makes it seem as if the indirect and inaccurate approach in the previous dream sequence portrayed in Figure 4.1 opens the door to represent an affect that what would otherwise have remained invisible. It is as if the surrealism of the dream can provide a vehicle for the detailed portrayal of the traumatic events that follow. Put differently, the sexual energy that the dream arouses in Carmi (and possibly also in the reader/viewer) enables Carmi to remember and interpret the affect of ‘nothing but uncontrollable fear’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 25, panel 1) that inhabited his body during the war, the experience of which he had forgotten until then. It is as if paradoxically ‘dark’ writing helps Carmi ‘see the havoc [he has] caused’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 25, panel  2). This is because it enables Carmi (and the reader/viewer) to associate aspects that may not usually logically follow each other according to the strictures of accuracy (such as sexual arousal and death). This is corroborated by Carmi’s declaration in the dream sequence that he still associates sleep with fear, ‘I always fall asleep when I am scared’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 21, panel 6). These words appear in the first panel in the sequence in which the tense changes unexpectedly into present tense from panels 5 to 6. These two panels are an extract from a dark page in the text, with black gutters and indistinct, blue-grey images (in the original). They immediately precede Carmi’s dream sequence

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  125 (see Figure 4.1). At the point where the tense changes into present tense, the image suddenly becomes clearer, and the white window panes in the panel echo the pattern of white gutters on the previous page, when Folman is shown in conversation with Carmi coming to a moment of clarity (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 20). This transports the reader/ viewer very quickly through the jarring changes in tense and colour of the panel and image into Carmi’s dream sequence. The dream sequence begins immediately after this panel on the next page. The gutters are still black. However, in the original the images are lighter and have taken on a strange blue and green tinge (broken by the lurid orange and russet panels) and translucent clarity. Although the black gutters (representing the ineffable) are more difficult for the reader/viewer to penetrate, here they have a containing effect. This is because the images that they frame are clearer and brighter than the images with black gutters on the previous page. The overall effect of the narrative transitions over these pages is that in a very short space of time and with very few words, the reader/viewer can catapult him/herself from the present to the past and back to the present again. The feeling that not all has yet been revealed hangs over the text as the reader/viewer tries to enter the opaque gutters, swirling colour changes and sudden clarity in the images. The reader/viewer is forced to become involved in the text in an embodied way as he/she scans the panels and pages backwards and forwards to make sense of the affecting images. In piecing the narrative together and coming to understand, he/she also becomes involved in the chaos of the story and the representation process itself, implicated in its literal and connotative content. A visually interesting aspect of the ‘uncontrollable fear’ sequence on page 25 is that it is one of the few times in the graphic narrative where the gutters are white. It is noticeable that in this graphic narrative, the colouring of the gutters, usually black, sometimes brown and only occasionally white or grey, does not follow the time sequence of the narrative but rather seems to be guided by changes in content. The gutter appears white when Folman has moments of clarity, usually in conversation with psychotherapists or friends. However, not all conversations with friends display white gutters, even when Folman is gaining factual information from them. The gutters seem to be white as a reflection of what is going on inside Folman – as he gains clarity in relation to ‘his’ narrative and organises his experience. This observation is thought-provoking, since in the graphic narrative form, gutters are used for the reader/viewer to enter into the text and project him/herself into them. I have previously described gutters as a visual representation of the ineffable. The multi-coloured gutters in Folman’s narrative suggest that there may be shades of ineffability. However, that ineffability is always present, in different shades, as part of reality. The white gutters make the text feel clearer to the reader/

126  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre viewer too. They enable him/her to project him/herself into the narrative and interpret it more quickly without having to pour over it. There are times when he/she must look carefully because the apparent clarity of the white gutters is lost and the gutters become opaque and restricting. Then they frame disparate and impenetrable images that seem to be inexplicably placed alongside each other or even to overlap. Thus, the gutters too encourage the engagement of the reader with the process of ineffability inherent in representation that dynamically seems to keep moving from clarity to confusion and back again. The second panel in the ‘uncontrollable fear’ sequence clearly shows the outcomes of Carmi’s shooting at the car. Carmi states ‘when it is finally light, you see the havoc you’ve caused’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 25, panel 2, my emphasis). This statement seems to become a metaphor for the way in which a representational process that includes the ineffable (signified by the white gutters) can organise one’s chaotic experience of violence, as ‘dark’ writing helps one to come to see what one has experienced. In the subsequent panels, the reader/viewer shares Carmi’s traumatic realisation of the human implications of having shot at the car: the family in it have all died at Carmi’s hand. These moments of clarity in the sequence also suggest a state of embodied terror. The containing or representing of such affects and emotions happens just this side of the point of excess which Carmi describes as ‘uncontrollable fear, and then silence’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 25). This happens when the violent content of the representation is refracted through techniques of the representational process such as the following: a dynamic moving between times, protagonists, colours and frames, images and words. This is what ‘dark’ writing can accommodate in the graphic narrative form. This powerful representational technique facilitates intimacy with the reader/viewer. It underlines the readers’/viewers’ sense that they know what is going on inside Folman’s head as he pieces together his experiences, just as the readers/viewers are piecing together the narrative presented to them. This may thus be an instance of the facilitation of meeting that ‘dark’ writing supports. Ironically, the analytical and interpretive processes of ‘dark’ writing shed light on the chaos, actively accommodating it. When these panels in the ‘uncontrollable fear’ sequence are read together with the darkened dream, memory and fantasy sequences that precede these moments of clarity, they give us a more adequate (rather than an accurate) representation of the experience of coming to know. This more adequate representation also includes supporting an ethical approach, as I have already pointed out. In the previous chapter, I defined ethics as both a lived experience of approaching the other and a constant process of critique, manifest in rigorous sent of relationships that the ‘representational’ process sets up. I continue the discussion of ethics in this chapter by showing that ethics is a relational

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  127 process (as when the reader feels he/she is encountering the author by entering the text in an embodied way). However, in this chapter, I will also show that ethics may be understood to be a self-conscious process (as when Folman tries to piece his memories together). The ‘Dark’ Writing of Memory In accordance with the graphic narrative tradition, where the political and the personal are so closely intertwined, Folman self-consciously explores the connections between past and present. He does so both directly, in his narrative content, and indirectly, in his use of panels and the way the graphic narrative form presents time. He states directly that ‘[m]emory is dynamic. It’s alive’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 17, panel 1). This is specifically relevant to the content of what he is representing in trying to recover his own memories of his role in the massacre. On a meta level, this indicates how the graphic narrative can make multiple temporalities visible, to come alive for readers/viewers. In Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) text, the dynamism of memory is not merely stated. It is also demonstrated as the story unfolds in the panels of the graphic narrative. Until Folman has represented his memories of the violent events in his text (which includes speaking to his best friend, Ori, a psychotherapist), he has no memory of the entire massacre. In fact, in this conversation, Ori mentions that ‘[t]here’s a human mechanism that blocks us from going into the dark areas we want to keep closed. Your memory will only take you where you need to go’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 17, panel 6). I contend that by engaging in ‘dark’ writing to represent his experiences, Folman can go into some of those darkened areas of his memory. However, the dynamism of memory has a different meaning for Folman than for someone who remains in a situation of continuing violence. Folman claims that he only had his first flashback of Lebanon, Beirut and the massacre after his conversation with Ori (nearly 20 years after the massacre). At this point in the narrative (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 12, panel 3, see Figure 4.2 to come), we see Folman placing himself (for the first time) into the grey scene that he identifies as a flashback of the sequence of violent events that he initially cannot remember. Folman and Polonsky show these same moments again, in close-up later in the narrative, once Folman has integrated it into his memory (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 115, see Figure 4.3 to come). This distinction between flashback and memory, in which memory is integrated and clearly emanates from an embodied point of view, is notable in the text. This has implications for both accuracy and point of view. It is not only created through the contrasting of images drawn in greyscale and sepia (in the original text), depicting Folman’s flashback (see Figure 4.2) and Folman’s memory (see Figure 4.3, in which, in the

128  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre

Figure 4.2 The flashback where Folman first identifies himself in his own experience (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 12).

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  129

Figure 4.3 Folman’s memory of his own experience (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 115).

130  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre original text the first two panels are in grey and orange and the last two in grey only) of the scene, respectively. It is recognisably the same scene. The distinction between them is made by showing us Folman from different perspectives in the scene. The flashback, in greyscale (Figure 4.2), only shows the back of Folman’s head and the faces of people in the crowd he is presumably facing in the streets of Sabra and Shatila. The memory, depicted in sepia in the original text (Figure 4.3) shows Folman’s face in close-up, facing the crowds and we see the backs of their heads. Folman’s position in these images indicates that his memories, coded in the conventional colours of photographic evidence from yesteryear, belong to him and he has some control over them. The flashbacks are another kind of ‘memory’. They are flashbacks with a life of their own, a grey, shadowy nightmare where he is forced to look upon the faces of his victims and where he does not have the luxury of distance and crucially, he is not able to see himself seeing. The juxtaposition of the memory and flashback sequences form a clear example of Serres’s (1982) notion of relational envisioning mentioned in the previous chapter. This juxtaposition also reminds us that our point of view on the past and our sense of control over events alters what is visible and thus affects the accuracy and adequacy of a representation. In this case, the point of view is also altered by the process of how the violent content is represented (as flashback or memory). Both representations are inaccurate (in that they are obviously ‘retrieved’, which Folman registers by not showing either of them in realistic colours). Yet, they both reveal important aspects of the narrative and the process of representing violence. Crucially, once Folman is able to place himself at the scene of the violence through his representation of it, there is something about it that binds or contains his experience so that he is able to recall it, to know it and not only see it, as was initially the case. In their study of traumatic memories represented in the comics form, Elizabeth MacFarlane and Leonie Brialey note that [t]he ability of comics to show multiple realities/ temporalities simultaneously allows for an accurate portrayal of the experience of grief as both in the past, and continually intruding on the present. (MacFarlane & Brialey 2017, p. 20) This is exactly what happens in Figure 4.3, when Folman is able to place himself into his narrative and integrate the story of his involvement in the massacre with his current life. It is as if the event breaks through into the realm of experience in that moment. According to Jambet (2006 mentioned in the introductory chapter), an event only occurs in the realm of thought and is imposed from there onto experience which is chaotic and continuous, ever-present. In Folman’s memory (depicted in Figure 4.3), it is as if Folman is suddenly able to contain his

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  131 experience as an event by labelling it as memory and placing it into the frames of a graphic narrative. It is at this moment that he can know his experience as experience, through representing it. This adds to the postcolonial model of trauma as not being primarily simply event based. Categorising or punctuating the flow of chaotic traumatic experience as an event is a way of imposing structure (literalised through the panels of this graphic narrative) on it to control it or contain the moment of excess when the experience exceeds the representation. Folman’s statement that memory is alive (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 17, panel 1) implies that representation and experience may be out of sync in memory. The usual chronology of having an experience, forgetting, remembering and then representing it is disrupted in Folman’s narrative. It is as if he first represents his narrative (based on the memories of others) and then remembers and experiences it for himself, as if for the first time. For Folman, the memory is alive and itself carries the experience, which strangely seems to stem from his representation. Elizabeth Grosz’s work (2004) on time can assist us to interpret Folman’s notion that memory is alive further. In her discussion of Bergsonian memory, Grosz (2004) suggests that, like Henri Bergson ([1912] 2004), we view time as a sometimes circular and often disjointed patchwork of memories, experiences and reflections. Bergson ([1912] 2004) rejects the reduction of memory to the body which he believes it exceeds. His distinction between memory and the body is not a simple Cartesian binary. He draws the distinction in the temporal and not in spatial arena. His distinction leads to an understanding of the unity of body and mind through time. He claims that memory houses the past and the body the present. To be conscious as a body means to look at the present from the past in the light of memory. To Bergson, consciousness is expressed through the union of memory and body, a unity articulated through different moments in time. (Furthermore, he claims that it follows that this notion of memory is a spiritual and ethical pursuit with the important purpose of orienting present action). If we view time as circular in the way Grosz submits (2004), then what we become consists of the mutual and complex dependence between experience and present representation, body and mind, present and past. Grosz (2004) uses the metaphor of a Mobius strip to describe how we can problematise binary relations to show that they are not fundamentally either identical or irreducible, but intermesh, and are constituted out of each other. Accordingly, we may imagine not only that representation may come about after experience but also that experience and memory may come about as a result of representation. In this sense, we may emphasise Folman’s statement discussed at the start of this chapter that ‘[m]emory is dynamic. It’s alive’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 17, panel 1). Memory, seeing and knowing consist of our experiences of ourselves and others, folding into one another,

132  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre sometimes as these happen and sometimes as they have happened. Folman’s text is such a series of windows through which the ineffable aspect of the experience of violence is preserved. As discussed in Chapter 2, in the context of hypermediacy, Bolter and Grusin (1999) explain that the ‘windows’ interface that many screensavvy readers/viewers have become familiar with means that (unlike in paintings and in three-dimensional computer graphics) space is no longer visually presented as unified around a single vantage point. Rather, because we are ‘windows’ users, we have begun to associate reality on a fundamental level with multiple perspectives. This ‘windows’ logic may be fruitfully applied to Waltz. Here, there are a myriad of examples of scenes shown simultaneously from multiple points of view. Carmi’s dream sequence is a case in point (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 23, see Figure 4.1). We see the scene from Carmi’s vantage point as we view the back of his head in panels 2 and 3 as he gazes out at a ship in flames at sea. We also see his eyes as we gaze at him, looking at the ship, in panel 4. In panel 5, we continue to gaze into Carmi’s eyes. This time we see that Carmi is much older, and we realise that he must be looking at something else that we loosely associate with his similar point of view in the previous panel. The graphic narrative form mimics the structure of human memory as it retrieves these experiences in different ways and allows us to see all these viewpoints at the same time. This has the obvious advantage of showing us that it is inadequate to view the representation of violence only from one vantage point (in time) or as only one discrete event or perspective. We need to consider the multiple effects of violence across peoples, places and times, as a flow of ‘intermittent’ (to use Badiou’s 2005 term) experiences all of which must be brought into the frame in order to gain a more adequate and ethical understanding of it. This same ‘windows’ logic may be used to interpret the second last page of the narrative, which shows four parts of Moyer’s photographs of dead bodies after the massacre, each from a different vantage point, yet all on the same page (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 116). This ‘windows’ technique of deliberately showing many vantage points at the same time familiarises the reader/viewer with the usefulness of a fragmentary and self-consciously limited view. Bolter and Grusin (1999, p. 39) claim that this combined collage-type view has become the dominant form of visual art of the twenty first century. They argue that it shows up the process of representation in the content viewed so that there is a constant tension between looking through a medium/’window’ and looking at something. Because we as readers/viewers have become familiar with this way of showing varied and incomplete points of view often simultaneously, instead of deeming it inaccurate, we assume that this kind of depiction lends credibility to what we are looking at and it now serves to make our viewing all the more convincing.

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  133 There are also several perspectives on memory, which may be accommodated by the graphic narrative form. When Folman states that memory is alive and dynamic (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 17, panel 1), he means something different to what Omm Nafez means when she states that ‘it is as if it is happening now. I’ll never forget it’ (Sacco 2009, p. 108). Folman means that memory can be used to recoup past forgetfulness and draw experience into the present. For Folman, his past contrasts with his present. It is as if his remembering of a forgotten past is more present than his experience. When Folman looks at the only photograph of himself from the time of the massacre with a friend of his, he states: ‘I don’t recognize myself either’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 34). He initially avoids the limitations of historical accuracy by not remembering how he fitted into the history but can eventually recover his memories of buried violence when he excavates his own past experiences through his active involvement in the representation process. Khamis’s and Omm Nafez’s ‘memories’ are categorically different from Folman’s in that they do not have the luxury of flashbacks, or of forgetting and recalling, as Folman does. Their memories of the massacre live on, uninterrupted. In traditional trauma theory and according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013), the term ‘flashbacks’ is used to refer to a pathological process caused by post-traumatic stress disorder when survivors suddenly remember supposedly suppressed memories. By pointing out that Khamis and Omm Nafez do not have the luxury of experiencing flashbacks, I add my voice to those who want to decolonise trauma theory (such as Craps et  al., 2015 mentioned in the introductory chapter) and reject this terminology of colonial theoretical frames. Khamis and Omm Nafez live in a state of perpetual violence; their memories continue to play out regularly in their present lives. They cannot gain a more distant perspective on past ‘events’, even though these may appear discrete. Continuing to live in the place of the violence, surrounded not only by its narratives but by its material presence allows their experiences to perpetually spill over the boundaries of the representational frame. This may be why Khamis’s and Omm Nafez’s stories do not seem ‘accurate’ in the same way that Folman’s is. Žižek (2008a) claims that the substance of violence is not dictated by its cause but is (only) significantly altered when violence is ongoing and cannot be revisited, as in Khamis and Omm Nafez’s case (as opposed to Folman’s and Sacco’s). Khamis gets past the cruel accuracy of his past by telling an altered story. He cannot forget to the point where he even remembers aspects that seem not to have occurred. He gets things mixed up, and he sees other aspects of violence and trauma without knowing them (see Figure 3.4 and Figure A 4). However, in his narrative, he is shown to recognise himself as connected to his family and community through the story his tells (see Figure 3.4). His narrative is not objective

134  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre because events work differently for him (even his grief has spilled over the bounds of objective reason). In his narrative, actions are not completed and do not succeed each other linearly as we might expect. Events do not discretely start and stop. Rather, it is as if in Jambet’s terms (2006) event and being, representation and experience break through each other. For this reason, accuracy does not seem to apply. By contrast, Folman’s struggles to remember and his memories are intermittent, dispersed among periods of forgetting and flashbacks. Folman describes the process of remembering trauma, when he gets his first flashback of himself during the massacre, in explosive terms that contrast with the passivity of forgetting: …then it happened, in a taxi on the way to the airport in Amsterdam. Suddenly – boom! The war came back. My memory blew wide open. It was no hallucination, no dream, nothing subconscious. (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 28) It is this realisation of the coincidence of the violence of his experiences and the violence of the remembering process itself that blows open his memory. I argue that this coincidence of experience and representation is staged by ‘dark’ writing. Through the operation of ‘dark’ writing, these violences are made to rub up alongside each other and accommodate the ineffable. Folman’s very next words after the flashback abruptly change into the present tense. Here, reading/viewing the narrative through ‘dark’ writing allows past and present to rub up against each other for the first time. Folman speaks in the present tense, of his memories, as if the events were happening to him now. He declares: ‘…it’s the first day of the war, I’m barely nineteen’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, pp. 28–9). He loses his previously distant perspective. This re-experience forms a vivid and inexplicable contrast to his actual experience of the event, which he claims happened ‘mechanically, as if we weren’t there’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 33). It is as if his representation of his memory in the present, in which he is able to alter his perspective, is more alive than his experience of the past. Folman’s statement about (his) memory being alive and constructed in the present appears on page 17 in panel 1. The vignette on the psychology of memory referred to earlier in this chapter, recounted by Folman’s psychologist friend, depicts an eight-frame story embedded in the main narrative. In these eight frames, Ori explains how memory works by reference to a hypothetical psychological experiment (Folman & Polonsky 2009, pp. 15–7). Ori’s explanation of memory forms a mise-en-abyme which catapults the reader/viewer into another world in the present moment. In Ori’s sequence, the original texts uses green hues are predominantly used in contrast to the sombre grey, blue, black, brown and sepia used in the narrative up to this point. The reader/viewer is aware that

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  135 the vignette is being told to Folman. Both the reader and the viewer thus become aware that he/she is positioned as being outside the narrative, with Folman as they both watch the main narrative unfold. Together, they are listening to Folman’s ‘shrink’ explain to them how memory is ‘dynamic and alive’. Through the lens of ‘dark’ writing at this point, we also begin to notice that the reader/viewer and Folman bear witness together to Folman’s narrative of the Lebanese War in 1982. The reader’s/viewer’s apparently direct involvement in this representational process makes it seem to him/her as if Folman’s part in these events really did occur. ‘Dark’ writing functions here as a lens to show a particular representational trace because it facilitates the representation of previously unknown content by accommodating the ineffable, whilst at the same time supporting an ethical approach in which the reader/viewer is intimately related to the narrative. ‘Dark’ writing also functions as a portal through which to enter the dynamic representational process because it opens up a channel for meeting between the author and the reader/viewer as it reveals the process of representation and the reader’s/ viewer’s involvement in it simultaneously, whilst also keeping the unknown in play in. Nora (1989) adds another layer to our understanding of the experience of memory in his remarkable essay, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’. He asserts that we are left only with remnants or sites of memory because the rich milieu of memory/the real environment of memory has largely disappeared. He warns that this means we run the risk of becoming fixated on a relatively ‘thin’ understanding of memory. According to Nora, we can augment our limited understanding of the experience of memory by seeking out the fragments of experience – or the decontextualised background information that still lives on in several aspects of experience. These are the ‘warmth of tradition’, in ‘the silence of custom’ and in the repetition of the ‘ancestral’ (Nora 1989, p. 17). However, these aspects are displaced under the pressure of a fundamentally denuded historical sensibility. By re-enriching our understanding of the process of the representation of historical violence and trauma through the ineffable, we may reinvigorate our experience. ‘Dark’ writing is able to do this as it performs the content of experience and the process of representation as they construct each other and so increases the ambit of what we can represent, whilst also facilitating an ethical, relational approach. Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) text allows us to reach beyond the mere history of events and sites of past massacres to the rich repositories of dreams, collective narratives and intergenerational memories. In fact, for him, memory depends on representation. Yet although memory depends on representation, he shows that it is simultaneously more than merely linear or narrative. For Folman, the processes of putting together a representation and of remembering what at first forgotten and ineffable are

136  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre inextricably linked. Memory thus allows ineffability into the frame and enables more to be seen. The graphic narrative allows for more than a merely accurate description of the past in Carter’s (2009) sense, and even more than a representation of a memory in words. The enhancement of our understanding of the representation of experience that the graphic narrative form affords us through ‘dark’ writing implies that we should acknowledge that representation and experience are not only intimately connected, but inseparable. They coincide with each other and make reality appear. Folman’s piecing together of public and private memories and representations accords with Nora’s (1989) notions of memory as an ancestral or cultural construct. It begins to move us in the direction of collective or cultural memory, and away from merely individualistic constructions. The Lebanese film scholar Lina Khatib (2008) notes that the representation of history always consists of a hybrid of public and private knowledge. In this, ‘public and private recollections both often work together to form what is known as collective memory’ (Khatib 2008, p. 153). This definition of memory further inflects the frame of accuracy. Khatib (2008) points out that one of the crucial implications of this is that our knowledge of history and our memories must thus necessarily be composed of gaps and inaccuracies. This is because some experiences of war and conflict are disallowed by the popular memory. Thus, they are never recognised as part of the ‘reality’ of the conflict (Khatib 2008). Waltz allows us to experience Khatib’s (2008) idea from Folman’s perspective. Folman fills the gaps in his own memory not by remembering everything himself again in a series of expedient flashbacks. He inserts parts of other people’s private or collective memories into his own representation. In so doing, he makes them part of his own experience. The private memories include the memories of Folman’s friends and colleagues: Boaz’s on page 6, Carmi’s on page 23 and Frenkel’s on pages 53–57. The collective narratives include Ben Yishai’s account of walking over heaps of bodies in the camp immediately after the massacre (depicted from pages 110 to 113) and Moyer’s photographic images at the end of Folman’s narrative on pages 116 and 117. In drawing on the memories of others, Folman includes some trauma into his narrative that would otherwise not be visible. Without this kind of representation of ‘his’ experience, the invisible would remain unavailable to him, and forgotten by him. Once again, this underlines the complexity of the connection between experience and representation. It further erases the boundary between them, making unclear the line between the content of violence and the process of understanding it. It thereby manages to preserve some of the ineffability of the trauma which remains part of the experience itself. The dissolution of the boundaries between experience and representation by means of ‘dark’ writing thus accommodates the interplay

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  137 between them to emphasise the dynamic process of representing violence and trauma and thus facilitating the sharing of experience. Akin to Nora’s (1989) rich notion of the environment of memory is Žižek’s (2008b) idea that a focus on decontextualised background information rather than historical truth may be an antidote for the erasure of memory loss. What Žižek (2008a) adds is that this focus is best achieved through aesthetics. One way to focus on background information in the case of memory loss, through aesthetics, is to first imagine what has been forgotten by focusing on other people’s memories. This is preferable to focusing on what we personally remember, given that personal memories are lacking in a situation of memory loss. This is a technique that Folman follows throughout his text. For example, the narrative starts when his friend Boaz describes his recurring nightmare of dogs chasing him. Boaz explains to Folman that these nightmares represent the memories of 26 dogs that he killed on different occasions during the war in Lebanon (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 7). He was forced to kill these dogs because he did not have the heart to kill the Palestinians whose villages the dogs guarded and warned of the approach of the IDF soldiers who invaded the villages at night searching for Palestinians on their wanted list. Agamben’s remedy for the memory loss caused by violence and trauma is even more specific. Agamben (1999) identifies the site of memory loss as a ‘gray zone’ of the witness, where a lacuna persists for trauma survivors, who are suspended between experience and representation. He proposes that such people may best represent their violent and traumatic experiences through silent images (Agamben et al. 2012). The notion of silent images’ being able to represent violence echoes a panel in Folman’s narrative where Carmi’s expressed his point of excess and ‘uncontrollable fear’, when he states that ‘there is nothing but …silence, the horrific silence of death’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 25, panel 1). As discussed in Chapter 1, it is in these aesthetic forms that ‘dark’ writing allows us to approach the ineffable and thereby represent more of the experiences of violence – even when these include what seems erased, forgotten or unspeakable – than we may have thought possible before.

Framing Ethics through Shame As stated in the Introductory Chapter, the experience-representation complex is ideally investigated through graphic narratives which engage in a process of ‘dark’ writing and blurs the line between interpretation and expression so effectively. One of the reasons for this is that, as discussed in the previous chapter, shame may point us in the direction of the ethical. In this regard, Agamben’s (1999) statement about shame and what may end massacres is pertinent.

138  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre For we can perhaps think that massacres are over – even if here and there they are repeated, not so far away from us. But that match is never over; it continues as if uninterrupted. It is the perfect and eternal cipher of the ‘gray zone’, which knows no time and is in every place. Hence the anguish and shame of the survivors… But also hence our shame, the shame of those who did not know the camps and yet, without knowing how, are spectators of that match, which repeats itself in every match in our stadiums, in every television broadcast, in the normalcy of everyday life. If we do not succeed in understanding that match, in stopping it, there will never be hope. (Agamben 1999, p. 26) Agamben is referring to a soccer match played between members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz during a work break. At this match, other SS onlookers placed bets, applauded and took sides from the sidelines. Agamben asserts that ‘[t]his match may strike someone as a brief pause of humanity in the middle of an infinite horror’ (Agamben 1999, p. 26). Yet, instead of being a moment of normalcy and humanity, this match itself reveals the ultimate horror – our tendency to normalise such ‘matches’ which conceals an insidious violence. In this statement, Agamben underlines his point that violence is not confined to that particular incident, but that it insidiously spills out onto its participants and spectators and all those who come to know about it. He suggests that in this way, the camp is everywhere. We are all implicated in the violence that constitutes the camp. This is the ultimate horror and the ‘invisible’ violence he refers to and what the concept of the ineffable gestures towards. Agamben further suggests that our tendency to normalise such ‘matches’ continually obscures a deeper understanding of the violence and trauma of massacres. He points out that this poses an ethical challenge regarding the way we look at and represent violence. It is possible that invisible and more horrific violence lurks behind what at first appear to be less sinister motives, or behind aspects of violence that we may have become used to. Such aspects include normalising the apparent recurrence of violence in certain regions, or among certain peoples. It even includes the unthinking striving to represent such violence photographically and journalistically accurately and in a way that allows viewers to be ‘directly’ present to it. These apparently humane motives may conceal real horror and stop us from apprehending what is really going on. Agamben (1999) appeals to these witnesses to go behind what seems to be humane/normal/accurate/numbing. He calls on them to find out what is really at the heart of violent situations that are so horrific that they do not detain us, but allow us to go on with our lives, unmoved. Here, a construct such as shame is helpful in the narrative. This is because it indicates a point where representation and experience may overlap and

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  139 where accuracy comes into the frame. As I have argued earlier in this book, a slavish pursuit of accuracy at these points may obscure what we can see. I suggested that where experience and representation seem to overlap in contexts of violence, we need the ineffable to help us see and know more. Agamben (1999, p. 26) gestures towards what may alert us to the (un)ethical nature of the situation, namely several layers of shame. Firstly, Agamben implies the shame of the camp survivors that they were survivors at all. It also indicates their humiliation as survivors who engaged in a playful way with the system that perpetrated violence on them for the entertainment of their perpetrators, by playing a soccer match with members of the SS in the camp. Agamben’s (1999) ethical challenge to those who are not directly involved in violence but are witnesses of it as viewers/readers of its representations may be fruitfully applied to Folman’s initially unrepresentable and forgotten trauma here. This statement of Agamben’s (1999) also emphasises a distinction between knowing and seeing. As I have claimed before (Viljoen 2015a), Agamben’s argument draws attention to the fact that through the particular process of representation, we may see Sabra and Shatila without knowing (just as Folman does) and know Auschwitz without seeing (just as Folman does). This also points to the danger of seeing violence so directly and regularly that it occludes any real engagement with it. On this basis, I posit that there is an ethical imperative to represent violence in a way that accommodates an embodied response from viewers/readers (such as shame) which may nudge them towards probing visible violence for its more insidious aspects. Although he may not himself have seen them, Folman knows the Auschwitz camps (and about them). Similarly, his readers/viewers may feel they have come to know the Sabra and Shatila camps without seeing them. This is an instance of the text’s facilitating the same process in the reader that is going on in Folman – the representation facilitates a knowing without having really seen. Furthermore, in view of Agamben’s (1999) statement, the reader/viewer is also in a similar position to Folman with regard to seeing the Sabra and Shatila camps (initially without knowing much about what we are seeing). This brings the reader/viewer and the author into close proximity to one another. Once again, the reader/viewer is made complicit in the content and in the representational process of the narrative. The representation’s instigation of the shame of knowing/knowing without seeing, something which remains to some extent inexplicable, can be used to facilitate an ethical response in the reader/viewer. However, Agamben (1998) suggests one further aspect to this relationship between ethics and representation. He claims that shame is the affective sign that we realise the importance of representing, and at the same time, that we realise that this can never be done accurately. This is the basis of an ethical and more adequate approach to representing violence. Agamben’s notion of shame is derived from Levi’s (1986)

140  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre suggestion that Auschwitz survivors felt shame at surviving something that their counterparts did not. (This notion was discussed in the previous chapter in relation to the survivors of the Khan Younis massacre too.) Agamben rejects an easy explanation of this in terms of guilt and innocence. Rather, he sees shame as an affective marker of certain shifts or recognitions within the subjectivity of the human, ethical witness. Shame may be seen as an indication of neither guilt nor innocence. Rather, it is an embodied indication of recognising the ineffable (as something that was beyond one’s understanding but now no longer is). Thus, shame is an indication of an ethical position. If such shame can be expanded by the concept of the ineffable, it may be a constructive element, rather than a dispiriting blockage to further ethical development. I introduced Probyn’s (2005) discussion of shame in the previous chapter when I discussed affect theory and its assistance in accommodating the ineffable. Additionally, as mentioned in the previous chapter in relation to Sacco’s work, Probyn argues that we can only feel shame when we are interested in others. She sees shame as a result of proximity between people. In this way, Probyn proposes that shame may become a zone of contact and provides the prospect of new ways of relating that may perturb us on both a personal and a political level. Folman’s shame is buried and unspeakable (something which Probyn also acknowledges about shame). For Folman, the unspeakable nature of his shame stems from his connection between Sabra and Shatila with Auschwitz. The knowledge of how his shame comes about allows him to re-evaluate his relationship to reality and the massacre and his relation to prominent victim-perpetrator narratives of Sabra and Shatila and Auschwitz. An avenue for his unspeakable shame provides Folman with a connection to himself previously severed by trauma. Probyn (2005) admits that this re-evaluation of shame can pose a significant challenge. This is because shame is also counter-productive, in that it perpetuates hegemonic power structures between victim and perpetrator. However, the challenge is to use shame as a vehicle to find ‘a more affecting way of engaging in politics’ (Probyn 2005, p. 106). Folman manages to do this through his narrative when he declares the inadequacy of pursuing accuracy from an ethical perspective. In this regard, he asks (Folman & Polonsky 2009, panels 2–4, p. 107): ‘[W]hat difference does it make whether I fired the flares or just looked up at the brightly lit sky that helped other people kill?’. Folman’s psychotherapist friend, Ori (the one with whom he spoke about the psychology of memory discussed in the previous section) claims that Folman could not remember because Folman felt guilty (page 107), indicating how his shame blocked his pursuit of accuracy. Yet it seems that the shame was helpful, in that it affected Folman from an ethical perspective and helped reveal Auschwitz as an invisible part of his experience at Sabra and Shatila for Folman. In this sense, shame

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  141 functions to connect Folman to the victims of Sabra and Shatila and the perpetrators of Auschwitz. It also helps form boundaries between himself and characters in his narrative such as Sharon who has been shown not only to have been directing the movements of the IDF at this time but also to have been remorseless about their part in the massacre (Folman & Polonsky 2009). Sharon was found to bear personal responsibility for the killings in an Israeli fact-finding mission and was forced to resign from his post. In this way, Folman’s emotion of shame is contrasted to Sharon’s shamelessness and thus shame becomes a political intervention as it is used to facilitate Folman’s leaving the IDF and as a critique of Sharon. This makes the emotion of shame a form of social capital in Ahmed’s (2004) sense. However, as Ahmed (2004) also points out, shame is deeply ambivalent and a mere statement about shame can actually also work to cover over what is shameful about the past. She claims that shame can construct a collective ideal even as it announces the failure of that ideal to be translated into action. In that sense, it should be guarded against as an ideal that may paralyse us from taking political action. Yet, if we are aware of this, as Folman is, it might be used as a starting point for political action. Folman’s experience of shame as a perpetrator of the same sort of violence that was visited upon his parents in Auschwitz contrasts with Ahmed’s view (2004, pp. 91–2) that sometimes it is the repetition of words detached from their context that prevents them from acquiring new meaning and value. Ahmed argues that the repetition of signs (such as ‘atrocity’, ‘massacre’ and ‘camp’) designates which bodies belong to which content categories or which bodies are excluded from it, without any consideration of their context and the layered meanings that may not be immediately visible. In Folman’s case, it is precisely the repetition of the images of ‘camps’, ‘massacres’ and ‘victims’ as loosened from their contexts of Sabra and Shatila and Auschwitz, which allows Folman’s experiences at Sabra and Shatila and the disparate experiences of his parents at Auschwitz to be productively associated. In Folman’s case, the general signs of the ‘camps’, ‘massacres’, ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ are disassociated from their local contexts (such as Sabra/Shatila and Auschwitz) and it is this that allows the once stultified meanings of the general signs to shift. I would argue that the way is opened up for their meaning to change precisely because the ineffable is accommodated in the representation of these disparate contexts. Through ‘dark’ writing, the general signs of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ are now located at a point of excess, where the boundaries between them may be blurred through the preservation of what is ineffable in each. In this way, Folman is no longer simply the victim of Nazi atrocities but opens himself up to and augmented ethical repertoire as he himself is now able to feel shame as he identified himself with the general sign ‘perpetrator’ once reserved only for Nazis. He is thus able to experience an ethical re-orientation

142  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre through shame. It is his ethical re-orientation that allows him to remember, and not his pursuit of accuracy. A similar moment of climax in the narrative can be identified in the final photographic image of the text (see Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 117). This is because this photograph contrasts previous similar drawn images of this woman’s face (see Figures 4.2 and 4.3). The image of this woman’s face is drawn in the centre of Figure 4.3 and off centre, in panels 3 and 5 of Figure 4.2. In Figure 4.3, where the image of this woman’s face is centrally placed, it is sandwiched between two close-ups of Folman’s face (in panels 1 and 3, Figure 4.3). Yet by the time we see this image of the distressed woman’s face in Figure 4.3, we recognise it from previously in the narrative (see Figure 4.2, p. 12, panels 3 and 4) where it was drawn small and placed to the side of a close-up image of Folman from behind, the first time Folman places himself into the narrative, during his flashback. This association between the similar images in Figures 4.3 and 4.4 heightens the moment of climax as we as the reader/viewer seem to be realising with Folman, that Folman is experiencing himself as having been present at the massacre and of having to face this distressed woman. We now understand that Folman has finally also come face-to-face with his own presence at the massacre. As the visual form changes in the last photographs, they indicate a climax and jolt the reader/viewer into the action. Moreover, significantly the final image departs from the several images of dead bodies seen especially in the last part of the text (from page 110 onwards) and is a photograph of intense pain. This brings life and affect into the final frame (and not death). This juxtaposition of the drawn woman’s face both with Folman’s in Figures 4.2 and 4.3 and with the final photograph of a similarly distressed woman (see Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 117) momentarily erases the binary between seeing and knowing, experience and representation. It places Folman and the reader/viewer in the thick of the action. Furthermore, Folman identifies himself as a subject that must accommodate the identity of both victim and perpetrator, a situation which surely requires the ineffable to represent it. We could interpret this further by claiming that in these pages, Folman is choosing to insert himself into narrative and remember. The indescribable pain and shame he must feel at recognising himself as both victim at Auschwitz and perpetrator at Sabra and Shatila he is jolted into an ethical re-orientation which allows him to confront the representation of violence and trauma at the heart of the memory that was lost to him before. In this, Folman becomes capable for the first time of experiencing his part in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The accommodation of the ineffable in the representation of this trauma facilitates the association of layers of shame, the further association of the shame that Folman’s parents may have felt at surviving at Auschwitz when others did not, also acts as a facilitator of the shame that Folman feels at his involvement at Sabra and Shatila. This enables

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  143 Folman to develop a deeper sense of ethical investment in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. This is something that had been lost to him up to this point in the narrative. This frame thus provides a building block for the development of an ethical position for Folman. One of the ways in which Folman and Polonsky’s narrative approaches an ethical representation is in the way it attempts to communicate pain. When we consider the drawn and photographic images of corpses towards the end of the narrative and the images of the distressed women in Figures 4.3 (previously) and 4.4 (to come) so reminiscent of the woman expressing pain in Moyer’s photograph at the end of the narrative, then we see that Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) text frames both Palestinian lives and deaths in a dynamic representation that makes each especially intense, especially when they are placed alongside each other. Yet Scarry’s (1985) view that pain cannot be shared by other bodies discussed in the introductory chapter of this book requires further consideration. Scarry’s view is refined by Ahmed (2004) when she claims that the emotion of pain cannot be shared either. Ahmed (2004) declares that the recognition of this very impossibility becomes the basis of collectivity or meeting, as Carter (2009) would put it. It is this (shared) recognition of the impossibility of the witness and sharing – which Agamben (1999) also grapples with – that is included in the ethical approach that this graphic narrative engages with. The graphic narrative addresses this impossibility of meeting (one’s traumatised self or the trauma of another) by creating a textual situation in which the reader/viewer can bear witness to the suffering survival of others (in situations of violence and trauma that may be associated through the ineffable). This is in part done through the logic of (re) presenting in panels, in a way that involves the reader/viewer intimately in the text; yet allows him/her to consume the small, hard-hitting bites of ‘text’ easily and intensely. In part, this is also done by foregrounding and manifesting the difficulties in representing the author himself (who in this text is both directly and indirectly traumatised by what he represents). Thus, the technique of making the author a character in his own representation of violence is effective in addressing the impossibility of meeting and making the imagined encounter between reader/viewer and the other manifest. It locates part of the elusive textual other in the author, always implicated directly or indirectly in the violence he represents. This contrasts from Deleuze’s (2001) understanding noted in the introductory chapter that there are immanently present activities (such as Folman’s trauma) that escape representation because immanence does not have to be fettered by self-consciousness. In this case, it is Folman’s imposition of his consciousness on his experience that allows him to remember and to represent. Also, although the emotion of pain may not be able to be shared across bodies, it should be emphasised that this ethical imperative to represent violence in a way that facilitates a response from the reader/

144  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre viewer should not simply be a cerebral exercise and it is in facilitating an embodied response that the ‘dark’ writing of the graphic narrative form can once again assist us. As discussed in Chapter 2, the intensity of the comics medium has been noted by Bukatman (2012), who emphasises the strength and embodied nature of representation in comics. Chute and DeKoven (2006) link this intensity of the graphic narrative medium to embodiment. They emphasise the drawn nature of graphic narratives and the trace of the artist’s hand that is ever-present in the representation. They suggest that the reader/viewer of graphic narratives gets more information from a graphic narrative than they would from other visual media. It is as if the reader/viewer of graphic narratives gets the intensity of a visual medium, additionally laced with the trace of the artist’s body, which adds a special potency to the representation. Belgian comics scholar Thierry Groensteen (2010b) holds a similar view, and argues that in comics, the body of the artist actually links the reader/viewer to the world: …the drawn image, as a manufactured creation, inevitably produces a signature of its creator. Drawing is per se an encoding and a stylization of reality, it is produced by a reading of the world. As such, drawing cannot be separated from the hand of a specific enunciator. (Groensteen 2010b, p. 4) He explains that the unique self-referentiality of drawing means that the comics medium is perceived as an embodied trace effect and resists referential illusion. Thus, reflection and embodiment, representation and experience come together in this form in a unique and powerful way because it is composed of drawn pictures (and words). Chute and DeKoven (2006) problematised the remarkable embodied effect of graphic narratives representations on reader/viewers in the context of representing violence in their early work. They pointed out that made-up, drawn images of the Prophet Muhammad have caused violent protest that have ‘led to deaths in Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, and Afghanistan’ (this list has grown since their time of writing as Chute herself notes in her more recent work 2016). They noted that by contrast, even the ‘photographs from Abu Ghraib’ that ‘were documents of real events…didn’t provoke such widespread violence’ as these drawings did (Chute & DeKoven 2006, p. 227). This remarkable paradox might stem from the repetition of photographic images in the public arena and the fact that this tends to have a numbing rather than an arousing effect on viewers because it does not link the reader/viewer, through the body of the artist to its subject matter as drawings do. In Waltz, the fusion of representation and experience occurs on a meta level because it represents (and so calls into being or instigates the experience of) what had been ‘lost’ to Folman’s memory and what he has

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  145 been able to represent up to this point. In this regard, the graphic narrative form of representation packs a double punch in using drawn images. Although these are visceral and immediate, they still trace their own construction and thus lack the numbing effect of the still photographic images of war that we are so used to. Hatfield (2008) affirms this when he points out the potential of the pictural medium of comics to ‘intensify and make more self-conscious the ways one’s eyes and mind interact with whatever’s on the page’ (Hatfield 2008, p. 130). This is also in line with McCloud’s (1993) description of comics, discussed in Chapter 2, as belonging somewhere in between reality and language. Through their merger of words and images graphic narratives are effective ‘dark’ writers and are able to draw the reader/viewer into a particularly intense and at the same time abstract experience that facilitates an ethical stance that is not only reflective but also embodied.

Framing the Gap between Words and Images Not only does ‘dark’ writing help us to interrogate the adequacy of accuracy and an ethical approach in representing experiences of violence and trauma but it also emphasises the importance of form in framing these experiences adequately. In light of its emphasis on form and its engagement with the process of representation itself, I will now discuss the way that ‘dark’ writing frames the formal qualities of graphic narratives (such as words and images; and gutters and panels) to allow us to share a more adequate depiction of traumatic experiences. In employing the notion of ‘dark’ writing as operating in the graphic narrative form, I contend that both mimesis and the instigation of experience as opposed to just representation (as discussed in relation to Keenan and Weizman 2012 in the Introductory Chapter) through images are at play. Both mimesis and the instigation of experience contribute to the accommodation of the ineffable. This is why ‘dark’ writing in the graphic narratives I analyse is able to draw together binaries that other forms of representation may treat as mutually exclusive. Some of these binaries include the past/present, memory/body, knowing/seeing and words/images. ‘Dark’ writing is a powerful tool for representing violence and the experience of trauma because it is able to work across and through these binaries and hold their contradictions in play, through the ineffable. Melding these binaries in the experience of trauma through the dual verbal and visual representational languages that graphic narratives employ is why these graphic narratives are a convincing example of ‘dark’ writing. A notable moment in the text which demonstrates the way that the relationship between words and images is performed in the graphic narrative is where there is a two-page spread of 11 wordless images showing the memories of one of Folman’s fellow soldiers, Frenkel, with whom Folman went on patrol (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 54,5).

146  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre He remembers how once when they went hunting ‘for terrorists’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 53) they came across a young Palestinian boy in the forest with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) (Folman & Polonsky 2009, pp. 54 and 55). Although Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) narrative suggests that they will be responsible for the death of this boy, the boy’s death is not actually shown. Instead, the images leading up to the boy’s death are particularly dynamic, and the reader/ viewer’s eyes are drawn swiftly along from panel to panel, mimicking the dynamism of the content depicted without the distraction of words. Each of these images shows shafts of moving light and shadow as the soldiers march through the trees, crouch on the ground and dodge missiles. The boy’s death is shown two pages later, in a very still, dark, blood stained image of his corpse, coupled with the words ‘[h]e was a young boy’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 57, panel 1, see Figure 4.4 to come). This image is large (it fills half the page) but shadowy and difficult to make out. The effect of this is to make the reader’s/viewer’s eyes stop scanning the panels momentarily and try to discern the brown, still body of the boy against the similarly coloured, muddy background of the forest floor. The reader’s/viewer’s eyes are also slowed down at this point by the fact that the style and colour palette of the images in the narrative change markedly after this image to become much clearer and brighter (see Figure 4.4 to come). Furthermore, the addition of the words seems to arrest the illusion of movement still further and makes the death seem more static and final, like words on a memorial. The contrast of the stillness of this image (and its past tense caption) contrasts strikingly to the adrenalin-filled march of the previous wordless images. It once again underlines how the graphic narrative form employs a dynamic interplay of movement (both in terms of the content of the panels and the scanning of the panels by the eyes of the reader/viewer), words and images to represent experience, allowing more to be drawn into the frame. This combination of formal qualities is a particularly effective way to represent or instigate the relentless march of experience that may otherwise have been suspended in memory loss. Since this sequence preceding Figure 4.4 (below) starts with an (partially clear) image of Frenkel and Folman on patrol (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 54, panel 1, it is also a salient illustration of how the graphic narrative is ‘[h]ighly textured in its narrative scaffolding’, working at once in the material and abstract realms (Chute 2008, p. 452). Because directly after the largely wordless sequence which ends in Figure 4.4 (to come), the first words that Folman utters are ‘Frenkel, tell me, was I there?’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 57, panel 2). In this sequence, the visual and the verbal are not blended seamlessly. Rather, they are deliberately made to jar. The visual shows parts of Folman’s experience that he is struggling to see, while the verbal decries the experience shown in the images, thus depicting the struggle and limitations of representation in the mechanics

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  147

Figure 4.4 ‘he was a young boy’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 57).

148  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre of representation itself, allowing the reader to share in this aspect of the uneasiness being depicted. This accords with Groensteen’s (2010a, p. 91) notion that this gap between words and images is itself something that is represented. He bases this claim on Deleuze’s contention that the image is utterable, describable and interpretable, even though this is not enough to restore to the image its semantic richness (Deleuze 1985). There is indeed a gap if we can assume there is a gap between seeing the image (however describable it might be) and knowing its semantic richness. If this fissure between seeing and knowing is to be represented, yet remain an opening, then the best way to do this is by insisting on the accommodation of the ineffable within the system of representation itself. There are several sequences in the graphic narrative where the way that words and images, experience and representation, work with and against each other comes to the fore and enables a greater ambit of experiences to be represented. In the graphic narrative form, words and images are not presented as ‘one simply to illustrate the other’ (Chute 2008, p. 452), but the representational form deliberately preserves their clash and intricacies to most powerful effect in the representation of violence, where the part of the experience that remains ineffable must be preserved in order for the experience to be adequately shared. When the representational process itself involves the reader/viewer in the struggle to represent, what is communicated is the experience of knowing less that may paradoxically lead us to see and understand more about representing violence and trauma more adequately and ethically. One example of this uneasy disjuncture between words and images in the narrative is from the central panel on page 9 to the end of page 13 (see also Figure 4.2, Folman & Polonsky 2009) where Folman conveys the experience of having his first flashback from the massacre that he took part in 20 years before. Again, there are very few words that accompany the images in this sequence, some of the few being ‘I had a terrible flashback from the Lebanon war’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 10, panel 3). These words begin a sequence of wordless images of Folman walking in the rain in present-day Tel Aviv, after greeting his friend Boaz and then driving away in his car. It shows Folman stop his car at the side of the road and then the moment of the flashback is depicted. In the original text, the last panel on this page changes from grey of the flashback (see Figure 4.2) to sepia to indicate that the time frame has shifted to the past and what Folman is now experiencing is what he saw 20 years before. However, the experience of the flashback (of which Figure 4.2 forms part) starts in the present, largely wordlessly, some six panels previously. It is as if Folman only begins to see the flashback after he is able to represent it as such. It is as if the graphic narrative form breaks open the disjuncture between knowing and seeing, representation and experience and begins to involve the reader/viewer in this deciphering

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  149 of the interplay of present and past as it plays out in this sequence. MacFarlane and Brialey (2017, p. 20) note that experience is re-lived in the act of representing in comics (through the embodied representation that is drawing). According to them, experience is thus re-lived in the act of drawing, but it is this re-living that allows the experience its own body outside of the body of the cartoonist. It is in this gap that there lies the potential for healing from grief and trauma, however slow and incremental. Although the word ‘healing’ may be misleading in that it is still teleological in a way that may not be entirely appropriate for the chaos and ineffability of some experiences of trauma, the notion that representation through the act of drawing in comics is both embodied and erases the boundary between embodied and disembodied supports the idea of graphic narratives as ‘dark’ writing occupying an otherwise inaccessible space between representation and experience, between words and images. Groensteen (2010b) discusses such a gap between the words and the images in the comic form when he explains the ‘comics system of narration’ as follows: It is not a question of having, on one hand, a text that recounts (and therefore would be diegetic) and, on the other, images that display (therefore solely mimetic) … a substantial part of the narration occurs in and through the images and their different levels of articulation. In other words, there is undoubtedly a gap between what is told with words and what is shown by drawings… (Groensteen 2010b, pp. 1–2) Groensteen (2010b) would thus not be surprised at the startling gap between words and images noted at the moment of Folman’s flashback when he states ‘…I had a terrible flashback from the Lebanon war’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 10, panels 3 and 4) before the narrative becomes grey and wordless shows the moments where Folman first identifies himself with his past experiences (see Figure 4.2). It is this gap between words and images foregrounded in this part of the narrative that brings the layered meanings of the representational process into focus. Expanding further upon the system of words and images in comics, Groensteen (2010b) coins the notion of a ‘shadow narrator’. This idea is useful in order to understand the apparent gap between words and images still better (Groensteen 2010b). He suggests that such shadow narrators in comics may fulfil both the roles of recitant and monstrator in the text. He defines the monstrator as ‘the irrefutable presence of an agent responsible for graphic enunciation’ (Groensteen 2010b, p. 1).

150  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre He contrasts this to the recitant, who is ‘responsible for verbal enunciation’ (Groensteen 2010b, p. 1). He explains that the necessity of refining the conception of a fundamental narrator to the specifics of the comics medium is imperative because of ‘the different positions that can be adopted with respect to storytelling’ since comics use words and images. In emphasising the different qualities of experience that the words and images each convey, Groensteen draws our attention to the increased ambit of experience that we can instigate through the combination of words and images in this form. However, Groensteen’s concept of the shadow narrator reveals that he does not simply believe that in comics words represent the world of the text to our mind’s eye for us to reflect upon, whilst drawn pictures provide us with a vehicle for bodily encounter with the artist. The notion of Folman using the words and images of others to come to represent and understand his own experiences problematises to whom the seeing and knowing of the representation of violence belongs, and the location of the authorial subjectivity in relation to the representation of violence in the text. The almost exact overlap between Folman as author and protagonist seems to call for a refinement of the notion of narration itself, in relation to the system of words and images used to represent in graphic narratives. It is for this reason that I have introduced Groensteen’s (2010b) terms recitant and monstrator to enable us to refine our use of the graphic narrative form to see and know more. Furthermore, it is the shadow narrator that wields the potent combination of these two representational languages and thus comes to know and see at the same time. In Folman’s text, Folman himself stages his own coming into being as a shadow narrator, as he comes to see and know through the images and words of others. This elaborate representational process allows the accommodation of the ineffable. This gap between words and images and its effect on the process of the representation of violence through ‘dark’ writing may be analysed even more closely in terms specific to the graphic narrative. Scholars such as Gibbon (2011, discussed in Chapter 1) and Vallorani (2009, mentioned in the Introductory Chapter) also remark that images are more embodied than written words, perhaps because images can be consumed faster. As mentioned previously in this chapter, there are several examples of a series of wordless images in Waltz (pp. 9–13, which includes Figure 4.2; pp. 54–7, which includes Figure 4.4 and pages 114 to the end, which includes Figure 4.3) even though Waltz as a whole may be seen as a text which in the main combines words and images. Thus, Waltz foregrounds the notion of both a reflective and a physical change in the representational process at the points preceding and at the end of these sequences. In the sequence spread over pages 54–7 (see Figure 4.5 to come), very few words are used. Only four of the sixteen panels in this sequence are captioned (of which Figure 4.4 is one). This sequence shows

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  151 the text shifting gear, lunging forward in a representational style that uses mostly dark, shadowy images that show movement, without the accompanying gloss of words. This sequence ends abruptly with the death of the boy as discussed above before it goes back to its previously well lit, wordy and more easily decipherable style. It is as if on page 57 (see Figure 4.4), the authors zoom in on the formal limits of the graphic narrative, which is so well able to represent Folman’s experience that it ends by Folman stating ‘Yes, yes of course I was there’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 57, panel 4) even though we know he does not remember being there, prior to his representation of this sequence. This sequence appears to be exploring close-up what the combination of words and pictures can do and how close they can come to the ineffable before the narrative gets back on track again with words and images combining once again in the representation from the second panel on page 57 (see Figure 4.4). Again, this illustrates how representation and experience rub up against each other in the gap between words and images – brought together in the graphic narrative form. This sequence thus provides a clear example of the instigation process that is ‘dark’ writing and how this accommodates the ineffable both outside of it (in its gutters) and within the dark, shadowy images depicting movement within its panels. It is as if the reader’s/viewer’s physical eyes mimic the peering and slow realisation that is happening to Folman himself as he remembers. This very process of struggling to come to see and come to know is able to encode more about the process of representation and experience than we knew before, where the one merges into the other. It is the darkness, the shadows and the movement as well as the performed disjuncture between words and images – all indications of the ineffable – that are supported in the ‘dark’ writing of this form and which increase the ambit of what we are able to share.

Framing Gutters and Panels As I am arguing, not only does ‘dark’ writing help us to interrogate the adequacy of accuracy and an ethical approach in representing experiences of violence and trauma but it also emphasises the importance of the formal qualities of the graphic narrative in framing these experiences adequately. I will now discuss the way that ‘dark’ writing operates within the gutters and the panels of the graphic narrative to enable us to represent more of our experiences of violence and trauma than we may have thought possible. As noted in the Introductory Chapter, I interpret the gutter (and the panels that negatively compose it) as a visual representation of the ineffable. It is notable that in Waltz, the entire graphic narrative is contained within panels. None of the images are unframed (as some are in Sacco’s work – which emphasises throughout how some experience falls outside of the frame). Yet in a similar way, the framing

152  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre in the panels/gutter structure throughout Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) work draws attention to the representational process and that fact that this is framed by the ineffable. This suggests that the only way for Folman to see what was wiped from his memory is consciously to represent, through the frame of ‘dark’ writing. This implies that the act of representing for Folman is the act of bringing ineffable aspects into the frame. In this graphic narrative, the gutters make for precise and uniform edges to each panel, and all the panels are suspended within black, white, grey or sepia gutters of similar proportions. The only exceptions to this pattern are notable. These are on pages 58 and 59 (see Figure 4.5 to come), where the panels are scattered across a blank background. If the ineffable is seen as being accommodated in the margins and gutters, this suggests how Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) book displays the ineffable as part of its formal composition. The largely dark gutters, to which the gutters in Figure 4.4 form an exception, have two effects: firstly, they solidly suggest the containment of images that may otherwise spill out of the frame and, secondly, they obstinately preserve an aspect of impenetrability in the narrative. If the gutters represent the ineffable and the backdrop is crucial to representing through ‘dark’ writing, the way that ‘dark’ writing operates to create meaning by bringing the backdrop into focus also warrants acknowledgement. The darkness of the ineffable, as visually depicted in the gutters of Waltz, creates such a backdrop to the violence of the content that Folman represents. Its overt denseness draws attention to itself, and to the limitations and violence of the representational process itself. In looking at the background and the dark form of the ineffable in this graphic narrative, we are able to glimpse previously invisible aspects of violence. The dark gutters are helpful for making lighter and more brightly coloured images even clearer, as in Carmi’s dream sequence (Folman & Polonsky 2009, pp. 22–3, see Figure 4.1). They have a different effect on dark images such as those showing the heaps of bodies described by Ben Yishai as he walks over the fresh corpses immediately after the massacre (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 113). From this point in the narrative, the gutters remain dark until the end but merely hang around the drawn and then photographic images of violence and distress, with a sombre and brooding presence. They seem to emphasise with the lack of words that there is no more to say. They depict a dark presence (an absence, a dark nothingness, an abject and irresolvable aporia surrounding otherwise inadequately described grief). In this sense, the mere inclusion of this visual representation of the ineffable in these gutters adds richness and shadow to our understanding of the quality and substance of this violence. This is achieved by allowing the ineffable to be represented without diluting its presence. Paradoxically, the process of ‘dark’ writing supports an understanding that we come to know that we know more, because we see less. In persistently constructing Folman’s representations

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  153 partially of not-knowing, Folman and Polonsky come closer to allowing their readers/viewers to experience some of the desperate confusion and uncomfortable ambiguity that is part of the content of Folman’s experience of violence and grief. In Figure 4.3, the dark gutters have yet another effect. Figure 4.3 forms part of this last section of the narrative and here the dark gutters help to clearly depict Folman facing violence and confronting his past depicted in sepia in the original text, now starkly framed by the irrevocable blackness of the gutters. Similarly, in Figure 4.2 (previously), the dark gutters bring the first images into sharper focus. In the original, the more colourful images in panels 1 and 2 (where the sky is an orange hue instead of just grey) are made brighter by the dark gutters while in panels 4 and 5, whereas the grey images framed by the black gutters become more difficult to read, slowing the reading/process down and involving the reader even more in the struggle to see. In this instance, because the gutters are slightly darker than the edges of the grey images, they are still visible as frames, curtailing the illusion of immediacy; however, they do not detract/distract from the dark images, as a white gutter might. The consequence is not only to bring the grey images into the foreground but also to highlight the process of trying to penetrate the general darkness. These dark gutters surrounding panels 4 and 5 in Figure 4.2 are thus reminiscent of Agamben’s (1999) ‘gray zone of the witness’ beyond which the reader/viewer feels they cannot fully cross. This is also Carter’s (2009) point of encounter where all our senses are engaged and where the ineffable often lurks. In this regard, Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) changing of the colour of the gutter to black is significant. It is murky yet impassable rather than a clear tabula rasa inviting a fresh interpretation. This reinforces the association of violence and powerlessness with the reader/viewer. Yet, we see the colours of the gutters change in this narrative (they are white in Figure 4.4). This suggests that they are composed by something unstable and that they suggest something not always fixed and plainly visible. Something which may not be anticipated yet is present as part of the framing of violent experience and remains irrevocably and inexplicably so. Finally, aside from the colour of the gutters, it is their arrangement across the page that also adds nuance to the experiences that this narrative carries across. A close reading of Folman’s depiction of himself visiting a combat trauma expert Professor Zehava Solomon (Folman & Polonsky 2009, pp. 58–61, see Figure 4.5 to come) may provide a succinct example of how this process of framing the representation of violence operates through the gutters and panels and their arrangement on the page. In this sequence, Folman visits Professor Zehava Solomon to ask her why he has no memory (experience) of the violence he was involved in and is attempting to represent. Her words provide Folman with an

154  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre articulate explanation in accordance with the limitations of traditional trauma theory and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013): That’s what we call a ‘dissociative event’. It happens when a person is in a certain situation but feels like he’s outside it. You’re not the only one. There was a young man, a photographer. In ’83 I asked him, how did you get through such a nightmare? He said, it was pretty easy, I tried to pretend I was on a trip. He kept thinking he was seeing it through the lens of an imaginary camera. He told himself, wow, these are amazing scenes. There’s shooting, screaming, explosions, people wounded…. (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 58) However, Folman and Polonsky’s graphic narrative adds something extra to our understanding of this trauma. In their narrative, Professor Solomon’s words (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 58) are followed by two half pages of wordless panels. Bits of panels are scattered haphazardly across the page with drawn pictures of war, bodies and a massacre on them. These are framed in such a way that they involve the reader in the experience of having to decipher meaning in a situation in which logical organisation has broken down. Some of the displaced images obscure the page numbers and corners of other panels. Images at the bottom of page 58 and top of page 59 are even cut off. They show only corners of ‘snapshots’ of the events that are too incomplete to show anything clearly. For most of the sequence of which Figure 4.5 (below) forms part, Folman and Polonsky (2009, pp. 58 and 59) deliberately do not provide the aid of words for our interpretation. In addition, once again the wordless panels demonstrate the representation of the monstrator and the absence of the recitant. For a while, the meta-demonstration of the graphic narrative, which stages the interplay between seeing and knowing, breaks down and the viewer only sees and does not know. As Chute (2008) has suggested, without words, the reader/viewer may more easily consume the representation without having to work so hard to construe meaning. It is as if the reader/viewer quickly and easily becomes aware of the content of these disconcerting images. Yet, as the reader/viewer is confronted by disturbing content of the images that he/she is consuming, he/she is also slowed down at points by having to do some reading as well. Yet what he/she reads is not wholly revealing, littered as the captions are with words like ‘something’ and ‘as if’ (see caption on page 59 in Figure 4.5 to come). The structure of the text thus encourages him/her both to take in and to dwell on the distressing content. Yet, at most places in this sequence, this seeing and approaching the intense experience of violence without knowing or fixing meaning through words is suspended within

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  155

Figure 4.5 ‘…it was as if his camera had broken’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 59).

the visual representation of the ineffable and the apparently disorganised gutter space used on these pages. At this point, the unruly gutters in the narrative underpin the declaration that the ‘photographer’s imaginary framing device mentioned by Professor Solomon above and in in Figure 4.5, which neatly differentiated

156  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre him, as an empowered military officer, from the squalid mundanity of war around him, has broken down. The implication is that we cannot rely on neat explanations of trauma, representational conventions and narrative logic to convey experience. Including the ineffable in representations of trauma demonstrates that representations break down in traumatic situations and when they do the prevailing social and representational relations are not able to contain what is seen. A reductionist portrayal of this is to say that the photographer (mentioned in Figure 4.5 and by Professor Solomon) loses his mind. A fuller depiction of this experience is included in Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) narrative, visually depicted by the panels’ becoming dislocated from the logic of the panel grid and beginning to fall, out of order, all over page 58. This representation of the ‘photographer’s’ disorientation in the narrative because of trauma is thus partially transferred to the reader through the representational form. Indeed, the displaced panels on pages 58 and 59 even appear to be covering the page numbers (see Figure 4.5). The reader/ viewer is unable to orientate him/herself by quickly glancing down at the numbers that he/she expects to be there to check that he/she is still tracking the narrative as the author intended. The lack of page numbers may cause the reader/viewer to turn the page back and forth frenetically to see where the page numbers end and begin. This serves as a device that emphasises the process of representation and gets the reader/viewer physically involved in both the process and (to some extent) the confusion of the content that is being represented. The sense of bewilderment is heightened by the fact that the white space of the gutters increases markedly on what we infer to be page 59. It is as if the ability to catch hold of the content and to frame it is disintegrating, and the panels and what they hold are blowing away from our understanding. It seems as if the reader/viewer is also approaching a ‘point of excess’ (Agamben 1998, p. 25) in the narrative, where neither words nor images can be contained or represent experience itself. However, what is crucial is that in the graphic narrative remarkably, this difficulty itself is being represented. This is in line with authors such as Agamben (1999), who instigate a move away from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ([1887, 1888] 1989) ressentiment of language, and suggests that representation of violent and traumatic experiences is indeed possible if we use the ineffable to expand our understanding of the representation of experience. It is at this point in Folman and Polonsky’s narrative that we find the unknown preserved within the known, when, as discussed in the previous chapter, people such as Folman try to express their experience as experience (Jaworski 2014, p. 81). In viewing these gutters in Figure 4.5 through the lens of ‘dark’ writing, the reader/viewer is able to capture some of this. This is because representational and non-representational knowledge rub up against each other in a meaningful way in the ‘dark’ writing of the graphic narrative. Looking at these pages through the lens

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  157 of ‘dark’ writing demonstrates some of what this experience must be like for the photographer, as it makes the reader perform some of the perplexity of the photographer’s representational process, as he/she reads/ views the text, which accommodates the ineffable in the disordered gutters. This also draws strongly on the reader’s/viewer’s own investment in organising the text. The gutters in fact are no longer gutters. The panels are no longer neatly arranged along grid lines (see Figure 4.5). These usually regular gaps around which the meaning of these pages pivot as the reader/viewer projects their interpretations into these blank spaces have been noticeably disrupted. Both the images (which carry the trace of the monstrator) and the gutters (which carry the trace of the ineffable) now seem to assail the reader/viewer, like bullets. It is as if in this concentrated and disruptive sequence, the experience of the author, the represented and the reader/viewer come closer to one another. The intensity is palpable, and the pace of consumption is accelerated. The frame appears to have broken down. In the hands of the monstrator (and those responsible for the gutters), the reader/viewer is able to envision more. The reader/viewer sees more of the clashing content of the panels strewn across the page in Figure 4.5 where irrevocable death and the mundane yet stubborn domesticity of a Palestinian man with shopping bags are both depicted. The reader/ viewer also sees more of the struggle to represent the violence that lies at the point of excess and how this may be captured and engaged with to some extent. The reader/viewer is then able to envision more both in terms of the violent political content that the drawer intended and in terms of the violence of the representational process in which he/she now experiences him/herself as complicit. The implication is that the broken or inadequate representation is mirrored in the violent content of the representation, which contains such traumatic images that these are not immediately available as experiences to those involved. The intimate connection between the form and content of representation is particularly obvious at this point. Because this graphic narrative is able to alter its representational style and logic, through images, words and gutters, it lends itself to representing some of such points of excess. In this sequence, the reader/viewer seems to come dangerously close to the violence of representation itself. A dizzying dynamism within ‘dark’ writing is glimpsed – ressentiment itself, the violation of and revenge upon language. But then, in the nick of time, the last panel in the sequence lands almost straight in the centre of the page. Then the comfort of the stable and the visible – also seen through the distance of words – begins to resume again. This suggests that through ‘dark’ writing we are able to see that some moments in the text are more ineffable than others. Indeed, perhaps only the interplay of more and less ineffable moments (as this sequence depicts so spectacularly by altering the gutter size)

158  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre allows us to realise that what we are seeing is the ineffable. This time, we catch sight of what was ‘invisible’ in the representation of violence. After Figure 4.5, the recitant continues in what now seem woefully inadequate words to describe the situation: ‘look, it was a really terrible moment’ (Folman & Polonsky 2009, p. 60). However, as a graphic narrative this text is able to express more than just this sentiment. The climax in the narrative on these two pages comes before these words, as the momentary silence in the aftermath of violence falls and is captured by the wordlessness of the monstrator and the reader/viewer-author amalgam at this point. Yet it is also the way in which the irregular gutters in this sequence of which Figure 4.5 forms part, frame movement that adds to this climax. This jarring sequence also allows the narrative to more fully depict the experience of trauma. As I have already pointed out, Bukatman (2012) claims that comics do more than any other form to visualise (and make visible) the causal relationships of movement through time. It is these relationships that the formal arrangement of panels and gutters can frame so well. This is particularly apparent in the sequence of scattered panels on pages 58 and 59 (see Figure 4.5). In this sequence of scattered panels, movement is emphasised visually because there are not words to regulate the panels moving out of place across the page. This scattered panel sequence is bookended by Folman’s neat and organised conversation with the trauma expert, Professor Solomon (represented, as we have come to expect, in both images and words, with regular-sized, conventional white gutters). She provides a clear (if limited) explanation for the chaotic events depicted in the sequence. Another striking element in the contrast between the panels depicting the conversation and the scattered panels is that the dispersed panels have moved out of the time sequence of the story. In other words, the scattered panels do not only depict scenes of motion (although some do) but also the dynamism inherent in the process of representation itself. The causal relationship between Professor Solomon’s neat explanations and the ordering of the panels in the narrative are very clearly visually depicted on these pages. Bukatman (2012) claims that this effect is an outcome of the fact that comics not only depict but also regulate narrative movement. I would add to this that we are only able to see how they regulate movement because they are also able to depict unregulated movement, chaos or the ineffability of the representational process in a sequence such as this on pages 58 to 60 of Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) text.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that ‘dark’ writing helps us to augment the notion of the adequate representation of the experience of violence and trauma as experience, by accommodating the ineffable and go beyond

‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre  159 merely accurate depictions of events. In doing so, ‘dark’ writing also helps us to approach a more ethical engagement with these experiences. Embracing and representing the notion of memory being alive, dynamic and happening in the present is able to link us to our representations of the past more adequately, even although this may not be more historically accurate. This was discussed in relation to Folman’s coming to know his experience of the massacre only as he put together a representation of his memory breaking open through a flashback, some 20 years after the events he is trying to recall. By doing this, he blurs the boundary between the abstract and the immediate experience. He gains access to the violence in which he was involved that he would not have in any other way. This process of Folman coming to know is explored through an analysis of Carmi’s dream sequence and the role of fear in his remembering; the inclusion of known historical narratives and characters (for example Ben Yishai, Sharon) as well as Folman’s conversations with trauma experts (Ori Sivan and Professor Zehava Solomon) and his own flashbacks (for example, the Palestinian boy with the RPG). These were examined as they played out in the graphic narrative form through the formal qualities of the interplay of words and images and panels and gutters. My argument has been that the formal qualities of graphic narratives frame the experiences of violence and trauma more adequately and thus allow us to share more of our experiences than were hitherto thought possible. In the graphic narrative form, this ineffable aspect might be represented in a particular panel, in the space between image and words or between panels in the gutter. Such representations of the ineffable invite the reader/viewer in. It is for this reason that the graphic narrative can come close to representing ‘a brief pause of humanity in the middle of an infinite [invisible] horror’ (Agamben 1999, p. 26). However, the punctuation point, when it is in graphic narrative form, draws attention to itself as representation (belonging to both the author and the reader/viewer). I posited that the ineffable resides at the point of excess where words seem inadequate for what we want to say. Following Ahmed (2004), I suggested that the ineffable is also performed at the disjuncture between context and signification. I have recommended that the ineffable and the impossibility of witnessing lie at the heart of the ethical position. This ethical position is indicated by the affect (and later the emotion) of shame. The role of the affect of shame in the process of Folman coming to remember was also discussed as was the facilitation of shame of an ethical re-orientation. If we engage with shame, it can elucidate the material conditions of the representation of violence and trauma far better than a focus on accuracy. This disjuncture of context and signification, where the ineffable is situated and manifests itself though shame, is key to the ethical sensibility that graphic narratives cultivate. Included in the discussion of shame was the notion that the semiotic signs of ‘victim’

160  ‘Dark’ Writing: Sabra & Shatila Massacre and ‘perpetrator’ do not have a fixed meaning outside of their context; they only gain meaning at the moment when they are inserted into their particular discursive context and their scorching, painful meaning flares brightly, until they burn themselves out and move out of focus once again. Such flashes of understanding are closely mirrored in the content of Waltz. In short, in this chapter, I have been making the point that without the intervention of the graphic narrative form with its framing of accuracy, the gap between words and images and the gutter and the panels, in his understanding of Sabra and Shatila, there could be no contained or contextually framed experience of violence for Folman in which to re-orientate himself ethically. Thus, the form of representation enables Folman to see himself as having been involved in these events. It is at this point (see Figure 4.3) that he is able to represent a perspective he has gained on the matter for the first time and integrate himself into the narrative of his past. This coincides with his being able to represent and experience the matter simultaneously.

5

‘Dark’ Writing Violent Experiences in New Aesthetic Forms

Introduction: From Graphic Narratives to Other Visual Aesthetic Forms 161 How Do Films Share Experiences? 165 Applying ‘Dark’ Writing to Waltz with Bashir & Animated Documentary 168 A Spectrum of Non-fictional, Visual Narrative Forms between Experience and Representation 175 Online Interactive Documentary 177 Applying ‘Dark’ Writing to Online Interactive Documentary 183 Summary 185 Why This Book Matters 187

Introduction: From Graphic Narratives to Other Visual Aesthetic Forms I understand violence as existing beyond its obvious instances and as always partially ineffable. I argue that a further understanding of violence may be achieved through aesthetic forms that preserve the ineffable quality inherent in the experience of violence and engage with it indirectly. This proposition may support and elucidate Schäuble’s claim that non-realistic modes of representation are the most appropriate way of representing war horrors (Schäuble 2011). For my purposes, this argument has been applied in studying representations of violence through graphic narratives to show that they extend the capacity for expressing what was previously thought of as unrepresentable or as confined to the inadequacy of logical narrative structure. In this final chapter, I summarise my views on the representation of violence in the graphic narrative form and make further suggestions for how ‘dark’ writing and representing ineffable aspects of experience may be more widely applied across other aesthetic forms. I affirm that this book matters because we need to re-orientate our epistemological stance on the representation of violence and trauma in war and conflict to enable us to approach the instigation and sharing of such experiences. I reiterate that this may be done through the method of ‘dark’ writing which expressly includes the

162  ‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms ineffable in the way it transmits experiences of violence and trauma. ‘Dark’ writing may thus help us to see, know and share more. Up to now, I have mainly analysed graphic narratives as aesthetic forms which accommodate the ineffable. I will summarise some of my reasons for doing this here, before moving on to a discussion about the identification of the ineffable in other aesthetic forms. Graphic narratives are creative, complex, non-fictional (and obviously non-realistic), aesthetic representations that often deal with violence effectively. As non-fictional representational forms, graphic narratives are aesthetic representations that abjure the structural blindness of seemingly more direct eyewitness accounts. In this regard, Schäuble (2011) notes that graphic narrative artists such as Spiegelman and Sacco deliberately challenge the inadequacies of traditional historical representation. For example, they expose its inability to represent the actual obscenities of the Holocaust (Shoah) and warfare by using realism as a code. Their graphic narratives foreground the notion of accuracy, and what falls through the cracks between representation and experience, the known and seen. This is why I argue that the particular aesthetic form of the graphic narrative is well placed to accommodate the ineffable. According to Chute (2008, p. 459), the most important graphic narratives explore the conflicted boundaries of what can be said and what can be shown at the intersection of collective histories and life stories. Graphic narratives do this by foregrounding the form in which reality is represented. Simultaneously, they immerse the reader/viewer into a particularly detailed, realistic depiction of events and experiences. This suggests that they display the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy (Bolter & Grusin 1999) as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. Immediacy and hypermediacy explain how an aesthetic form may be ‘authenticated’ by paying attention to the immediacy of the content (in which the form seems to become transparent) and to making visible the process of representation. Another result of graphic narratives staging the boundary between representational and non-representational knowledge is that graphic narratives draw readers/viewers into an apparently immediate experience of the content of the representation. They do this on abstract level by keeping in play the tension between reality and the form in which it is represented. They do this on a concrete level through the use of frames and gutters, which provide a literal boundary to what the reader/viewer knows or sees, and a visual representation of the ineffable. They also involve the reader/viewer in an embodied way in sequencing the narrative, paging backwards and forwards and letting his/her eyes scan the words and images. Thus, the graphic narrative form reveals the ostensibly ‘invisible’ mechanics of the representational process, in which it also simultaneously deeply involves reader/viewer. This approach to representation and the sharing of experiences has also been noted in other aesthetic forms that use images and purport to

‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms  163 work in the realm of non-fiction, such as animated documentary film and photography. However, authors such as Patrick Maynard (2001) claim that graphic narratives are distinct from other still-image forms of representation, such as photography. Maynard (2001) contends that photography, like sequential art, forces the reader/viewer to think about the arrangement of time within seemingly motionless and momentary depictions of space. One difficulty with photographs and graphic narratives is determining what degree of time is represented by a single graphic narrative panel or photographic image: For example, if we attempt … to picture time as a one-dimensional flow … with ‘now’ as an index… we have the awkward situation that, since all times get indexed as ‘now’ … to identify the present we’d need to know where the ‘now’ index was … (Maynard 2001, p. 208) This leads to the unusual situation where a reader/viewer of a photograph or graphic narrative experiences a seeming directness in the apparent ‘now’ of the image whilst at the same time, being involved in an abstraction, because he/she cannot identify where the ‘now’ index is. Thus, a series of photographs and a graphic narrative have the apparent potential to present a reader/viewer with access to a representation of experience that feels direct and immediate, although it is expressly indirect. This ‘invisible’ tension can be approached in these aesthetic forms because they include a staging of the boundary between process and content knowledge through the way in which they work with time. Chute (2008) presents compelling reasons for the graphic narrative’s ability to accommodate the problematic of the ineffable and elements of violence which often remain ‘invisible’ in other representational forms. Although graphic narratives present a traumatic side of history, Chute (2008) claims that the most prominent authors of graphic narratives in contemporary times – such as Spiegelman, Sacco and Satrapi – all ‘refuse to show [the trauma] through the lens of unspeakability or “invisibility”, instead registering its difficulty through inventive (and various) textual practice’ (Chute 2008, p. 459). This ability of graphic narratives to tell the unspeakable may be a relevant strategy to get around some of the political restrictions placed on war art (which I deliberate on later in this chapter). It is this ability to include invisible and ineffable aspects that is captured by the notion of their ‘dark’ writing. A number of comics scholars over the last few decades have studied comics as a visual/verbal medium (Berger 1973; Eisner 1985; Gordon 1998; Groensteen 2009; Jacobs 2007; McAllister, Sewell & Gordon 2001; McCloud 1993). However, few have focused specifically on the genre of comics journalism (which is another name sometimes given to graphic narratives). The few who have done so, like Chute (2008) and Rocco Versaci (2007), argue for a strong link between such graphic narratives and ethics, and the possibility of political intervention. Versaci

164  ‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms (2007) argues that graphic narratives are constructed to facilitate an awareness in the reader/viewer of what was not apparent to him/her before, or what was at first invisible. Thus, as non-fictional works representing reality, graphic narratives reach beyond reality into the imaginations of their readers/viewers. Versaci (2007) compares the graphic narrative to memoirs, traditional journalism and film, among other aesthetic forms. He goes further than merely suggesting that graphic narratives stimulate readers’/viewers’ imaginations, asserting that they cultivate our ethical sense and our ability to appraise what is experienced and represented. For Versaci (2007), graphic narratives have the ability to transform their readers ethically by …using exceptional and unique representational strategies, by subverting commonly held beliefs and assumptions, and by calling attention to both how texts represent the world and what is at stake in those representations. (Versaci 2007, p. 7) Authors such as Chute (2008), Marianne Hirsch (1992–3), Honess Roe (2011) and Schäuble (2011) all believe that sometimes language may be able to accommodate our experiences of violence and conflict and we may be able to share these experiences. Hirsch (1992–3) acknowledges that a careful combination of specific aesthetic and media forms may produce vast intricacies that alter the problematics of representing violent atrocities. She asserts that an aesthetic form such as that used in Spiegelman’s Maus (2003) ‘palpably conveys absence and loss’ (Hirsch 1992–3, p. 119) whilst also registering their elusiveness. She claims that this capacity for conveying both the intense and the abstract enables graphic narratives to make the experience of violence and trauma more representable than we might first have thought. The suitability of the graphic narrative to increase what might be represented by foregrounding form whilst also being firmly grounded in reality can be compared to that of other contemporary and pictural representational forms. Although not all graphic narratives accommodate the ineffable, the graphic narrative form (see my discussion of Chute’s definition of graphic narratives in Chapter 2) has a strong claim on this, perhaps stronger even than the graphic novel. Graphic narratives and graphic novels may use the same format, but the crux is that graphic narratives, as self-reflexive works of non-fiction foreground form whilst simultaneously immersing readers/viewers in vivid details of historical reality. At first glance, graphic narratives seem to be distinguished from graphic novels solely because of their historical (and often politically violent) content. But they also portray the particular content differently. Thus, they combine content and form, representational and non-representational knowledge in a unique way, which allows us to approach aspects of violence that would otherwise be invisible. Also,

‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms  165 some representational forms of war and conflict, such a journalistic account, often exclusively focus on the historical accuracy of the content, ignoring form and the process of involving the reader in the text. However, any representational form that operates via the twin logics of hypermediacy and immediacy (Bolter & Grusin 1999) has the potential to accommodate the ineffable to a greater or lesser extent, even though in the context of the violence and trauma of war and conflict, the ineffable is likely to be shown in graphic narratives. Keeping the focus on form, I will discuss other representational forms that may also operate in this way in this chapter. In the remainder of this chapter, I probe the capacity of other visual aesthetic (live action films, animated documentaries and online interactive documentaries) to represent experiences of violence and trauma by accommodating the ineffable.

How Do Films Share Experiences? Perhaps the most obvious visual narrative form to compare the assertions I have been making about the ability of graphic narratives to portray the ineffable in experiences of violence to is film. Phenomenological film critics have long claimed that film is a unique medium because of how it foregrounds the experience of the subject in the representation process. Indeed, film seems to express the experience of reality whilst it is simultaneously perceived as mediating reality. However, the degree to which film follows the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy (Bolter & Grusin 1999) in depictions of horrific violence has also been challenged. For example, Schäuble (2011) argues that films tend to be structurally less reflexive than graphic narratives (especially in their depictions of the horrific violence). She claims that films are rarely as overtly self-conscious as graphic novels in their structure. Although this is contentious, typically mainstream Hollywood films at least, work harder at making the medium seem transparent rather than at foregrounding their technology or form. However, Vivian Sobchack (1992) points out that the seeming transparency of the film medium is actually not so unobtrusive on the viewing experience. Although we may not always reflect on the medium intellectually, film viewing works against transparency because we remain aware that we are watching a film, at the same time as being immersed in the experience. According to Sobchack (1992), viewers of film are always immanent subjects interacting (bodily) with the film, which is its own immanent subject. This reading of film thus also gives it the potential to accommodate the ineffable. Furthermore, I contend that animated documentary films are particularly adept at accommodating this tension between immersion and foregrounding processes of representation. Not only do they retain the focus of the viewer on their seemingly unrealistic form by using animation to tell real, historical stories; but they manage to represent the ‘invisible’ in that they are able to engage with aspects that are concealed in live action films.

166  ‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms According to Schäuble (2011), by questioning the adequacy of representational systems, memory and factual photographic documentation, animated documentaries are able to uncover a hidden truth and allow stories to be told beyond the limits of actual events. For example, Schäuble (2011) claims that in the animated documentary film Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008), Folman seems less interested in depicting or evoking historical facts than in discovering the traces that the experience of (war) violence may leave on survivors’ minds and imaginations. This film is also able to capture the subjective emotional states of eyewitnesses as they open up a non-fictional, historical topic. These traces are the opaque ambivalences and unseen states of consciousness that constitute people’s experiences of violence. Animated documentaries and graphic narratives give the reader/viewer access to these concealed elements. Arguably, other experimental films (including online interactive documentaries) also manage to show these ‘invisible’ states most effectively Thus, representations such as Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008), that grapple with the ineffable parts of experience, may really distinguish themselves. Schäuble (2011) claims that the film Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) offers an exceptional chance to recover what is otherwise lost by means of its unique use of comics-style animation. This is a style of comics animation that looks like rotoscoping, a digital animation technique that draws attention to the transfer of an image from live action film into another film sequence. In this case, the transferred images are taken from real images of interviews, battles, authentic conversations and archived photographs of the Sabra and Shatila massacre captured on video (rather than rotoscope) and then included into the animation. This enhances the tension between accommodating reality and foregrounding form (as the comic does) even further, thereby potentially showing off the ineffable by revealing the mechanics of the representation process. Yet Folman is emphatic that the film was not rotoscoped – because for him rotoscoping is not good at conveying realistic emotions, something that he deliberately wanted to convey through the animated form. Honess Roe (2011) corroborates the capacity of the animated documentary to present the ‘invisible’ to the viewer. She claims that the animated documentary broadens and deepens the range of what we can learn from documentaries’ because it shows what is not filmable – especially subjective states of mind – as if they were part of reality and can thus capture what is invisible to most live action films. (Honess Roe 2011, p. 217) This suggests that there is at least a potential for animated documentary films to engage the tension between foregrounding form and accommodating gritty reality in a striking way, thus accommodating the ineffable and conveying more of the experience.

‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms  167 Thus, both graphic narratives and animated documentaries have the potential to offer a glimpse of ‘invisible’ violence because they explicitly perform the problematic of representation in a highly self-conscious fashion, while engaging deeply with aspects of experience that are not always clearly apparent. This self-consciousness draws the reader/viewer intimately into the construction of the representation. It places animated documentaries and graphic narratives as forms of representation in a particular position on the continuum between representational and non-representational knowledge, in that they exploit the twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy (Bolter & Grusin 1999). In doing so, they involve us in the tension between reality and what seems to be part of experience but remains unseen. The graphic narratives (and to some extent, online interactive documentaries) have the added advantage over animated documentaries that they invite the reader/viewer to participate actively in the structure of the narrative by deciding on the sequence in which to read/view the visual panels. Graphic narratives and some online interactive documentaries also elicit active bodily responses from the readers/viewers, such as scanning pages or panels with their eyes and turning over or clicking on pages/windows with their hands. This involvement of the readers/ viewers in the process of representation has the effect of heightening both the sense of immediacy and the sense of being involved in the representational process. When the ineffable is included and co-contributed to in this way, we become aware that such representational forms can include in their ambit of representation some experiences that are simultaneously very abstract and profoundly embodied and intense. Saige Walton (2009) explains that with regard to comics …the act of reading …practically forces the intertwining of our senses. Because comics are structured around the simultaneous co-presence of multiple panels, their juxtaposition of images/texts/panels (not to mention their shifting configurations) forces the eye to scan and to kinaesthetically follow the narrative trajectory… Optical scanning in tandem with manual handling helps enact the flow of comics, as an intersensory experience that is physically performed by the reader, rather than technologically externalized, as it is in …film. (Walton 2009, p. 101) The participation of the reader/viewer in such texts is further necessitated by the non-synthesised combination of words and images, used often within graphic narratives. Chute (2008) points out that the double code of graphic narratives in their use of non-synthesised text and images demands labour-intensive decoding by the author. The code militates against easy consumption and in fact detains the reader/viewer (Chute 2008, p. 460). Indeed, a reader/viewer of graphic narratives not only fills in the gaps between panels but also ‘works with the often

168  ‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning’ (Chute 2008, p. 452). This coding may be seen as compounding the representational and detracting from the immediacy of the experience. This again sets graphic narratives (and comics too, to some degree) apart from film. However, Bukatman (2012) presents an influential treatise on the rebellious energy demonstrated by the drawing of hyperbolic emotion and the movement of bodies, which tends to restore immediacy to the comics representation. Bukatman (2012) (discussed in Chapter 2) claims that comics capture the immediacy of the physical body navigating space in a way that would otherwise remain invisible. In fact, the extent to which the reader/viewer’s body is involved in physically sequencing and simultaneously puzzling out the narrative differs across different visual narrative forms (such as online interactive documentary and graphic narratives) even though all may support an engagement with the ineffable aspects of experience to some extent. Yet, as discussed in Chapter 3, it is not merely the ability of a representation to support an embodied/reading viewing that makes it write darkly and preserve the ineffable, although this is one aspect. In addition to supporting embodied, affective aspects of experience, ‘dark’ writing also facilitates a dynamic and performative sharing of experiences that opens up the possibility for meeting, and thus ethical encounter.

Applying ‘Dark’ Writing to Waltz with Bashir and Animated Documentary As stated, the graphic narrative, Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky 2009) is very closely based upon the Waltz with Bashir film (Folman 2008), a feature-length, animated documentary which uses comics-style drawings. The film version of Waltz is also part of a wider move towards a more aesthetic documentation of war. This move aims to make visible aspects of such violence and trauma that have previously been invisible in direct or accurate approaches. In this regard, critics such as Raz Yosef claim that Folman’s (2008) film represents a decline of representations of historically ‘accurate’ Israeli collective memories of the First Lebanese War. They believe that we are seeing the rise of more expressive individual representations depicting memories of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers of the war. As Yosef (2010) points out, this is not the first time that the drawn-out, controversial and traumatic (First) Lebanese War has been represented in an Israeli film. He argues that other recent Israeli productions such as Waltz (film) tend to depict the personal psychological struggles that the Israeli left have to contend with when considering their complicity in the war. He claims that such subjective and personal aspects have not been accommodated in the greater Zionist collective memory. Considering O’Toole’s (2015) remark that Palestinians are not allowed to forget the massacre, it is striking that Zionist collective memory has not allowed Israeli’s to remember it. According to Yosef (2010), films such as Waltz deal with one of the most interesting

‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms  169 phenomena in contemporary Israeli cinema: films that explore repressed traumatic events from the (First) Lebanon War, events that have been denied entry into the shared national past because they did not fit in with prevailing notions of accuracy (Yosef 2010, p. 313). Yet, Yosef (2010) points out that such filmed representations still fail to engage with the experience of the (often Palestinian) Other. The Waltz (film) and graphic narrative texts thus move into territory that Zionist collective memory disallows, although its focus is still on the agents of power. The animated documentary film and the graphic narrative are both unique in the way they facilitate an audience response and thus an ethical stance through their form. Although animated documentaries do not do what graphic narratives do in terms of actively eliciting involvement in the text from its readers/viewers through sequencing the narrative as he/she scans the panel with his/her eyes and pages back and forth with his/her hands, they do draw the bodies of the artist and reader/viewer together in the way that graphic narratives do if they use drawn images, as the Waltz (film) does. Moreover, animated documentaries, in their ability to show what cannot be filmed actively, involve the viewer in the text in terms of the projection of narrative content. Yet, because not enough attention is paid to their form and the link between politics and aesthetics that this supports, the animated documentary film version of Waltz has received several criticisms for its apparently unethical stance. One claim is that the film seduces its viewers into watching violence. Chris Hedges has argued that ‘[a]ll narratives of war told through the lens of the combatants carry with them the seduction of violence’ (Hedges 2009, n.p.). If we accept the individualistic, even-based approach to depicting trauma that old-style literary trauma studies often assumes (discussed in Chapter 2), then we may imagine that a scopophilic relationship is set up by the visual representation of trauma between the witness of violence and its direct victim. According to this way of thinking, we cannot shy away from the fact that the images of violence and distress somehow appeal to viewers who wish to see the pain that others experience (voluntarily or involuntarily), whilst remaining in control themselves. The ethical impasse that this confronts us with seems to be exacerbated by the fact that unless it is sadomasochistic, then there is only a very limited victim perspective included in this relationship between witnesses and victims. Such criticisms have led critics to view the Waltz (film), as only allowing Palestinian others to appear in the text as objects or butchered bodies in live action trauma photographs and so positioning viewers as normal and as enjoying the pain of the others depicted. (To consider such criticisms, we will momentarily leave aside my discussion of Butler (2009) and framing in Chapter 1 and my assertions in Chapter 4 that the inclusion of Moyer’s photograph of the grief-stricken Palestinian woman at the end of the Waltz narrative alongside similar drawn images of distressed Palestinian women’s faces, does give us the opportunity to grieve the Palestinian deaths the narrative shows, because it also shows Palestinian lives in a deeply affective way).

170  ‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms Gil Hochberg (2013, p. 46) advances a useful reading of Waltz (film) in which he ‘by no means denies the fact that as spectators we are seduced into finding pleasure in the sights of violence and destruction’. However, Hochberg refines this criticism in that he still views Waltz (film) as a critical (anti-war) war film, which as such does not shun the allure of the spectacle but rather mobilises it. Hochberg suggests that such films help us engage with our ethical failure to see what war really is and does to victims and perpetrators. If we add to this a focus on form and Barthes’s suggestion that ‘we photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds’ so that we do not have to feel or experience them (Barthes 1981, p. 53) then we begin to see that in its sue of a mix of photographs and drawn images, Waltz is able to support a powerful engagement with ethics. If we see that the Waltz text supports the ineffable that is hidden in the way its photographic representations drive feeling out of our minds whilst at the same time its hand-drawn images deeply connect our eyes with the artist’s hand, then we may view this text as a poignant vehicle for ethical re-orientation. If we pay attention to the form of the text and the process of representation, as a focus on ‘dark’ writing enables us to do, we are able to see that these photographs (included both in the film and in the graphic narrative) are themselves the frame with which to look more closely at the perpetrator, something which postcolonial studies of the representation of violence call for because of the understanding that the identities of the victim and the perpetrator are deeply intertwined and not in simple opposition. Hochberg (2013) comes to this same conclusion of victim and perpetrator as having co-dependent identities, something that Žižek’s (2010) criticism of the film as unethical goes against, instead maintaining a binary distinction between victims and perpetrators. Žižek (2010) claims that in focusing on personal experiences of individual soldiers, Waltz (film) reproduces a spectacle of horror devoid of any meaningful political or historical analysis. This misses the point that although Waltz (film) depicts a personal perspective, it does not portray an individual one, but one that is expressly composed out of the experiences of others and as such becomes a complex collective repository of envisioning through ‘dark’ writing. Žižek’s (2010, p. 31) further critique that this film’s focus on the personal narrative legitimises the re-focus on the perpetrator’s traumatic experience is no critique at all in that this is precisely one of the foci of postcolonial studies of violence, especially as the latter seeks to destabilise binaries such as personal and collective; perpetrator and victim; representation and experience as being part of the hegemonic notion of representation itself that makes us think that we cannot share such experiences. Furthermore, facilitating the representation of this complex and non-binary view of identities as they are constructed by contested events, the text also helps us to imagine the links between disparate violent incidents (such as Sabra and Shatila and Auschwitz). This demonstrates that

‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms  171 reading/viewing the text through the lens of ‘dark’ writing helps us gain a richer understanding of the complexity of the interlocking traumas which coalesce around these experiences when we allow the meanings of the signs ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ to shift and acknowledge their codependence. After all, Waltz boldly shows how Sharon and the IDF are implicated in the ongoing horror perpetrated by Zionist ideology that fixes the meanings of victim and perpetrator in its distinctive telling of the Holocaust (Shoah) as a fixed and discrete event, rather than portraying it as intertwined, ongoing and dependent upon an unrelenting view of Jewish Israelis as victims. It also reminds the west of the longstanding and brutal role of Christianity, in various guises as enabler of the ongoing violence in the region. As the basic source text for the graphic narrative analysed in the previous chapter and as part of our investigation into the animated documentary form as a way of accessing ‘invisible’ aspects of violence, it is worth making some remarks about the Waltz (film) itself. Furthermore, foregrounding both the representational process and form are critical to the approach of ‘dark’ writing. Honess Roe (2011) substantiates the capacity of the animated documentary to present the ‘invisible’ to the viewer. She claims that the ‘animated documentary broadens and deepens the range of what we can learn from documentaries’ because it shows what is not filmable – especially subjective states of mind – as if they were part of reality and can thus capture what is invisible to most live action films (Honess Roe 2011, p. 217). This suggests that animated documentary films may engage the tension between foregrounding form and accommodating gritty reality in a striking way, thus accommodating the ineffable. The initial decision to share the traumatic experience of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in animated rather than live action form is deliberate and significant. The balance between the details needed to depict (emotional) realism and animation was carefully considered throughout the film’s production. Obviously stylistically, a documentary is ordinarily quite different from animation. But filmmaker Ari Folman has a different point of view. Who decides whether a digital image made out of dots and lines is more true than a drawn one, both of them are speaking in the same voice? Who decides the video picture is more real than an artist who drew the images for four months? (Folman in Kaufman 2008, n.p.) Folman worked backwards first shooting live action with three digital video cameras, and then painstakingly transforming these shots into animation. The first step in producing the film was to videotape, on a sound stage, the interviews and even bare-bones representations of the war re-enactments. Folman claims that he and his production

172 ‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms team ‘tried to dramatize those scenes in the studio as much as we could’ (Folman in Kaufman 2008, n.p.). One thing Folman was firm about was recording crystal-clear sound, without distractions of a cinema verité scratchy style of recording. Once the film was videotaped, it was first turned into a storyboard and, from there, finally transformed into an animation. Once the team had an animatic that they were happy with and that depicted a tight story, the next step was to draw 3500 keyframes at crucial points in the film. This was the job of art director and illustrator, David Polonsky who drew three quarters of them. From one keyframe to the next, the animators moved the keyframe painstakingly in classic, cut-out style. Folman says that he was ‘obsessed that the characters would really have a realistic style’, he asserts ‘[t]hat meant more detailed faces with contours and wrinkles’. This made it more complicated to animate them. Polonsky also created the dream style, for the surreal scenes, which is not less detailed but freer in terms of proportions, colours and design. To achieve realism in the setting, the small team of frenzied drawing animators took photographs and then carefully added all the background details. To achieve realism for the faces and bodies, the animators broke them into sections and sub-sections. The faces were typically divided into eight sections and each section was broken down again into 15 sub-sections. This did not work well for the lower part of the body where the slow movements it created looked unrealistic. For this reason, in several places, the team used frame-by-frame classic animation to construct the lower part of the body. Folman and his team went to an inordinate amount of trouble to make the animation seem realistic and detailed. Folman claims that this was so that the form did not distract too much from the content of what was being presented. However, animation was deliberately chosen overall. This begs the question as to why one would go to all this trouble to use a particular kind of realistic animation and not just use live action cinema instead. The film critic Schäuble, who works on Holocaust (Shoah) films (2011), claims that despite all his trouble to be realistic in Waltz (film), Folman seems less interested in depicting or evoking historical facts than in discovering the traces that the experience of (war) violence may leave on survivors’ minds and imaginations. It is these traces that are a most critical aspect of making experiences shareable, but these are not an aspect of experience that can be shown in live action footage. The drawings and animations in graphic narratives and some animated documentary films, such as this one, point to constructedness and make such representational forms highly self-conscious. This facilitates an engagement with and understanding of the process of representation itself. This is why watching an animated documentary is always also a deep engagement with what counts as reality. This enables the ineffable range of violent and traumatic experiences that can be represented to be increased.

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In many ways, Waltz (film) is an early example of a burgeoning category of feature-length animated films, usually about serious, political topics, which overtly problematise the tension between fiction and non-fiction in their re-telling of historical and political events. In many of these films, the film makers often appear in their own work, which are often autobiographical stories set amid tumultuous or violent historical or political events, making these films a highly self-conscious representational form. Furthermore, the idea with these films is that they portray narratives of memories that highlight the unpredictable socially produced nature of history in contrast to being allied to a singular, controlled, official version of history. By doing this, they often give voice to marginal and personal positions within history. They are also often about personal and political violence and trauma that might be difficult to remember or represent directly. As such, animated documentary allows complex affects and emotions, dreams and aspirations to be represented imaginatively and indirectly; yet still from within the documentary form, which also represents real events, characters and conversations all as interwoven aspects of the same complex reality. In this way, animated documentaries such as Waltz (film) manage to preserve the ineffable and are thus able to help us share aspects of the experience of violence that live action footage cannot. Animated documentary is also often seen as a democratic way of filmmaking, created on low budgets, by ordinary people wanting to their tell stories. It may encompass either entirely animated films or a mix of live action and animation. Honess Roe (2017, p. 273) notes that ‘since around 2000, as digital animation has become increasingly ubiquitous, so too has the appearance of animated sequences in otherwise live action documentaries’. Furthermore, within this broad category of documentary style films, there are those like Waltz (film) that are based on significant sections of unscripted dialog between characters, bound together by narrative: and, then on the other hand, those like Persepolis (Paronnaud & Satrapi 2007) which are entirely scripted (and which often also exist as graphic narratives, although in the case of Persepolis, the graphic narrative came first). It is useful to talk about them all as animated documentaries because they are all scripted to some degree, all go to trouble to portray themselves as realistic and all overtly explore the continuum between fiction and non-fiction. A selection of other recent animated documentary films that display these characteristics are listed below: Irinka & Sandrinka (Stoïanov 2007) which animates the personal story of a self in the context of broader familial and national migrant history; the Green Wave (Ahadi 2010) that depicts stories of the failed protests in Iran in 2009 to oust Ahmadinejad and intersperses animation with footage assembled from first-person accounts in tweets, Facebook entries, blogs and live footage of protests and public gatherings shot on mobile phones by people who

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were there; Nowhere line: voices from Manus Island (2015 Schrank), which is narrated by two asylum-seeking men – one of whom is the recognised author Behrouz Boochani – detained in Australia’s Manus Island Offshore Processing Centre, as they recount the dangerous journeys that brought them to the island and their memories of the riot that erupted there in 2014; The Tower (Maitland 2016) which explores the impact of the 1966 mass shooting at the clock tower in Austin, Texas in the United States through a mixture of live footage and animation; Liyana (Kopp & Kopp 2017) in which renowned traditional South African storyteller Gcine Mhlophe co-created an animated documentary with five AIDS orphans from eSwatini who use their past trauma to create an African fairy tale together; After the Apology (Behrendt 2017) which is a documentary mixing live action footage and animation that shows the extent to which Australian aboriginal children are still being removed from their parents a decade after the official apology made to the victims of forced child removal by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions; Tehran Taboo (Soozandeh 2017) that is an animated film about the everyday life of a sex worker in contemporary Tehran who is forced to take her young son with her while she visits clients and moves through a city inundated with drugs and male hypocrisy; Funan (Do 2018) depicts the struggle of a young mother to find her four year old son who has been taken from her by the regime during the Khmer Rouge revolution (1975–9) in Cambodia; and Chris the Swiss (Kofmel 2018) which is a film set in Croatia in 1992. In the middle of the war, a young journalists’ body is found dressed in the uniform of an international mercenary group and 19 years later, his cousin Anja Kofmel tells his story in this animated film. Additionally, as with graphic narratives that are based on them, animated documentaries focus on the drawn animated form and reveal that animation carries in it the trances of the artist’s hand. This links the viewer’s eyes and the artist’s hands together closely in an embodied encounter of shared meaning making. It is this potential for meeting and sharing that the ‘dark’ writing of forms such as graphic narratives, animated documentaries and online interactive documentary, to be discussed below, supports. I will now briefly discuss the new form of online interactive documentary in the light of its ability to support an embodied reading/viewing and accommodate the ineffable through engaging in ‘dark’ writing.

A Spectrum of Non-Fictional, Visual Narrative Forms between Experience and Representation In this book, I have argued that graphic narratives provide a unique opportunity for accommodating the ineffable when we try to represent experience, thus increasing the ambit of what experiences we can share.

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They do this because they are visual and pictural (as discussed in Chapter 1) narratives. As such, they support an embodied reading through facilitating the interaction of the reader/viewer’s and artist’s bodies by facilitating access to both the processes of making and reading the text and through having to involve the reader/viewer in evoking other senses entirely through the visual. At the same time, they promote a highly reflective reading/viewing of the narrative because the reader/viewer not only chooses how to sequence the panels in the narrative but also inserts themselves into the gutters to create multiple narrative connections between panels. Another form which works in a similar way is multimodal literature. (Both graphic narratives and multimodal literature may be printed or digital, however, for the sake of clarity I have confined much of my analysis to printed forms of graphic narrative and so will also refer to printed forms of multimodal literature here.) Multimodal printed literature is defined by Alison Gibbons (2010) as an experimental literary genre in which multiple communicative modes (mainly the verbal, visual and haptic) are used to communicate story. I prefer to define such texts as representing through written words, and including pictural and haptic aspects, since they also evoke the sense of sound through the visual and are thus not solely verbal in this sense. Such texts are difficult to categorise due to their hybridity and their experimental forms, which draw on the aesthetics of scrapbooks, sketch books, journals and collage. In Gibbons’ (2010) definition, the emphasis on ‘printed’ excludes digital, bringing attention to the physical or material aspects of the book and how these aspects contribute to the meaning of the text and its overarching narrative. Examples of non-fictional multimodal printed literature include Michael Rosen’s (2005) Sad Book; Susan Howe’s The Midnight (2003) and Anne Carson’s Nox (2010). Although such printed books may allow multiple possibilities for narrative sequencing, they tend to focus less on providing multiple possibilities for narrative sequencing and have fewer gutters for the reader/viewer to project their interpretation into than graphic narratives. However, printed comics and graphic narratives can technically be considered a type of multimodal printed literature. This is because both are sequential visual narratives, which invite an intense degree of interaction from readers/viewers where readers/viewers may choose from an array of possible linear organisational structures in the narrative. These texts are also often self-consciously aware of themselves as artifice. Therefore, I treat the distinction between them as one of genre rather than one of medium delineated by significant structural differences. Other forms of non-fictional visual narrative tend to be more consistently digital or digital hybrids. Lev Manovich’s (2002) now dated but still pervasive understanding of new media forms as being organised by the logic of the database as opposed to the logic of narrative is a relevant starting point for the discussion of the narrative structure of

176 ‘Dark’ Writing in New Aesthetic Forms these forms. Manovich argues that websites and the interactive, navigable three-dimensional space we typically find in computer games have become the two major ways of building knowledge in our times. He argues that there are specific associated new media forms attached to each of these knowledge building categories and that these two categories have now even eclipsed film (which had already eclipsed more traditional literary forms) as the predominant way of building knowledge. Examples of new media forms that are associated with the data base way of structuring knowledge are websites, where the form is dictated by the goal to arrange data or information so that one can access it easily. Manovich (2002) asserts that since access to information is paramount, being self-conscious of itself as a medium has not typically been a concern of texts in texts in this form. On the other hand, he argues that in new media forms associated with navigable, three-dimensional space (for example, computer games), the formal qualities of the aesthetics are largely dictated by the goal of psychologically immersing the user/viewer in a virtual world and as a result these texts tend to have a greater focus on narrative and also tend to be more aware of their own form. I would argue that Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) notion of ‘windows’ logic (discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to graphic narratives) is applicable to computer games too, but not only to them, but in some degree to all non-fictional, visual narratives, which are aware of their own artifice to greater or lesser extent. This means that the user/viewer is immersed (through ‘hypermediacy’) in the game-world or text by what becomes visible through the ‘window’ (whether this is physically hand drawn in a panel or visible through a screen), whilst at the same time being constantly aware that what he/she is seeing is mediated. Thus, the reading/ viewing process of this form involves a combination of physical intensity and cerebral mediation that together form a defining feature of reality. This emphasises the process of representation as an explicit part of the way in which these texts can be engaged with. Additionally, many texts along the non-fictional, visual narrative spectrum openly concern themselves with the tension between fiction and non-fiction in terms of the content of their narratives (Sacco’s work and the Waltz (film) and graphic narratives are cases in point). In the case of online interactive documentaries and alternate reality games, this tension between fiction and non-fiction becomes even more explicitly communicated to the reader/viewer when he/she is not only invited to allow the visual text to arouse his/her body and take part in the sequencing and interpretation of narrative meaning, but is also engaged in the process of representation as the text elicits the literal generation of the narrative content itself from the reader/viewer. Although Wikis do this too to some extent, they are often less visually arousing and support less opportunities for multiple readers/viewers to become involved in generating multiple narrative possibilities at once.

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Although too rigid a distinction between Manovich’s (2002) two organising structures of database and narrative has since been disputed, distinguishing representational forms by narrative structure is still useful for the purpose of understanding the space between representation and experience and how the reader/viewer of a representation is involved in creating and projecting experience from this. Collaborative and interactive new media representations that engage the viewer/user in actually getting involved in contributing, not only to the narrative structure of the text but also its content, are located at an important juncture in the experience-representation complex, potentially arresting narrative control from a single source and providing new opportunities for the sharing of experiences. Online Interactive Documentary Other texts that occupy the space between representation and experience by supporting a high degree of viewer/user interaction in narrative creation and structuring are online interactive documentaries. While these may, in their simplest form, just have the goal of disseminating information, they may on the other hand (and like other closely related forms) be highly conscious of their own artifice and of conveying their narrative through a carefully structured and subjective narrative voice. These are hybrid digital texts which while self-contained, also exceed traditional textual boundaries in how they are projected into the physical world. As such, they are a different medium to printed graphic narratives (and printed multimodal books) in terms of their relationship to the possibilities that they open for physically supporting opportunities for multiple narrative structures. However, they are similar in this regard (and in varying degrees) to the related hybrid digital genres of alternate reality games, audio-visual essay films and interactive Wiki databases. A diagram of categories on this textual continuum is indicated in Figure 5.1. The above diagram would suggest that my classification of the online interactive documentary differs from several scholars who have recognised it as an emergent medium in its own right. I classify online interactive documentaries as merely one genre in the digital, nonfictional, visual narrative (examples of which are indicated in purple above) medium alongside other hybrid genres that may include alternate reality games, audio visual essays and Wikis. A key feature of online interactive documentaries is the possibility of multiple multi-linear narratives that they support in a hybrid, but predominately digital medium. Studying the whole formal spectrum of non-fictional, visual narratives can tell us much about interactivity and the space between experience and representation, especially as the texts along this spectrum are collaborative forms. In the online interactive documentary, the possibilities for collaboration are multiple, involve both the sequencing and generation of

graphic narratives

alternate reality games

Multiple, multi linear narratives

multimodal books

online interactive documentaries

Wikis

Single, linear narratives

audio visual essays

live action documentary films

DIGITAL

animated documentary films

Figure 5.1 Interactivity index of non-fictional, visual narrative forms by linearity (mediums indicated by shade).

PHYSICAL

art installations

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content and tend to leave digital traces for us to study. This is in keeping with Kate Nash’s definition of online interactive documentaries where

[t]he potential for audiences to interact with documentary in various ways is at the heart of what makes these new modes of documentary

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distinctive; audiences are potentially able to engage in a range of practices from navigating virtual environments, to choosing video content from a database, taking part in ‘chat’ sessions and creating content and voice as authorship vs voice as social participation. (Nash 2014, p. 383) On the other hand, scholars like Stuart Dinmore (Dinmore 2014, p. 124) classify online interactive documentaries as a database rather than a narrative form even though they may note that this type of text moves documentary from a more passive transmission in the direction of a more collaborative engagement. Siobhan O’Flynn (2012, p. 143) also uses the notions of database narratives as theorised in the early 2000s to mean randomised, algorithmic cinematic forms. However, she adds to this ‘the impact of ubiquitous computing and the development of Web 2.0 platforms, social media, mobile and tablet devices as multiple screens’ have contributed markedly to the uptake of this participatory, collaborative representation of reality. As such, interactive documentaries ‘can be contrasted with web-based documentaries (webdocs) that use the Web as a broadcast platform for traditional linear documentaries, and which may or may not have interactive paratextual components’ (O’Flynn 2012, p. 142). The inclusion of collaborative online platforms such as networking sites, social media, blogs, Wikis, tagging and video sharing as part of these forms include the audience in the production of such texts in new ways. This implies that static assumptions about levels of interactivity in online interactive texts (such as those assumed in Figure 5.1 previously) must always turn out to be reductive and inadequate although these may nonetheless be used as a starting point for thinking about the categorising of the levels of interactivity in such texts. Due to the slippage between genres in the medium of digital, nonfictional, visual narratives, a discrete definition of online interactive documentaries is difficult to come by. For this reason, I will attempt to further our understanding of these texts by briefly discussing some examples and highlighting the ways in which these cross boundaries of form and content, representation and experience. Julia Scott-Stevenson (2012, p. 87) has noted that the recent lowering cost of technological tools as well as the traditionally low costs of non-fictional film forms for which actors do not need to be hired has led to a wave of new low-end productions such as ‘video diaries on YouTube and mobile phone camera categories in film festivals’ which are closely related to the online interactive documentary. These new media genres are variously called transmedia, cross-platform or interactive documentaries. Alongside these developments, professional documentary filmmakers are being forced to re-think the relationship between fiction and non-fiction especially in terms of the possibilities of non-linearity and the novel, collaborative approaches to narrative that these texts open up. This is because the experience for the reader/viewer is not passive as he/she takes part in the

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structuring of the narrative with his/her mouse, by clicking on various bits of content if and when he/she chooses to. This has far-reaching implications beyond just the narrative structure of these works as it means that even the length of the work is not able to be pre-determined by its authors or producers but happens in collaboration with the viewer/user. Scott-Stevenson (2012) also furthers our understanding of interactive documentary by pointing out that it even exceeds the narrative structure of the closely related genre of games. She notes that making an interactive documentary is not as simple as placing chunks of linear content online, nor does it necessarily mean implementing a game-like structure, with the viewer becoming a central participant in the unfolding of events. (2012, p. 87) What her comparison pinpoints is the multiple narrative structures that these texts support. This means that traditional storytelling techniques need to be balanced with other elements that are particularly common within web-based platforms including that they often contain shorter forms if content and serialised or episodic work and also encourage community and viewer engagement. Nonetheless, production decisions range beyond what would be considered in making traditional documentary or even animated documentary forms with more traditional linear narratives. In online interactive documentaries, production and narrative decisions include not only questions such as whether a text should be portrayed using live action footage or animation but also whether the text should be made within a particular digital medium at all. Questions such as should this be a smartphone application or an installation become pertinent. Scott-Stevenson (2012) also mentions the following features of online interactive documentary texts: that they should be informed by their unique mode of production and that they tend to be released to audiences immediately (even though audiences may struggle to find them online). This implies that these texts may be thought of as storytelling across multiple forms of media, with each element making distinctive contributions to a user’s understanding, where a user’s actions affect their experience of content across multiple platforms. This also suggests that in the online space, audiences are fragmented across myriad sites and it can be less than clear who is actually watching and engaging, even though it is probably safe to assume that young people on tablets and smartphones definitely form part of this audience. Scott-Stevenson defines this new media form most usefully by way of listing examples of them such as Highrise (2009 Cizek) which provides a glimpse into the experience of ordinary people living in high-rise apartments in 13 cities around the world. This interactive documentary is online and includes still photography, audio interviews and video filmed with a 360-degree camera. However, this text was first screened at a live event in Toronto in 2015 which combined scripted and unscripted,

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recorded and live storytelling and was scored on stage by electronic musicians. It was also presented by a host who improvised conversation with the audience at the event. This also made it akin to installation art, a talk show or a music concert. Another pertinent example of online interactive documentary that helps us to define this form is Out my window (2010 Cizek). This work is one component of the larger ongoing collaborative media project called Highrise (2009 Cizek) described above. Out my window was also presented as an installation at the International Documentary Film Festival in 2011. Since its launch in 2009, Highrise (Cizek 2009) has generated many related projects, including mixed media, interactive documentaries, mobile productions, live presentations, installations and films. Collectively, the projects envision investigating how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation rather than just to document it; and to help re-invent what it means to be an urban species in the 21st century. (Cizek 2009, n.p.) Katerina Cizek speaks of this form as being highly collaborative and curatorial in a way that extends our understanding of collaboration. She describes the collaborative process as being particularly far reaching and stretching beyond the documentary content and the online space to the physical production of the work and the residents of buildings, city departments and landlords who are involved. Someone else who extends this notion of audience collaboration in the creation of online documentary even further is Christina Rupp (2014): She builds it into a framework for identifying and analysing four different ways audiences can participate in interactive documentary as the (1) viewers, (2) commentators and sharers, (3) explorers and (4) co-creators or collaborators (Rupp 2014, p. 2). Another example text that may help us extend the definition of the online interactive documentary is the innovative and effective transmedia production entitled Collapsus (2010 Pallotta). Set in the near future, Collapsus is a hybrid production that blends documentary, drama, animation and interactivity. This story follows how the impending energy crisis affects ten young people, while international powers battle with political dissension and a fearful population during transition from fossil fuel to alternative fuels in a three-screen interface. The producers, Submarine Channel, were inspired to take a serious documentary subject and present it to audiences that were not traditional documentary viewers. This example indicates that this form of storytelling may be interactive and highly immersive as it involves the audience in a bodily way in the structuring of the narrative by eliciting from them, clicks of the mouse on various windows of content as well as simultaneously provoking intense reflection upon the story’s politically charged topic. Examples like this one take animated documentary to the next level in that through animation, they are able to show what cannot be filmed

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and through their focus on interactivity and involving the audience in creating the narrative content themselves. In doing so, they engage users/ viewers in collaboratively considering, generating and sharing aspects such as state of mind that occur outside the frame of what is visible. This is why such examples are particularly good exemplars of ‘dark’ writing and its support of dynamic, performative texts that may facilitate meeting, collaboration and the sharing of experiences. Other groundbreaking, hybrid digital, non-fictional visual texts that facilitate a high degree of interactivity are Jane McGonigal’s alternate reality games World without oil (2007), Urgent evoke (2007) and Lance Weiler’s Pandemic (2011). The latter has also been billed as a short film, immersive installation. Like graphic narratives, these texts blur the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, representation and experience and have used hypothetical frameworks for projecting near-future scenarios to invite audiences to address and/or ‘solve’ crises and generate narratives in the process. Yet another notable example of such a cross-generic hybrid text is the interactive website for Errol Morris’ live action documentary film Standard operating procedure (2008) which explores the photographs of torture and abuse of prisoners by the United States military in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. On this website accompanying the documentary film, viewers/users can look through the photographs of American soldiers torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in any sequence they like. Each photo is accompanied by explanations from the soldiers involved as well as expert commentary. These examples accord with Kerric Harvey’s (2012) nuanced definition of interactivity in this context, which goes beyond mere viewer/user interaction with the text itself, but explicitly expands the context to include para-textual elements. It is this that makes online, interactive documentary distinctive, the fact that it extends our understanding of interactivity and sharing in the space between experience and representation. Harvey (2012, p. 192) claims that: In sum, the ‘interactivity’ aspect of an interactive documentary can take many different forms and can be located at any given point in the production, transmission and reception process. It can appear in the way in which visual and audio material is gathered (crowd-sourced content); it can be inherent in the way in which ‘authoring’ is perceived. It can dictate how the ‘story structure’ unfolds, and it can be especially conspicuous in the process by which ‘audiences’ affect the film itself. In any and all of these iterations, however, the driving idea is a movement away from thinking of the screen media as something that one set of people create, and another set of people consume. This is primarily because, as O’Flynn (2012) indicates, interactivity is no longer just about authorial control and who generates the narrative content and ordering. Instead, it varies across texts, many of which are no longer finite or closed repositories of content in which the user/

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viewer must simply make choices about narrative sequencing. Indeed, as O’Flynn (2012) has asserted, meaning making has become even more collaborative than we had previously imagined. Meaning today is no longer provided, controlled or conveyed solely by the ‘authored’ text as …Barthes conceived. Instead, texts are disrupted, remixed, created and distributed by audiences who bypass earlier models of production and reception. Meaning is also generated in the interactions of audiences as networked communities, responding to online content and to each other, shifting the centre of gravity… (O’Flynn 2012, p. 156) And studying the online interactive documentary, alongside other non-fictional, visual narratives (such as graphic narratives) allow us to map out the space between representation and experience in more and more nuanced ways. This augments our understanding of interactivity and extends the notion of representation, as an unpredictable method of sharing experiences. It suggests a process that facilitates meeting and sharing not only in visually immersive and embodied ways, but also in ways that are not fully under our control. In this sense, such texts may also be said to support the ineffable in the way they represent. Applying ‘Dark’ Writing to Online Interactive Documentary So far in this chapter, I have suggested that along with graphic narratives and animated documentary films, it is possible that new hybrid non-fictional visual forms such as the online interactive documentaries may also assist us to share experiences by facilitating a complex web of interactions between text and context. This has the potential to reorientate us ethically and enable us to intervene politically. This is because the online interactive documentary form and its closely related genres of alternate reality games and audio-visual essayistic films also hold potential for accommodating the ineffable in our experiences. In her discussion of the deep understanding of interactivity that studying online interactive documentary gives is, Sandra Gaudenzi goes as far as to state that the online interactive documentary is a ‘relational object that requires the agency and interactivity of the audience’ (Gaudenzi 2011, n.p.) for it to exist as a text at all. In other words, this representational form is distinguished by its ability to facilitate Carter’s (2009, 2013) space of chance meeting (discussed in Chapter 1) and the possibility of shared experience. Furthermore, scholars such as Hannah Brasier (2017), in their likening of online interactive documentaries to essayistic film or the audio-visual essay, also point to the potential of such texts for accommodating the ineffable aspects of our experiences. This is because these texts support a multi-linear narrative structure and a complex and collaborative, yet distinct narrative voice. Brasier (2017) notes the breadth within the online interactive documentary category by

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pointing out that these texts may range from using either the more traditional expository documentary voice-over that presents us with facts and explains the images to us, to a more essayistic film voice, which exceeds expository narration and preserves the ‘subjective, wavering or somewhat unsure’ qualities of the narrative voice (Brasier 2017, p. 34). She also notes that seen in this way, the documentary voice extends beyond the singular voice of the filmmaker to emerge from multiple filmic elements to include many individuals and institutions involved in the making, arranging and receiving of such highly collaborative texts. Furthermore, she emphasises that narrative voice in such works is often made elusive because the text and images of the film do not explain each other; inviting the viewer to think through the relationship between text and image because the film does not do this for them. This elusive voice is often achieved through a combination of an uncertain and fragmented voice-over with observational images of world that create a complex relationship between words and pictures. (Brasier 2017, p. 35) When the explanation of the images or the narrative accompanying the images (in written words or voice-over) is disconnected from the images and the viewer/user is able to re-arrange and circumvent the images and explanations in some way, then even more possibilities for multiple narrative trajectories are opened up. This is closely reminiscent of the discussion of the frame of words and images in the context of graphic narratives and the recitant and the monstrator (Groensteen 2010b), in the previous chapter. This discussion underlines the need to be able to identify and describe a range of narrative voices for an interactive form that involves the audience in the creation of the text’s meaning. The relationship between words and images create different narrative positions which interact in the text. These narrative interactions create a space to accommodate the ineffable so that aspects of the representation of experience in such texts, which may have been previously invisible, are now able to be shared. Brasier has created an interactive essayistic film entitled Grey Skies/ Blue Skies (Brasier 2015) to share her experience of initially feeling restless in Melbourne and contemplating a subsequent move to San Francisco. Brasier argues that the disconnection between the images and the narrative voice in her text exposes an unpredictable connotative space of multiple linearities in her documentary to be filled by the user/viewer. Grey Skies/ Blue Skies allows users to occupy a physical space to stop and contemplate the images they are seeing and the voice-over they are hearing, where this agency allows their contemplation to inform what they will see next and the pacing…This expansion of space between expressed thoughts and documentary images positions the user physically between the voice-over and the image. As a user

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interacts with the project they watch the clip currently playing, the relational pattern and software provide them with three thumbnails, which they then select from to open a new playing clip, and a new set of thumbnails become available. If the user does not click a new thumbnail the images of the project will stop, however the voice-over will continue. As the voice-over continues the user is invited to think about which clip to open next from the thumbnails available to them, without the images of the film continuing forward while they are still contemplating what they are seeing and hearing in the browser. (Brasier 2017, p. 41) In opening up a space for the user/viewer to fill, this disjuncture between words and images that is preserved in the text allows the user/viewer to experience affective knowing (Miles 2014) a more adequate form of knowledge that merely vision allows. This affective knowing is more adequate because it accommodates unpredictability, involves the participation of the user/viewer and preserves the ineffable in our experience. Adrian Miles (2014) scrutinises the aspect of interactivity as a defining characteristic of online interactive documentaries and the way they span the gap between representation and experience. Strikingly, he suggests that their interactivity is primarily characterised by the way they manage to preserve uncertainty. He notes that online interactive documentaries can be fragmented and incoherent by reasons of design, choice or something more, in turn manifesting this uncertainty within them. Moreover, since the user/viewer fills the space between images and voice-over and is able to pause and re-direct the narrative, he/she is able to move the text forward at his/her own pace as he/she comes to comprehend it. This means that knowledge comes from the user/viewer’s consideration of when to act in between these indeterminate fragments of the narrative, rather than just from what he/she observes. This more adequate kind of knowing is called affective knowledge by Miles (2014, p. 79). He declares that ‘[d]ocumentary, when reconsidered as …affective knowing, offers wonderment and knowledge as its account for what is, or might be’ (p. 79). Characterised in this way, online interactive documentary offers a clear example of including the notion of the unknowing position within what can be known and thereby providing an avenue for a more adequate account of experience as experience that moves towards closing the gap between representation and experience. This ineffability is partially facilitated by the transmission of affect as discussed in Chapter 3. Although Brasier’s experience in Grey Skies/Blue Skies (2015) is of discomfort rather than pain and violence, her text illustrates how a space may be opened up for meeting the user/viewer between the narrative voice and the images. When understood as a space of interaction and affective knowing, such a text demonstrates the power of non-fictional visual narratives to help us share uncomfortable experiences when they accommodate the ineffable.

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Summary Chapter 1 of this book expanded upon the broad process of what an adequate representation of violence and trauma entails by discussing the details and benefits of the field of aesthetics and non-fictional visual expressions were proposed as a means to expand the ambit of what violent and traumatic experiences may be expressed. Following the first chapter, in Chapter 2, I delved into the history of the graphic narrative form in some detail and argued for why this form is particularly adept at representing the ineffable aspects of violence. In doing this, I demonstrated that non-fictional, visual aesthetic forms such as graphic narratives have a vital role to play in helping us to find avenues to express what seems to be too horrific for words, particularly in situations of ongoing violence, involving subaltern subjects. In this regard, I briefly identified my model of the five-frame approach to how the graphic narrative form may use ‘dark’ writing to accommodate the ineffable and help us to represent and interpret experiences of violence. In Chapter 3, I analysed the ineffable violence in Joe Sacco’s (2009) graphic narrative Footnotes in Gaza and its depiction of the Khan Younis massacre in 1956 from an outsider’s perspective in order to explore the ineffable aspects of violence in this graphic narrative. I discussed how the structural mechanics of the graphic narrative form – words and images, the gutters and logic of panels – work together to accommodate the ineffable and extend our ability to share experiences. I also discussed how haptic visuality (Marks 2000) and a particular version of affect theory may help to preserve the ineffable in Sacco’s text, without explaining it away. In Chapter 4, I analysed the ineffable violence in Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s (2009) graphic narrative Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story from an insider’s perspective in order to discuss what it might mean to have knowledge of an experience one has lived through but forgotten. I ended the chapter with a discussion of how my approach to accuracy and contested events might be melded into an ethical approach to the instigation of the violence and trauma of war through ‘dark’ writing, especially in cases where the violence is ongoing. In the final chapter, I have sought to continue the discussion of my approach of identifying and representing the ineffable aspects of violence by broadening the conversation to encompass other non-fictional visual aesthetic forms, such as animated documentaries and online interactive documentaries. I briefly discussed how the animated documentary film form preserves the ineffable and is thus able to help us share aspects of the experience of violence that live action footage cannot. I then also discussed how the interactive online documentary form, which in some ways builds on and extends the animated documentary form, is part of a continuum of non-fictional visual texts which support interactivity. I explained how such texts

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support the ineffable and affective knowing in different ways, making them effective avenues to explore for the sharing of violent and traumatic experiences.

Why This Book Matters This book began with an invitation to engage with the seduction of violence and ‘come a little nearer and have a look at the needles?’ writing, inscribing pain into another living body (Kafka 1949, p. 147) in an attempt to consider whether painful experiences may be represented and shared. Throughout history, humans have inscribed pain onto other human’s bodies, whether deliberately or accidentally, sometimes in view of others and sometimes in secrecy. Particularly when these experiences constitute trauma or physical pain and occur in the context of the collective assault of war, we tend to view them as unspeakable and therefore unable to be shared. But what if we are able to share them? Perhaps being able to share them with others, being able to express some of them, whether we read them off our own bodies or the bodies of others, may stop us in our tracks. We need to re-orientate our epistemological stance on the representation of violence and trauma in war and conflict to enable us to instigate and share such experiences. This may be done through the method of ‘dark’ writing which expressly includes the ineffable in the way it transmits experiences of violence and trauma and thus may help us to do this in a more complex way where content and process knowledge are both activated and made to rub up against each other in a reinvigorated understanding of the representational process and our involvement in it. This book thus nudges us in the direction of an epistemology that accommodates not knowing and not seeing and takes them seriously as parts of the knowledge we build. It opens up a space in the hegemony of scientific knowledge and the obsession with accuracy and the known for a re-evaluation of a not-knowing position. This book argues that aesthetics has an important role to play in this regard. It emphasises that art in general, and non-fictional visual narrative forms, may help us to experience and to represent things that may otherwise remain concealed, because this form of representing can accommodate the ineffable. This is important because the danger is that if we cleave to the notion that horrific violence is somehow unrepresentable, we run the risk that it and its opposite (icy indifference, complacency and political apathy) remain concealed and unable to be challenged. ‘Dark’ writing can expand the ambit of what we are able to represent because it supports a deep engagement with the dynamism, performativity and embodiment of experience of the representation process, in combination with the conscious and rational reflection on it. This is because as a form of representation that supports movement, ‘dark’ writing works against the portrayal

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of experience as manifest in discrete events. This matters, particularly in the representation of violence because for the pain and trauma of those in situations of ongoing violence to begin to be understood, literary trauma studies needs to continue to move away from a paradigm that sees trauma simply as a pathology, something we get over and can choose to go back to or not. The pursuit of the goal of pathologising and conceiving of trauma as unspeakable in western trauma theory has meant that accuracy and direct representation (often through forms of realism) have come to dominate our understanding to the exclusion of imagination, memory and modes of representation which not only accommodate but also preserve the inexplicable. For those who must live in situations of ongoing trauma, trauma is not something that ceases or may be explained away. These cases teach us that healing does not expunge painful experiences by explaining them away but rather accommodates them in our expression of them as partially ineffable. This opens up a way to communicate how we go on living with the irrevocable presence of trauma and the changes that this necessarily wreaks on our sense of being in the world. In order to break out from the Modernist and psychologically universalist stranglehold that psychoanalysis places on us, a reconfigured way of representing and reading/viewing trauma through ‘dark’ writing is necessary. ‘Dark’ writing supports forms of indirect representation of pain and trauma through aesthetics in ways that do not force us to converge on enlightened answers, but instead support shared questioning and the preservation of vulnerability, incompleteness and ineffability. The specific visual, non-fictional forms of aesthetic representation analysed in this book support the ineffable and thus work to represent violence through ‘dark’ writing. It is in visual, non-fictional aesthetic forms that we may probe the relationship between representation and experience, the mind and the body, words and images, reflection and immersion crucial for understanding more about and sharing of experiences, without explaining them away. Moreover, in addition to arguing that these visual, nonfictional forms show us more than we might otherwise see or come to know, I have proposed that these forms support an ethical reorientation and political engagement with what they represent as they support affective knowing and the preservation of ineffability, rather than merely making trauma directly visible. Directly describing what we already know about such experiences seems inadequate in going beyond current political impasses inherited from the binary representations of violence and trauma still present within colonial discourse. In these increasingly politically polarised times, what could be more important than our ethical reorientation towards our own experiences and the experiences of others so that we are able to more deeply share perspectives? This can only be achieved through the passionate pursuit of being able to ever-more adequately represent experiences of violence and trauma.

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Appendix A

Images referred to in Chapter 3

List of figures

Figure A1 Page 384 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009).

200 Appendix A: Images in Chapter 3

Figure A2 Page 385 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009).

Appendix A: Images in Chapter 3

Figure A3 Page 111 Panel 3 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009).

201

202

Appendix A: Images in Chapter 3

Figure A4 Page 113 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009).

Appendix A: Images in Chapter 3

Figure A5 Page 110 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009).

203

Figure A6 Page 388 of Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco 2009).

Figure A7 Page 389 of Footnotes in Gaza a(Sacco 2009).

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures. Abdelrazaq, L.: Baddawi 53 accuracy 25; Agamben’s view 55; ‘dark’ writing 55–6; experience and representation 55, 67; Footnotes in Gaza 64, 67; in graphic narrative form 117–27; and inaccuracy 54; indefiniteness against 7; knowledge, representational/nonrepresentational 55–6; memory, ‘dark’ writing of 127–37; politics of ‘dark’ writing 68–71; and precision 56; process knowledge 54; re-evaluation of 57; of representation 36; Sacco as witness (see Sacco, J.); seeing and knowing 46, 55; structural frames of 5; violence, representations of 55 aesthetics: approaching ineffable through 25–7; comics 52; ‘dark’ writing violence (see ‘dark’ writing); definition 26; and ethics 27; forensic (see forensic aesthetics); graphic narrative form 27; indirect representation and 39; between making and thinking 14; and media 164; painterly forms (see painterly aesthetic forms); reality, quality of 27; in re-imagining representation 5; representation of experience 14; seeking truth 27; self-reflexivity 26–7; sharing experiences 26, 27; visual 21; western 26 affect(s): and effects of violence 67; Massumi’s concept of 89; numbness 99, 101–6; of shame 64, 99, 106–11; theorists 68 To Afghanistan and back (Rall) 52

After the last sky: Palestinian lives (Saïd) 59 Agamben, G. 3, 11, 28, 32, 46, 68, 89, 143; ethical challenge 139; experience and representation 139; ‘gray zone’ 70, 80, 86, 90, 95, 97, 137, 138, 153; guilt and innocence 140; Holocaust (Shoah) witness testimony 82; ‘invisible’ violence 138; knowing and seeing 139; readers/ viewers 139; remedy for memory loss 137; shame, notion of 138–9; soccer match 138; tensional, notion of 97; zone of indistinction 97 Ahmed, S. 68, 111, 141, 143, 159; emotion of pain 143–4 animated documentary 17, 58, 163, 165; After the Apology 174; applying ‘dark’ writing 168–74; audience response 169; Chris the Swiss 174; Funan 174; Green Wave 173; Irinka & Sandrinka 173; live action and animation 173; Nowhere line: voices from Manus Island 174; pictural forms 40; projection of narrative content 169; reader/viewer access 166; self-criticism 28; Tehran Taboo 174; The Tower 174; of war 24 animation: comics-style 166; digital animation technique 166, 173; frame-by-frame classic 172; interactive 36; realistic 172 art photographs 34 audio-visual essayistic films 177, 183 Auschwitz camp 28, 42, 106, 117, 138–42, 170

206

Index

Baddawi (Abdelrazaq) 53 Badiou, A. 14, 25, 30 Baiasu, R. 29, 66 Baldick, C. 122 Barthes, R. 33, 34, 101, 170 Batman: the dark knight returns (Miller) 43 Benčin, R. 14 Benjamin, W. 91, 93 Bergson, H. 131 Bergsonian memory 131 Bertozzi, N.: Jerusalem: the story of a city and a family 54 The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world (Scarry) 9 Bolter, D. 26, 45, 75, 132, 176 Boochani, B. 174 Brasier, H. 183, 184 Braverman, M. 100 Brialey, L. 130, 149 Bukatman, S. 44, 58, 144, 158, 168 The Burma chronicles (Delisle) 52 Butler, J. 33, 53, 54, 87, 100, 104, 115 Camera lucida: reflections on photography (Barthes) 33–4 camps: after massacre 118, 136, 138; Auschwitz 28, 42, 106, 117, 138–42, 170; images of 141; Palestinian refugee 117; Shatila refugee 113–14, 139; survivors 139 Carson, A. 175 Carter, P. 5, 12, 21, 34–5, 44, 58, 60, 103, 105, 136, 143, 153, 183; ‘dark’ from light writing, distinguishing 105; ‘dark’ writing, notion of (see ‘dark’ writing); the ineffable 12, 21 cartoons: comics 44; Naji al-Ali 53–4; Saba’aneh, Mohammad 54 Cavarero, A. 103 Chomsky, N. 51 chronophotography 44 Chute, H. 5, 27, 42–3, 47, 48, 49, 52, 53, 57, 63, 70, 84, 100, 144, 154, 162, 163, 164, 167 Citizen 133600 (Okubo) 52 Cizek, K. 181 Collingwood, R. 9 comics: aesthetics 43, 45, 52; American 52; animation 166; books 44; cartoon strips 44; ‘comics system of narration’ 149; definition 45, 56; fiction/ non-fiction continuum 43, 49,

52; gnomonic projections 95; gutters 50; and ‘invisible’ 50; journalism 66, 70–1, 163; memoirs 52; modern comic strip 43, 44; panels, logic of 44, 50, 58; photojournalistic 52; process and content knowledge 45; reader/ viewer 45, 56; relationships of movement through time 44; representational process 50, 144, 149; space 45; style animation 166; as visual/verbal medium 163 Craps, S. 2 cross-platform documentaries 179 ‘dark’ writing: aesthetic forms, violence in 21–5; anastomotic 12; to animated documentary 168–74; approaching ineffable through aesthetics (see aesthetics); approaching violence through images (see images); associations of violence 99–111; experiencerepresentation complex 6–10, 21–2; forensic aesthetics 12–13; framing accuracy (see accuracy); in graphic narrative form 41–2; indirect representation of trauma through images 10–11; indirect, shadowy process 23; the ineffable (see ineffable); Khamis, as witness 84–9; Khan Younis (see Khan Younis massacre); material and abstract, space between 22; of memory 127–37; mimetic representation 22; painterly aesthetic forms 30–2; politics of 68–71; as provider of process knowledge 44; ‘representational’ method 20; Sabra and Shatila (see Sabra & Shatila massacre); seeing and knowing 23, 49, 70; sharing experiences of violence 19–20; subject and world 12; traumatic experiences, sharing of 4; violence and trauma 12; violent experiences in new aesthetic forms (see violent experiences); visual aesthetics 21; Waltz with Bashir 113–17, 168–74; witnessing relationship 89–99 DeKoven, M. 144 De la Durantaye, L. 11 Deleuze, G. 7, 8, 9, 11, 143, 148 Delisle, G.: The Burma chronicles 52

Index 207 Derrida, J. 7, 8, 14, 30, 39, 47; experiences of war 31; The truth in painting 25, 30, 32 de Spinoza, B. 107 Dewey, J. 9 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 88, 133, 154 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III 2 digital animation technique 166, 173 Dinmore, S. 179 dream: Carmi’s dream sequence 120, 121, 122, 124–5, 132, 152, 159; surrealistic dream sequence 123–4; ‘uncontrollable fear’ sequence 125–6 Eisner, W.: A contract with God 43 El-Haddad, L. 65 embodiment: of affect 107; of experience 11, 144, 187; of pain 24; of reading/viewing 95; for representations 46, 144 emotion(s): body and 91; of pain 143–4; politics of 68; Sacco’s 83, 106, 110; of shame 141 ethical: and aesthetics 27, 29, 61; challenge 139; in Foucauldian sense 48; images and 46; and ineffable, relationship between 27–9; re-examination 106; representation 13–18, 139; self-criticism 107; through shame 137–45; violence and trauma 28; witness 159 experience: affective aspects 168; ineffable aspects 168; memory and relation of 7; over representation 8–9; process of relating or sharing 29; and reflection 7; of suffering 4; of violence 19 experience-representation complex: accurate description 9–10; body and mind 9; experience and reflection 7; experiences of violence 19; experiencing over representation 8–9; graphic narratives 5; Heidegger’s understanding of being 7, 8; non-fictional visual narrative forms 174–85; process of mimesis 8; quality of violence 10; representation and real life 6; selfconsciousness 8; subject’s awareness of the world 7; understanding of representation 7–8

eyewitness 36, 76, 82, 162, 166 factual photographic documentation 51, 166 fiction: comics 43, 49, 52; Modernist 74; novel 43 film 45, 164; animated (see animated documentary); Hollywood 165; live action 165; medium 165; phenomenological 165; twin logics of immediacy and hypermediacy 165, 167; viewers of 165 Fischer, N. 54; Graphic novels explore an (un-) holy land 54 five-frame approach 15, 17; accuracy 46, 54–6; gutters 46, 59–60; logic of panels 46, 57–9; violent associations 46, 61; words and images 46, 56–7 flashbacks 133; Folman’s 127, 128, 130; and memory 127; posttraumatic stress disorder 133 Folman, A. 17, 51, 52, 57, 59, 113, 114, 116, 117, 122, 127, 135, 146, 152, 153, 158, 168, 171–2, 186; ‘dark’ writing functions 135; emotion of shame 141; experience as experience 131; experience of violence 160; flashback 149; forgetting and flashbacks 134; graphic narrative 154, 156; guilty 140; Lebanese War, narrative of 135; moments of clarity 125; multicoloured gutters 125; narrative approaches 143; past massacres, events and sites of 135; protagonist and witness of massacre 120; representation and experience 131; Sabra and Shatila 141; seeing and knowing 142; self-consciousness 143; violence of experiences and remembering process 134; violent events 120; Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story 5, 43, 117; wordless images 148; words and images 150 Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco) 5, 43, 56, 62, 100, 186, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204; accuracy, frame of 64, 67; dark and ineffable ambiguities 65; ‘dark’ writing, process of 51–4, 63–4, 112; exclusionary discourse 66; experience-representation complex 65; five frames approach

208

Index

63–4; gutter, notion of 64; IsraelPalestine conflict 65; Khamis, Omm Nafez and Abu Antar, traumatised witnesses 64, 68–70, 69; Khan Younis massacre, 1956 15–16, 63–5; lived experience 66–7; logic of panels 64, 201; numbness 101; process and content knowledge 64; Rafah massacres, 1956 65; readers/ viewers 64–5, 66; words and images, frames of 64 forensic aesthetics: experiences of trauma 13; images of photography 12–13; ‘instigation’ process 13 Foucault, M. 7, 27, 48, 85 frame see five-frame approach Gaston, S. 31; history of narrative and war 31; rencounter, notion of 31 Gaudenzi, S. 183 Gibbon, J. 23, 35, 36, 38, 39, 150; Watchmen 43 Gibbons, A. 175 Gibbs, A. 2 Glidden, S. 54 Goethe 43 graphic narratives: to aesthetic forms 161–5; body and ethics 45–9; case of Persepolis 173; content, violence of 47; ‘dark’ writing 41–2; drawings and animations 172; ethical and aesthetic, intertwining 29; and ethics 163; experiencerepresentation complex 5; five frames approach 54–61; Footnotes in Gaza (Sacco) 51–4; graphic novels and comics 42–5; historical context of 51–4; images, drawn 169; ineffable aspects 15–16, 49–50; labour-intensive decoding 167; of Levantine (and IsraeliPalestinian) conflict 53, 54; logics of immediacy and hypermediacy 162, 165; non-fictional forms 44; notion of gutter 17; pictural forms 40; process of representation 119–20; readers/viewers 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 57, 118–19, 126, 144, 162, 164, 167; reality 162; representational and non-representational knowledge 47, 120, 162; selfconscious process 127; self-criticism 28; shame in 28; text and reality 118; textual strategy of surrealism

120; violence and trauma 45, 47; violence and trauma, experience of 5; violence of representation 47–8; Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky) 51–4; of war 24, 52, 59; war drawing 46; words and images 167 graphic novels 43, 53, 164; American 52; anti-Zionist 53; Eisner 43 Graphic novels explore an (un-) holy land (Fischer) 54 Groensteen, T. 144, 149; notion of ‘shadow narrator’ 149–50; recitant and monstrator 150, 154, 157, 158; words and images 148 Grosz, E. 131 Grusin, R. 26, 45, 75, 132, 176 Guibert, E.: The photographer 52 gutters 5, 17, 151–8; ‘anastomotic’ 59; context of ‘dark’ writing 60; dark gutters 153; depiction of ineffable 60; in graphic narratives 60; panel-to-panel transitions 60; ‘photographer’s imaginary framing 155, 155–6; reader/viewer 154, 157; representational and nonrepresentational knowledge 156–7; visual depiction of ineffable 59; of Waltz 152 Harper’s Magazine 65, 101 Harvey, K. 182 Hatfield, C. 43, 145 Hedges, C. 65, 169 Heidegger, M. 6–7, 7, 68, 115 Hirsch, M. 164 Hochberg, G. 170 Hodapp, J. 15 Holocaust films 172 Holocaust (Shoah) trauma 3 Honess Roe, A. 114, 164, 166, 171 horrific violence 187 Howe, S. 175 Howson, P. 36 How to understand Israel in 60 days or less (Glidden) 54 hypermediacy 26, 27, 45, 132 images: and ethics 46; handdrawn images 170; ineffable in graphic narratives and animated documentary 11; ‘invisibility’ 32; means of expressing pain 11; motionless 34; in motion pictures

Index 209 44; representational form, ineffable 32; seeing and knowing 11; silent (moving) image 11, 32; space and time 44; static 47; trauma through, indirect representation of 10–11; war drawings 35–9; war photographs 33–5; see also words and images immediacy, logic of 26, 27 indirect representation: forms of 4; of trauma 6 ineffable: effects of 26; and ethical, relationship between 27–9; experiences 21; inadequacy of representation 21; non-representational or process knowledge 29, 32; in representations of trauma 4–6; through aesthetics (see aesthetics); of trauma 20, 24, 28, 32; violence 5, 15, 17, 19–20, 20, 28, 32, 41 instigation process 13, 17–18, 24, 139, 145, 151, 161, 186 interactive documentary see online interactive documentary invisible violence 20, 62, 90, 98, 101, 110, 138, 166, 171 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers: memories of 168 Jambet, C. 2, 130, 134 Jaworski, K. 108–10 Jerusalem: the story of a city and a family (Yakin and Bertozzi) 54 Jobnik! An American girl’s adventures in the Israeli army (Libicki) 54 journalism: American 65, 66; comics 66, 70–1, 163; mass 66; photo 118; traditional 164 Kafka, F. 1, 187 Kamola, I. 66 Keenan, T. 13, 33, 108 Khamis: and Abu Antar 88; accuracy and facts 84, 88; blackness of experience 88–9; characters of 68–70, 69; ethical subject and representation 85; experience and representations 88; in first ‘panel’ 76; grief and guilt 87–8; haptic depictions of 80, 81, 85–6; as imperfect witness 79, 79, 84–9; knowledge creation 84; memory 133; Omm Nafez 86–7; physical

features 87; position of 87; reader’s/ viewers 86, 89; and Sacco 70; sight, emphasis on 84–5; Subhi’s death, experience of 87; violence and trauma without knowing 133; vision and knowledge 85 Khan Younis massacre 15–16, 100–1; depiction of 186; Footnotes in Gaza 63–7; Sacco’s frame of accuracy 67–99; survivors of 82; violence through ‘dark’ writing 99–111 Khatib, L. 136 Kristeva, J. 20 Langer, S. 9 language: inadequacy of 25; of ineffable 21; “meeting place” or sharing 21; and words 19 Levi, P. 139–40 Leys, R. 89 Libicki, M.: Jobnik! An American girl’s adventures in the Israeli army 54 literary modernism 43 live-action film 17, 165–6, 169, 171–4, 180, 186; Standard operating procedure 182 MacFarlane, E. 130, 149 Manovich, L. 175–6, 177 Marks, L.U. 68, 84, 85, 93, 97, 100 Massumi, B. 68, 89, 107 Maus (Spiegelman) 42–3, 51, 52, 74, 164 Maynard, P. 163 McCloud, S. 44, 45, 56, 57, 59; description of comics 145 McGonigal, J. 182 McLuhan, M. 44, 56 memoirs 52, 118, 164 memory 51; collective or cultural 136; ‘dark’ writing of 127–37; definition 136; dynamism of 127, 131; environment of 137; experience and representation 136; experience of violence 153; and flashback 127, 159; Folman’s 127, 129, 130–1; graphic narrative form 133; Khamis’s and Omm Nafez’s 133; loss 137; memory and body, union of 131; nature and psychology of 119; personal 137; public and private 136; relational envisioning, notion of 130; remembers and

210

Index

experiences 131, 133; seeing and knowing 131–2; sharing trauma 3; transgenerational 3; traumatic memory loss 4; Zionist collective memory 168–9 Mhlophe, G. 174 The Midnight (Howe) 175 Miles, A. 185 Miller, J.H. 12, 60; Batman: the dark knight returns 43 mimesis 3, 6–7, 14, 68, 91, 93, 97, 115, 145 modern comics 43 modernism 26, 27, 43 monstrator 149, 150, 154, 157–8, 184 Moore, A.: Watchmen 43 Morris, E. 182 Moyer, R.: archival photographic account 118; dead bodies, photographs of 132; photographic images 136, 143, 169 Nafez, Omm 80, 86, 133; memory 133 Nash, K. 178–9 news photographs 34, 99, 101 Nietzsche: ressentiment 156–7 non-fiction 43, 49, 52, 164, 173 non-fictional representational forms 162 non-fictional visual narrative form 18; digital or digital hybrids 175–6; between experience and representation 174–85; highly reflective reading/viewing 175; interactivity index 177, 178; by linearity 177, 178; multimodal printed literature, definition 175; new media forms 176–7; notion of ‘windows’ logic 176 non-representational knowledge 29, 47, 55–6, 70, 90, 96, 117, 120, 156–7, 162 Nora, P. 2–3, 135; ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’ 135; notion of environment of memory 137; notions of memory 136 Not the Israel my parents promised me (Pekar) 53 ‘novel’ see graphic novels Nox (Carson) 175 numbness 102; black gutters 104, 105; consumption of violence

104; identifying stories 103; Khan Younis massacre, aftermath of 104; ‘nasty stuff,’ ‘news’ and ‘the story’ 102–3, 106; ‘old’ story 105–6; recurrence of violence, aftermath and effect of 104; representation, process of 103–4; Sacco’s 101, 102; violence of war and conflict 101–2 objective violence 83, 89, 114 O’Flynn, S. 179, 182–3 Okubo, M.: Citizen 133600 52 ongoing violence 5–6, 9, 15, 17, 20, 24, 46, 88–9, 99, 111, 171, 186, 188 online interactive documentary 165, 166; affective knowing 185; applying ‘dark’ writing to 183–5; audio-visual essayistic films 183; collaborative online platforms 179; collaborative process 181; Collapsus 181–2; database narratives 179; definition 178–9; Grey Skies/Blue Skies 184–5; Highrise 180–1; hybrid digital texts 177; interactivity and sharing 182; live action footage or animation 180; multiple multi-linear narratives 177; narrative voice 184; new media genres 179; Out my window 181; readers/viewers 167, 179–80; reality games 182, 183; sharing experiences 183; smartphone application or an installation 180; traditional storytelling techniques 180; web-based documentaries (webdocs) 179; words and images 184 ontology 14, 23, 35, 68 O’Toole, M. 168 painful experiences 1–4, 187; ‘Condemned Man’ in In the penal colony 1; non-western minority groups 2; and trauma 188 painterly aesthetic forms: animated documentary film 32; content knowledge 31; graphic narratives 32; images, use of 30, 32; performative truths 30, 32; pictural forms 30, 31, 32; ‘truth in painting,’ Derrida’s 30, 32; see also aesthetics painterly forms see painterly aesthetic forms

Index 211 Palestine (Sacco) 51, 59, 96 panels, logic of 5, 158; comics 58; ‘dark’ writing 58–9; form of representation 58; presentation of time 57–8; reality 59 Pekar, Harvey: Not the Israel my parents promised me 53 perpetrators 2, 12, 17, 51, 66, 88, 108, 113, 117, 139–42, 160, 170–1 Persepolis: the story of a childhood (Satrapi) 52, 74 The photographer (Guibert) 52 photography 163; from Abu Ghraib 144; art 34; images of violence and distress 152; news 34, 99; pornographic 34; reader/viewer 163; war (see war photographs) Pickering, M. 64, 66, 115 pictorial 39–40, 45 pictural 30–2, 34, 35, 37–8, 40, 41, 44, 50, 145, 164, 175 ‘picture stories’ 43 political violence 3–4, 29, 173 Pollock, G. 3 Polonsky, D. 17, 51, 52, 57, 59, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120, 127, 135, 146, 152, 153, 158, 172, 186; events and sites of past massacres 135; graphic narrative 154, 156; narrative approaches 143; Ron Ben Yishai, massacre 118; Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story 5, 43, 117 Probyn, E. 68, 107, 140 psychological universalism 2 Rafah massacres 65, 100 Rall, T.: To Afghanistan and back 52 Rancière, J. 14, 26 realism 4, 162, 172 reality games: Pandemic 182; Urgent evoke 182; World without oil 182 recitant 149–50, 157, 158, 184 relational envisioning 130 rencounter, notion of 31 representation: benefits of ‘dark’ writing process 14–15; as mimesis 14; in moment/process 14, 25; ontology and 14; process of reading/viewing 3; and reality 37; re-imagining 5–6; systems 51; see also ‘dark’ writing Rosen, M. 175 rotoscoping 166 Rupp, C. 181

Sabin, R. 43 Sabra & Shatila massacre 17; act of genocide 113; ethics through shame 137–45; framing accuracy (see accuracy); gutters and panels 151–8; photographic image 142, 166; Waltz with Bashir 113–17; words and images 145–51 Sacco, J. 15, 16, 54, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65, 66, 117, 122, 162, 163; accuracy, notion of 77, 80, 82; confusion 70, 80, 82–3, 88, 109; content and context 105; ‘dark’ writing 73–4, 80, 82–4; differing accounts 77, 78; emotions 83, 106, 110; entanglement, process of 83; experience and representation 74–5, 82; ‘experience as experience’ 109; eyewitness testimony 76; fallible narrator and protagonist 71, 72–3; Footnotes in Gaza 5, 43, 56, 87; frame of accuracy (see accuracy); graphic narratives 52, 87, 93; guilt and grief 67, 83, 106; images 113; inaccuracy, re-evaluation of 83; ineffable violence 186; ‘the Israeli authorities’ and ‘the refugees’ 77–9; journalistic works 35–6, 52; knowing/seeing 73–4, 82; knowledge of events 74; modernist self-reflexivity 75; narrative perspective 76–7, 82, 92; non-representational knowledge 70; official UN report 80–1, 83; ‘oldness’ of stories 105; pain and conflict 80; Palestine 51, 59, 96; problematic positioning 74; readers/ viewers 71–7; refashioning 75; selfconscious struggle 71, 72–3; selfdepiction 74–5; shadowy process of understanding 83; shame, emotion of 83, 110; speech and written narrative 75; survivors’ memories 82; as witness 71–84 Sad Book (Rosen) 175 Saïd, E. 59, 67, 84, 100 Satrapi, M. 52, 163 Scanlon, M. 52, 65 Scarry, E. 9, 143; The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world 9–10; reality of physical pain 9–10 Schäuble, M. 51, 161–2, 164, 165, 166, 172

212 Index Scherr, R. 85 Scott-Stevenson, J. 179–80 Second European War 42 self: care of 27; cultivation of 27; self-criticism and cultivation 85; transformative relationship 28 self-consciousness 5, 27, 143, 166–7 self-criticism 28, 85, 107 self-reflexivity 26–7, 52, 57, 71, 75 sense of being 26, 66, 167, 188 Serres, M. 55, 89, 94, 95, 130 In the shadow of no towers (Spiegelman) 48 shame: cognitive process 107; emotion of 68; ethical re-examination 106; experiences of violence 64; framing ethics 137–45; in graphic narratives 28; guilt and grief 106, 107, 108; imperfect witness 106–7; the ineffable 108; of knowing/knowing without seeing 108, 139; in process of Folman 159; reader/viewer 107–8; re-evaluation of 140; Sacco’s expression of 110–11; subjectivity 106; witness 28; zone of contact 107, 140 silent images 11, 137 Sobchack, V. 165 Solomon, Z. 153, 154 Sontag, S. 34 Spiegelman, A. 42, 43, 51, 52, 162, 163; Maus 42–3, 164; In the shadow of no towers 48 Stallabrass, J. 37 surrealism 120, 122–4; dream sequence 122 Sylvester, C. 31 ‘talking cure,’ form 2 Töpffer 43 transgenerational memory 3 transmedia 179, 181 trauma: decolonisation of trauma studies 2; event-based model 2; experiences of 42; Holocaust (Shoah) 3; indirect representation 6; ineffable in representations of 4–6, 18; ‘invisible’ 29; memory in 3; painful stories 2; psychological universalism 2, 3; scholarship 3; sharing experiences 2; through images, indirect representation of 10–11; violence and 20; visual representation in 20

traumatic memory loss 4, 117–18 travel writing 52, 118 ‘the truth’ 4, 8, 25; in moment/ process of representation 14, 25; performative 25, 30, 32, 35, 39; truthfulness 13, 110; war 35 The truth in painting (Derrida) 25 Vallorani, N. 11, 46, 107, 150 Versaci, R. 163–4 victims 170; direct 169; perpetrator 141, 159–60; of violence 28; of war 33; witness and 14 violence: aesthetic form 26; affects and effects of 67; an ethical stance 100; associations in texts 5; beam of numbness 101–6; and conflict 39, 46; ‘dark’ writing violent experience (see ‘dark’ writing); ethical representation 13–18; experience of 25–6; framing, notion of 101; image-rich, aesthetic representation 15; images of 169; the ineffable 158–9; ‘invisible’ 29; panels of Palestinian deaths 100; political 3–4; and powerlessness 153; shaft of shame 106–11; sharing painful experiences 1–4; through ‘dark’ writing 99–111; through images, approaching 32–9; and trauma 4–6, 15, 46; ‘the truth’ 4; visibility and dignity 101 violent associations, frame of 5, 16–17, 46, 61 violent experiences: animated documentary 168–74; films sharing experiences 165–8; from graphic narratives to aesthetic forms 161–5; non-fictional visual narrative forms 174–85; online interactive documentary 177–85; sharing of 41; transmission of inexplicable aspects 6; Waltz with Bashir 168–74; war and conflict 5 Walton, S. 167 Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon war story (Folman & Polonsky) 5, 17, 43, 51–4, 62, 74, 166; accuracy and memory 116; coloured photographic images 113; comicsstyle drawings 168; critical (antiwar) war film 170; ‘dark’ writing 168–74; fiction and non-fiction

Index 213 173; five frames approach 115; and graphic narrative 113; gutter and panels 116–17; hand-drawn images 113, 170; interpretation of reality 115; Palestinian lives and deaths 143; process of ‘dark’ writing 114–15; readers/viewers 116; representational and nonrepresentational knowledge 117; representation and experience 115–16, 144–5; Sabra and Shatila massacre 113–14; shadowy images 151; Sharon and IDF 171; traumatic experiences 114; ‘windows’ logic 132; wordless images 150; Zionist collective memory 168–9 war and conflict: instigating the ineffable 13; sharing violent experiences 5; violence and trauma 4, 5, 23, 24, 31, 49, 57, 61, 67, 161–2, 165, 187 war drawings: aesthetic feeling and truth, Romantic 37, 38; art and notions of aesthetic value 37, 38; content knowledge 35; Footnotes in Gaza 37; individualistic war art 38; observational drawing 35; parody and close observation 39; presence of ineffable 35, 39, 40; process knowledge and context 37; representation and experience 37; Romantic Tradition of art 39; Sacco’s journalistic works of war art 35–6; subjective form of representation 41; tradition of pictural portrayals of war 35; witness, idea of 36, 38, 39 war horrors 161 war photographs: apparent ‘accuracy’ 33; art photographs, power of 34; bodily experience, direct access to 33; Camera lucida: reflections on photography (Barthes) 33–4; content knowledge 34; as evidence 33, 34; mass media photographs 33; ‘punctum,’ qualities of 33–4; representational process 33, 34, 40; victims of war 33; visible and invisible 34 wartime violence 16

Watchmen (Moore & Gibbon) 43 Weiler, L. 182 Weizman, E. 12, 13, 33, 108 Whitlock, G. 71 ‘windows,’ logic of 45, 132, 176 witness: bearing responsibilities 49; body and emotions 91; concept of affect 89–90; ethical position 159; experience-representation of violence 90, 97; framing, process knowledge in 95; ‘gray’ zone 95, 97; haptic and relational knowledge 93; haptic vision 96–7; images 93–4; ‘invisible’ violence 98; Khamis and Omm Nafez 90, 95, 97–8; Khan Younis massacre 94–5; knowledge, kind of 91; mimetic representation 92–3; patterns of knowledge and ‘nonknowledge’ 98; process knowledge 95, 97; process of telling and retelling 99; reading/viewing 95–8; reduction or translation, process of 94; relational seeing, Serres’s notion of 90; representational and nonrepresentational knowledge 90, 96; seeing, kind of 91–2; shadowy knowing 92, 92; shame 28, 89; and victim 14, 28; of violence 169 words and images 5, 16, 17, 45, 112; ‘dark’ writing, notion of 145; experience and representation 148; form, importance of 145; Frenkel and Folman, image of 146, 147; in graphic narrative form 57, 145; Groensteen’s 148; illusion of movement 146; process of representing violence 56–7; reader’s/viewer’s body 56–7, 146; representation of violence 150; rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) 146; seeing and knowing 148 Yakin, B.: Jerusalem: the story of a city and a family 54 The yellow kid 43 Yishai, B. 136, 152 Yosef, R. 168 Žižek, S. 5, 20, 29, 67, 133, 137, 170 Zwicky, Jan 21, 25