The Man Booker Prize continues to pose searching questions about how we appraise contemporary fiction. After abandoning the limitation that writers have to be from the Commonwealth to be eligible for the annual literature prize, and thereby opening it up to American novelists, this year’s longlist has a graphic novel. The shortlist is to be announced on September 20, and it’s anyone’s guess whether Sabrina , Chicago-based Nick Drnaso’s second graphic novel, will make the cut.
The Booker jury, headed by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, has also included a work of verse ( The Long Take by Robin Robertson) in the longlist, but it’s the inclusion of the graphic novel that must compel us not just to ask whether expanding the scope of what’s a fictional narrative makes sense, but also to take stock of the different ways of seeing and reading that a graphic novel demands.
A dystopian narrative
There is certainly no doubt that Sabrina is a powerful work. It is almost mandatory while talking of it to mention the high praise it drew from Zadie Smith: “Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina is the best book — in any medium — I have read about our current moment. It is a masterpiece, beautifully written and drawn, possessing all the political power of the polemic and yet simultaneously all the delicacy of true great art. It scared me. I loved it.”
At just 29 years old, Drnaso already appears to have a signature style of drawing. His uncrowded panels also keep you on edge to make sure your eyes are not moving too quickly over the speech bubbles and missing something in the narrative. The novel opens cosily enough with a woman housesitting her parents’ cat when her sister drops by. They chit-chat, potter over a crossword puzzle, share secrets, and make plans for a bike trip around the Great Lakes. The woman turns in for the night, has her morning coffee, feeds the cat, leaves a note in the kitchen, and leaves the house. Thereupon, the warm colours give way to bleaker hues, and you know you’re wading into a dystopian narrative ordered around the woman’s disappearance.
Ways of reading
Sabrina ’s contention for a leading fiction prize is as much a milestone as was the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for Maus , Art Spiegelman’s graphic narrative about the Holocaust. It signals the graphic novel’s evolution as a prominent medium for storytelling. But it also demands of the reader what Hillary Chute calls “visual literacy” in her excellent introduction, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere . Chute is a columnist on graphic novels and comics for The New York Times , and has previously taught the first dedicated course on the subject at Harvard University.
The historical recap is very American, perhaps necessarily so given that its development has been driven in large part by American authors and publishers. Interestingly, while there is a distinction between cartoons, comic strips and graphic novels, graphic novelists, Chute notes, are interchangeably referred to as as “authors”, “artists” and “cartoonists”. In fact, most authors do not like the phrase “graphic novel”, she explains, quoting bestselling writers like Neil Gaiman and Marjane Satrapi — Chute herself prefers “graphic narrative”, as it “is inclusive of both fiction and nonfiction”. As readers of Satrapi’s work on growing up in Iran (the two Persepolis books, Chicken With Plums ), Joe Sacco’s Palestine or Spiegelman’s Maus would know, a lot of it is drawn from personal experience.
Chute orders her chapters to encompass different subject matters that the medium has been use to explore — for example, disaster, superheroes, sex, cities, illness and disability, girls. But for those of us looking for guidance on how to read graphic narratives, she has some tips. One, as Chute says, students have asked her whether to read the words first or take in the images first. Neither, she suggests: “The words and the images each move the narrative forward in different ways the reader creates out of the relationship between the two.”
It’s a learning curve. Chute explains: “Historically there has been an association between comics and a kind of subpar literacy, as if comics reading could not be ‘real’ reading. This is because of the widespread notion that visual literacy, which comics requires, is somehow less complicated than verbal literacy, which comics also requires.”
Two, to acquire this literacy, we need to learn comics’ vocabulary: “gutters, panels, tiers, balloons, bubbles, bleeds, splashes.” It’s not just about what is contained in each box, but also how they stack up, how the passage of time is sought to be conveyed, etc. Writes Chute: “Comics does not propose linear reading in the same way prose does. Cognitively, one’s eye usually first takes in the whole page, even when one decides to start at the upper left hand corner and move left to right. This is sometimes called comics’s ‘all-at-onceness,’ or its ‘symphonic effect.’”
Or as Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist, is quoted as saying at the book’s outset, “It’s like learning a new syntax, a new way of ordering ideas.” It’s a learning that will be hastened if Drnaso’s book wins the Booker on October 16.
