Epileptic

David B.’s “Epileptic” is a history of a life lived in the shadow of a disease.   Epiplepsy is not a disease that manifests itself as a tumor or some other physical sign, it is, perhaps more than any other, a disease for which only its secondary effects have a graspable reality.  With only the results known, the root cause is left in the dark.

This quality has made epilepsy often mythologized.  It occupies a role analogous to that which syphilis held in earlier eras of human history.  It is likely that my prejudice against, resistance to ethereal explanations leads me to say that man fills in the blank spaces of his understanding with mental invention.  This is clearly made manifest in the narrative of Epileptic.  David B.’s family travels as a gypsy band, Nomads in Search of The Cure, moving through both physical and mental spaces.  These matters are especially fascinating to me but consideration of the graphic novel as a narrative representative of some real drama is not the goal of course and I suppose, therefore, of this blog.

It is, however, relevant to consider the intuitive ways in which the graphic novel as a form of storytelling is particularly suited to relating narratives in which the known and unknown intersect.  Here, the author can more firmly take a hold of the communication of the imagined.

Written language is an elusive tool.  As Nabokov is quoted in the beginning of McSweeney’s #13, we do not think in words, and it is reasonable to assert that in reading stories we take words from the page and create mental realms from these reports.  In a narrative communicated exclusively through text the reader has more imaginative agency, and, by necessity, the author has less control over the experience.

However, in the graphic novel we have visual and textual cues from the author.  The imagined place of the text is supplemented—and perhaps enhanced—by the images.  I say enhanced because within the graphic novel and, here, specifically, in Epileptic, the attention to refined aesthetics seems to be direct more towards the images—the text is often anemic, a mere catalogue of physical action and direct dialogue.

The author can induce more tightly controlled mental spaces for the reader, and this kind of control seems critical in autobiography centered around the uncertain, the unconcrete.  How can David B. be sure that we are representing his encounters with mysticism, superstition, and dreams if he does not hold our hand deep into the imaginative process with visual hints concerning fantastical dragons, the bird-ghost of his grandfather, and the singularly slippery subject of dreams?

Although perhaps it is no coincidence that the narcissism underlying the fact that so much of the graphic novel genre is comprised of autobiography is presented in a form that allows the author to have deep imaginative control over the relation of his stories.