Someone Else’s Dream
Reading Anders Nilsen’s Dogs and Water is like being immersed in someone else’s dream. The lack of boxes, and consequent fluidity of the gutters, makes the work feel very fragile, as if the world presented could melt or change at any instant–as, indeed, it frequently does. The breaks–the black pages, the lighter blue sequences of him adrift on the ocean, or of dreams-within-dreams, the blue backgrounded pages in which the protagonist floats in an abstract space–all serve to reinforce the ephemeral nature of the narrative. At one point, the narrative is even directly referred to as a dream; after the protagonist is choked, and is drifting through space, he says, “aww… you ruined my dream… what? whatayou mean, get up? I can’t get up” (Nilsen, 74).
Like a dream, the narrative is very abstract, and as such, I found it very difficult to pin down a particular meaning to the images. The book was very beautiful, engaging, and moving, but all in a very subconcious way. In this sense, Dogs and Water is a prime example of the value of the image in a graphic novel–the power of an image, regardless of words, to connect directly to the subconscious, to what Dr. F. W. Seward in McSweeney’s calls “the roots of life”–but I didn’t come out of the book feeling like I had fully ‘gotten it’ (McSweeney’s, 52). One of the things that makes dreams and the subconscious so powerful is that they are deeply personal; as someone remarked once in class, it’s generally very boring to hear other people recount their dreams, because they are so specific to an individual. Dogs and Water is, in a way, Anders Nilsen’s dream–and so, for the first time in this class, I immediately looked for some ‘author’s commentary’ on the work.
I found his words, unsurprisingly, very illuminating:
“During the time after I started [Dogs and Water] and before I finished it the war in Iraq started, so that started to percolate a little bit. The original strip I started with was more about just being an artist and figuring out how to make it through the world and how to hold on to what a sort of ridiculous idea that is, but to hold on to it and persevere. When I started [the book] it was a symbol of leaving school and being in the middle of nowhere but having this notion of childhood that I’m still carrying along with me. I’m using a childhood notion to navigate the world. I’m hanging on to this idea that I’m an artist, even though it’s not an adult thing to do… We constantly imagine that there is a purpose or a higher meaning, a plan for all of us. It’s the thing that gets us out on the road, doing stuff, feeling like what we do matters. But I don’t actually believe that there’s something there, but it’s important to have that sort of motivation.” – Anders Nilsen, from the website Read Yourself RAW (http://www.readyourselfraw.com/profiles/nilsen/profile_nilsen.htm)
Knowing the context of the work–the Iraq War, and his leaving school and setting off into the world–makes Nilsen’s personal dream-world much more sensible. His comments are, fortunately, not specific enough to limit interpretation, but they gave me a way to access a lot of the images. For example, I can now see a lot of meanings in the teddy bear he carries on his back that I didn’t fully appreciate before: innocence (from war), the “childhood notion” of being an artist, a ‘motivator’ (a presence that keeps him going, keeps him feeling like his journey has meaning), etc. I came to see him giving up the teddy bear, in a way, as coming to terms the conflicts he carried with him–’growing up,’ finding his own meaning and drive, acknowledging his own lack of innocence (which would certainly explain the vomiting).
Even though this is a highly personal work, whether a reader’s interpretations are ‘correct’ (in the sense that they conform to Nilsen’s understandings) is not really relevant. The very power of an image, in a way, lies in its lack of specificity, its openness to viewer interpretation. Nevertheless, I think that approaching a work like Dogs and Water through Nilsen’s lens can be illuminating–and with a work as beautiful as this, I would hate to miss one of its subtle profundities.
