Holes
I wondered also about what exactly the significance was of the swirling debris we see so often in Black Hole. I wrote my paper about this novel, in relation to ‘The Iliad, or a Poem of Force’. Simone Weil writes that “force is that x which turns a person into a thing.” Obviously in ‘Black Hole’ that happens very literally in the case of the disease, and I wrote that by that definition there are many other forces at work also in the novel. The physical violence that Weil is talking about is obviously one of them as well. In any case, the significance of that swirling debris, the bones and pipes and etc., is that the characters keep coming back to them. They’re impossible to escape and are obviously evocative of what’s been taking place in the novel. They are swirling in a current that the characters are mentally carried away in. With these facts in mind, I think it’s possible to see those pictures as an attempt to physically manifest the current of force… To give it some sort of visual representation in the novel. I do think that “that x which turns a person into a thing” is at the essence of ‘Black Hole.’
I was very attracted to Burns’ art style. There’s an element of unrealism in the way he draws his characters… I can’t think of the word, but a sort of mainstream, pretty aspect which is the sort of thing that people have disparaged before, about books like ‘Life Sucks’. But he balances that element of his style out very interestingly with his attention to those weird teenage attributes and 70s styles, like Keith’s unibrow or Rob and Chris’ haircuts. It grounds it in a reality. I found his style also simply very beautiful to look at. It’s always foreboding, but can be entrancing. The whites and blacks without gray’s mean it never feels like daytime. Everything looks as if its under moonlight.
There are elements of the relationships between the characters that can seem a little adolescent, like ‘Life Sucks’. It’s a very important difference to recognize though, that that’s the case for a reason. The characters are teenagers and they act very much like teenagers. Burns’ isn’t encouraging us to believe that Rob and Chris really were destined to be together for all time, but he acknowledges the all-encompassing importance a relationship like that can have for a teenager. Chris in particular is not always likable as a heroine. Both she and Keith, in fact, get the disease very much by the fault of their own. But Burns’ in turn does not lose his sympathy for either of them. He makes it clear that one such mistake can lead to other problems that are not deserved.
Why do the characters dig through garbage for food? Because presumably no one will hire them for a job, so they are forced to live on whatever they can. Also, it takes place in Washington State, and hippies love to do stuff like that.
