black holes
The black hole, in science, can be described as a liminal divide between material existence and nothingness. From our perspective in the realm of material existence and the consciousness that seems to have sprouted as a result, the hole is a symbol for death, the period putting a clean dot at the end of our lives. The black hole as a symbol in Charles Burns’ work of the same name functions analogously. The metaphor adheres to its physical grounding (–“in life as in literature” stuff).
As Keith peers into one via the gaping incision on the frog he thinks: “I was looking at a hole… a black hole and as I looked, the hole opened up… and I could feel myself falling forward, tumbling down into nothingness. For a while I was just floating… I was in this totally black place. It was kind of spacey but it felt nice… nice and safe.” This experience of the black hole feels strange to me, and I don’t think there is a similar reaction to it in the rest of the book, that is, a black hole that is “nice and safe.” Aside from this first instance, the many black holes the characters peer into are frightening, they are spaces that cannot be moved into and survived—though more often the spaces seem to be the agents moving into the individual in the form of gashes, bullet holes, and other direct and indirect symptoms of “the bug.” For me the black hole was the central character of the narrative and the one that imparted its eeriness. It was the frightening face of the bug. It frightens us with the simple connotations we carry into our reading at the outset of the work and by the end it still frightens but now because we have surveyed its destruction and are still left with strikingly little insight.
The black hole is an ominous presence looming over cliché yet still-lived narrative of adolescence littered with sex and substances. If it weren’t for the bug this book would contain the same story we’ve heard a million times. However, it’s precisely the juxtaposition of the generally mundane universe and the unsettling presence of the black hole that imparts our reading with a sense of eeriness. We have seen this story before minus the black hole and the bug but these inclusions jar us. What do they signify? What is Burns’ intent? They seem to be pregnant with meaning and it is intuitive to interpret the bug as some sort of STD or, as Wolk suggests, sex itself, but this seems a bit forced to me—arising more out of need for the reader to associate this unknown quantity with something digestible in our lived experience than of a need on the narrative’s part to explain itself. I’d like there to be some way for the work, with all its bizarreness, to just be itself, its own thing. Maybe this task is difficult, maybe this task is not a task at all but just a reading absent any critical analysis. I haven’t yet worked this out in my head at the time I’m writing this.
