GRAPHIC NOVEL
Of binary lives
SUMANA ROY
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Constantly draining religious icons of their religiosity, Patil turns tradition on its head with wit.
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The aesthetic of the everyday is what gives the novel its tone…
Kari, Amruta Patil, HarperCollins, Rs. 295
Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Kari is a courageous book about its eponymous heroine. Bending the rules of the genre (certainly not “comic book”, in spite of Patil’s words in “Acknowledgements”), Patil tells us the story of Kari’s double life — as writer in an advertising agency by day and “boatman” at night. The graphic novel is, because of its hybrid genealogy, already coded in the binary. Patil decides to take the case further: “There are two of us, not one,” begins the prologue (titled “The Double Suicide”); the architecture of pairs continues almost without end — Kari and Ruth, the head and the heart, the aerial and the sewer, Crystal Palace drawn in colour followed by a dull map, Kari’s face on the front cover and her back to the reader on the back cover.
Patil worked as a museum security guard in Boston, guarding “mummies and medieval Madonnas”. Surrounded by the materiality of history, it is easy to see how a writer can “secularise” a religious iconology by placing it in the religion-aseptic atmosphere of a graphic novel about a lesbian or in the artificial secular atmosphere of an advertising agency or an aeroplane. “The airport was a ford, and she crossed over”: in the first row sits a bearded man with a newspaper in hand, this small frame embedded in a larger frame from where the world appears like a Cubist’s construct. Patil, through four weak lines, turns the spine of the newspaper into a cross and the bearded man to Jesus. This she does without any direct textual allusion, leaving it half-done until we reach the last phrase “crossed over” and the verb has involuntarily become a noun (“cross”) in our heads. The woman behind Patil’s Jesus could well be Gauguin’s Virgin Mary.
Linguistic vitality
On the next page we find Kari in a “Trinity outfit in PVC”; Patil’s mythopoeia, here as elsewhere, drains the religious — usually the Judaeo-Christian — icon of its exaggerated religiosity, leaving a residue where the motif belongs only to the realm of Art. Even the tired trope is rejuvenated with an adjective, whether linguistic or visual: “personal moons”, “Fairytale Hair”, “smog city”; or a familiar fable is reinterpreted with the substitution of a noun, as in “The fox was beautiful, and white as snow”; or the metaphorical is transformed to the literal — “sink without a trace” follows a picture of a boat sinking in a sewer.
Whether it is the use of names such as Lazarus, Ruth or Angel, or the direct evocation of myths, as in “The Ark”, Patil turns tradition on its head with wit, so that the semiotic is drained of emotion without becoming an artifice, and the sense of the contemporary there’s-something-in-my-tooth is held in it: “Lord have mercy on the uncoupled”. The biblical connotations are further emphasised by Patil’s recurrent use of the visual metaphor of “falling” (the vertical lines, tapering and narrowing near the bottom, exaggerate this sense). The book begins with “Ruth’s fall”. Allied to this is the trope of the aerial, the most important optic in the novel: “Angel on the Cornice”, “It was time to fly solo …”, “Airlines Lady”, “he likes to be where there is a bird’s-eye view”.
What one takes back from Kari is Patil’s brilliant treatment of the female anatomy. Impatient with both idealistic and naturalistic traditions of representation of the female form, she subverts even the European tradition of the female nude by holding up the nakedness of the idea. Kari’s nudity framed against the background of the toilet in stark black and white — with her desire to look like a man, “like Sean Penn”, hanging below the frame — is a companion piece to the solitary shot of the clean bathroom Patil has shown us earlier, where the neat assembly of everyday objects (lotions and tubes in colour as opposed to the B&W frame used in the nude frame) creates a new aesthetic of representation in the IE graphic novel, one that turns the readymade into art. Patil’s bathroom is not Duchamp’s Fountain but what is worth noticing is how Patil succeeds in melding various traditions of representative art into her tiny frames.
Aesthetic of the everyday
The aesthetic of the everyday is what gives the novel its tone, one where invocations of the distant and the fantastic seem unnecessary. The contemporary is dissected but Patil does not turn the voyeur into a laboratory demonstrator: the female body is torn into shreds, but never reassembled to resemble a cyborg: “prosthetic breasts”, the winged tattoo, “celebrity calluses, corns, bitten fingernails and ugly toes”. Even the urban is dismembered — “smog city’s … varicose veins fight to break out of her skin”. Quite surprisingly, there is no direct gaze in Kari. Kari never looks directly, nor does anyone for that matter. There is almost no frame where the character meets the reader’s eye. Is this, also, Patil’s tweaking of the tradition of representing the woman in European art?
Incompleteness is a part of Patil’s aesthetic, as true of her drawings as her “story”. The “To be continued” on the last page is not just the promise of a sequel or the parody of post-modern open-endedness, (epitomised in Lazarus’s fluid life-death dynamics). It is a part of Kari’s story and a biblical echo of “… without end”. In being able to produce such a polyphonic reading experience lies Patil’s success.
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