Ahhh, Black Hole. A black hole, indeed. I found this book disturbing, fascinating, intriguing, and freaky, all at the same time. I couldn’t put it down, but almost in a car-accident-and-I’m-rubbernecking kind of way. This is going to be a diarrhea post. I’m just going to say everything that’s on my mind about the book. Feel free to start your own post if you want to steer the discussion in one particular direction, especially one that I’ve not considered.
• The characters seemed pretty consistent. I felt for Keith and his earnestness.
• I wanted more of a story that followed the beginning, middle, and end rules. Is the ending of Keith’s story (cuddling with Eliza in the motel, exchanging “I love you”s, and then he says “I’m gone”) and Chris’s story (floating in the water, alone on the beach) copouts for Burns? Do the endings mean anything? Do the readers deserve more? Do we deserve to know more about what happens to these two, what decisions they make regarding their future? They are both in limbo, in an unstable state, when we leave them. That might be purposeful (their whole lives are unstable), but I was curious to know more, to know how they survived and how they lived.
• The story jumped around a little too much. I think we could have seen some of the flashback scenes as they were really happening, instead of as they were remembered in a character’s mind. I think I could definitely tell that this was pieced together over a time period instead of written from beginning to end, as most novels. Also, looking back, I’m a little confused about the order of events. In the second “chapter,” Keith finds a female skin in the woods. In the third chapter, Chris appears to be living in the woods already and sheds her skin. But those events seem totally out of order (in the next chapter or two, Chris goes skinny dipping and doesn’t even realize she’s showing symptoms of the bug). Is this just a result of the piecing-together, or did I miss the significance?
• Even though it’s a graphic novel, it still needed to be proofread. There were misspellings (Rob’s last name is spelled two different ways), misplaced commas, missing commas, incorrect possessives (“it’s” instead of “its”), etc., that I found a little distracting.
• The whole book was extremely sexual, with all the vaginal imagery and the actual sex scenes. Even the slit in the frog’s body at the very beginning was extremely sexual. I’m sure the significance of the imagery is that “the bug” was passed through sexual contact, but is there more significance than that? Just that everything comes back to sex, to intimacy, to the human body? There was some phallic imagery, too, if I recall, but certainly not as much as the vaginal stuff (the cut on Chris’s foot that keeps coming back).
• Did Keith know what he was doing when he slept with Eliza? Did he realize that her tail was a symptom of the bug, or did he just think she was “different”? Was he so desperate for love/affection/belonging/getting laid that he willingly “caught” the bug?
• When Eliza was telling Keith how she came to live with those guys in the house and then have her artwork trashed (which she did herself), she was saying how she couldn’t bear to live with her stepdad for another year. So we hear about the different options she tried, including sleeping in the woods with friends. And then one frame shows her come across a guy strung up on a tree, dead (leading to her decision of not living in the woods). What was the significance of that? I had thought all the weirdness of the skeletal figures was that one guy (Rick – and they were probably harmless?) and all the murders were Dave. So did that murdered guy in the tree mean anything? Also, at the beginning of the book, the people around the campfire are talking about how that one girl Lana disappeared and how Roy found that arm. But that was before Dave was obsessed with Chris, so were there really other murders going on in the woods? If there was more than just what Dave did, I felt like I didn’t know enough about it and I was cheated a little bit.
• I found the AIDS metaphor pretty real and current today, with the alienation, the thought that it could never happen to you (the way Keith’s friends are making fun of the yearbook they find), the need to escape but yet not really being able to... Did it simplify the disease at all?
• Was the love between Chris and Rob real? Was the love between Keith and Eliza real? Were they all just desperate to find someone who would accept them, someone who would love them, someone who was also sick, someone who wouldn’t judge them, someone with whom they could escape?
I know that’s a lot to muddle through, but this book is a lot to digest. So I’m just throwing it all out there. Anyone care to pick up a topic and discuss?
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3 comments:
Wow, these are a ton of great questions, Susan. I'm going to pick up two of the issues you raised here and then start another short post so we can talk about interpretations. (Note: I loved this book and am likely to consider most of the things that bugged -- hee -- other people as deliberate writerly choices.)
1) Storytelling style: ie, the episodic nature of the narrative, the flashbacks, the confusing shifts in time and the lack of satisfying endings for various characters. I can see how this would be annoying if you think that these things are partly the inadvertent result of Burns' having patched this together from a dozen separate books, but on the whole they worked for me because I think they reflect, in a marvellously disconcerting way, the way everything can start to feel sort of surreal when you're an adolescent, like your life is out of your control and all your emotions are painfully intense and -- especially if you're an adolescent who experiments with drugs. I really like the disjointed leaps from event to event because they completely eliminate all the things that just don't matter to a teenager all caught up in sex and friendships and rebellion and social drama. They telescope the experiences that are really intense and important, and leave out all of the mundane stuff of life.
Its like what Umberto Eco says about porn films, except in reverse: he says about porn that they always stick in all these boring, meaningless scenes showing people travelling on trains and walking into banks and going shopping, just so they can hide the fact that otherwise, the only thing the film consists of is sex scene after sex scene. I think Black Hole doesn't include a lot of the "connective tissues" of storytelling that would make the plot more comprehensible because it's ultimately all about these isolated, overwhelming experiences.
I also think the leaps back and forth in time and the use of flashback instead of real-time, and the shifts from dream to memory to "reality" underscore the paradoxical fact that being a teenager is utterly isolating (of course we get flashbacks instead of real-time narration; that way we're stuck inside a single character's head and we can't be objective) and at the same time your life is inextricably entangled with the lives of the other teenagers you're surrounded by (Chris's dream turns into Rob's present moment turns into Keith's memory, and on and on and on).
I admit that I was unsatisfied when I got to the endings of the stories, but I really don't know what could possibly have satisfied me. I think the book is about these kids being stuck in limbo, and it makes complete sense to me that we would end there, with them -- not knowing what happens next and not knowing how to change anything about the future.
2) The Sexual imagery stuff works on a lot of different levels, and I think you're totally right that intimacy is really big -- it's so difficult for these characters to have conversations with each other, but they're fucking each other at a moment's notice, and the sex is totally an experience of intimacy and sharing, but the consequences of that intimacy can be devastating. Also, I think the vagina imagery has a lot to do with the idea of trying to escape from your sitation or from your own self (rip your skin open, be reborn, cut doors in the universe so you can get away) and being fundamentally unable to escape because you can cut open a million slits and there'll still be another skin underneath the cut, or something else buried inside it.
Phew. Yeah, I think it's dark. But I loved it.
My first response upon finishing the book was: That was gross!
Then: Wow.
I want to address mainly format here, as I think it is the source for many of my (and Eunice's) issues with the book --
Like Eunice, I wanted more of a traditional narrative. How about a plot?; Black Hole encompassed much teenaged meandering around, replete with sex, drugs and mutant growths. Regardless, I don't think traditional is appropriate -- I like what Meera says about the structure fitting the given chaos/alienation of being a teenager, but I also think part of that is native to the comic format. Long-term endeavors like the ten-years-in-the-making Black Hole are rambly. The collection emphasizes every aspect of the story and magnifies (i.e. hits you over the head) with what might have been more subtle in the original format.
Not to say that the book was subtle in any way.
As Meera noted, Black Hole is very heavy-handed with symbolism. There's a whole lotta vaginal and sexual imagery. Overwhelming for one book, perhaps, but I kept wondering how would I have read this book over a long-term release? Or even by reading one issue a day, instead of the entire story in one sitting?
I think some changes should have been made to the design to match the book format. Nothing major -- we're talking page numbers and proofreading for consistency (fix those grammatical errors for Eunice!) (BTW, that is something that continually frustrates me in comics -- if you are going to bother to conceive and draw out a story, please take the extra effort to have it proofed).
There's another point I'm torn on -- the original covers for each issue/chapter. (shown here in the original color; scroll down) I like them but they broke up the story. What about putting them in an appendix? The art is crucial to the story, yes, but they irritated me. I hate breaks. Any thoughts?
These flaws would not be obvious in the original issue format. But is this a book or "The Collected Comics?" Are the publishers obligated to polish it up a bit or just put all the issues between hardbound covers?
I didn't even realize the "chapter" title pages (which is what I thought they were) were from the original comics. In fact, to be honest, I'd completely forgotten that this was a collection of previously published pieces until Eunice mentioned it.
So... maybe thinking about it highlighted the ways in which it interfered. I did find some of the intervening titles confusing.
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