Truth Games

: Fact, Fiction, and Performance in British Autobiographical Comics

Abstract

Writing in On Autobiography, theorist Philippe Lejeune defines autobiography as: ‘Retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’ (1989, p.4). On Autobiography built on Lejeune’s earlier writing, particularly his theory of the Autobiographical Pact (1974), in which the author and reader enter an implicit agreement where the author tells the truth of his or her life, and the reader shares with the author the assumption that the author, narrator and protagonist are the same person. Using Lejeune’s definitions, autobiographical comics can, therefore, be described as stories of people’s lives told not through prose but through a sequence of words and pictures. However, the complex relationship between word and image, and the way they simultaneously construct and undermine each other in comics, leads to many questions about how comics communicate these life narratives.

This interdisciplinary PhD contains historical chapters, analysis of autobiographical comics texts—including online autobiographical comics workshops—as well as an investigation into comics performances of both fiction and autobiography. The key research questions in this thesis are:

•What are the material and social conditions that allowed the production of British autobiographical comics?
•How can the theories of games and play, or ludology, be applied to Lejeune’s Autobiographical Pact, and what are the consequences?
•How much is autobiography a product of the performance of identity? And can we consider theatrical performances as comics?

Autobiography has become an increasingly important and critically acclaimed genre of comics since the turn of the 21st Century, and academic work on the subject has grown rapidly over the last ten years. Joseph Witek’s Comics As History (1989) was a significant early work in the historical, biographical, and autobiographical field, and focussed on three North American creators: Art Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar, and Jack Jackson. More recently, scholars have increased the global scope of this field of research with books such as Elisabeth El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012) and Michael A. Chaney’s Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (2011). Autobiographical comics are a transnational phenomenon that have developed in many countries simultaneously, but often independently. However, to date, there has been little historical research on British autobiographical comics in particular. One original contribution of this thesis to comics scholarship is an extensive historical analysis of British autobiographical comics.

Several academic books on autobiographical comics, such as Hillary L. Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative And Contemporary Comics (2010), Drawing From Life: Memory and Subjectivity in Comic Art (2013) edited by Jane Tolmie, along with others such as Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005), and Bart Beaty’s Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (2007), examine the nature of truth and authenticity within autobiographical comics. This thesis builds on these investigations, and examines the games that autobiographical comics creators play with truth, including such concepts as fake autobiography. Another original contribution to comics scholarship presented here is the concept of a ludic model of Lejeune’s Autobiographical Pact. The ludic model proposes that the pact is not a contract, but an invitation to play with readers’ expectations of autobiography. The model is not restricted to comics, however, and can be applied to autobiography in other media, such as prose and film. This research also tests reader reaction to autobiographical comics and truth with a web-based workshop using my own comics created for the experiment.

The other original contribution of this thesis expands on El Refaie’s idea of the ‘dramaturgic approach to authenticity’ (2012, p.138), and examines the concept of identity as a performance, following Judith Butler’s research on gender and identity (1988). The relationship between text, creator and reader is better understood as the creator and reader performing such roles, and adopting contingent positions within a ‘game of truth’, rather than essentialist ones within a ‘pact.’ There is also an investigation into comics performances, both as adaptation in a theatrical setting but also comics created for performance rather than print or screen. This includes a historical study of comics performances such as vaudeville chalk talks, as well as an examination of DeeCAP, which is a comics and performance event which I founded in Dundee. A special autobiographical DeeCAP show was held at the University of Dundee in September 2014, and has informed my research in this area.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Dundee
Sponsors	Arts & Humanities Research Council
Supervisor	Chris Murray (Supervisor)