The Expanding Art of Comics: Ten Modern Masterpieces by Thierry Groensteen

Author:Thierry Groensteen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

© 2007 by Dominique Goblet. Translation © 2016 by Sophie Yanow. Published by arrangement with New York Review Comics.

Accompanying the couple, Michèle’s spectral presence. © 2007 by Dominique Goblet. Translation © 2016 by Sophie Yanow. Published by arrangement with New York Review Comics.

The meaning of the title is doubtless to be found in the afterword by Guy Marc Hinant. He writes, “What is the proportion of fiction produced by the simple fact of focusing on the key moments of our lives?” And he goes on to conclude that the characters that represent Dominique and himself in this comic should not be confused with the real live people. They are “controlled avatars” bearing “similar names.” Hinant is repeating here what many have said before him. Jacques Lacan, most notably, has insisted that as soon as we take up the pen, or even before, as soon as we formulate our story, we are creating a fictitious self. As Simone de Beauvoir says in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, “My life would be a beautiful story come true, a story I would make up as I went along.”21 Or André Gide in If It Die: “Memoirs are never more than half sincere, however great one’s desire for truth; everything is always more complicated than one makes out. Possibly even one gets nearer to truth in the novel.”22 Dominique Goblet would probably not describe her book as autofiction, that fashionable catchall category, but she has no illusions: she knows that the point of a book is not for reality to leap naked onto the page. The subject matter must be organized and recomposed; its “truth” is subjective and acknowledged as such: it is, after all, a work of art. Recounting and drawing are “pretending” and so inevitably “lying.”

Moreover, Goblet does not claim sole authorship of her work. She enjoys sharing and collaboration. Chronography was cowritten with her daughter, and consists of portraits that each produced of the other, over a period of ten years beginning when Nikita was seven. Her contribution to Wrestling Match in Vielsalm—about the imagery of wrestling—again involved joint authorship, this time with Dominique Théâte, who suffers from mental illness. And in her most recent book, Seeking LTR, she shares the billing with Kai Pfeiffer.

Pretending Is Lying opens on this notification: “The text of chapters 3 and 4 was co-written with Guy Marc Hinant.” What we have just read is, then—both unusually and unflinchingly, in that it recounts a chaotic relationship with its frictions, its deceits, and its inevitable share of resentment—a plural autobiography that allows room for the point of view of the other person. “To be honest, I thought that using these painful experiences as artistic raw material, doing it together and reflecting on it together would help us in real life to understand what had been going on and above all to transform any remaining resentment into complicity …”23

Another characteristic of Goblet’s approach is her liking for long-term projects: ten years to create Chronography, and twelve years to get to the end of Pretending Is Lying.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.