R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self by David Stephen Calonne

Author:David Stephen Calonne [Calonne, David Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781496831859
Google: _bCOzQEACAAJ
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2021-01-15T23:49:34.873812+00:00

R. Crumb, “Nausea,” Hup, no. 3 (1989).

R. Crumb, “Nausea,” Hup, no. 3 (1989).

Crumb finds this section of Nausea particularly compelling since it dramatizes so effectively many of his own concerns. As we have argued previously, he felt himself from childhood to be an outsider to American life and spent the sixties and seventies undergoing the turbulence of those Dionysian decades. Existential themes appear frequently in Crumb’s autobiographical drawings, and one of Crumb’s bibliographers, Don Fiene—a professor of Russian language and literature—began his scholarly investigations of Crumb with the intention of pursuing the links between “the great Fyodor Mikhailovich” Dostoevsky and Crumb.19 The mad search for God depicted in the Russian author’s great novels dramatizes the existential quest with the force of unrelenting genius. Crumb himself drew parallels between Dostoevsky, his epileptic brother Maxon, and his own reflections in his journal notation from November 1, 1990: “My mind is so intensely lucid today I feel almost on the verge of a seizure of some kind…. I guess that’s what Dostoievski and Maxon mean by their pre-epileptic state of hyper-awareness, only much more so…. Too many realizations crowd the mind at once, building to a state of ecstatic enlightenment, then the fit happens, the convulsions which render you a helpless, quivering, writhing mass on the floor.”20 Dostoevsky was of course an epileptic, and Crumb seeks to underscore the similarities between powerful epiphanies and the convulsive, bodily shakings of epilepsy, which the ancient Greeks—before Hippocrates’s medical understanding of the illness—called “the sacred disease” and associated with divinity and genius. Maxon has also confessed to being stricken by epileptic seizures when confronted by naked women. It is not difficult to discern the connection here between erotic ecstasy, possession, and the “fit” of epilepsy: orgasm may also allow a moment of self-transcendence in which the self is for a few minutes “taken over” by an immersive, primal, archaic, instinctive, irresistible power.

Here the climactic moment leads to a recapitulation of the earlier emphasis on the words “exist” and “existence”: “So this is nausea: this blinding evidence? I have scratched my head over it! I’ve written about it! Now I know: I exist—the world exists. That’s all. It makes no difference to me.” Sartre is clearly playing on René Descartes’s famous Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” But here there is no causal relationship, no “therefore”: I exist, the world exists. This is the moment of the awareness of radical solitude and contingency: into this world we’re thrown. Crumb skillfully varies our view of the narrator either by himself, with the Self-Taught Man, or with another patron of the restaurant. Crumb also draws the narrator in a slightly different posture in each of the six panels on the page in which he appears. In the first, he is portrayed sitting on the left side frontally; in the second panel, again on the left side, but the right side of his face is in the viewer’s direction—the different angle here also allows us to view the

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