Caricature: 9 Stories, by Daniel Clowes

burlesque cartoon distortion farce imitation
lampoon mimicry parody
pastiche satire
send-up takeoff
travesty

A title well-chosen.

The graphic collection Caricature: 9 Stories by Daniel Clowes is a *dreadful mélange of people and situations that represent the fragmentation of the self. There are nine people, nine portraits of loneliness, and nine representations of isolation. While reading it, I asked myself (as I have whilst reading other works by Clowes): is Clowes in the middle of a life-long existential crisis? Judging by the characters he creates, there is almost no perceivable point to living other than to find ways of mocking the banal terror of daily existence.

*full of dread or inspiring dread, not extremely distasteful

Why create characters when all they become, ultimately, is caricatures? Is this art imitating life? Or is this art imitating the farce of life? Daniel Clowes’ stories rely in part on your prior knowledge and experience. I believe that Clowes' work is most meaningful to people who feel alone even when in the middle of a crowded room. And I’m not talking about fairy tale bitches like Rose DeWitt Bukater from Titanic. I mean you. If you have ever known the feeling of "aloneness," Caricature is a book you must read.

So then what is a caricature? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines caricature as the “exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics.” It is a representation often found in literature that is concerned with character over incidental climax.

Take, for example, the title story, Caricature. Main character: a 39 year-old childless and divorced male, possibly Jewish -- last name is Rosen, which may be significant in itself if we are to seriously consider the issue of the cheese standing alone -- whose isolation and disconnected existence is expressed by his state of self-imposed homelessness. He is an “artist” who makes his living drawing caricatures for random people at county fairs across the country.

Clowes subverts the trope of Western Literature’s barren wasteland and instead litters his scenes with people who pollute the landscape as mere props and are as devoid as the landscape of identity and distinguishing features. I always fall back into this body-as-land stuff when I think about most literature, because I can’t help but see over and over how Western writers are at a loss when it comes to building upon the concept of the psychic landscape in early writing. It is still a common trope, but where once loneliness was expressed through images of empty land, it is now expressed through the polluted and glutted modern landscape that is common to every city in North America!

The more surrounded we become, the lonelier we feel.

While Western Literature has long been concerned with establishing a common identity, Clowes tears away the curtain and amidst the big C’s of postmodernism – commercialism, capitalism and consumerism (think of the insipid mini-mall Enid and Rebecca scoff at in Ghost World) – Clowes lays bare the new truth of Western isolation and the fallacy of identity-formation in a society that expounds the sensibility and importance of participating in collective consciousness. Aren’t we taught to find ourselves amongst others? To establish an identity via imitation?

Clowes’ characters are caricatures because they subscribe only to certain notions and aspects of sociey. They, like the definition of caricature suggests, are borrowed exaggerated parts of what would make up a whole and “normal” personality. Where one “normal” person may be an amalgamation of certain traits like cynicism, despair, aloof, or cowering, Clowes’ character (pick one), would represent an amplification of just one.

If art – and I’m using this as a blanket term, especially since a graphic tale is a marriage of both visual artistic and literary traditions – if art is a vehicle for “externalizing the internal” (fans of the film adaptation of Ghost World will get this) and we never get to see any honest manifestation of this ideal in Caricature, are Clowes’ characters really just caricatures used to mock it? Or are these caricatures the only real characters because they exist on the fringes of what Clowes seems view as a bromidic society? What is Clowes saying with this caricature of a man who, in turn, draws caricatures for money?

Of course, in my consideration of a graphic “novel,” I am obligated to address the visual aspect of the narrative in a second part to this review (coming soon). Suffice it to say, while the words may be telling stories of people who are alone, visually, these characters are not. They are surrounded by an odd assortment of usually nameless faces that are absolutely sinister because of their their anonymity – an irony that belabours Clowes’ ideological thrust that you are alone even when you are not.

Daniel Clowes’ Caricature raised more questions than I am prepared to answer at this point, but this is what a great book should do, is invite the reader to linger a while and, in this case, to consider the medium as well as the message.