Embodiment, Time, and the Life Review in Jeff Lemire’s Ghost Stories

Abstract

Embodiment, Time, and the Life Review in Jeff Lemire’s Ghost Stories Katie Mullins (bio) Jeff lemire’s graphic novel trilogy, Essex County (2009), has received much critical attention: the trilogy won the Joe Shuster Award and awards from the American Library Association and was also one of Canada Reads’ top five selections in 2010. It has also been nominated for two Eisner Awards, an Ignatz, and a Harvey Award. Perhaps surprisingly, however, little to nothing has been written about the trilogy in the way of scholarly study. Divided into three interconnected books, the trilogy explores the history, personal hardships, and intergenerational family ties that bind a collection of characters in a small rural community in Essex County, Ontario. Although I address aspects of the trilogy as a complete work, I focus on Book Two, Ghost Stories, and its representation of the aging body in connection with memory. Ghost Stories focuses on Lou Lebeuf, a once successful hockey player, who finds himself alone in old age and estranged from his younger brother Vince, with whom he once shared a close relationship. Elderly, deaf, and suffering from alcoholism and dementia, Lou attempts to tell his story as he recalls his earlier life in fragments of memory that emerge sometimes from triggers (photographs or places, for example) and sometimes spontaneously. The visual juxtaposition of youthful and aging bodies highlights [End Page 29] the effects of time on the body and foregrounds Lou’s struggle to maintain a sense of his identity in old age. In addressing Lou’s process of remembering, I explore how the narrative’s visual rhetoric and complex spatial configuration of time work to express Lou’s recourse to memory and his relationship to the past, as well as the vital role of the body within the process of remembering and storytelling. Ghost Stories presents Lou’s experience of isolation and alienation as a central issue in the narrative. Yet, while the narrative depicts the traumas of aging, it also shows how Lou’s body enables him to remember and tell his story; how, for instance, physically being in a certain place or adopting a particular posture aids his memory of a past event. Lou’s body also allows him to experience fleeting but positive moments of engagement with his present embodied experience and the external world. In other words, Lou’s embodied, sensory experiences (sight, vision, smell, and touch) often pull him out of his solitary reflections on the past and into an appreciation of his experiences in the present time. I argue that Essex County presents a model of aging that ascribes significance to the aging body by suggesting the ways in which embodied experiences are inseparable from processes of remembering. I also argue that, although Lou frequently dissociates from his aging body, his embodied experiences in the narrative’s present time allow him to experience fleeting, but life-affirming, moments of connectedness to others and to the external world, which counter his sense of isolation. My reasons for examining these issues with reference to a graphic novel are twofold. I am interested in probing the ways that experiences of the body and remembering are visually recorded but also in the medium’s ability to convey moments of time—past, present, and future—on the same page and the recursive effects that result from such (almost) concurrent temporality.1 In an interview with comics scholar Hilary Chute, comics artist and theorist Scott McCloud states that “comics is the only form in which past, present, and future are visible simultaneously” (“Scott McCloud”). In her own work on trauma and autobiographical comics, [End Page 30] Chute suggests that the effect of this simultaneity is to cause the reader to “look, and then look again” and thus the work “builds a productive recursivity into its narrative scaffolding” (Graphic Women 8). The interaction between text and image, which requires the reader to read back and forth between both, also works to this effect. Such recursivity becomes crucial to the work of confronting issues of subjectivity and selfhood and thus to my focus on the body in relation to time and remembering/storytelling, as it avoids reducing embodied experience to a...