Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant (2014) and Kawthar Younis’s “A Present from the Past” (2016) as Multimodal Narratives of Old Age

Abstract

This paper investigates Roz Chast’s graphic novel Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant (2014) and Kawthar Younis’s feature- length documentary “A Present from the Past” (2016). Both works provide narratives of old age based on actual events. Chast’s work chronicles the experience of the famous cartoonist as she takes care of her ageing parents while Younis’ documentary discusses the journey of a daughter with her elderly father in search of his first love who lives in Italy. Created by female artists who confuse the role of creator and character, both works reveal the complexities and ambiguities of ageing through the lenses of gendered story telling. The paper posits the following questions: How can the modes of sequential arts and visual narrative give utterance to new poetics of ageing, particularly through exploring the interaction between the generic features of these modes (such as temporality, comedy, and journeying) and aspects of the ageing experience such as resilience, infantilisation, defiance of ageing, and perception of the ageing body. The paper further contends that, through their intergenerational dimension, these stories reevaluate the underlying, fixed patterns of the perception of old age. Finally, the paper investigates the insights offered through a cross cultural examination of works about ageing that belong to different cultures, in this case Middle East and American. Surveying earlier literary works by female writers in which ageing people take precedence such as Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse and Latifa El Zayat’s Ageing, the first part of the paper attempts a theoretical framework that synthesizes this survey with the givens of critical gerontology (which encompasses literary gerontology and narrative gerontology) as suggested by Holstein (2007), Hepworth (2000), Woodward (2006), and Wyatt- Brown as well as theories of visual narrative and documentary genres structures proposed by Eisner (1996) and Cohn (2013) . The second part of the paper explores the techniques of storying adopted by Chast and Younis as they relate to their respective modes/genres. The final part of the paper examines the gender, intergenerational and cross cultural aspects in both works thus evaluating the interplay of the subjective with the global aspects of old age. Taking these issues into consideration the paper attempts to prove that a consideration of ageing narratives across modes and genres enhances Simone de Beauvoir’s remark that “it is this old age that makes it clear that everything has to be reconsidered, recast from the very beginning. That is why the whole problem is so carefully passed over in silence: and that is why this silence has to be shattered”.