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 featurelength 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 WyattBrown 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”. TEXTUAL TURNINGS Department of English Journal of English and comparative Studies VOLUME 1, 2019 217 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 Fadwa Mahmoud Hassan Gad In 2013, the United Nations issued a report on ‘World Population Ageing 2013’ stating that the “world’s population aged 80 years or over has increased from 8 percent in 1950 to 12 percent in 2013”. However, studies on creative works concerned with aging in general, and with cross-cultural aging in particular, are still largely lacking. In their introduction to a 2017 special issue on “Screening Old Age”, Dollan and Hallam lament a recognized lack of scholarly work on screening old age, observing a “long overdue scholarly interest” in “film and television productions that feature aging protagonists played by aging actors” (119). The Arab world shows even less academic attention to creative works on aging, with very few exceptions that tackle pioneering works such as Latifa al Zayyat’s Aging, 1974, and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Sur Ma Mère 2006. In the media, the depiction of old age is often restricted to the graceful senior figures avoiding grimmer facts of physical, psychological, or mental decline. Lapse in creative and scholarly interest in aging has also to do with the status allotted to humanities in gerontological studies. Since its impact cannot be materialized in concrete results, its contribution to gerontological studies is usually contested. Cole nicely summarizes this situation when he notes that “contributions from the humanities are often seen as “soft” and “unscientific” and thus subjected to unduly brisk critique when submitted to mainstream gerontological journals... Gerontology remains committed— however unwittingly—to a medicalempirical paradigm of aging as, at base, “a problem to be solved” (Cole 241). There is therefore an increasingly recognized need for more research on aging, not only as a topic within the discipline of humanities, but also as a compelling topic within the multimodal domain. In this context, the present paper proposes a comparison between the depiction of old age in two contemporary multimodal narratives: Roz Chast’s nonfiction graphic documentary Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant (2014) and Kawthar Younis’s featurelength documentary film “A Present from the Past” (2016). Chast’s graphic documentary was a finalist of the 2014 National Book Award, won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2014 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction. Younis’s documentary also received international recognition, including the Cairo International Film Festival award in 2015 and the Alfilm Festival award, Berlin 2016. Based on real events, Chast’s work chronicles a two-year experience of taking care of her nonagenarian parents. Likewise, Younis’s documentary relates details of a journey to Italy during which she accompanies her septuagenarian father in search of his first love whom he left more than thirty years ago. The study investigates how these narratives, being intergenerational, multimodal, and crosscultural, explore issues related to the TEXTUAL TURNINGS Department of English Journal of English and comparative Studies VOLUME 1, 2019 218 narration of the aging. How does multimodal narrative affect our perception and reaction to the aging body? What multimodal tools are employed in such a depiction? How could the intergenerational, crosscultural dimension influence this perception? To address these questions, the paper proposes a reading based on the interplay of Genette’s narrative theory and the perspectives suggested by experiential narrative forwarded by Hutto and Caracciolo. The purpose of the paper is to throw light on how experiential narrative theory contributes to reveal further potentials of documentary comics and feature –length documentary film as genres of old age narratives. The first part of the paper defines the narrative premises of experiential narrative theory. The remainder of the paper applies these premises to the works under study, with particular emphasis on their evaluative and interpretative features, strategies of engaging readers, multimodal depiction of embodied emotion, and the multimodal rendition of experiential spaces of old age. Experiential aspects of aging necessitate prior distinction between representation and experience. JanNoël Thon offers, in Transmedial Narratology, several terms that indicate that the difference between verbal and visual representation. Verbal presentation is “conceptual, “referential”, “propositional”, while and “perceptual” aspects characterize visual representations. Caracciolo accepts this distinction, but expresses reservations regarding the consideration of representation as an overarching category. Caracciolo explains that while representation is the domain of conceptual and semiotic reference, experience is a cognitive medium that precludes referentiality. Experience is perceived through basic movement, color, sensual perception and emotions, which could be revealed gradually via degrees of intensity (2014, 58). Hutto classifies this type of perception as rudimentary, i.e. it cannot be explained through object-based schema. In other words, basic experience, unlike objects, people, or events, is nonconceptual, and cannot therefore be represented through semiotic or mental representation (17-19). In a 2011 talk on “Narrative, Embodiment and Cognitive Science” Caracciolo surveys the development of the experiential approach to narrative. This approach started in the last decade of the twentieth century and discussed how perception of our body affects engagement and response to our reading experience of narrative. Caracciolo mentions that according to David Couzens Hoy there are certain bodily responses such as pain that all people share, regardless of their respective cultures. Hoy uses the term “invariants” to qualify these universal responses (2). Caracciolo also refers to the philosopher Mark Johnson who elaborates that the human body interacts with the world in five ways: biological, ecological, phenomenological, social, and cultural. Johnson adds that narrative belongs to the social and cultural context. A major contribution in that direction has been Monika Fludernik’s discussion, in 1996, of the link between narrative and embodied experience. Caracciolo mentions that the idea that experience involves not only embodiment but also an evaluative process. Has been discussed by Varela, who believed that evaluation comes from stored cultural and social values, or what he termed “the evaluative background”. Caracciolo illustrates this evaluative quality characterizes the reader’s reading experience which involves two stages of “conscious attribution” and “conscious enactment”. By these terms Caracciolo TEXTUAL TURNINGS Department of English Journal of English and comparative Studies VOLUME 1, 2019 219 refers to the reader’s “stance towards the characters” and an “imagined undergoing” of the character experience in the first person respectively. The “story –driven experience” is therefore both evaluative and simulative. Caracciolo maintains that intersubjective dialogue bet