Monsters and Mouths

It was interesting to read Black Hole directly after Jimmy Corrigan, because despite their incredibly distinct styles, narratives, and characterizations, there were striking similarities in the way the two novels describe and imagine sorrow.  In class, we talked a lot about the concept of ‘transgenerational haunting,’ the almost genetic way in which sadness is passed down, over and over, from father to son. In Black Hole, there was also a ‘haunting:’ the “bug,” the monstrous disease that comes to represent all of the different traumas, insecurities, sadnesses, and slights that compose human adolescence. Like in Jimmy, sadness in Black Hole is presented almost as a disease, ever-present and always threatening to mark you with its terrifying mutations.  

The bug in Black Hole isn’t as inexorable as the haunting in Jimmy; Jimmy was born into his sadness, and the characters in Black Hole only acquire the disease through sex. Yet, sex is an important and inevitable part of living–the only way to escape the disease, it seems, is to hold back from life, to not embrace the passions and risks inherent in growing up, and that doesn’t seem like much of a way to live at all. Both authors, then, leave us with a very negative world view, a view of the human experience as unavoidably tainted with isolation, misery, and sadness. In both books, too, the sadness comes from the very thing that makes life worth living: its richness, its detail (see my previous post on Jimmy Corrigan), its passion.

Black Hole also holds a strong connection to Epileptic.  In both books, trauma is personified, signified, made physical–the monsters in Epileptic and the mutations in Black Hole are both indirect ways of expressing the inexpressable, of presenting, and hopefully addressing, the deep sadness in the authors’ lives and in the world.

There is a difference, though, between Black Hole and either Epileptic or Jimmy Corrigan. In both Epileptic and Jimmy, the world’s sadness seems to come from within. It’s their genetic diseases–the ‘transgenerational hauntings’–that keeps them from living properly, unable, in both cases, to connect to the things that are good in the world. In Black Hole, though, sadness comes from other people, from people hurting, killing, lying, loving. And, somehow, this makes the sadness in Jimmy and Epileptic easier to bear. By the end of Epileptic, one gets the sense that David B. is on the road to recovery; by creating his art, he has made great breakthroughs in his relationship to his brother and the world. At the end of Jimmy, I felt that though Jimmy himself may have been tainted forever, there is room for the reader to see beauty in the world, and possibly escape Jimmy’s fate. Sadness, it almost seems to suggest, is a conquerable creature in the mind of the sad.

At the end of Black Hole, though, the reader is left with nothing–just Chris, alone, adrift in the ocean, floating in a void. There is no hope, and no chance for recovery. She will never be well, and though she’d like to stay hidden from the problem forever, it is clear that she can’t, and that even if she did, she would have to stay hidden alone. Eliza and Keith, though together and in love, still can’t escape from their horrible dreams–‘gone,’ every night, to their own isolated nightmares. Once you get ‘the bug,’ it seems, there is no escaping its tug, its misery, and its loneliness, as blank and terrible and inexorable as a black hole.