I taught this book in my graphic novels class in 2017, but Past Me did not do Present Me the favor of making any kind of notes about what I did with it in class back then, other than a detailed description of the fascinating ways the text charts time, so that’s probably something I talked about. But then as I was lecturing in class today I had a sudden jolt of recognition — stronger than deja vu; a sense of certainty that I most definitely had had this idea before, that this book is a fascinating play on Aristotelian tragedy, because the protagonist is “a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty” — and, amusingly, if we take the autobiographical claim seriously, could be called a man from an illustrious family. Also, the story activates the same kinds of questions about choice and fate (was it all pre-determined and inevitable anyhow?). And if we think that Satrapi was intentionally invoking Aristotle here, then it’s all the more dazzling how she plays with time and cause and effect and reversal (which is why I think that she probably IS doing it intentionally, because it’s so cool!).
I went back to my old blog to see if maybe I had written this up there but no, just a very cringe-y post from the first time I read it, and insufferable 27-year old me blithely dismissed things that my older, wiser self sees as actually very interesting. There’s a whole other thought here about how there are these ideas you have while teaching that never get written down, and maybe some of them are actually really good and should be written down. But of course, you might also say, you said them to a whole room full of people (or at least a handful of people, depending on attendance that day…) and so maybe the idea isn’t “lost” at all, but will reappear in future years in someone else’s work, or will be the seed of a much better idea, etc. Or, hey, maybe if it’s actually worthwhile, it’ll still be there in your brain 5 years later, ready to emerge once more.
Anyways. Reading it now, at any rate, Chicken with Plums strikes me as my favorite kind of text, namely, one that can very plausibly be read in two diametrically opposite ways, and that moreover seems to be insisting that both of them are true. In this case, whether you see the book as the story of a great artist who is destroyed by his shrewish wife’s failure to appreciate his art, or by a tragic miscommunication that led him to abandon his romantic dreams, or by being the kind of person who had romantic delusions — or maybe the story of a talented but really sort of reprehensible narcissist and awful husband who failed to appreciate others in his life except as reflections of himself. Which of these interpretations you choose seemingly commits you to very different positions in terms of the text’s ultimate “meaning” and “message” — and clearly, the text seems to invite you to draw some kind of wisdom from it. Yet they all feel equally right, to me anyways.
What makes these competing interpretations even more pleasing, this time around, is how the book is ALSO playfully vacillating between the idea that it’s an autobiographical text; a family story, or alternatively, a timeless parable or folktale. This is where the minute chronicling of times and dates comes in (here I actually do have a sense of deja vu — have I written these very words before, somewhere? In some other set of teaching notes, or something? And now it grows, and I half expect to discover this entire post written in some diary of mine…), and the sudden intrusion of autobiography, but also the very familiar parables of the 5 men and the elephant, and the angel of death. Are we actually supposed to believe in the angel of death? I asked my class. If we want to embrace this text as a window into another culture and worldview, why draw the line at the angel of death? “It doesn’t matter if it’s real,” someone said. “That’s not what the book is about.” But doesn’t it matter? The claim to documentary authenticity seems very intentional.
It was a great discussion, in both sections, which made me feel much better about having assigned a text in which the central character decides to die, at a time when the world seems so bleak, and it’s cold and rainy to boot. It really is a wonderful book.
And I seem to have also justified the impulse to have written out all these ideas about it, too, instead of the various other overdue things I was supposed to be doing… (like picking my kid up from after school on time, gah)
Kasia Reads 