Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books by Arnold Weinstein
Authors: Arnold Weinstein
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What does this tale of an idiot teach us about growing up? I have emphasized all that Benjy has lost and continues to lose every day. Is there anything gained? Not for him, that is certain, but for us? The answer is yes: his uncomprehending vision of things, his to-the-death fidelity to his sister, both convey to us in words an immediate luminous fragrant noisy poignant unlabeled world we have long ago exited. We could not return even if we wished to. Yet I believe that at some primitive level of psyche—a level prior to all the abstractions we adults live among—this is how it once was for all of us: an incessant craving for love, a total helplessness, an unfiltered picture of bright shining shapes that rush upon us, an existence parsed only by crying or not crying.
The Little Princess: Marjane Satrapi’s Marjane
Little Marjane, the child heroine of the graphic novel
Persepolis
(2003), is doubtless based on the real life of the author, Marjane Satrapi, herself distantly related to an earlier shah of Persia (1848–1896). This matters a great deal, for Marjane’s perspective is indeed that of a privileged child, even if she and her family are targeted by the regime. She is privileged but also perky, feisty, and irresistibly winning as she offers her little testimony of the events in Tehran from 1979 to 1982: events of enormous political moment, as the (current) shah loses his grip on power and is replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who installs a no less repressive order of militant Islam and militant communism. But it is also a time of enormous personal change, as Marjane moves from childhood into adolescence, identifying ever more closely with the seductive Western culture that is demonized by the (new) forces that be. This is a potent artistic mix, and the force of this memoir stems unmistakably from an innocent child’s evolving angle of vision.
Blessed with the temporal reach of all narrative,
Persepolis
is not confined to its three-year central drama but contains a number of haunting episodes from the more distant past, as Marjane learns about her family origins, especially about the princely identity of her dead grandfather (as the text has it). This sequence illustrates to perfection how Satrapi makes use of her graphic language and child perspective. At first the child is simply thrilled to learn that her grandfather was royal, and we see an image of a gentleman with a crown astride an elephant, in charge of his domains. Then we see the shah confiscating all his possessions, only to ask him, in a later frame, to serve as prime minister. At this point Mother—the blood daughter of the prince—takes over the storytelling and evokes, in a few harrowing frames, the punishments meted out to her father because of his Marxist leanings: frequent arrests, frequent prison sentences, torture via water cell, rheumatism, ruined health. But because this is a graphic text, we now see the mother as child, as uncomprehending as Marjane herself is, visiting her father, leaping and riding on his (damaged) back. Most striking here are the images of the innocent Marjane’s open-eyed bewilderment, the blankness of her face as she receives this political and familial education. She had earlier asked to play Monopoly but is now so dazed that she wants only to take a bath, “a really long bath.” The penultimate frame shows her, still vacant-eyed, lying in the tub while conversing with God, who has been a frequent nightly visitor of hers; He sits next to the tub and seems manifestly unequal to the task. The last frame of this episode displays the naked little girl, having exited the tub, standing in a small puddle of water, examining her hands intently. The caption reads, “My hands were wrinkled when I came out, like Grandpa’s.”
Granted, this is scarcely a version of Huck’s “All right, then I’ll
go
to hell,” but it shares something of the same generosity and moral growth. Perhaps this is how political
What does this tale of an idiot teach us about growing up? I have emphasized all that Benjy has lost and continues to lose every day. Is there anything gained? Not for him, that is certain, but for us? The answer is yes: his uncomprehending vision of things, his to-the-death fidelity to his sister, both convey to us in words an immediate luminous fragrant noisy poignant unlabeled world we have long ago exited. We could not return even if we wished to. Yet I believe that at some primitive level of psyche—a level prior to all the abstractions we adults live among—this is how it once was for all of us: an incessant craving for love, a total helplessness, an unfiltered picture of bright shining shapes that rush upon us, an existence parsed only by crying or not crying.
The Little Princess: Marjane Satrapi’s Marjane
Little Marjane, the child heroine of the graphic novel
Persepolis
(2003), is doubtless based on the real life of the author, Marjane Satrapi, herself distantly related to an earlier shah of Persia (1848–1896). This matters a great deal, for Marjane’s perspective is indeed that of a privileged child, even if she and her family are targeted by the regime. She is privileged but also perky, feisty, and irresistibly winning as she offers her little testimony of the events in Tehran from 1979 to 1982: events of enormous political moment, as the (current) shah loses his grip on power and is replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who installs a no less repressive order of militant Islam and militant communism. But it is also a time of enormous personal change, as Marjane moves from childhood into adolescence, identifying ever more closely with the seductive Western culture that is demonized by the (new) forces that be. This is a potent artistic mix, and the force of this memoir stems unmistakably from an innocent child’s evolving angle of vision.
Blessed with the temporal reach of all narrative,
Persepolis
is not confined to its three-year central drama but contains a number of haunting episodes from the more distant past, as Marjane learns about her family origins, especially about the princely identity of her dead grandfather (as the text has it). This sequence illustrates to perfection how Satrapi makes use of her graphic language and child perspective. At first the child is simply thrilled to learn that her grandfather was royal, and we see an image of a gentleman with a crown astride an elephant, in charge of his domains. Then we see the shah confiscating all his possessions, only to ask him, in a later frame, to serve as prime minister. At this point Mother—the blood daughter of the prince—takes over the storytelling and evokes, in a few harrowing frames, the punishments meted out to her father because of his Marxist leanings: frequent arrests, frequent prison sentences, torture via water cell, rheumatism, ruined health. But because this is a graphic text, we now see the mother as child, as uncomprehending as Marjane herself is, visiting her father, leaping and riding on his (damaged) back. Most striking here are the images of the innocent Marjane’s open-eyed bewilderment, the blankness of her face as she receives this political and familial education. She had earlier asked to play Monopoly but is now so dazed that she wants only to take a bath, “a really long bath.” The penultimate frame shows her, still vacant-eyed, lying in the tub while conversing with God, who has been a frequent nightly visitor of hers; He sits next to the tub and seems manifestly unequal to the task. The last frame of this episode displays the naked little girl, having exited the tub, standing in a small puddle of water, examining her hands intently. The caption reads, “My hands were wrinkled when I came out, like Grandpa’s.”
Granted, this is scarcely a version of Huck’s “All right, then I’ll
go
to hell,” but it shares something of the same generosity and moral growth. Perhaps this is how political
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