by Antonio Faeti
1.
On the importance of the mark, in comics, it sometimes seems that everything has already been said, so relevant, unavoidable, and fundamental is every consideration expressed about this essential component of the comics universe. Yet, when one encounters an extensive comics work, a great and new example of authentic narrative entirely based on balloons, one realizes that it is necessary to rethink, to reconsider, to make comparisons, to revise the meaning of a historical journey.
Because Marjane Satrapi’s mark can also deceive a distracted eye that is unable to place it within its rich and varied genealogy. At first glance, it appears to be an intentionally simple, condensed mark, one aimed at extracting all the resources that an essentially stylistic research has always offered cartoonists. But one soon discovers that this is a mark with pictorial origins, close to the woodcuts of Frans Masereel, yet also devoted to the uncompromising clarity of Chester Gould.
A mark, in short, that fills the entire page with insinuating shadows, that knows how to render the nightmare of the city, that sketches avenues emerging from an oneiric vision which rethinks and rediscovers the deepest meanings of surrealism. Thus, any interpretation based on naïve experience must disappear, and Persepolis becomes the result of a cultured, allusive, unsettling mark: a mark that knows the mysterious inks of Kafka the draftsman, but which, in certain depictions of stairways, in certain crowd scenes, when it must convey the torment of traffic or youthful alienation, can even evoke Art Nouveau and draw upon a multiplicity of twentieth-century traditions, where Sironi’s outskirts meet Morandi the engraver and retrace the thanatological grimaces of Otto Dix.
A mark, therefore, capable of concealing beneath the deceptive evidence of its simplicity a vast network of references.
2.
The child who, in Iran, experiences the transition from a dictatorship rooted in the final cries of an old predatory colonialism to the fanatic fundamentalism of those who use religion as a tool of oppression and torture, must rediscover suffering and cursed archetypes. She must reconnect with the nightmares of a History that contains so many massacres, so many unwelcome arrivals, so many catechisms imposed through torture.
One must acknowledge that Marji has, paradoxically, benefited from a disturbing privilege: she was already rebellious from the beginning, while the Shah failed to understand the horror of his dying power. Naturally, she welcomes the change and opens herself, as she must, to hope. She experiences, in short, a frantic transition from one regime to another, but she is immediately able to condemn the second one as well, even more despicable than the previous, because it denies any true hope and murders legitimate dreams.
It is not by chance that the hidden torment that extinguishes hope can be described as Kafkaesque. Certainly, we are here in Iran, but at the same time we are in the tar-like sea of every form of fundamentalism. We are in Salem, we are in Calvinist villages where adulterous women were marked with a scarlet A; we are in a small town in Lazio where the tyrant is a Counter-Reformation Jesuit; we are in Gogol’s Russia, always the same, whether under the Communists or under the Tsar’s Cossacks: a window cleaner is placed in charge of a hospital because the fertilizer of every fundamentalism is always stupidity.
3.
And then comes the war. For us, it was a televised war, embedded in the soft summers of Reagan-era hedonism, interrupted by Isaura the Slave Girl and other soap operas, by Japanese anime, by Quelli della notte, by countless beach stories, by Miss Italy, Sanremo, and the Oba Oba that came from Brazil.
But for them, it was an immense Totentanz, a massacre that almost equals twice the number of Italian deaths in the First World War.
The little girl moves forward, through hopes, fears, and conflicts, similar to many children in wartime who, in order to resist, often look elsewhere, emphasizing the faded symbols of normality so as not to be entirely overwhelmed by the vivid colors of war’s abnormality.
There are hospitals still suspended between Kafka and Gogol; there are mutilated bodies that can perhaps only be represented in this way, as tragic comic-book figures rendered with a terrifying power of synthesis that transforms them all into symbols. Marji truly understands that war and fundamentalism can proceed together. She understands everything, as happens to children in war, even though this is a strange war indeed: a war where Scud missiles are already being used, where the whip is still used against those who simply demand the right to survive, to celebrate, to dance.
Between war and fundamentalism there is a maniacal alliance. Here, resistance must merge with new strategies, new alliances, new outcomes. The theft of an Iron Maiden poster is as complex as a maquis operation, because it is a struggle against the deathly darkness of those who kill the spirit, the desire to live, the anxiety of existing, and hope. Boys are already ready for the front at thirteen; it becomes difficult to define what childhood is, what adolescence is, with these numbers, with these visions.
It is essential to note how the simple yet dramatic mark, the many blacks representing basements and curfews, and the language of comics give Persepolis its absolute specificity. One might dare to suggest that this horror, filled with the ridiculous atrocities typical of every bloodthirsty fundamentalism, could truly only have been told in this way.
Of Persepolis, therefore, one must say that it truly puts the language of comics to the test, extracting from it resources that seemed previously unknown. This dark Tehran, this wandering of poor survivors who hear one Scud after another falling in nearby streets, this insane otherness presented as legitimate everyday life — or rather, the deep roots of this unprecedented horror within the eternal history of horrors — perhaps could only be rendered in this form.
Here, after all, one thinks of Bacon’s drawings of refugees sheltering in London’s Underground while Göring’s planes bombed England.
4.
And then comes Austria, the beneficial Elsewhere, the Austria Felix where one studies, receives an education, and grows. And Marji does indeed grow in many ways: first of all in height, dramatically, and then in the equally dramatic awareness that every form of exoticism is foolish, false, and murderous.
This Austria has a smiling former Nazi as its president, whose repentance is uncertain. It is an Austria so racist that it cannot even understand that it is racist. It is an Austria where Marji can renew her relationship with Kafka and Gogol, with an even stronger and more justified intensity.
It is an Austria of underwear, contraceptives, dog excrement, food that aspires to define itself as food while lying about it, meaningful urinals, various drugs, landlords in houses reminiscent of concentration camps, people lost in the metropolis, and absurd schools.
There is no Sissi, the Danube is not blue, there is no New Year’s Concert, and no one dances the waltz: it is a beautiful concentration-like universe where Marji’s peers truly search for themselves, perhaps even going as far as Tyrol to look for an alternative in which Cesare Lombroso might have happily found confirmation of his theories.
Then she returns home. Everything acquires clearer contours. In its own way, it has been a Grand Tour, different in its routes, but capable of transforming her gaze and her perception of Elsewhere.
5.
Of Persepolis it is inevitable to say that it is a “sentimental education,” in the fullest and most Flaubertian sense of the term.
And then, of course, it is also a Bildungsroman.
Persepolis pays a great tribute to comics and to their history, because today those who tell a “sentimental education” often fall into the traps of a memorialistic intimacy that makes one long for the television fiction of one channel or another, including police dramas.
But when comics possess this primal and painful force, these graphic variations from degradation to tenderness, these expressionistic distortions that nevertheless do not limit the aching presence of genuine tenderness, then comics can truly look toward Flaubert — toward the great Flaubert.
Antonio Faeti is one of Italy’s most important scholars of children’s literature, illustration, and comics. A professor at the University of Bologna, he has dedicated his research to the relationship between images, storytelling, and education. Through his critical work, he helped recognize the cultural value of comics, moving beyond the idea that they are merely a popular or entertainment medium. In his essays, he has explored the power of images as tools of memory, education, and knowledge. His interest in drawing and illustration has opened new perspectives in the study of contemporary visual culture. In his essay The Sense of Elsewhere, dedicated to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Faeti demonstrates how comics can narrate history, war, and freedom through a complex and profound language. His work remains a fundamental reference for anyone studying the relationship between words and images.
Text published in the catalogue Il Velo di Maja: Marjane Satrapi, Ovvero dell’ironia dell’Iran (The Veil of Maya: Marjane Satrapi, or The Irony of Iran), edited by Elettra Stamboulis and Gianluca Costantini, Lizard Publishing, 2003.
