Marjene Satrapi's Persepolis, whether it's this version or this version, has a lot to offer the reader. How does she do it? That's what this video is all about. When I say a lot to offer the reader, I'm talking about value. There's a word, valuable, down there.
What's valuable? What's valuable in reading your work? Well, investigations of value, for me, really center around theme. So to understand theme, you have to ask a question. You say, well, what is Marjane Satrapi saying or trying to say about the subject?
Well, what's the subject? What's the book about? What are the subjects that are in the book? Well, there's a lot. Repression, social control, revolution, Marxism, family, mental health, social class, history, imagination, the power of the imagination, cultural identity, drug use and abuse.
marriage, sexuality, memory, resistance, growing up, gender, religion, violence, war, justice, education, the Middle East as a region, patriarchy, torture, tradition, and forgiveness. These are the subjects. Different chapters, sometimes a whole chapter will focus on one or two of an idea. Sometimes a subject just kind of comes and goes. But most importantly, if we have a subject like memory, When you read the whole book, when it's all over, and you ask yourself this in question, what is Margie and Satya be saying, trying to say, about memory?
What does she want to give the reader? What kind of understanding does she want to give the reader? That's because literature is really designed to help us with the human condition.
So these are big ideas. We're going to get into much more detailed Ideas later. I don't know if this is going to be a two-parter or a one-parter. We're going to talk about how it works. Authorial choice.
What is it that she does? But most importantly for you as a reader is like, well, who cares? Why would it ever matter what she thinks about family or Marxism or revolution or social control? Well, we're all humans.
If you're watching this, you're a human. We are born. Why are we born? And we die.
Why do we have to die? It's not easy being human. It's complicated. We need help.
And if we learn something, conceptually, emotionally, maybe something about perspective, well, that would be really, really good. Something that would help us with our own understanding of maybe our own family, or maybe our own struggles with sexuality or justice, or our own understanding of education. The idea is...
This is really good. There's something in here. There's an understanding or maybe a particular attitude toward or maybe some insights, maybe something we didn't realize about revolution or family or the imagination. And so we need to think carefully about what it was she was trying to say because it is a good book.
There's value in here. So let's start to look a little deeper into the choices that she makes. I think I identified 33 and defined them because I think a struggle that a lot of people have is like, I know what's going on. I know that there's something in here that's really interesting about cultural identity, but like, how do I pick it apart? How do I describe it?
How do I analyze it? Well, let's start talking about it. Let's just get right into the work and talk about how it works. Here we have chapter one. So it's a graphic memoir.
This is a graphic memoir, which means it's true stories drawn from her own life that she is narrating herself. So what is the choice, this choice of graphic memoir, how does it allow, what does it allow Satrapy to do? And what implications does this have for the reader? What is your experience reading this?
That's an authorial choice. A choice in form. Graphic memoir. Why? Second choice.
It's in black and white. What impact does that have on the reader? There's no color. There's nothing in between. There's shading, but there's black and white are used to make the images.
It's another authorial choice. Verbal narration. So in every panel, Sometimes we have dialogue, sometimes we have no dialogue. Dialogue is indicated by our dialogue bubbles that we're familiar with. But in most panels, there's some verbal narration.
Now, this verbal narration is the voice looking back. I think now would be a good time to talk about Marjean Satrapi's life. So here she is, Marjean Satrapi, born about 1969. In 1979 is when the Islamic Revolution occurred.
She was about 10 years old. Shortly after that, a major war broke out between Iran and Iraq. And at some point early in that war, her family sends her to Europe.
So she's sent away from her family, 13, 14 years old. And then now, if you're reading this version of Persepolis 1, which is wonderful, great, it ends right there. It ends when she's sent away.
So the entire focus of the narrative is this time period right here. Sometimes she goes a little bit further back. If you're reading the complete Persepolis, you'll see the rest of the story all the way to 1994. But that's not the end of the story for Marjean Satrapi. Because this is a memoir, it matters when she wrote it. She wrote it in 2002 when she was about 30 years old.
So this voice is the voice of a 30-year-old woman. who has lived through all of these experiences, looking back on her own life, which gives her a unique perspective on the events. And it's also a unique format. So graphic memoir is the form. In a graphic memoir or any memoir, the writer is also a character in the story.
That's unique. So in that narrative voice, here are things to look for and think about. How should we describe the knowledge, the perspective, the emotional responses of the narrator?
As opposed to dialogue between the characters or Marjean, the character. What does this narrative voice, the one that's right here, know about everything that the characters don't know? Well, this voice knows how things are going to turn out. And so look for the relationship between the images and Marjean Satrapi's character. depicted and this voice.
Do you see irony? Hyperbole? Understatement?
A dry wit? Personal commentary or evidence of a struggle with remembering? So remember here when I said, look, maybe there's something valuable to learn about memory.
Well, we have to figure out what it is that she's trying to tell us about memory. You know, not about any of the specific characters or moments in the story, but what are the things about memory? So for these subjects that you're looking for, notice that none of them are like tied, you know, directly to like the events that are depicted in the story.
War is, yeah, you could learn about the Iran-Iraq war, but when it comes to the subjects and themes and these bigger ideas that we're trying to draw from, it's the concept of war. It's the concept of violence. It's the place of religion within a culture. It's the institution of marriage.
It's memory. Here we have a specific example of a possible irony. You know, irony is always an act of interpretation.
And so whenever you see irony, it's your speculation that what is being said or meant is not what it is on its face. You have to look a little deeper. And in this case, she says the Islamic revolution, but she puts Islamic in quotation marks.
Why does she do that? Because maybe from her perspective, as a 30-year-old looking back on these events, it's not really fair to call it an Islamic revolution without saying it was an Islamic revolution. Now, maybe that's what she means.
I don't know. That's my act of interpretation as a reader. Narrative voice.
Moving on, there's also choices that she makes at all times in this format that are a balance or some kind of sometimes tension between how is she going to tell the story through verbal narration right here, right here, through dialogue between characters that we see right here, or through visual storytelling at different times. Those are choices. Why in this moment did she use verbal narration?
Why in another moment did she use dialogue? And why in another moment did she use visual storytelling? Those are the acts of interpretation and analysis that you can do as someone trying to figure out what this means and what it's worth and what you can gain from your experience as a reader. Structure. Structure is huge.
It's huge in all literature, but I love teaching graphic narrative because you can see it. Choices. Always choices.
Why did she choose to open the graphic novel with a her alone? In the middle, nobody else around her. And then her next structural choice was that as she moved forward, she moved herself out of the center and had everyone else but not her.
And so how is the story built? Well, to just... your journey of an examination of structure, you can say how many panels per page. This one has one, two, three, four, five. This one is double wide.
These are centered in the middle. They're kind of equal. So you look at how things are weighted and balanced and how are things positioned.
I'll talk about this later as I dig deeper into this first chapter and a half, but where are things positioned? Where does the eye move? Center position often is a dominant position.
This one does not have a center position, so the dominant position really becomes right here. This is like the topic sentence. This is how we read. We start reading here, and then we move this way. Of course we do.
But on any page, this might set the tone. And we'll see what it looks like when you have something in the middle. On the next page, here we go.
So here we have two pages. That image is in the middle. Why that image in the middle? And look at also, it has taken over the entire center line of frames, of panels.
And so that's a dominant position for a man who is in a dominant position of authority. And then, and I think I talked about this in another point. So I think I'll hold off on that for now. Because I talked about position.
Now I need to talk about juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is huge in graphic narrative. It's an implied comparison based on placement and proximity.
So sometimes there's a very powerful comparison made just because two things happen to be next to each other. I have an example of that. I think I'll come to it when I go to that page, but you can also have juxtaposition if something is in the same position on the page.
So here's the first page. It looks like this. And then when you turn the page, what you see is that. So if you're analyzing her use of images and juxtaposition as an authorial choice, you could talk about the comparison between this is now for her, wearing the veil, all frowns, she's not even in the picture, to an implied comparison with what things were like before the revolution when she was in a mixed gender school. Look at the students, boys and girls together.
Some smiles, some frowns, but the placement of the images invites that comparison. So that is a structural decision that has to do with juxtaposition. She also uses this technique right here.
It's called montage. That's when you combine many images into one image and create an effect. Moving to the second page. And we'll see how many, I don't know how many.
If I just keep going for 45 minutes, maybe I will. Now, where do I start? 10. Structure, images, panels.
So sometimes she breaks things up with little narrative sequences. So this one I've numbered 1, 2, 3, 4. These are the only images in which this man, who is apparently a representation of the education department, of the new fundamentalist theocracy, government. And look at how he's depicted.
Center, center of the image and in the center of the entire page. And then the close-up. So, and this tells a little story. And then suddenly, in 1980, moving through the story, that's number 10. Number 11. I've gotten at this a little bit, is notice where People are in images. So in this one, where is he framed?
So now I'm talking about visual interpretation of visual analysis. The man is the central figure. So who has the authority and the power in this moment?
How does this represent? This represents patriarchy. You go over there, you go over there. He's in the center.
He's in the power position. Look at how he's even depicted above. It's like almost like he's floating in the air. Okay, so think about that. Being centered, being centered, being centered.
Now. Look at Marjean's mother. Here she is.
So now we have also some, this could be called perhaps a juxtaposition, or you can see both images at the same time when you have the book open. So there's something going on between this image here and these for sure, because look how powerful she looks right in the center. Now is she in the center panel?
No, because there isn't one on this page. That's a structural decision. But here she is in the center, but look, she's off center, you know? So here we have the man in the position of power over here. If I were going to put like a big dot on the center of the panel, it's right there.
But look where her face is framed as she's looking in the mirror. Not in the dominant position, but below and to the left. So what is that?
So what do we call that? I would call that framing, how the images are framed. And then here's some other terms.
Let's see, I have 11. I have, well, I think I'm going to skip to 14 because I'm kind of talking generally about when we're talking about images and their placements. We're talking about composition, opposition, balance, contrast, symmetry, division. These are just different terms you want to use to talk about how the images are composed. This image is composed to show opposition and contrast.
It has also a composed in a way that shows division. Is there symmetry? Somewhat. There's symmetry in that there's figures on the left and figures on the right.
Is there symmetry in this image? Yes. Is it important? Probably not.
Is there symmetry in this image? Yes. Is it important? Yes. Does it show division, opposition, balance?
So, contrast. So I talked about a contrast here where we have the man on this page. And again, this is when you open up the book, you can see both of these pages at the same time. So that's one of the wonderful complexities of this graphic narrative form, is that you can read in a circle.
You know, you read, you read the text, you read this way, of course, but then you can, like, take in the totality of it, and the meaning is still seeping from the page. And I think I've got students on their way into my classroom, and so I will stop this video at 17 minutes and 43 seconds to be continued.