Gaiman and McKean’s Violent Cases and the Mystification of Memory
Metaphors are our way of interpreting the truth, writes Nietzche in On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense. With each metaphor, remarks the German philosopher, we stray further from the truth. Because the first metaphor is the stimulation of our senses in reaction to a stimulus, and the second is the expression of that reaction through language, man always remains two metaphors from the truth. Neil Gaiman’s Violent Cases operates in the space between Nietzche’s metaphors. Memory is the first metaphor and its depiction in this graphic novella is the second; it is a treatise on the mimetic deceptiveness of memory.
Drawing from the gothic tradition, film noir and the crime and horror genres, the storyteller of this faux memoir makes a mythology of his childhood; Gaiman and McKean blur the line between fact and fiction in their retelling of the past. These artists testify to the mystification of memory over time; their unreliable representation of time and character appearance riddle the story with forgetfulness and doubt, leaving the reader to discern what is real and what is artifice in memory.
Gaiman breaks down the veracity of his narrative voice by relying on an unreliable primary narrator. As the story opens, the present-day storyteller, a young man who resembles Neil Gaiman, interjects almost immediately. “I wouldn’t want to gloss over the true facts,” he admits to the reader, following with the question: “Without true facts, where are we?” (1). Admitting that he wants to pursue the “truth,” the Gaiman look-alike indirectly admits that he is uncertain if his episodic childhood memories are truthful. This defensive statement in pursuit of “truth” casts doubt into the mind of the reader. It pushes them to examine the partial or total mystification of the narrative. The narrator further admits that “although there is much that I remember from this time, there is as much that I do not;” he describes his memories as “blurred… [and] filtered” (5, 7). After initial admissions like these, the reader can immediately put the storyteller’s recollections of the past under scrutiny.
Dave McKean’s erratic shifts between expressionist and realistic illustrations in Violent Cases mirror the narrator’s unfamiliarity with his own memory. He underscores Gaiman’s fallible portrayal of memory with his shifting artistic styles and changing likenesses of main characters, particularly that of the osteopath. McKean uses realistic art for memories that are closer to the present and are easier to retrieve, like the striking beginning of the story with the narrator’s father. When the narrator asks his father what the osteopath looked like, McKean places a hauntingly realistic illustration of the narrator’s father in a full-width frame that zooms in menacingly over a series of three panels. “What do you want to know for?” asks the father, darkly looking at both the son and the reader in the final frame (5). Like what psychologists would call a flashbulb memory, this photorealistic break of the fourth wall begins McKean’s tirade of blurred, expressionist depictions of childhood memory.
To emulate the fleeting emotions and fuzzy past recollections of the narrator as a child, McKean skews the appearance of the narrator’s childhood memories. These collaged illustrations — a sporadic mix of sketches, patterns, photographs, medical diagrams placed together if they are all pieces of the same puzzle — distort perspective and portray holistic but disjointed vignettes of the narrator’s past. However, McKean and Gaiman take the distortion one step further: they completely change the countenance of main characters like the osteopath. Initially, the child narrator recalls the osteopath being “a kindly, old man,” but near the end of the narrative he decides that the osteopath actually resembles an actor in “The Maltese Falcon” (5, 29). The illustrations shift from a light sketch of an amiable Albert Einstein-lookalike to a photo-realistic screened image of a young doctor. This artistic shift demonstrates the permeability of memory; as the narrator looks back (even though he finds it “hard to remember”), he can iterate over his childhood memory, adding new impressions and images over what his child-self recalls (29). McKean’s illustrations and Gaiman’s uncertain diction show the reader the world that the narrator experiences, but both raise the question: which narrator’s perspective are we truly working with? At first, the child’s and osteopath’s narratives may appear distinct from each other. However, each of these perspectives ultimately depend on the storyteller’s fallible childhood memory. This triune set of recalled experiences shares the single, unreliable orator.
Along with his fallible storyteller, the structure of Gaiman’s double frame narrative dismantles the tale’s representation of time. Merging three timelines, Gaiman merges the perspective of the present-day narrator, the narrator as a child, and the austere osteopath; he fashions a story — within a story — within a story. Gaiman collages these three narratives in tandem with McKean’s visuals to upend the linear trajectory of the tale. The child’s and the osteopath’s timelines merge most clearly during the game of musical chairs at Louisa Singer’s birthday party. While the kids run and squabble around, the osteopath, the third narrative voice, recounts his own graphic experience with Al Capone and his gangsters. In a violent, dark clash, Gaiman aligns the squabbling of children over chairs in a party game with the “screaming,” “smashing” and “bashing” that the osteopath describes as Capone murdered “twenty or thirty” men in front of the doctor as a younger man (32, 33).
McKean especially contributes the break in time at the birthday party by breaking the traditional artistic grid while alternating between the party and murder scene. As Capone’s violence escalates, McKean shatters his grid with erratic cross-hatching, jarring textures and a monochrome color palette for everything but the red blood of victims. The roses from Capone that the osteopath describes at the funerals of his victims even invade the areas of the page depicting the party. When the osteopath’s story muddles with the recollections of the child, it becomes clear to the reader that a singular narrator is conflating two different time periods in this work, driving their distrust and demonstrating the underlying entanglement of these three timelines in recalled memory.
Gaiman and McKean’s erratic shifts between art and narration styles fully mystify the narrator’s childhood memory. They construct representations of the past and offer them to the reader as palatable truths. Because we are capable of forgetting and generalizing, Gaiman and McKean’s Violent Cases displays the beauty and the light to be found in the present through forgetting the darker edges of the past. When the narrator recalls seeing a “star twinkling coldly… [that] continued to increase in brightness…Then it faded…until it was just another star” he freezes, stuck in a moment between his childhood and his present adult life. This epiphatic star symbolizes what Alan Moore calls “the magic to be gleaned from remembered events (46).” Over time, memories coalesce and allow us to reach a point of understanding, like the narrator experiences here with the illuminating star. Memory can be the spark that ignites the kindling we hold in the present moment; we can remember how to imagine because we now know that memory is a tool for the present.
