This study examines Black Hole, the graphic novel of Charles Burns, through analyzing main characters’ transformations and their emotional life from a Freudian psychoanalytical perspective. Black Hole is literally a story about teenagers and their psychological, physiological and actually sickening transformations in various forms of alienation and defense mechanisms. In the story of teenage angst or turmoil of growing up and social exclusion; adults – parents or teachers –, who are the figures of authorities, are seen at the peripheries, they are not visible in teenagers’ life worlds.
Charles Burns’ story starts in suburban Seattle, during 1970’s with an unknown sexually transmitted disease that deforms the high school students’ bodies. As we read the story, we could realize that the bug or the teen plague is a metaphor for adolescence and fear of bodily mutations, sex and being ostracized by classmates and families; hence the bug helps us to highlights the adolescents’ love, lust, fear and self hatreds. Additionally, dreams and particularly sexual symbols have an important role in the development of characters; whose lives intersect as time passes. The story of teenagers’ growing up, fear and loneliness ends up tragically for most of them since there is no going back to their normal, boring lives again.
Teens of the story are no longer able to deal with their out of controlled, hormonal bodies. One has a small tail, the other has a second mouth on the neck that talks when he falls asleep, a girl shed her skin like a snake after copulation, one of them has a face that covered with hair, another girl has webbing between her digits; both of these freakish characters’ deformations, odd distortions could be read as the external manifestations of their inner conflicts. Some of the teens can easily hide their mutations but most of them have problems with their deformed bodies and they leave their sterile and controlled environments, drop out of school and start to live in a closed community hiding out in the woods; where is cold, dark and insecure. They spend their time living under tents, eating junk food, using drugs and drinking alcohol as a temporary escape.
Black Hole is an experience of disgust, and unease of a transition period, an internal turmoil for teens, who are trying to be an individual and find their own way. The emotional and hormonal distortions of adolescence are drawn by Burns through the bodies of characters. Characters feel themselves as monsters and their anxiety about sex manifests itself physically. As the characters lose control over their own bodies, Burns changes the frames’ styles, prefers wavy lined frames to define the fantasy world or dreams but after a while it becomes difficult to understand the difference between frames; and also the readers lose the control over the story since they could not understand the difference between reality and fantasy. Thereby, a process through which the ordinary reality dissolves into the truth can be seen in Burns’ story that narrates processes of teenagers’ dispersals.
In Black Hole the imaginary and the real progressively dissolve into one another and characters and also readers become incapable of distinguishing between what is fictional, what is in their mind and what is social reality. Many of the oedipal images are repeated through the story, nearly in each chapter we see shattered glasses, snakes, holes that are represented within flashbacks, aspirations for the future, dreams, hallucinations and fantasies of the teens. It is only at the end of the each chapter that we understand real situations.
Id, Ego and Super ego during Biology 101
The story begins with a vaginal like opening in Biology 101 science class at high school. While two protagonists, Chris and Keith dissecting a frog, which is surrounded by liquid like a vagina, Keith collapses, and is sucked in a nightmarish vision of the future that reflects a foot with a cut, a back and skin split along the spine, a swirled pubis, a hand covering genitals, snakish images, holes and many phallic symbols such as branches and broken bones. Although the two protagonists are ordinary kids, their world starts to change after Chris’s relation with Rob. Keith and Chris are virgin at the beginning of the story and when Chris has her first with Rob, and then crisis starts. Page to page characters experience a conflict between their Super ego and Id; and feelings of anxiety, guilty and inferiority become the main parts of the story.
Rob’s second mouth, dissected frog, Chris’s damaged foot, and bodily openings are the black holes of the story, where the Id tries to take the control, and these pictures are the repressed drives of each character. Therefore, Freud’s explanation of human psychic structure with three interactive components is important to understand the Black Hole. These three components are Id, Ego and Superego and they work in coordination, mainly unconsciously; and any lack of harmony among them led to disorders (Freud, 1962). In Black Hole characters’ internal disharmony, emotional disorders could be read in dreams, free association sessions and art as in the examples of Keith and Eliza.
Freud states that a newborn is dominated through instinctual needs for immediate pleasure that is the Id, which is the primary psychic structure and is responsible for the very basic impulses and drives that we continually repress them at the unconscious level. The Id, the most primitive part of the pscyhe, is egocentric and operates according the pleasure principle, seeking release and gratification. Sex (Eros) and aggression (Thanatnos or death drive) are two important drives for self gratification; these are the two major instinctual drives of psychic development (Freud, 1962). Hence, anxieties and fears of Black Hole’s teens underline the duality of the human psychic development that means gratification and desire of non-existence, the death- instinct could be experienced together.
Although the id is the reservoir of the libido, which is distinguished by the Ego through diverse mechanisms of repression, the Ego remembers the repressed memories since these memories are transferred into “screen memories” and also Id finds alternative expression for the repressed impulses (Freud, 2003). Therefore, we could say that the balance between the Id and the external world is maintained by Ego that separates what is real and act according to reality principle as opposed to the Id that contains primitive drives. Individuals’ safety and psychic integrity is the main concern of the Ego, and also some of the Id’s desires are organized and then expressed through Ego since it searches for appropriate objects to satisfy the Id. Third component is the superego, which represents the internalization of parental and societal demands and prohibitions that works with the Ego to control the gratification of the Id.
On the one hand, super ego acts as censor over the ego's moves and helps individuals to fit into society; and on the other hand it manifests itself as conscience and a sense of shame and guilt. Thence we could interpret Black Hole’s characters’ copulation scenes literally through this sentence: “You are never the same again; you do not belong to the home any more”. There is something Unheimlich that is the fear of the unfamiliar, which has not been experienced before and led the hidden, unknown, concealed or repressed to come to light (Freud, 2003). When Chris and Rob have sex in graveyard, Chris loses her virginity. Since they rebel against the rule of Super ego, they are not belonging to home anymore, and they feel sense of shame and guilt very deeply.
Daily representations of the death instinct could be seen in Burns’s characters’ desire for peace, their attraction to drugs and alcohol, their attempt to escape, and their strong desire for rest and sleep are all the examples of Thanatos, which promises release from the struggle. Thus, it is obvious that each character has a tendency towards self-destruction and an unconscious wish to die in the forms of aggression, cruelty, murder, and destructiveness. Characters’ “object-cathexes” are tied to their earlier sexual phases and these are surpassed through the stages of psychosexual development; teens of Black Hole are they are less well-adjusted individuals in a transition period, who are driven to abnormal reaction formations or substitute formations, and therefore they have the possibility of neurosis (Freud, 1936). These teens in the story are faced with obstacles to satisfaction of the libido’s cathexis’, and they remain fixated within the conflict between the libido and the ego, which can lead to alternative sexual discharges. Return of the repressed or their rejected libidinal longings manifest themselves as in the formation of teen angst, characters’ neurotic behaviors.
The concept of unconscious is interpreted as a forbidden zone and as an inescapable uncivilized side of each individual; and individuals’ secret uncivilized desires find outlet and could be explained through the analysis of dreams (Freud, 1980). As I mentioned before, our primitive impulses are repressed; however, Freud believed that the sexual impulse was so powerful that it continually threatened to “return” and thus disrupt our conscious functioning. And dreams become for Freud the clues to the secret functioning of the unconscious and normally overlooked repressed. According to Freud the dream-work deforms the unconscious drives and turns them into a more acceptable form so that the subject can come face to face with them.
Adolescence and Characters in Black Hole
“Adolescent has to integrate and move into a different space;
and there are internal changes that lead the consolidation of
the identity or self representation (Giovacchini, 2001)”.
Adolescence is a period that teens learn who they are and shape their identities in relation to other people around them, role models, peers, and family; as a consequence adolescence has always been considered to be a crucial developmental stage. Erikson states that adolescence is the period of psyche to start to establish an identity sense and to achieve autonomy (Erikson, 1968). Similar to Freud’s psychosexual stages Erikson examines eight stages that people go through their lives to reach self development; and besides he details adolescence by referring Freud’s genital stage (Erikson, 1963).
Emotional changes control this identity construction period and adolescents generally experience loneliness, sadness, and complex emotions and fears about sexuality. These feelings are “teen angst” that can disrupt previously secure and quit life. As Erikson states that teens want to give up self doubt; and at the end of the transition and change period of emotional and physical turmoil, teens develop a sense of ‘who I am’, an identity and self-certainty, indeed (Erikson, 1963). Teens of the story represent a transitional phase of psyche and also corporeality with a sense of uniqueness that differentiates him-her from parents and peers; and “there is a marked increase in the intensity of the biological drives and an initial hypercathexis of the oedipal objects” (Trosman, 1978).
Freud analyzed five stages of sexual development to describe the determination of personalities. These stages are named as Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital; and each stage emphasizes sexual gratification that experienced on a particular area of the body; and personality develops through these stages. Characters enter their final “genital phase”, adolescence, according to Freudian sexual development theory; and they desire members of the opposite sex to fulfill their sexual instincts; and Black Hole highlights the difficulties of Genital stage for adolescents that adult sexual interests come to dominate. Characters of Black Hole are trying to find new ways to their desperate lives to enter and survive in the adult world, however they are not able to cope with the death drive and everything is intermingled; thence they projects some of their aggressiveness towards themselves and towards the external world.
Chris is governed by the death drive, which emerges as a response to the frustration in the face of the impossibility of going back to time of the womb. Water is a symbol of the unconscious and crucial factor for Chris’s mutation. The first act that Chris makes is the releasing of water in the camp, symbolizing a release from the unconscious; and then she shed her skin like a snake; that means she wants to give up all the bad memories with the water. Her rising out of the water could be read as a reflection of giving of life and also her unconscious drive to regression. She is in love with Rob, the guy who has effected by the bug before his relationship with Chris and has a second mouth in his neck that talks as his unconscious voice; however she has a sense of shame since she is not able to hide her deformity as a result of the disease. So, she has a desire to turn back to her purity, to her secure, heimlich life world.
Keith, shy at girls, is attracted to Chris, smoke – drinks and drugs. His friends and he employs alcohol and drugs as a catalyst for sex. Keith becomes addicted to drugs and alcohol to fill the space opened by his emotional loss, and the more drugs he takes the bigger the internal space grows, the more the internal space grows the less he is able to make conscious choices. When he learns Chris’s feelings about Rob, he does not give up and he tries to protect Chris from the chaos in the woods. Similar to Chris, he was virgin at the beginning, but then he meets with Eliza, who is lucky as Rob to hide her distorted body (her tail), eventually he feels in love with her; but never forgets Chris.
Eliza, the Lizard Queen. The adolescents find security in their own groups, in secret societies that provide the needed support; and creativity is an alternate to neurotic forms of conflict resolution within adolescent their own communities. Creative individual has a capacity to transform the unconscious stirrings so that they emerge under ego dominance; and the character of Lizard Queen is an example of this transformation. She invests her both emotional and mental energy to art works; her room is full of phallic sculptures and drawings. Unlike to the Chris, she does not escape and instead she tries to push prejudices about her away. She feels in love with Keith and after their copulation or when Keith loses his virginity, he has the bug on his body.
Dave, the murderer. As the bodily transformations start, the gap between the social reality and the truth is opened. Dave is an ordinary nerd of the high school, and he loves Chris, who is not aware of this poor guy. He might be the extremely ostracized character of the story; however his invisibility has led him to move very effectively since no one thinks that he is suspecting of committing crimes. The murderer’s grotesque face becomes the mask veiling the truth. What we have here is rather than his mask being a metaphor standing in for the truth, it is the face as a metonymy standing in for the truth.
These youths are about to losing control and their rationality; actually they are suffering from anxiety, the internalized social world of shame, guilt and punishment becomes a threat for them. But, in Eliza’s relation with art work, Keith’s premonitions and dreams, Rob’s and Chris’s escapes from home or the other mutated teens’ new lives in the woods proves how the ego defends itself through different ways of defense mechanisms. As Freud mentions that, when the anxiety becomes overwhelming, the ego unconsciously blocks or distorts impulses into a less threatening form to cope with reality and to balance the conflicting demands of the id and superego. In Black Hole, Burns tries to communicate directly with the unconscious of the reader. The unconscious is his target and he draws symbols to match the unconscious drives. Alienation, detachment, fear and violence are all analyzed in terms of their relations to death and nothingness during the story; and they are mainly composed of dream-visions. The relationship between the Id, the ego, and the super-ego, together with the external factors influencing this relationship are narrated through novel.
Bibliography
• Erikson, E.H. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: Norton, 1968.
• Erikson, E.H. Childhood and Society. (2nd ed.). New York: Norton, 1963.
• Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretation of Dreams”. New York: Avon. 1980, pp.272-282, pp.307-326
• Freud, Sigmund. The Problem of Anxiety. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1936, pp. 80-104
• Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny”, Screen Memories. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, pp.1-22, pp.121-140
• Freud, Sigmund. "The Ego and the Id". The Hogarth Press Ltd. London, 1962.
• Giovacchini, Peter L. “Dangerous Transitions and the Traumatized Adolescent.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis. Volume 61, Number 1 / March, 2001, pp.7-22
• Trosman, Harry. “Freud's Adolescence and the Prolegomena to Psychoanalysis.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence. Volume 7, Number 3 / September, 1978, pp. 215-222
Teori dersinin odevi Karen, kadin bedeni ve yarattigi resistance uzerine olacak, umuyorum, baslamak uzereyim... "there is nothing that she is in control. so, losing weight signifies not just weight control but total control.... ve boyle ilerleyecek bakalim neye benzeyecek, bitince koyacagim. Todd Haynes'in filmi uzerinden gidecegim, barbie dolls = ideal female body falan fiti...
Sıkıcılıktan okunamayacak boyuta erisen bu alanı birazcık renklendirmem gerekiyor, nasıl olacak bu iş pek bir fikrim yok. Eski bloggerlarla arayı bir an önce kapatabilmek için blog yazmaya yeni başlayanların vazgeçilmez tekniğidir hevesle gunde bir kac defa giriş yapmak. Bende boyle islemiyor durum, su uc cumleyi yazana kadar icim daraldi, ruhum bunaldi, mideme agrilar girdi. ama yok bu defa azimliyim sıkıcı da olsa, sadece kendimin gorecegi bu blogu bir sekilde doldurmaya karalamaya baslayacagim. yandaki fotografi kendime armagan ediyorum ebit, oldu mu?
