My Likeness, My Brother
A powerful autobiographical work from a prizewinning creator of comics in France.
Reviewed by Andrew Wilson

 

Epileptic
by David B.
Pantheon, 2005
368 pp.; $25
 
David B. is the pen name of a French artist and writer whose comics and graphic novels have won prizes in Europe and the admiration of his peers. His graphic memoir, Epileptic, a portrait of the artist that traces his relationship with his epileptic brother, Jean-Christophe, has just appeared in English translation.

Near the end of Epileptic, David B. draws a series of images showing his conception of death as myriad faces inhabiting the swollen visage of his afflicted brother: "All the faces of the world, flickering across your face for all of eternity. �?I figured at some point my face would be yours." This sequence brought to mind a famous Zen koan, variously translated but with the essential question (or demand) being "what was your face before you were born?" On the final page, David B. proffers an epilogue nearly as gnomic as the koan: penned on curling pennants floating before the great black horse which David is astride, a horse never explained, who has carried him through harrowing phantasmagorias throughout the book, is a Pessoa poem:

Sit under the sun
Abdicate
And be your own king.
David B. is astride the horse; his brother, bloated and battered by violent seizures, lies peacefully curled in the belly of David's great black horse, at the very center of David's dream.

David B. is not his own king—after all, no one is—but the tension between David's self and reality charges his sinuous, nervy line. It's all black-and-white, a quivering, quavering world of shades and golems and depictions of people that are remarkable for their simplicity and specificity. I laughed out loud at the image of the would-be guru who demanded that the children shave only the left side of his hair and beard: "that way, when people see me, they'll see a bald guy, and when I turn the other way they'll see a bearded guy and it'll freak 'em out!"

Later, on page 280, the half-bearded fellow is an unseen presence on a powerful page. Frames have dissolved, and we see David, a stark, angry figure composed of jagged slashes of ink before the spindly, insubstantial buildings of Paris. The next drawing zooms in to David's enraged face, snarling "It's over. Jean-Christophe will never get better," and despite the smoothness of the printed page the violence in the hatching of David's cheeks and eyes is palpable. Beyond the next ragged white stripe, the eye pans down David's body, wherein "the past ties [his] insides in knots, screaming," and his body is filled with contorted Davids, white figures in the blackness of himself. The last panel fills the lower half of the page, showing the tortured figure of David, incised with past and present selves, striding toward the margin, pursued by the surgeons and quacks and mystics who promised salvation for Jean-Christophe, and for himself. Behind the magnetists and mediums run skeletons, identical faces of death who haunt the pages of the book.

David B. recognizes early on the difference between death and the presence of the dead. On page 16 he has a dream wherein Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god who ushers the dead to judgment, appears (in black on white, then white on black) before his bed. The angularity of this panel's composition—David B.'s bedded body a slash across the panel's lower left corner against Anubis' glyph, white lines against an oblique black triangle—indicates the increasing abstraction of David's thought. When he wakes from his dream, the image of Anubis remains for a moment a living shadow before freezing into the waking world; from that time onward, David says, he has no longer feared ghosts, witches, and shades. Of course he still fears people, life, and the future.

The narrative of Epileptic is not, as plot, particularly thrilling. David B. is a member of a small family; his parents are both art teachers; his younger sister Florence is unknowable; his older brother Jean-Christophe is epileptic. The book traces the family's miseries and joys as they grapple with Jean-Christophe's illness. A darkly hilarious succession of doctors and healers and gurus undertake to cure Jean-Christophe. Some are mere charlatans; others, like Master N. the Japanese macrobiotic healer, depicted as a giant cat, offer tantalizing hope: under Master N.'s care Jean-Christophe's seizures ceased for six months. At one point David B.'s parents establish a cell of the Rosicrucian Order in their garage. All the communes dissolve, none of the diets work, and as David grows up his brother becomes increasingly foreign, detached from reality, difficult to care for. Jean-Christophe's self explodes in each seizure, and the density of his otherness exerts increasing gravity on his family, both living and dead. David B., obsessed as a child with Genghis Khan and the Tartars, relates the history of his family as a series of wars in which his relatives took part: "1914-1918. 1939-1945. 1954-1962 [the Algerian conflict]. Even if I did not live them, these dates are part of my life, too." His war does not take place on a battlefield.

David B.'s drawings are intimate without being cramped, detailed without being busy, expansive within an economy of space. As Epileptic progresses, recurring images—his childhood scenes of battle, the ghosts he befriends, representations of arcane systems—build on each other until each page exhibits not just the procession of narrative but a cosmology. By the end, it seems that David has attained some kind of wholeness, that Jean-Christophe's inscrutable relationship with reality has bound them together, that David B. has found a home for his dreams. And he has done so not by becoming his own king, but by recognizing that the face he had before he was born, and the face he will have again, is also the scarred and ineffable face of his brother: he has achieved wholeness by abdication of self.

Andrew Wilson is a writer living in Chicago.

Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.