Princess of Persia

In my break from prepping for job interviews and preparing for next semester, I read through volume one of Persepolis, the Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical comic book on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran.

Needless to say, my break devolved into an extended break.

It seems impossible to avoid making comparisons to Art Spiegelman's Maus.
Both are autobiographical. Both have simple art styles. Both reveal how perplexing simple and swift it is for an entire, real world society to devolve into an Orwellian police state.
From my first reading, I would say that Maus certainly seems the more complex of the two works, perhaps because I read Maus as a graphic novel about writing a graphic novel about the Holocaust, rather than being a comic about the Holocaust. Persepolis has occasional moments of anachronistic metafiction, but these are usually designed to present quirky observations, humor, or the occasional footnote about Iranian culture.

What I found most stunning about Persepolis is how recently Iranian society was hijacked by fundamentalist extremists and how very minor cultural trends (say, wearing a tie or buying an Iron Maiden poster) could suddenly become an act of rebellion and treason. Satrapi's graphic novel relates these issues in a way that only a comic can make emotionally accessible, and provides a celerity to the social upheaval that would be bogged down in a prose narrative.

My only concern about the tale is that volume one does not provide much counterbalance to its depictions of Marxism. Marxists and Communists largely come off as attractive heroes and/or martyrs. The only seeming questioning of Marxism comes when the young protagonist declares herself a revolutionary, and finds that God (whom she had been on a personal basis with during her previous desire to be a prophet) suddenly disappears from a panel. The fact that the Iranians largely seem to rebel by adopting (or rather, I should say, continue to consume) Western culture might also provide a commentary on Marx, but it would be a rather indirect inference.

Essentially, what seems most attractive about Marxism in the graphic novel is the offer of a classless society to replace what was once a hard-line class system (there is a brief story of a maid who falls in love with the son of a neighbor and is rejected when he discovers her career). Extreme Islam seems to offer certain characters a loophole around the class system: by becoming die-hard fundamentalists, lower class people seem to magically ascend ranks in the society. Indeed, the anti-Imperial revolution which the author's parents joined as Marxists became a bait-and-switch, replacing the socialist ideal with religious fanaticism. This, of course, is the problem with a revolutionary ideology like Marxism...what you get from the new order is often not what you were promised.

Comments

[Lindsay]

I read Persepolis for my adolescent literature class. (It was more of a survey of books adolescents read than anything we'll ever teach.) We read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics at the same time, so my impression of the book was more artistic than a focus on the social theory, but I loved it nonetheless.

[PeterTerp]

Scott McCloud's book is pretty essential if you want to be able to sound smart when talking comics. I steal all kinds of lesson plans from it to teach certain principles of narrative and representation (and I don't even teach any comic books).
That being said, I think Maus offers more in terms of the aesthetics of autobiographical comic book writing than does Persepolis.
I also grew more frustrated reading Persepolis 2. I feel like the book only covers the worst of the West...and I keep imagining that if Satrapi had been sent to the CSC instead of an Austrian boarding school, she would have produced a very different book. Or maybe I'm just farther removed from mainstream Western culture than I realize.