Charles Burns’ ‘Black Hole’ and the timelessness of high-school angst

Charles Burns’ ‘Black Hole’ via Google Images

I was left open-mouthed by a lot of what happened within Charles Burns’ Black Hole, and it took me a few moments to realise that the majority of the drama which took place was completely detached from the reason I had picked up the book. I picked up the book because I was intrigued by its seeming basis in the science fiction genre. Set in the mid-1970s, Black Hole is a story revolving around a sexually transmitted disease which mutates its owner: growing new body parts, excess skin, boils, spots, bulges and second mouths. It would manifest in different ways for different people.  In the end, this wasn’t the focus of Burns’ gaze. No. In this gripping graphic novel, Burns’ use of raw, honest detailing is predominantly used to share with us the raw and emotive world of teenage angst.

Here, I will be highlighting the subtle ways in which Charles Burns’ portrays the Existential Angst experienced, specifically, by the American teen.  In Philosophy, angst represents a necessary anxiety we experience because of our status as free, undetermined, creatures. In other words, it is a symptom of the fact that there are absolutely no rules as to what we should or should not do, no cosmic guidance on how to act, and no one to tell us which is the best path.

By no large stretch can we see how this angst can become prevalent during the teenage years; when most of us cannot avoid thinking about the future and all that it entails. For the teenager residents in suburban Seattle, this angst is embodied by the mutations of their peers. Of course, one of the big decisions or dilemmas of secondary school involves the testing of relationships and sexuality. Perhaps there are first boyfriends or girlfriends, sexuality may be discovered, feelings get stronger, and the entire school seems to be holding its breath and waiting for you to testify to these things.

In Black Hole, these decisions are put on display for everyone through often grotesque means. Surprisingly, those students without the disease do not seem to rule out relationships with their condemned peers. On one hand, the nature of desire and lust is that it is hardly reasonable, but on the other, it seems that the decision of whether or not to make any kind of ‘move’ is heightened by the idea that either path will be clearly identifiable by friends and family. Suddenly, the high school dating scene, usually something adults laugh at when looking back on because of its intangibility and temporality, is something which will stay with them permanently for the rest of their lives. For, whether they give in to desire or not, they will be left wondering what life would be like if they did otherwise.

However, there is also a reading whereby Charles is trying to tell us that this is what it really does feel like to be a teenager; as if you will be forever accountable for the decisions you make now. It is where right now is the most important time in your life, and it is what you do right now that matters most with the shaping and formation of that life. Recently, I read a letter to my future-self I had written during my secondary school examinations, and it read basically as an apology letter in case I had not studied hard enough and had not got the grades I wanted. Now, I laugh at the letter. But at the time, those exams were synonymous with my future. Here, Burns is trying to allow us the reader an unflinching glimpse into the teenager psyche: where fainting in Biology class can feel equivalent to being swallowed by a black hole, and an unplanned one-night stand makes your skin peel and shed until you don’t even feel like yourself anymore.

Simply, Charles Burns assimilates teenage angst into an undeniable visible form and through this demonstrates the timelessness of these uncertainties. For every teenager, the present seems to, above all, defy time and space with its demand for decisiveness: their own unique black holes.

 

‘After Dark’: Murakami’s Temporal Lullaby

Murakami’s After Dark lasts for the duration of a single night in the centre of Tokyo. The pages are a-buzz with the perpetually busy city. But at night, a different kind of crowd begin to dominate the streets and a series of closely-knit, but independent, events unfurl. With the action sharply divided by frequent chapters from the perspective of a young woman who had been asleep for several months, we cannot help but imagine if the whole plot is a dream (it certainly feels like it).

After Dark’s dream-like nature is only reinforced by the fact that, often, the reader only receives fragments of information during a scene: until – suddenly – there are dramatic links between stories, as in a dream when the isolated episodes begin to blend together so that afterwards we are left with a simple incredulity: how could I not tell this was a dream?

With one narrative slowed down to the sleeping heart-rate of Eri Asai, and the other charged with the increasing momentum of events surrounding her sister Mari (who is awake and out in the city), After Dark prompted me to consider the correlations between Sleep and Time.

Eri Asai’s constant, sleeping form poses a metaphor for Relative Time. Throughout After Dark, Eri acts as a reference point for the passage of time in the novel. The events of the night speed up and combine and separate as ideas of causation and coincidence are forced upon the reader: Was it inevitable that the events ended up this way, influencing each other?  We lose track of time whilst reading as the plot thickens and we discover new connections. We don’t know, in the beginning, that Mari is the younger sister of Eri Asai. We are simply guided back and forth between their narratives by a very omniscient narrator, strikingly familiar to ourselves.

There is a theory of time in which the flow of time is not an objective reality, but is something projected onto reality by our experience of it (Smith, 2016). In After Dark, we are forced to keep track of time at the beginning (and end) of every chapter: chapter numbers are accompanied by the image of a clock, on which we watch time slowly move forwards. I realise how much I appreciated this as I read, how I could better imagine the plot alongside these time-references. How have I managed to immerse myself in books without this fictional guidance? I wondered.

But this is exactly the issue at hand: normally, frequently without any guidance at all, we superimpose a timeline onto fiction. We wait for some cues to confirm this “The next day” or “three years later”, but if these fail, we – the reader – become the reference point to time. As we read the dialogue, the dialogue is performed in our heads. In After Dark, Murakami takes this control from us; we are kept to a strict series of events, happening in a predetermined timeframe. And this is why I felt so reassured when the events slowly pushed and influenced each other, time was being set out for us so nice and orderly. 

And yet, this aid to immersion further distances us from any narrative involvement: time is taken from our hands. We become like the sleeping Eri Asai, cared for and unchanged by what happens elsewhere in the city, at night, after dark. The narrative lens Murakami provides – the ‘camera’ he describes us as looking through as we watch Eri sleep, even the ‘bird’ flying over the city in the very opening chapter, viewing all from above –  forces us to reflect upon our own involvement in time… wondering whether time is perhaps dependent on this involvement.

 “In both that room and this room, time is passing at

the same uniform rate. Both are immersed in the same

temporality. We know this from the occasional slow rising

and falling of the man’s shoulders. Wherever the intention

of each might lie, we are together being carried along the

same speed down the same river of time”

—-

[1] Smith, Nicholas J.J., “Time Travel”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel/.

[2] Murakami, Haruki, After Dark (London, Vintage, 2008)