Humour and Reflexivity

Title: "Showing 'Helder'", from The Little Man: Short Stories 1980-1995 (68-101)

Writer and Artist: Chester Brown

Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly

I chose to examine a collection of Chester Brown's short comics because I found it to be rich ground for Jones' theory of reflexivity. The brief comic "Showing 'Helder'" is a commentary on "Helder", a story that precedes it in the anthology. Both stories feature a character called Seth, but in "Helder" Brown narrates a relatively realistic plot, while in "Showing 'Helder'" he breaks the narrative illusion and draws attention to the construction of the medium. Brown achieves this effect to make both stories retrospectively comic, and so nullify the negative emotional impact of "Helder".

On page 76, Chester draws himself in a scene that the reader recognizes from the previous story. This is what Jones calls "authorial awareness", or the intrusion of the author onto the story. Chester Brown achieves it in a similar technique to McCloud--by drawing a comic counterpart to himself. This intrusion draws attention to the construction of the comic and makes the reader critically distant from the fiction he or she is reading. The effect is humorous and playful: the reader is distanced from the dramatic action of the story as it is happening, and is encouraged instead to play with the conventions of comic writing. A humorous effect is appropriate to this particular story because it is aimed at lightening the mood after a dramatic and realistic narrative. "Helder" was a relatively dark story as well, because it involved scenes of domestic abuse and violence. "Showing 'Helder'" does exactly what the title implies--it "shows" the construction of the previous story to mollify its negative emotional effect.

"Showing 'Helder'" is obviously an instance of intertextuality as well, adding another level of reflexivity to the narrative. Even though it references an author's own story, it nevertheless references another text; as Jones argues, this relativizes both texts and undermines their illusion of reality (281). Brown uses this to undermine the realism of the story even further and add a comedic element to both of his stories--even to "Helder", albeit retrospectively. Jones notes that "parody is one genre of comic art that makes particularly strong use of intertextuality" (282). This is because parody creates comedy by undermining the serious emotional effect arising from other texts' illusion of reality. Chester Brown's "Showing 'Helder'" is therefore a self-parodic story that makes itslef and "Helder" become funny in retrospect.

Deni Kasa