In His Mind: Dialogue Fusion in Diaz's "Ysrael"

      In “Ysrael,” the lack of quotation marks helps to integrate Rafa’s dialogue into Yunior’s exposition, thus creating a closer sense of psychic distance where a reader experiences the world as Yunior would.
            Psychic distance can be defined as how
close "the narrative stands, relative to a character”
(Darwin). It is the level of intimacy the narrative voice has in terms of a character’s thoughts and perceptions.
            Diaz never employs quotation marks in his stories, but this stylistic choice felt most effective to me in “Ysrael.” Although there are places where other characters speak without punctuation, I believe Rafa, as Yunior’s older brother and a major speaker in the piece, has the greatest influence and integration into Yunior’s narrative voice. Because of this, I have chosen to examine Rafa’s dialogue in particular.
            One of the first pieces of dialogue in the story is delivered by Rafa, who declares the campo to be “shit” after Yunior gives the reader a lengthy description of the place (Diaz 4). Without quotation marks, Rafa’s declaration feels as though it is a part of the narration because it has become a part of Yunior’s perception. Although he may or may not agree with Rafa, Yunior has processed Rafa’s words and molded it into his description of the landscape. Simultaneously, Rafa’s words become a part of Yunior’s own narration. The psychic distance is so close that as readers, we are processing the landscape through Rafa’s words, just as Yunior does.
            Later, after the two boys get off of the bus, Yunior incorporates more of Rafa’s harsh dialogue in the middle of description and action in a way that synthesizes the three kinds of information (13). First, Yunior says that Rafa takes in the “lay of the land,” which serves as a spatial transition in the text. Next, Rafa’s words are quoted without dialogue tags: “If you don’t stop crying, I’ll leave you.” It is clear that this is Rafa speaking because he has been chastising Yunior for crying in previous paragraphs. However, this unpunctuated dialogue is followed immediately by more exposition. Rafa starts walking toward “a shack that was rusting in the sun.” Rafa’s voice telling Yunior to stop crying has become a part of Yunior’s voice. Although readers know Rafa is speaking, it is impossible for them to visually separate Yunior’s voice from Rafa’s.

            The pattern of Rafa’s chastisement of Yunior becoming part of the younger boy’s thought processes continues later in the scene (14). The paragraph starts with an action, Rafa spitting, and continues with his dialogue, a critical lecture to Yunior that he has “to get tougher,” reminding him that their father hasn’t been crying for “the last six years." Rafa turns away from Yunior and begins to interact with the landscape by “crackling through the weeds.” Yunior’s narration surrounds Rafa’s dialogue, swallowing his older brother’s words and allowing them to assimilate into his own perception.
            Throughout “Ysrael,” Yunior’s perceptions of the world blend with the dialogue of others, thus pulling readers into the vivid experience the young boy has of his surroundings. The strongest voice to assimilate into his consciousness belongs to his older brother, Rafa. As the story unfolds, Rafa’s dialogue lies deeply entrenched in Yunior’s exposition, giving readers a more intimate experience of Yunior’s perception.

Works Cited

Darwin, Emma. "Psychic Distance: What It Is and How To Use It." The Itch of Writing. n.d., n.p. Web. <http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/psychic-distance-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html>

From Panel to Poem: Reimagining Isolation in Bechdel's Childhood Home

                Through her attention to the details of her father’s home décor in her childhood house, Alison Bechdel uses the graphic novel genre to show the oppressive and lonely hobby of her father and its effect on people within the home. Many of the panels stand as isolated depictions of rooms, fractured from each other through the graphic novel form. I attempted to recapture these feelings in poetry by translating three panels of Bechdel’s first house into three coordinating stanzas.

First Home

In the mirror, she could see herself
but she never looks—hard gold wood,
cloth & can & will it always
be like this? It won’t always be.

Others, old, kind, wander
through and almost smash
into her father’s walls of silence.

“The Library.” “The Library.”
Don Quixote, windmill-lost,
gilt too high to touch,
velvet holds back the sun,
as the devil watches us
read to keep our minds lit.

--

                In the same way I choose what images to put in my lines and what to leave out when I write poems, it seems that comic writers and artists have to make the same decisions about what is represented in their panels. I tend to write one complete image, often multi-faceted but still independent, per stanza, so I feel as though I could “translate” my poems into comics. This inspired me to try to write stanzas for some of Alison Bechdel’s panels.
                Bechdel was able to use the static, isolated panels in her graphic novel to represent the different rooms in her house and the funeral home in a way that reflected her feelings about them. I decided to focus on her family house in particular and attempted to render in verse both the opulence and loneliness of the rooms her father so painstakingly furnished. Each stanza coincides with a specific panel in Fun Home.
                The first stanza is based on the panel where a young Bechdel polishes a large mirror (16). I tried to illustrate her disconnection from the furniture her father chose (“she never looks”) even as she is forced to clean it (“cloth & can”). I also wanted to capture her wish for her own future home to be different through the last two lines of the stanza (14). I ended it with the word “be” to sound more ominous and to represent the loss of her father and her original family dynamic.

                The second stanza is after the panel where an older lady visiting the house nearly runs into a large mirror (20). Bechdel says the house was designed to hide her father’s “shame,” thus I represented the idea of his shrouded life by calling the mirror “walls of silence.” I chose this panel because I felt it illustrated how deeply entrenched Bechdel's father's self-consciousness was in their home's design, and how it even affected those outside of the family.

                The last stanza deals with the library as captured on the large panel on page 60. I found it interesting how she said that usually “only landed gentry” could refer to a room as “The Library” without sounding pompous, but her father’s study could go by no other name. I tried to capture this by repeating the room name in italics. I represented the Don Quixote statue as lacking his windmill, which served as a symbol to his delusions of grandeur in Cervantes’ novel. Bechdel’s own voice does not possess a quixotic outlook, and so I felt it would be fitting to draw attention to the statue’s missing windmill. The gilt and velvet descriptions both represent the untouchable and oppressive quality of her father’s décor. Mephistopheles is the devil from the Faust story, so I represented the statue of him as a grim guardian of the family’s books.
                Through her panels illustrating the opulence of her father’s interior decor, Alison Bechdel is able to use the graphic novel form to draw attention to specific details of the home and how isolating they were. By adapting three of these panels into verse, I hoped to draw further attention to some of these connections between physical detail and emotion.