I picked this book up from a Half Price bookstore last week, recognizing on the spine Gene Luen Yang's name from his wonderfulfantastic autobiographical graphic novel, American-Born Chinese (2007). I'm not familiar with Derek Kirk Kim's work, but, I promise, I will soon seek it out.
In American-Born Chinese, I liked how Yang approached spiritual and fantasy metaphors for creating identity in a world in which much of our identity is created for us, and I was looking to see how he extended this theme in The Eternal Smile, a collection of three short comic stories, published last year by First Second (which is quickly becoming my favorite graphic novel publisher).
So what is the eternal smile?
Before I read the book, I thought the title referred to God. Words like "eternal" most often evoke that sort of transcendent-theme-feeling in me. Plus, the artwork on the front suggest a happy, yellow, sunshiney deity, worshipped adoringly by a cosmopolitan group.
But the eternal smile in the book is a joke.
Not to suggest that the book argues that God is a joke. I don't think the book argues that at all--perhaps, in an implicit way, the book argues the opposite. If anything, the joke is us and the realities we create for ourselves and, oppresively, for others.
These aren't some solipsistic adventures that Yang and Kim throw their characters into in order to justify a new (but cliched) relativism. They do, instead, emphasize the arbitrariness of our "mind-forged manacles". (Like how I threw in some William Blake?) In these stories, there is always an ultimate reality, a really real (to invoke some worldview jargon)--these aren't realities that are self-delusional. I want to say that in these stories is a call for readers to look for what's really real, but I think Yang and Kim assert that we already know, somewhere deep inside us, what's really real. But, around the really real, we've unfortunately built up layers and layers of fantasy, delusion, sin, bad habits, and, most of all, a deeply wounding shame.
In "Duncan's Kingdom", the first story, Duncan is a young man whose stepfather sends into a coma for protecting his mother against his violent whims. Duncan is ashamed of his mother for failing to protect herself and him from this monster, even at one point saying she deserves this treatment because of her lack of self-will. But, most of all, Duncan is ashamed of himself, failing as a son and as a man in his defeat.
While in his coma, Duncan weaves together this dream-world in which he is a brave young knave in a medieval kingdom, whose king has just been murdered by the Frog King. The now-fatherless princess implores him to slay the Frog King in revenge, and will receive her hand in marriage and keys to kingdom upon his success.
Through his quest, Duncan realizes (I won't reveal in exactly what manner the ephipany arrives) that this kingdom-reality is a false reality. In fact, signs from the really real (his real mother appearing in dreams, an errant soda bottle) invade this fantasy. These signs act as echoes, or remnants, from a reality that is not ideal, but it is real.
The ultimate question for Duncan, then, is why does he give up this perfectly laid-out world, in which he is sovreign, in which he is a hero, in which he is unashamed, in which he is sinless, in which he is loved by all? And why does he give it up for this dark, sad, violent, disgraceful, ungraceful, shameful world we live in?
It's because we can't help it. It's our tragic flaw--or our comic flaw: we must know truth. We must.
And when there's a truth we don't like, we create a separate reality for ourselves--not a new philosophy.
(There's some perfect lines about this in Emery's song "After the Devil Beats His Wife":
"People want the truth, but never want the scars.../
This is the pain of believing.")
The solipsistic philosophies of our time, and times past, have certainly created a severe moral relativism that we don't really know how to navigate, but navigating truth is painful, too. Yang and Kim, however, seem to be saying that the realities we create for ourselves are:
1. created out of shame and guilt
2. paradoxically moral
We conquer our shame by embracing truth. We find truth, a redemptive truth, by confronting our guilt.
Failing to do that, at least in Duncan's kingdom, separates us from people and creates a self divided against itself. Relying on yourself for salvation, then, is quixotic. Salvation lies outside of ourselves . . .
On the surface Duncan's kingdom seems perfect for him: he defeats the king's enemy, marries the princess, inherits a kingdom, and his subjects adore him. But something from the outside lingers--this bottle of Snappy Cola, a remnant or echo of what is true and real, has infiltrated this fantastic dimension. There's no mistake in this story that the very first frame is of a giant castle, colored purple in the night, and the last frame is of the hospital where Duncan is recovering, drawn with the same scale, perspective, and color as the castle in the first frame. The story emphasizes a healing that can only be accomplished by searching the stone fantasies for those more ephemeral signs, lurking and waiting to take us home, back to truth.
The bottle of Snappy Cola functions like that, like a miracle--unexplained phenomena in a solipsistic universe.
As readers, then, maybe we are asked: what are the aberrations in your reality, in your world? The lie is that these are merely aberrations--those things (people, events, experiences, objects, words, songs, etc.) are actually signs of truth, the ultimate reality, the really real. Because when you come face-to-face with the truth, you'll find that you are the one who is lying to you.
I like how this story emphasizes signs--signs are placed in our reality to remind us, to compel us to remember, that this is not what's really real. Not to chase some kind of platonist rabbit because I think this problem of dualism is answered in later stories, but there is something to be said about how, if we look for signs of truth and salvation, we'll find them.
Free will is exercising the choice to pursue them.
I'll pursue the titular eternal smile in the next post about the second story: "The Eternal Smile." (Sadly, more frogs die in that one, too.)
