Borrowing the Reader's Stories: Richard McGuire's "Here"

Herein lies a deep, bellowing, “fuck you, buddy” to the very thought that objectivity is the paramount thing (let alone the only thing) we ought to strive for in critical discussions, especially of art.  Comics do not only consist of constituent parts each of which individually and collectively inspire certain thoughts and feelings; they also take a piece of the reader, digest it, and spit it back out.

Lying quietly in bed on the evening of New Year’s Day with my partner, I turn to her and I say, “here, I want you to see this.”  (Note: What a wonderful sentence out of context).  I reach down by the base of my bed where a stack of late library books is sitting and grab Richard McGuire’s Here.  Still lying flat on our backs, I put my arm back around her, reach straight up with both hands and the book, and slowly turn the pages, re-reading McGuire’s magical little book, but mostly watching her gaze as it slowly glided over the same pages I had already painted with my own eyes. 

We said nothing.  A few pages here, a few pages there, still nothing.  I thought about how she has told me comics “aren’t really her thing” and basked gleefully (and with a playful touch of spite) in the silence and the fact that she hadn’t yet looked away from the book.  Like me, she moved away from her original childhood home at a young age and I knew that she often thought about what the new inhabitants had done with the place.  I thought about how the kids in my old house would never get to be creeped out by the musty old wet bar that I helped my dad sheet-rock off into a storage space.  I thought about—well, you know, turning the pages.  Making sure I didn’t turn more than one at a time.  Duh.

Then, we got to this page:

“In my mom’s old house, they had wood panelling in the living room,” she said, breaking the silence, but continuing to appraise the page, “and she said if anybody takes it out, my grandfather will kill them or come back and haunt them because of how much of a pain in the ass it was to put it in.”  It wasn’t my story.  And, you might say, that it wasn’t really the story of Here. 

But I’m not sure that’s quite right.  I can hem and haw all day about the visual aspects of a comic that make it comprise a narrative, but the fact of the matter is that some works have an impact on the reader specifically because they borrow the reader’s own experience and gingerly transform it into a unique visual melody.  I don’t know if art is a mirror—if it’s supposed to be a mirror, or if it’s usually a mirror, or if it’s really just inherently conversational—and, frankly, I don’t really care about bold general claims like that. 

Here is special in the manner in which the narrative ebbs and flows, asserting itself on the reader, and then retreating to become more of a substratum for the reader’s own stories.  The bits with Ben Franklin are rather explicitly about Ben Franklin.  Tender moments where a single person stands at a window, looking out, seem very particular to that character. Yet many parts of Here, the above page being one of them, are presented in a manner such that they feel open-ended.  The people are connected by the space but at the same time they are cardboard cutouts in a much bigger scene.  The whole thing is composed as to almost be one big tender nudge to the reader asking, “remember?”

And I do.  I remember the couch at the old house that I never wanted to part with but that desperately needed to be junked and set on fire and set on fire again.  And here, right fucking Here, antithetical but also in lock-fucking-step with McGuire’s work, I sit in a house of which my family are the first inhabitants.  And yet the crude stone wall that I helped my father dig out of our back yard was a rustic (and heavy) reminder that this house did not spring into being here, even if my awkward, miserable high school years sort of did pop into existence right here, out of nowhere, in a torrent of hormones.

Just as it all begins, each little story will end, as will they all, together, in a series of inevitable cataclysmic scientific fuckeries.  As a page in Here reminds the reader, the sun will swallow the earth and all of our heres will become nowheres.  Ultimately, you could probably carve up space-time in such a way that even what we lost can still be indexed.  Somewhere in the four-dimensional space-time worm you can, however abstractly, point to the plot of land where you had your first kiss.  But even the heat death of the universe will make sure your memories will keep from being eternally etched into anything quite so lasting.

Here uses a kind of magic that really only works in comics to bend four dimensions of one cubic bit of space over time.  In bending that one space as McGuire does—with history, color, humor, tragedy, drama, and some of the ugliest fucking wallpaper I have ever seen—he allows his book to be an artistic end in itself as well as a reflexive gateway through the pages, back into our own memories.  That last bit really is special to comics.  Though you might think Here would work as an animated slide show, there is a tremendous amount of importance in the fact that my partner could stop, reflect, and in that moment tell me a story without me turning a page.  When we are allowed to have time stand still in our consumption of a narrative, we can allow ourselves to be led outward (and in this case, inward) by the experience.

We can attend, at our own pace, to what is happening right here.