In 2013, Tim Kreider wrote that, “[i]f we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” If you’re online enough to be reading SOLRAD, you’ve likely seen that last phrase around, if not as a New York Times quote then as a meme. It’s a handy one, as far as sentiments go, far less likely to be misinterpreted as the Sartre quote that preceded it, and it manages to sound dramatic without being unearned. It’s an eternal quandary, whether the self can—let alone should—exist as a curated, pick-and-choose construct while achieving true social intimacy.
Of course, it only remains an eternal quandary for about five seconds or so, until you think about it enough for your head to ring with talk-show wrong! buzzers. But this problem lies at the core of Léa Murawiec’s debut graphic novel The Great Beyond, released in English last year from Drawn and Quarterly with a translation by Aleshia Jensen.
The world of The Great Beyond is a world constantly at risk of terminal alienation. It is predicated on a system both intuitive enough to carry its own weight and vague enough in its mechanics to work as immediately-potent allegory: you have to be present in the minds of others or you die, simple as that. Individuals appear to have completely replaced corporations, at least in terms of brand recognition; billboards bear a first and last name with no other explanation, no associated discipline. Celebrities, past a certain point, become immortal—physically, sociologically—while the people on the other end, those who can’t access that scale of mass consciousness, have to work hard as all hell, having to go to social mingling sessions or pay professionals just to perceive them enough just to keep themselves alive.
And at the center of it is Manel Naher. She’s not a heroically-appealing person, so to speak—she’s completely focused on leaving the system for the titular great beyond, understandably enough, but in this superficially-worthy pursuit she rather completely eschews any interest in the world around her, even the parts of the world that want the best for her. This becomes a problem when Manel’s lack of presence proves terminal, as she herself proves unwilling to work to make any small impact; to her, the only solution is soul-sucking celebrity—a way to be perceived by many, even if that means being known by few.
I should say that Murawiec is, above all else, one of the most compelling cartoonists I have encountered in quite some time. The quality of her linework, that is to say her actual detailing and mark-making, is reminiscent of cartoonists like Michael Furler or Aisha Franz; there is a rubbery, almost liquid simplicity to her geometry, all stretched and curved with nary a sharp corner to be found, aiding the sense of motion at the heart of her linework.
But, though the people populating her world are as tentative as putty, the landscape around them is permanent and fixed. A few pages into the book, Murawiec sweeps us into her equivalent of a title sequence, six dialogue-free pages showing the full corrosive glory of her world’s city; signage emblazoned with the names of individuals clutters your eyes wherever you turn, all of it rather meticulously rendered with a striking sense of design that doesn’t repeat itself for a moment. There is an almost casino-like dazzle to it, not a photo-realism but a bastardization thereof: there is just so much of it, a slow collective death by overwrought design. It makes me think, oddly enough, of Judge Dredd artist Ron Smith. Where his most celebrated 2000AD peers voiced their pathos through a lens of absurdist maximalism (O’Neill, McMahon) or a propulsive, scratchily chaotic action (Ezquerra), Smith’s guiding principle was an earthly, solid quality; he was nothing if not unwaveringly precise. Murawiec’s future metropolis, wobbly- and wiggly-lined though it may be, shares that quality with Smith’s visions of Mega-City One: she does not omit a single line in its set-pieces; in fact, I hesitate to call them set-pieces, dominant as they are in their characters’ perception. The urban landscape is not articulated so much as belabored, intentionally so: it is smothering, inescapable, disabusing the reader of any idea of a vanishing point.
And that spatial incongruity is, of course, the most fertile of grounds for a derealization of self. Murawiec’s story is ultimately predicated on a dichotomy between being mere presence and authentic intimacy, between person and persona. Manel’s celebrity namesake, the pop-star who incites the story by stealing any potential presence our ordinary protagonist could have had, initially appears to be a contrivance, a convenient coincidence at best, but the author is skilled enough to justify it very early on.
Manel has little respect for the world around her, as a construct; even the bookshop she frequents, and its owner with whom she maintains an affable rapport, serve as little more than a means to an end in her mind. Hell, even that great beyond that she holds up as a fantasy is just that—a slippery, unarticulated thing, the contents of which she can only speculate on. It’s little wonder, then, that she views celebrity as both a contemptible stratum and an easy way out of social intimacy.
In the very first scene, the story establishes a largely post-historical atmosphere; when asked why she doesn’t read the newspaper, Manel refers to it as “celebrity gossip and current events“; people getting into public feuds or “murdering [their] ten babies,” here placed on the same level of social impact. There are no developments of substance to the world, at least not from Manel’s perspective. For the most part, the story appears to prove her right; the world’s gossip, its obsessions with the clout of each individual—everything exists as a palliative for an entropic world, and Manel’s dynamic with her system is one of mutual repulsion.
But that is precisely where the imbalance of power asserts itself—Manel matters little to the system, but the system means life or death to Manel. She finally becomes so cynical about her dependency on the system that she winds up losing any faith in the alternative—and thus resigns herself to her fate, and achieves celebrity through sheer scandal.
By the time the final scene rolls around, though, this tension ends up operating somewhat to the author’s detriment. It’s a highly anticipated sequence, foreshadowed from the start, though the inevitability of it feels a bit like a squandering. Having seen the consequences of being smothered by mass perceptions while her roots die around her, Manel finally understands that she has lost sight of her true goal, which is escaping into the beyond—breaking out of the system. She escapes the mega-city and sees the world, supposedly, for what it is. But it is the scene, the actual what, that leads the book to falter somewhat. Manel finds herself in a rustic idyll, a simplicity of nature and communality unencroached-on by the technoscape of estrangement. She basks in nature, in babbling brooks and trees the likes of which she had never seen before. She sees a simple family, living a simple life, in a simple village of simple houses.
Here we see, in my opinion, the friction between shorthand and intent. The Great Beyond is, of course, a book about the authenticity of connection, about a profound reciprocal immediacy; having first been denied it by the oppressive system of spectacle, then becoming the one to deny it as she is subsumed by the system as a willing victim-turned-enforcer, Manel finally sees that there is, in fact, another way, one that is truer to one’s surroundings. “Most of my fantasies are of to be of use, to be of some hard, simple, undeniable use,” Bill Callahan of Smog sings, and one cannot deny the romance of that idea: to love, and to help, and to love to help; to feel connection and belonging as a result. In Murawiec’s world, this sort of sentiment is most easily voiced through that rural diminution; it’s an absolutist retort, so as to say that, if we wish to eradicate the system, we must view the existence of good things as tenable only outside the system.
But we know, of course, the limits of shorthand. The post-industrial fantasy of the return to the agrarian typically fails to engage in any way with the fundament: it is treated as a lifestyle, which is to say a style, which is to say not a life at all. By concluding on this ecstasy of initial discovery, the varnish of romance allows Murawiec to escape the particulars of hardship. Walden only bears its impact so long as you don’t know that someone else was doing Thoreau’s laundry, after all.
But that’s just the thing: The Great Beyond ends with Manel as a spectator. She does not interact with the people living that other life, and we don’t know if she ever will, if her change of circumstances will lead to any change in intrinsic tendency. What’s sure is, she looks, more than anything, disoriented. She looks feral—lost. Reductively romantic dichotomy aside, it’s a fittingly ambivalent note to end on—running away is all good enough, but eventually you’ll have to know where you’re running to and what you’re going to do there. Otherwise, what’s left? Is there anything in the great beyond—or is it all incorrigibly out of reach?
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