Day 4 and I am going to take on Territory, in order to explore Andrew White’s non-sequential storytelling. I talked a little bit about that on day 3 of this tumblr swap, arguing that it is part of White’s interest in finding meaning, while at the same time eschewing direct attempts to access meaning. I am not looking to contradict that here, but rather to get at how he uses this technique to communicate his thematic interests.
Territory is a maze of a comic, and definitely runs the risk of being just a plot puzzle to solve (like I mentioned before). And to some extent it is – I definitely spent a while just looking at it to piece it all together, trying to figure out the exact order of it. The process is rewarding, in that the plot specifics do seem to be there to find and they inform the choices of the character. I haven’t even fully figured it out. What is the story with the blue box? When did it get from place to place?
But the non-sequential storytelling also describes the emotion of the character, it adds a sort of franticness, confusion, and inevitability to it all. The audience understands that the character “was sure he didn’t have a choice” because the audience is already aware of his obsession and to some extent how far it goes. It’s a trick to describe nascent motivations by justaposign them with their fully formed versions.
Even the puzzling out of the plot itself is the same sort of act that the character is doing “late” in the plot as he tries to figure out what the meaning was behind all of this. The character and the audience are essentially in parallel for this experience. The question “why should I work to understand this?” that I mentioned as an audience response that must be contended with in art/poetry comics, is basically uttered by the character when he says “so/is that it?” This feeling is asked in frustration, out of the desire to understand what’s going on, and it’s that frustration that makes the audience want to understand too. They are siphoned into the characters search for meaning, and into his failure to find it.
The character’s arc is ended with two choices, both emotionally and thematically the same. He moves away from his attachments, and towards some ambiguous purpose that is somehow meaningful to him. The audience doesn’t necessarily end the story here, instead searching through the story making sense of the orders of events. But the fact that it’s the ending privileges it with greater importance, and when no greater understanding of the mysterious draw of the go (shogi?) board is found, the audience makes the same choice as the character. Not to walk away, but to settle for the draw of the ambiguous, rather than access it’s meaning directly.