Jan Assmann’s cultural memory – in comics?

This post took me much longer to write, as I found making a connection to comics with this one is somewhat trickier. Jan Assmann is an egyptologist, and his book Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (“cultural memory”)¹ is concerned with entire ancient cultures – Egypt, Greece, Israel – and they way in which each of them formed and maintained a distinctive collective memory. In order to apply Assmann’s theory to comics, we could look if comics can be said to constitute a culture, or several cultures, of their own (e.g. Matthew J. Pustz’s “comic book culture”²), and analyse how such a comic culture differs from others in terms of its “connective structure”.

Another approach would be to investigate how the content of a particular comic relates to a cultural memory, which is what Karin Kukkonen has done for the case of Bill Willingham’s Fables.³ Similarly, but with less emphasis on Assmann, Marianne Hirsch has examined Art Spiegelman’s Maus in relation to Holocaust remembrance.⁴

There’s another aspect in Assmann’s book that I find more interesting though. Cultural memory is primarily based on writing, which developed out of rites. A rite is a “mimetic routine” that has a symbolic meaning beyond its mere functional meaning. All rites are situated on a scale between repetition on the one hand, and realisation or revival of a past event (“Vergegenwärtigung”) on the other. The less strictly a rite adheres to a form, the more vivid is the reference to the past.

Given the sequentiality of comics, it’s not hard to find instances of mimetic routines in them. It then takes a closer look to tell the functional routines apart from the symbolic routines, but that is still feasible. For instance, consider the sequence of Jim Davis’s Garfield epsiodes from May 10 – 14, 1993. All five of these strips are about Garfield shedding his hair. Only in three of them (May 10, 12 and 13), however, he is actively moving to intensify the shedding, whereas in the other two he is motionless. Garfield’s shedding motions therefore constitute a mimetic routine (if we assume that these Garfield strips are connected to one long story in which the events of the episodes occur one after another). Furthermore, it isn’t a functional routine, as Garfield’s motive is certainly not merely the advancement of his change of pelage. Rather, the motive is mischief towards Jon (May 10 and 12) and competition against Odie (May 13).

These motivations can only be conveyed if we interpret Garfield’s actions as neither indexical nor iconic signs, but symbolic ones. (The hairs already shed might pass as an indexical sign, but they are not part of the mimetic routine.) Each time, the shedding motion conveys a message that can only be deciphered through its context: Garfield giving a Greek gift (May 10), Garfield claiming his superiority over Jon (May 12) and Garfield claiming his superiority over Odie (May 13). As these mimetic routines have symbolic functions, they must be rites according to Assmann.

The problematic part of Assmann’s notion of rites is the emphasis he puts on their purported reference to past events. This may be true for the religious rites discussed in Assmann’s book, but which event does Garfield’s shedding ritual refer to? This rite can well be regarded as an extension of a cat’s natural change of pelage, but that is a recurring, annual event, not a singular one such as the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. For the kind of rite meant by Assmann, it is essential that it refers to an event that is long gone and unlikely to return, so that it has to be remembered through rites (or writing) within an “extended situation” (“zerdehnte Situation”). If we add this requirement to Assmann’s definition of rites, they are much rarer in comics than mere mimetic routines.

In Garfield and other comics, there are examples of rites more in line with Assmann’s sense: rites connected to festivities such as Christmas, New Year’s Eve, or Garfield’s birthday. Which past events do these rites refer to? Maybe Christmas rites most likely refer to the birth of Jesus, New Year’s rites to the past year, and the rites of Garfield’s birthday to the birth of Garfield? But when we look at such a rite, e.g. Jon giving a birthday cake to Garfield (usually on June 19, the publication date of the first Garfield strip ever), it’s hard to see any connection to a past event in that. Surely anthropologists could explain how the cake-giving rite originated and how it is connected to childbirth, but that connection just isn’t conveyed in the rite itself. In contrast, Assmann’s examples, such as the reading of the Haggadah at the Passover Seder, directly refer to past events.

Therefore, I think this trait of rites should be considered part of their definition: a rite

1. is a mimetic routine;
2. has a symbolic function; and
3. refers to a past event.

Such rites, however, aren’t easy to find, in comics and elsewhere.