Annie Sullivan and
the Trials of Helen Keller – Joseph Lambert (w/a)
Hyperion, $17.99, 978-142311336-2
One of the more original voice in cartooning to emerge in
recent years is Joseph Lambert, whose whimsical, bucolic fantasies marked his
collection, I Will Bite You!, as the
stand-out debut of 2011. When he revealed
that his follow-up work would be a biography of Helen Keller, it seemed
a wasted outlet for his talents to work on something so mundane and
well-trodden. But Lambert is too
consummately inventive a cartoonist to merely retell The Miracle Worker and
instead provides us with a haunting, synaesthetic portrait of a unique, if not
remarkable life.
As the title suggests, the focus of the book is not
Keller herself, but Annie Sullivan, the teacher — partially-sighted herself —
who was responsible for educating the young girl, who had been stricken blind,
deaf and, consequently, mute by meningitis at 19 months. Her world was dark, silent and alien, and the
main challenge that Sullivan had was how to help the child make sense of her
world, with only a rudimentary sign language that she struggled to make sense
of. While there has always been sympathy
engendered in Helen Keller’s story, the real issue has always been one of
empathy and how we, as a hearing, seeing, talking audience, can even begin to understand
her situation.
This is where Lambert’s experimental cartooning really
comes into its own. He presents Helen’s
world as a black void with only the vaguest of impressions to denote the world
around her — in the early pages, Helen’s mother is a pink blob, at once helping
us to share Helen’s understanding of the world and her maternal affection. Frequently the effect will be heightened by
juxtaposing Helen’s perspective with the omniscient narrative view-point, often
finding her caught in the middle of a heated family argument and driving home
the tragedy of her condition.
Her world becomes more fully-formed as Annie’s teaching
methods begin to take hold and her understanding of the world gels her vague
sensory impressions into an organized catalogue of the world. (A transition that's elegantly told on the book's casing design.) We even begin to see how Helen’s imagination
begins to work and — in one of the most visually-striking segments — an
adaptation of the “Frost King” story she sends to Annie’s mentor at the
Institute for the Blind.
“The Frost King” becomes something of a turning-point for
both Helen and Annie when it is revealed that the tale was plagiarized. Thus begins an investigation into Annie’s
methods which still resonates today, drawing as it does upon notions of
academic pressures and the corrosive influence of celebrity. It’s an area of
Keller’s life that often brushed aside, but is perhaps more endearing and
powerful a story than that of her education, because again we are able to
empathise with Helen.
Lambert’s line has a fragile quality to it that is
perfect for capturing the precarious lives of Keller and Sullivan. The emotional hardship that each endures is
almost palpable in their portrayal, but is also just abstract enough that we
can’t also feel thrown into the midst of their situation ourselves. The cartoonist is thereby not only able to
tell a wonderfully moving story, but also demonstrates the power of his medium
and how it can offer sensual, sensory experiences like no other.
-- Gavin Lees
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