15 April 2012

Review: Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller by Joseph Lambert


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

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More