Forging the Past

The work of Canadian cartoonist Seth positions itself between history and memory, and in doing so gives rise to a range of ambivalent impulses, chief among them an ambivalent longing for the past. Seth suggests that “the whole process of cartooning is dealing with memory,” and by consistently drawing attention to seams and borders, his comics invite the reader to examine the processes by which narratives of the past come to seem seamless. Seth’s work exhibits a complicated nostalgia that is well aware of its own reactionary, restorative and nationalistic inclinations, and is able to channel them toward productive ends. His ironic, humorous, and metafictional approaches to memory, loss and longing for the past reveal that his attitude toward these closely related subjects is deeply ambivalent. Memory is here conceived not just as an invisible, ubiquitous mental phenomenon that reflects our experience of time and relation to the past, but as a medium, an art –one which is in many ways akin to cartooning. The fundamental operation of comics as a visual medium initiates and makes space for narrative interpolations in a way that is not only comparable to but in a certain sense mimics the historical interpolations of memory; in both cases, longing is spurred by incompleteness. Seth turns the medium of memory on itself, using it as an instrument to examine the processes of remembrance and making history.