“I killed my father in my book, even before he died”, by Marion Fayolle

What a marvelous little book! Between November 2020 and April 2021, comic strip author Marion Fayolle confided in her art historian friend Tony Côme – whose questions do not appear – about her creative process, her relationship to the Ardèche highlands, the death of her father… Trained at the Arts-Deco in Strasbourg by the famous Guillaume Dégé (whose decisive role in her artistic development is detailed here), Marion Fayolle has become one of the bridgeheads of the leading house of Magnani edition, where she published ten books. Among them, “the Tenderness of the Stones” or “the Suspended Loves”, delicate and poetic books, whose rhythm evokes the theater, and the characters, often seen in profile, both hieroglyphs and cut-out dolls. At the same time, the young woman carries out her work as an illustrator, for the “New York Times”, the “New Yorker” or… “the Obs”. In “Fond perdu”, this designer says she conceives the book as a “space of the absolute”, “a parallel life, without impediment” and formulates nice things like: ““Illustration is a narration, it is drawing that thinks, that tells, that can deliver. It’s not there to dress up literature, it’s literature. » We would like all comic book authors to engage in this exercise of confession with the same grace as Fayolle.

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Excerpt from “Bleeding”

“Sex, tunnel sex, burrow sex, mousehole sex, golf hole, pencil sharpener. Head that unhooks, head that opens like a lid, flowerpot head, cup head, head that fits into its shell body. Pooled bodies, cracked bodies, yawning bodies, pecked bodies. Enlarged breasts from breast-feeding. Pierced belly. Baby countershape. Mother cave. Parents perforated, parents separated by a gap. Carved child’s sawdust.

I continue ?

Limbs dropping out. Falling masks. Absence of nose, mouth. Missing pieces. Hatches. Character who erases himself, who erases himself. Hole to bury a lung, hole in the stone eaten by the waves, hole in the roof of the house, hole in which the father sinks. I could – could find you others, holes, by still leafing through. Emphysema, tracheotomy, since you’re talking about autobiography.

For five years, you know, my father lived with a cavity in the thorax, that is to say, direct access to his stomach. There, we are really in the hole. My father was bored, as some of my characters can be. I could very concretely look inside him through a small hole. It was strange, the changes that were made in his body seemed to me almost like logical consequences: I had the impression that I didn’t know my father very well, he didn’t speak much, so we tracheostomyed him. , we never knew what he was thinking deep inside, so we made a hole in his stomach and left it open.

Quite disconcerting images came to me naturally, they spoke of the body, of death, of the meeting with one of its parents. I needed to draw them to explain certain things to myself. The challenge I had given myself was to make a book out of it, but I didn’t want to take the easy route of realistic testimony. In “The Tenderness of Stones”, I never show the hospital, illness, old age, when that’s all there is to it.

Could you please not look me in the eye?

The image of the nose, there, it’s very simple: when my father was in intensive care, we waited a long time for him to recover enough breath so that we could install an artificial nose. I heard this expression all the time. We talked about it, without ever seeing it. Me, I really imagined a nose, we were expecting a nose. And then one day, they put a little round mouthpiece on it that didn’t look like a nose at all – it was kind of disappointing. The vocabulary of doctors was rich in images of this kind but I needed to create still others to understand, because what was happening in my father’s body was very abstract. They took out a lung.

What were we going to do next with this lung? Where were we going to put it? Since it was damaged, sick, we couldn’t give it to someone else. How was it going to happen in practice? Were we going to bury it, throw it away? It was a fragment of human body after all. All these questions were never directly addressed and remained enigmas for me. I needed to draw to mourn this lung, which we didn’t talk about, which was no longer there. So I was imagining a little funeral for this little piece of body, you know?

It was also about questioning the specificities of comics, you’re right. When you start writing an autobiographical story, with a very real, very embodied character, you have little room for manoeuvre. If my idea was to make my father the main character of my book, he was going to be transformed with each chapter. The way of looking at it or of thinking about it, its modes of representation would be constantly in motion. As if I was spinning around. It would be sometimes huge, sometimes very small, an enigmatic silhouette, a rock, etc. I wanted my main character to redesign himself, and therefore redefine himself, each time we discover something about him. By drawing, it was not a question of representing my father but of trying to meet him, to reveal – as in a photographic bath – his different faces and his complexities. I felt like I was digging, digging inside. I adopted a writing which, through the image, sought to strip bare, to remove layers, to go deep and, once at the heart, to create galleries, underground paths, paths of thought, which sometimes I I gave up, to go to another place, to come back better later and, in the end, to show biases, behaviors, sequences that no longer belong to the figuration.

I felt ready to do this book because my father was starting to get better. He had become a disabled person but was no longer ill. In remission, his body was not degenerating – but not improving either. I was less emotional, sufficiently detached to recount this strange normality that had just been established. Surprisingly enough, when I started drawing – I had to do only one chapter – during an annual visit, we were told that he had a recurrence, that the cancer had come back. By drawing, by making it appear, I had the impression of having reactivated the story, as if with a magic power.

I felt guilty, you know me. At first, I was recounting past events. Then I found myself talking about the present and a race started against my will: when was my father going to die, first in life or rather in my book? We were told of imminent death. Maybe I was going to have to tell about his death as it happened. I was advancing the writing of my book but it was still there. Don’t you want to go to the living room? There is a beautiful light.

I killed him in my book, before he was even dead. I was able to show him the book that told of his own death while he was still alive. It was very disturbing. No, no, I don’t mind talking about it but it’s to tell you that it went beyond autobiography, that it became fiction, at least anticipation. It was quite nice, for me, to have killed him before he died, since I had consoled myself for his loss, I had put an image on his disappearance, it was also a way of me prepare.

I knew he wanted to be cremated. At the end of my book, in the credits, it becomes landscape, we recognize it in small rocks, small mountains. And, indeed, today, he is in the landscape, on the set. We will have to talk about it. It is this image that has remained, it has anticipated the event. We spread his ashes there to stick to the book. It was very hard emotionally but these strong images allowed us to talk. With my mother, we talked a lot about my book, the images in the book, certain passages, but never about my father, never about what we were going through. Through drawing, which came to encrypt everything, we managed to talk about very delicate subjects that we could not have tackled head-on. The images became part of our life. The ladies who took care of my father themselves started using them, almost like… like climbing holds. These images became part of the family, almost people you could contact. I had this desire to seek a kind of appeasement, lightness, to make people laugh, or at least smile, at certain situations. »

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