Michael DeForge's Big Kids and the Problem of Childhood Memory and Representation

• In Event: 52.063 - The Child in Question: Exploring Social Constructions of Childhood

Abstract

This paper explores the ambivalent experience of encountering forgotten childhood as a way to understand the strange manipulation of memory in DeForge’s (2016) graphic novel Big Kids. In this novel, the adolescent protagonist – Adam – undergoes a transformation from twig to tree (literally into a tree-like figure), after which he experiences a radically transformed world of objects and senses. After assuming his new shape Adam sees those humans who have not “treed” as twigs, representatives of emotional immaturity and a lack of self-conscious awareness. As well, the shapes of the world that Adam once knew – the environmental textures and the forms of its subjects – fade into obscurity; even when he stares at old photos he cannot recall what he used to see. Helping him navigate these changes, a character named April describes the ways that maturity affects perception: “You aren’t hallucinating,” she tells Adam, “You’re seeing the world through tree eyes” (n.p.), a transformation she herself experienced at nine. This loss of past perception, however, is something April obsessively tries to recover; throughout the book, she is shown making 3D models on her computer that, as she explains, “replicate how we saw the world before we changed … a way to remind us of the old shape of things” (n.p.).

Working to describe the virtual (Burgin, 2013) inscriptions of childhood memory as a creative endeavour against an illness from which we will never recover – namely, adulthood – and moving between a literary text and personal experience, this paper turns to a cultural theory of memory work (Kennedy, 2000; Kuhn, 2000; Radstone, 2000), as well as a psychoanalytically informed understanding of “potential space” (Kuhn, 2013; Winnicott, 2005). The author also characterizes this search as a form of essential “play”: relating to childhood images through the space of memory, we are simultaneously joined and separated from our past. This paper’s significance lies in posing the educational problem of how to relate to a past resistant to representation.

Author

• David Lewkowich, University of Alberta