Mother, Come Home : Trauma, Time, and Groundskeeping the Disaster

It's not just that we experience loss, but the things we lose can themselves seem “filled with the intent to be lost” as a feature of their very existence.

Just as, existentially, we are “always dying already,” so too are we always already grieving.

As a cross-discursive text that relies on the interplay between word and image, graphic narrative is well-positioned to explore the boundaries of what can be both said and shown. We know that these boundaries also trace and delimit the traumatic experience, so it can be argued that psychoanalysis is critically and productively allied with comics as a narrative medium. Of course, psychoanalysis already understands that its interest in the “complex relations between knowing and not knowing” overlaps with the general nature of literature (Caruth, 1996, p. 3). But here I want to suggest that the visual/textual interface of graphic narrative is uniquely situated to attend to psychoanalytic readings of unconscious complexity and conflict. This special issue of American Imago testifies to such possibilities.

This essay will focus its attention on Paul Hornschemeier's 2006 graphic novel, Mother, Come Home, the story of a seven-year-old boy, Thomas, and his father, David, who are attempting to survive the untimely death of Thomas's mother. Narrated

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Fantagraphics Comics—especially RJ Casey and Paul Baresh—for both the extensive duplication of images from Mother, Come Home and permission to use them. Thanks to Paul Hornschemeier, the author-illustrator of the text, for a generous and enlightening personal correspondence. Thanks to the Humanities Advisory Council at Otterbein University for a writing grant to assist in the completion of this manuscript. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers and Vera Camden, the editor of this issue, who helped to improve this manuscript. And thanks to Ken Petri, who offered constructive and decisive feedback all along the wa