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384 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 2000
Jimmy Corrigan traces the history of the titular character from a childhood characterized by an absent father and overbearing mother to his life as a middle-age white man whose isolation is represented by the cubicle in which he works. He is the novel's Everyman. Contacted by the father he has never met, Jimmy travels from Chicago to a small town in Michigan. In Waukosha he meets Amy, his father's adopted African-American daughter and – unbeknownst to them – a distant relation to Jimmy. Though the figure of the Everyman never completely understands himself in the context of a racialized America, the audience is aware of this complicated genealogy.7. I cannot now find it, but I recall that a critic at the time compared Jimmy Corrigan, with its complicated racial genealogy and its aesthetic formalism, to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. Absalom, Absalom!, yes, but as adapted by Wes Anderson. Or E. L. Doctorow. Most of my criticism of Jimmy Corrigan would, with allowances for the specificities of graphic storytelling vis-à-vis prose narrative, echo my criticism of Ragtime. Both Doctorow and Ware formally appropriate a past style or ideology, in implied quotation marks; Ware’s use of 1890s advertising and comics iconography is the graphic equivalent of Doctorow’s “There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants.” It is a premature and adolescent disavowal of the past rather than an honest struggle with it. “That’s not me!” you say by way of mocking imitation, like an insult comic. You want to say, “The past is dead. It is even past.” Braver to go forth as the heir to your tradition that you in fact are. Your father’s sins will be visited upon you, yes, but petulant denial in the guise of formal mastery cannot in any case prevent that. Faulkner was not performing a pastiche of Shakespeare or Melville; he was writing as best he could in their tradition about his time and place.
The narrative is interrupted periodically by the story of Jimmy's great-grandfather and grandfather, which is set in 1893, and this narration focuses on the great-grandfather's abusive relationship with his young son, whom he beats and eventually abandons at the top of one of the largest buildings in "The White City" at the Chicago World's Fair. This narrative section also reveals that Amy is not only the adopted daughter of Jimmy's father but a blood relation descended from Jimmy's great-grandfather's relationship with his African-American maid. Reduced to its barest bones, the narrative is built upon Jimmy searching for himself through the lost father and finding a much more (racially) complicated family. At the same time, the reader learns of a more complicated backstory to that diverse family (blood, and not just adoption, link Amy to her half brother). Given that the protagonist never discovers this history that the reader is privy to, the novel refuses a simple conclusion in which the protagonist finds or even fully knows himself.
…Ware sets up a reading practice that challenges the ability to read and interpret race through simple chronologies. As the reader attempts to follow both Jimmy and his sister Amy's stories, no simple narratives of racial origins emerge. Instead, the reader is left to actively piece together the narrative, making errors and corrections along the way. Ware reminds us of this reading practice at every step in the novel. For example, the novel withholds page numbers, deemphasizing a traditional narrative sequence and encouraging a reading practice that may move freely backwards and forwards and across the page in numerous directions. As if to complicate this practice even more, Ware's hardback and paperback editions of the novel participate in this notion of errors and corrections in that the latter adds visual material not included in the former edition.I understand, intellectually, the focus on error, but all the same: Ware tells, the readers learn, the characters never find out. They err, we err—but does Ware ever err? Are not even his corrections obsessive evasions of errancy? (Apologies, like claims to injury, can be assertions of authority.) Who’s in charge here again? To say “error” is to imply that the right way is known. Who is it that knows if Ware flattens time into space to draw us a map?