10.13125/2039-6597/3239
Ghost World (1997) is a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. Two teenage girls, having ended high school, confront with the passage to adult life in a spectral American suburbia scattered with non-places: diners, shopping malls, vinyl and comic stores. From their own bedrooms, the two spend their time cynically commenting the fatuity of US pop culture, trapped between a haunting past and an uncertain future. This contribution intends to discuss space in Ghost World from three main perspectives, concerning the material book, the visual level (page layout, framing, colors) and the diegetical one (investigating spaces inside the story).
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Giorgio Busi Rizzi
Between
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Last Stop: This Town.  Sameness, Suburbs and Spectrality  in Daniel Clowes's <i>Ghost World</i>
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
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Essay
2018-07-10
2018-02-20
2018-07-10
2018-07-10
1
Giorgio Busi Rizzi
2018/07/10
10.13125/2039-6597/3239
KU Leuven, Università di Bologna
2039-6597
15
Graffiti
en
Last Stop: This Town.  Sameness, Suburbs and Spectrality  in Daniel Clowes's <i>Ghost World</i>
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3239/2926
8
          Last stop: this town.
    Sameness, suburbs and spectrality
     in Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World

                            Giorgio Busi Rizzi


        Ghost World, first published as a graphic novel by
     Fantagraphics in 1997, is to date the most famous and
     successful work by Daniel Clowes1.
        It recounts a key, yet consistently mundane, moment in the
     life of two teenagers, Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca
     Doppelmeier2. It is the summer after the end of high school
     and the two self-proclaimed witty, cynical, different girls have
     to confront with the passage their coming of age involves
     towards an adult life, consider moving to a new town, and face
     the possible dissolution of their friendship3.



     1
        The book won the Ignatz Award (1997) and was considered by the mag-
azines Times and Paste to be among the ten best graphic novels of all time.
      2 Significantly, both names mirror and redouble the identity of the au-

thor: Enid Coleslaw is anagram of Daniel Clowes, and Doppelmeier alludes to
a pun with doppelgänger that will be explicitly made in the course of the story.
Clowes even inserts in the story a third alter ego of himself, a creepy cartoonist
called David Clowes.
      3 On the first paperback edition’s back cover, Clowes includes a brief syn-

opsis: “Ghost World is the story of Enid and Rebecca, teenage friends facing
the unwelcome prospect of adulthood and the uncertain future of their com-
plicated relationship” (2001).


Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town



         Enid and Rebecca live this liminal state in an anonymous
      1990s American suburb that Clowes reportedly distillated by
      merging Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, realizing a
      hypostasis of America scattered with and haunted by non-
      places: diners and snack bars that stage trite 1950s pastiches,
      both unlikely and extremely plausible in their being uniformly
      deprived of every sense of history; shopping malls and urban
      sprawl; sex shops, vinyl and comic stores; and of course the
      bedrooms and living rooms of the teenagers’ houses, where
      the two friends spend their time sifting, with the sharpest
      postmodern sarcasm, through the fatuity of US pop culture -
      a fetish subject of Northern American alternative comics 4.
      «Their artfully contrived dialogue», observes Venezia,
      “«emphasises their attempts to construct some kind of critical
      distance from their environment and the banal mass of
      consumer choices on offer, a distance that fails to materialize»
      (2012: 60).
         This contribution aims to discuss space from three main
      perspectives: investigating the physical book, asking what the
      specifics of Ghost World as a graphic novel are; analyzing the
      visual level, with a stress on framing, page layout and colors;
      and exploring the diegetic universe, interrogating the
      representation and role of spaces inside the story, highlighting
      the sense of sameness given by living in the suburbs and the
      heterotopic possibilities opened by the graffiti the story
      features. Particular attention will be given to the idea of
      spectrality that repeatedly resurfaces in Ghost World (the title
      itself is in this sense quite significant), and that will be put in
      relation to Fisher’s reworking of the concept of hauntology.



      It must be noted, on the other side, that the criticism of the status quo is
      4

never deepened to a radical extent in the 100% white periphery that Clowes
builds: issues of class and race are completely overshadowed in this and other
works by the American author.


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                                           Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)




  Material world: a very peculiar kind of graphic novel
     Ghost World was not meant to be a graphic novel from the
beginning. It was instead serially published on Clowes’ fanzine
Eightball, a series comprising 23 installments from 1989 to 2004, fully
published by Fantagraphics. The first issues were mainly composed by
short stories, very sharp, always auto-conclusive. Schneider defines
them as

        a rather chaotic miscellanea of short or serialized stories, essays,
     interviews, adaptations, and non-sequitur pages drawn in different
     styles and shooting in various directions as, for example, the
     banalization of violence, sex, teen angst, consumerism,
     corporatization, and industry of entertainment—in a cynic and one-
     dimensional critique of modern boredom. This thematic anarchy is
     followed by an aesthetic of randomness, fragmentation and excess,
     overload of themes, an overwhelming profusion of plot twists,
     overly crowded panels, and wordy captions. (2015: 198)

     Then, starting from number 11, most stories would be serialized,
and since number 19 each Eightball issue would be devoted to a single
storyline. Almost every work by Clowes first appeared on Eightball: Like
a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (issues 1-10, published as a book by
Fantagraphics in 1993); Pussey!: The Complete Saga of Young Dan Pussey
(issues 1, 3-5, 8-10, 12, 14, book version by Fantagraphics in 1995); David
Boring (issues 19-21, book version by Pantheon, 200); Ice Haven (issue 22,
book version by Pantheon 2005); The Death Ray (issue 23, book version
by Drawn and Quarterly, 2011)5.

     5
        Non-Eightball works are instead called Wilson (Drawn and Quarterly
2010, Clowes’ first non-serialized graphic novel, which is ironic considering
that its appearance mimics a collection of strips), Mister Wonderful (originally
serialized on The New York Times Sunday Magazine, then published as a book
by Pantheon in 2011) and the most recent Patience (Fantagraphics, 2016).


                                                                                    3
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town



     Ghost World hence appeared originally in eight chapters on
Eightball, from 1993 (issue 11) to 1997 (issue 18). Chapters are not
particularly long, ranging from 6 pages to 16, for a total amount of 80
pages, an unusually short length for a graphic novel. The first
phantasmal aspect one can notice in Ghost World is then related to this
serial structure, which Clowes chooses not to alter or expand, keeping
the chapters divided, and marking each beginning with a page adorned
by the words “ghost world”.




Fig.1 a and b: The first pages of the eight issues of Ghost World: chapters 1 (6 pages),
2, (6 pp), 3 (12 pp.), 4 (6 pp), 5 (8 pp), 6 (6 pp), 7 (10 pp) and 8 (16 pp).


     The serial publication ends up in an «episodic plotless drift of the
narrative» (Venezia 2012: 58) that manages nevertheless to convey a very
vivid portrait of the spectrality and the repetition compulsion of
American suburbs (as underlined by the periodic comparison of the


4
                                        Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



anonymous mural that only says “ghost world”). The result is an
impressionist but most effective bildungsroman reflecting on and
nourished by the 1990s zeitgeist of the United States. «What we think of
Generation X», assert Baetens and Frey, «is as much indebted to what
we have seen in Ghost World as what we have read in Douglas
Coupland» (2015: 176-77); and the same comparison can be made with
the vast cinematographic production devoted to the figure of the slacker,
from Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Dollhouse to Kevin Smith’s Clerks,
from Richard Linklater’s Slacker to Jefery Levy’s SFW.
      The story thus carries in the spine of its books structure «the mark
of a fragmentation, of an episodic structure full of discontinuities»
(Labarre 2013: 3). Yet, despite the episodes being auto-conclusive and
relatively autonomous, their succession effectively manages to shape a
clear narrative arc that describes the evolution and dissolution of the
friendship between Rebecca and Enid.
      Throughout all the story, in fact, Enid fights to stay the same, both
consciously and unconsciously avoiding the frightening future that
might await her, and possibly relegating herself to the role of the eternal
misfit (the same destiny shared by many secondary characters of the
book). On the opposite, Rebecca eventually conforms to adulthood,
beginning a relationship with Josh and potentially fulfilling her WASP
destiny. Enid will instead close her narrative arc while symbolically
moving away from young girls going to school (that is, both from her
past and her possible future as a Middle American mother and wife),
before leaving town for an unknown future.




                                                                                 5
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town




                  Fig. 2. Enid symbolically moving away from her past


             “Look at us!”: direct gaze and thresholds
     If, as Michael Chaney affirmed in his analysis of the March trilogy,
“graphic novels are books you can judge by their covers” (forthcoming),
it would be worthwhile to discuss the covers of the various editions of
Ghost World.




Fig. 3. Main US editions of Ghost World (2000 edition recto/verso; 2008 edition; 2011
special edition)




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     Most of the covers for the US market present a similar scene: Enid
and Rebecca occupy and dominate the space as the sole distinguishable
human figures, with a clear predominance of Enid’s figure and face.
Either the latter or both gaze toward the reader, a strategy that in the
case of the 2011 special edition is accentuated by Enid’s utterance saying
“Look at us! We’re totally special!”.
     The common element is the breaking of the fourth wall via the
interpellation of the reader through what Mikkonen defines ‘direct gaze’
(2017: 167), which enhances the viewer’s involvement, inviting her to
traverse the threshold of the story. Similarly, Hescher remarks how «in
a social semiotics approach, frontal views are usually connected with
maximum involvement on the viewer’s side» (Hescher 2016: 139).




Fig. 4. Other Ghost World-related covers (Italian edition; German edition; screenplay;
DVD cover)


     The device is even more evident if considering the covers conceived
for the foreign market and the paratextual apparatuses (the graphic
novel has seen an independent, critically successful movie adaptation of
the same name6, whose covers are drawn by Clowes himself). Here Enid
clearly stares at the reader while framed in a close up aimed at her face,


     6
      Ghost World (2001), by Terry Zwigoff. The movie’s scenario, co-written
by Clowes himself, does not simply adapt the story of the graphic novel, but
expands it adding characters and events.


                                                                                       7
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town



while Rebecca is shown by her profile half the times, suggesting she will
eventually take a different path from that of her friend.
      Architectural elements correlate with the staticity of the image,
symbolically enclosing the space behind the protagonists in half of the
covers7. Alternatively, the two adolescents fluctuate in the void (on a
white or dark background), with the notable exception of the Earth’s
globe seen by the space in the back cover of the original edition, possibly
with the function of augmenting the contrast between the world itself
and the far smaller “world” the two will inhabit in the course of those
eighty pages.
      If, then, on the one hand, the “ghost world” seems to be the outer
one, surrounding and isolating the two cynical, witty teenagers, on the
other they do very little more than inhabiting – or maybe haunting – the
small surface of their habitual territory like they inhabit and haunt the
«no man’s land between adolescence and adulthood» (Bouchard 2011),
before having to realize they are not ‘different’ or ‘special’, because even
their difference (like that of their surrounding) was nothing but a
citation, a re-proposition, an imitation of something already happened.
What the covers suggest, eventually, is that the two adolescents are
organic, not opposed, to the invariable sameness of the environment that
surrounds them; they are constrained by the surroundings the same way
they are metaphorically condemned not to escape their anonymous
destiny.

          As seen on TV: page layout, framing, and color
     The same considerations can be done when dealing with Clowes’
visual choices throughout the graphic novel.



      7
       In this sense Labio interestingly suggests that “there is an architectural
unconscious of the comics page, an extradiegetic mirroring of domestic archi-
tecture that gives the page its basic structure and accounts in significant meas-
ure for the readability, emotional power, and popularity of the genre” (2015:
317).


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                                         Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



     To begin with, Ghost World’s layout is quite consistent, presenting
three rows with one to three panels per row, in a steady rhythm. The
regularity of page composition reinforces the key themes of the story:
the existential staticity, the monotony of everyday life and the
pervasiveness of social conventions with which the story deals.
     More subtly, framing has a very active role in the composition of
the image; the observation point leads us very close to the protagonists,
isolating them visually from the rest of the characters, who are almost
always shown in the background or laterally divided from the two. If
we accept the division between ocularization and focalization, we
should therefore see this kind of composition as an indication that the
story is cognitively focalized on Enid - or, with what Kai Mikkonen
defines ‘shared subjective perspective’ (2012: 86), on Enid and Rebecca8.
     As Hescher remarks,

        the great majority of the images are half-subjective and POV
     images, and what I get to know as a reader is all filtered through
     Enid and Rebecca’s consciousness; nothing is withheld from my
     perception as I see (that is I know) the world through the minds of
     the two teenage girls. (2016: 176)

     The round traits of faces and balloons heighten the contrast with
the severe geometry of the squared landscape, normally aligned with
the borders of panel, reinforcing the sense of containment every panel
exercises on its characters and, symbolically, the repetition compulsion
effect that the “ghost world” that surrounds Enid and Rebecca exercises
on them.
     In this sense, Clowes, as already mentioned when talking about the
covers, maximizes the role of thresholds, constantly interpolating
transparent or semi-transparent surfaces between his protagonists and


     8
       Hescher acutely notices on this purpose that more exactly “the single
episodes are dominated by internal focalization, which will narrow down
from Enid and Rebecca’s to only Enid’s focalization toward the end of the nar-
rative” (2016: 176).


                                                                                  9
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town



us. This has the double effect of narratively framing the story,
continuously reminding us of its artificial nature, and (again)
encapsulating the two adolescents into an environment they
unsuccessfully try to escape from. In this sense, the frequently recurring
scene of the two watching television represents a mise en abyme of the
very structure through which the reader is confronted with the
narration.




Fig. 5. The first panel that show Enid and Rebecca (‘s legs). The TV is on, a window
interposes between us and the scene, and the panel constraints the characters on the
inside of its closed space.


     But this framing effect also sharpens the contrast of the border
between the outer “ghost world” and the inside, «self-centered world»
(Hescher 2016: 140) that the two adolescents experience and project,
sublimating «a tendency to kill boredom by converting their ordinary
surroundings into something extraordinary» (Schneider 2015: 200). It is
precisely to escape from this claustrophobic sameness that the two try
to convert the most mundane kitsch into something iconic and peculiar,
managing to

         find interest in inhospitable locations, like a tacky ‘50’s diner and
      sex-shops; and creat[ing] fully extravagant back-stories for


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     common people in the street. Enid’s town is inhabited by serial
     killers, mass murderers, Satanists, weird waiters, and a psychic.
     (2015: 200)

      Boredom and strangeness are then truly for the two teenagers «the
two main forces of everyday life» (Highmore 2002, in Schneider 2016:
62). Yet this «oscillatory dynamic that orchestrates boredom and
interest, the marvelous and the ordinary, as complementary forces
rather than opposing incompatible ones» (Schneider 2016: 63) and that
seems so peculiar of the two adolescents is, on the other hand, nothing
but the very postmodern capacity to convert camp into pop, absorbing
and recycling its own past, no matter the weirdness, into a slightly
different, new form.
      The fourth chapter is the only exception to the regularity of the
composition, presenting a series of pages where the first narrative level
(that sees Enid chatting on the phone with Rebecca) opens up on a
second, projected level, where Enid recounts of having met their
common friend Naomi and having told her about her own first time 9.
This framed level is based on four rows instead of three, from which
starts a third narrative level, the story of Enid’s first time, that presents
two pages with six unframed, de-contoured panels divided along three
rows.




     9
       En passant, sexual curiosity and frustration is a common theme through
all Ghost World.


                                                                                 11
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town




Fig. 6. The regular layout composition adopted through most of the graphic novel
and the two variations in chapter 4.


      According to Benoît Peeters’ repartition of the types of page layout
(2007), Clowes adopts here a narrative dominant10, oscillating between
rhetorical and conventional mode, but with a clear preference for the
conventional mode. That is to say, the structure of the page layout is
based on «the systematic repetition of the same structure and form of
tiers and panels, independent of any content [or] style» (Baetens and
Frey 2015: 108). It’s a fixed system that leaves little to experimentation,
giving much attention to the narrative; nevertheless, since the grid is a
given element and remains consistent in spite of the content, «the
relationship between the two dimensions is one of independence»
(Baetens – Frey 2015: 108-09).
      In the fourth chapter of the graphic novel, though, we see the
resurfacing of the rhetorical mode: panel and page «are no longer
autonomous elements; they are subordinated to a narrative which their
primary function is to serve. The size of the images, their distribution,

      Peeters’ envisions two kinds of dominants (narrative and composition)
      10

and two types of interaction between the two levels (interdependence or au-
tonomy), giving birth to four different conceptions of page layout. For a full
explanation, see Peeters (2007).



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the general pace of the page, all must come to support the narration»
(Peeters 2007: 19), slowing down and accelerating the rhythm while we
deepen the narrative levels until reaching the story of Enid’s first time –
not casually, one of the few true “events” of the narration.
      The recurring layout adopted throughout the rest of the works
gives instead steadiness to the rhythm of the action unfolding,
encouraging repetitions (often, if not always, with few variations of
perspective and composition) and enhancing the involvement in the
storyworld of a reader who «feels that there is ‘room’ for him or for her
in the development of the story» and that she «is really invited to join
the fictional universe of the characters» (Baetens and Frey 2015: 110).
      Another element that can be noted in all those examples is the
peculiar, phantasmatic presence of color. Furthermore, considering
Clowes’ full production, there is a striking difference towards his usual
resource either to b/w or to full colors. In this case, instead, he opts for
the trichromy white/black/light blue, with the third nuance originally
changing in every Eightball episode and eventually uniformed in the
graphic novel version. The pale, ghostly appeal of the green-blue shades
is equally reminiscent of the melancholy of twilight and of the greenish
light flickering TVs project on the rooms they are in:

        There has always been a feeling of jittery unease underscoring
     Clowes’ work, but in Ghost World, the sense of dread and horror
     emanates more from the real world than from the supernatural one.
     The creepy disquiet of Ghost World is nourished by television,
     suburbia and the soul-sucking banality of both. The serial’s panels
     are cast in the eerie blue light of the television -- which is always on,
     always talking, never saying anything. (Chocano 2000)


                        I’m not here:
        diegetic spaces, non-places, and hauntology

     As Fisher efficaciously sums up, in contemporary times




                                                                                    13
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town



         The erosion of spatiality has been amplified by the rise of what
      Marc Augé calls the ‘‘non-place’’: airports, retail parks, and chain
      stores which resemble one another more than they resemble the
      particular spaces in which they are located, and whose ominous
      proliferation is the most visible sign of the implacable spread of
      capitalist globalization. (Fisher 2012: 19).

      The non-places of Ghost World’s settings, already evoked in the
course of this analysis, are everywhere the two adolescents go: «an
anonymous (sub)urban sprawl of fast food joints with ersatz décor and
second-hand ambience, out of town shopping malls, and blank expanses
of low rise blocks» (Venezia 2012: 59). Conversely, the only proper place
of Ghost World is that of home, of which we are given three examples:
Enid’s house with her parents, Rebecca’s with her grandmother and
Josh’s (a friend of Enid and Rebecca). Mostly, we see the two adolescents
in their bedrooms or living rooms, talking to each other on the phone
and/or watching TV and caustically commenting on US pop culture.
      The list of non-places in the story is impressively long, not limited
to the already mentioned franchises, capable of conjugating anonymity
and ubiquity and accentuating the perception of the events taking place
anywhere – or rather, in the middle of nowhere. Another recurrent
feature of the book is the display of subcultural niches for collectors of
ephemera: a vinyl store, a comics shop, a sex shop. As the unlikely - but
absolutely believable - gray pastiche of a 1950s diner, those settings are
typical of 1990s US fiction (from literature to films, from comics to other
arts), deriving from and commenting on the very tendency of late
capitalism to wallow in its own popular culture. In this sense, pastiche
in Jameson’s view, as John Storey sums it, «recaptures and represents
the atmosphere and stylistic features of the past; and/or it recaptures and
represents certain styles of viewing of the past» (Storey 2015: 204). In
Jameson’s perspective, pastiche always works towards nostalgia,
limiting itself to a sterile blank imitation of the surface appearance of
past works (1991: 279-96). As Fisher remarks, then, what happens here
is that «the disappearance of space goes alongside the disappearance of
time: there are non-times as well as non-places» (2012: 19).



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      Now, as Hagglund sums up, in Derrida’s construction of the figure
of the specter what is more important is “that it cannot be fully present:
it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not
yet” (Hagglund 2008, in Fisher 2012). Furthermore, Fisher, in his taking
over the Derridian concept of hantologie (a neologism that the French
thinker created to oppose to the stable idea of ontology), distinguishes
then two directions of hauntology. On one side, it refers to «that which
is (in actuality is) no longer, but which is still effective as a virtuality»,
that he calls the traumatic «compulsion to repeat» (2012: 19). On the
other, hauntology refers to «that which (in actuality) has not yet
happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an
anticipation shaping current behavior)» (2012: 19).
      More clearly, then, (non-)places in Ghost World have to do with
what Bernardelli, in his reading of Bachtin, called chronotopical function
(forthcoming), in which space and time are in communication and
metonymically hint at the transition period that the two adolescents are
undergoing, to the changes that result and to the phantasmatic presence
of a problematic and alienating past counterposed to an uncertain and
threatening future.
      To follow this reasoning, it is helpful to consider some apparently
secondary events in the course of the story.




      Fig. 7. Two panels from the sequence set at the amusement park.


                                                                                   15
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town



      Most micro-narratives in Ghost World, in fact, refer to the past,
marking its signs of decay. The first good example is the small sequence
set in the abandoned theme park in which Enid and Rebecca go play,
that they discover being remarkably less impressive than they
remembered it was. Another signal is the deteriorating sign of one of the
diner the two girls meet to chat that reads “BREAKFA T” and “BREAKF
T” some pages later, a metaphor subtly inscribed in a peripheral angle
of the image, that the eye of the spectator should not notice until a
second reading.
      In fact, the “ghost world” of the graphic novel seems to be itself a
non-world whose boundaries, except for this small sequence, are never
successfully trespassed by the two adolescents, at least until the open
ending that leaves Enid’s fate unclear (fans’ speculations went from
deducing she left the town and finally changed her life to assuming she
was about to commit suicide, having realized the faint vanity of her
existence).




        Fig. 8. The two panels showing the deteriorating “BREAKFAST” sign.


     Others hint at the possibility of change (for better or worse) in the
future. An example in this sense is “Norman”, that is, the person who



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waits in vain for a bus line that is not served anymore, and whose name
(given to him by the two adolescents) derives from an inscription on the
concrete next to him. Towards the end of the graphic novel, Norman is
not there anymore, having taken the bus of the restored line (we can see
his silhouette inside the bus in the last page of the graphic novel).
      Analogously to those micro-events, the relationship between Enid
and Rebecca remains stable and functioning for most of graphic novel,
but deteriorates towards the end. Enid has not been accepted into
college, so she has to sell the car she had bought second hand to go to
university, and Rebecca, who is the more ordinary and less intellectual-
wannabe, wears a pair of glasses for the first time in the last page of the
graphic novel as a symbol of the acceptance of her upcoming maturity.
      It is the reader who has to fill the gaps the text disseminates and
project herself (Gardner 2012) eluding the anonymous genericity of
Ghost World’s landscape, to opt for the possibility of a different life or
imagine the protagonists succumbing to the irresistible repetition of the
same.
      Considering Clowes’ attention for details, the two panels in which
Enid is at the beach are in this sense striking, breaking with the squared
geometry and the suburban geography of the rest of the graphic novel
to introduce instead round shapes and natural, open landscapes.




            Fig. 9. Some panels from the small beach sequence




                                                                                  17
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town



     In fact, the “ghost world” of the graphic novel seems to be itself a
non-world whose boundaries, except for this small sequence, are never
successfully trespassed by the two adolescents, at least until the open
ending that leaves Enid’s fate unclear (fans’ speculations went from
deducing she left the town and finally changed her life to assuming she
was about to commit suicide, having realized the faint vanity of her
existence).

                          Ghost World:
        graffiti and the haunted suburban unconscious
      One last reflection concerns the “ghost world” graffiti, which is
inscribed on several architectural elements of the unnamed town of Enid
and Rebecca: on a garage door, on a wall, on a glass panel, on a fence
and so on.
      While reflecting on graffiti, Jean Baudrillard affirms that “they
resist every interpretation and connotation, no longer denoting anyone
or anything. In this way, with neither connotation, nor denotation, they
escape the principle of signification and, as empty signifiers, erupt into
the sphere of the full signs of the city, dissolving on contact” (1993: 78-
79; emphasis in original). Yet more recently Gaetano Chiurazzi remarks
how graffiti has begun a culture with an undeniable reflexive attitude,
expressing in very self-aware and culturally refined forms, capable to
always allude to an alterity (though in a way that is “undecipherable by
the dominant code”) (2013: 96).
      Graffiti has, according to Chiurazzi, a disorienting quality and an
intrinsically heterotopic character, always alluding to something and
somewhere else, in the same way dreams work according to Freud, that
is, not being declassifiable as mere cerebral extravaganza, but as
meaning-making elements, as potentially decipherable signs. In the
same way, Chiurazzi asserts, graffiti is apparently indecipherable, but
always allude to this elsewhere that in Freud’s term corresponds to the
unconscious: “graffiti are thus the symptom of the unconscious of the
urban world, that emerges disturbing its normal daily life” (2013: 96).



18
                                          Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



     Graffiti is hence to be counted amongst those that De Certeau, in
his The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), defined ‘tactics’ through which
individuals oppose and try to subtract themselves to power strategies,
the daily ‘practices’ that he described as being repetitive and oppressive.
To this pervasive sameness, graffiti oppose an alterity, constitute a
heterotopia, haunt the (sub)urban landscape opening a different space
and remembering of other possibilities.
     This interpretation seems consistent with the sense of the “ghost
world” inscription itself – as an admonishment, as a critique, and at the
same time as a key to read the whole work. In this sense,

        Haunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction
     and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is
     stained by time, or when a particular place becomes the site for an
     encounter with broken time […] a fatal repetition (Fisher 2012: 19).

      Furthermore, towards the end of the graphic novel, in the third-to-
last panel, Enid glimpses from afar the mysterious author of the graffiti.
She shouts at him and tries to talk to him, but he runs away without
making visible, to Enid and to us (to our aligned focalization), any
details of his face. Yet if we give a second look to the cover of the work
we realize that we have already seen that silhouette: it is in the
background between Enid’s leg.
      It is surely significant, then, that the mysterious graffiti artist
appears marginally, at the beginning and at the end of the volume.
Metaphorically opening and closing it, he thus configures himself as an
intradiegetic personification of the author himself and as a signature to
the work it begins and ends.




                                                                                  19
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town




Fig. 10. Two close-ups of the mysterious writer at work in the cover and in the second
to last page of the story.


      Spectrality, already evoked in the title and reiterated in the
penultimate page, seems in this sense the most fitting way of reading the
work while accounting for the liminal state (on both a spatial and
chronological sense) of those moments in the life of the two adolescents’,
between what is not anymore and the anticipations of what is not yet,
that is, the traces of their individual and collective past and the uncertain
future to which they try to rebel and that already conditions their choices
and behaviors, as volatile as the mysterious graffiti that appears around
the suburbs of Ghost World.



20
                                             Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)



      The uncanny phantasmaticity that crosses the bored,
unenthusiastic gestures of Enid and Rebecca, may then, again, be
interpreted as a symptom of Fisher’s hauntology, as a nostalgia for an
already lost future and at the same time as the «vicarious nostalgia for
the times they never had the fortune to experience nor, shall we say, the
misfortune to endure» (Hogarty 2017: 80), that is, as a «nostalgia for a
time period when a future seemed possible and when viable alternatives
seemed to exist» (2017: 89).
      Despite all her ostentatious cynicism, in fact, Enid is haunted by her
past exactly as the “ghost world” that surrounds her is haunted by its
own timeless history. As DeFalco notices,

        The uncanny is tightly bound to temporality; the inability to
     return to past sites and past selves often comes into conflict with
     our memories of these pasts. Memories can become ghosts that
     haunt the present. (2010: 9)




      Fig. 11. Three panels of Enid listening to her childhood favorite record


     This explains the hesitance, on Enid’s part, to let go of her
childhood possessions (the specimen of Mr. Potato she refuses to sell at
her own yard sale, the “A Smile and a Ribbon” record her father recovers
under her request and to which she falls asleep): they are memories of a
more secure, stable and decipherable moment, when life seemed at the



                                                                                     21
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, Last stop: this town



same time full of open possibilities and exciting adventure – that is, for
an irretrievable time when life, and possibly Enid herself, could still be
believed to be special.




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                                        Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)




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                                        Between, vol. VIII, n. 15 (Maggio/May 2018)




                              The author
Giorgio Busi Rizzi

Giorgio Busi Rizzi holds a BA in Foreign Languages, an MA in
Comparative Literatures and one in Italian Language and Culture, all
from the University of Bologna. He recently obtained his PhD in Literary
and Cultural Studies with a joint supervision by the Universities of
Bologna and Leuven, working on a research project about nostalgia in
graphic novels. He is interested in comics studies, magical realism,
characterization, humour theory and translation, and TV series.

      Email: giorgio.busirizzi2@unibo.it




                              The paper
Date sent: 15/03//2018
Date accepted: 30/04/2018
Date published: 30/05/2018



                     How to quote this paper
Giorgio Busi Rizzi, “Last stop: this town. Sameness, suburbs and
spectrality in Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World”, Spazi tra le nuvole. Lo spazio
nel fumetto, Eds. G.V. Distefano, M. Guglielmi, L. Quaquarelli, Between,
VIII.15 (2018), http://www.betweenjournal.it




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