Broken Frontier

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle.  Drawn & Quarterly Books, 2005.

Pyongyang is at once a travelogue, a journal, and a satire, recounting the experiences of French Canadian animator Guy Delisle as he’s sent to North Korea to work on an animation project for a French company.

Originally published by the French publisher L’Association, who also brought the world Epileptic and Persepolis, the book follows the conventions of each of those works, illustrating realistic, true-life accounts in a cartoon style.

Even more than those other works, Pyongyang is told from a wry, distanced perspective, displaying occasional wit not so much through its imagery as through its laconic, literal tone and unadorned line drawings.

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The book’s satiric tone is well-served by its subject matter, as the narrator observes and relates the mechanics of a society clearly engineered by madmen.  Delisle and his expatriate colleagues are tucked away on a secluded island to prevent them from exploring the city too closely.  They occupy a single floor of a luxury hotel, while dozens of other floors remain unlit and unused.  Three restaurants, evocatively named “Restaurant No. 1,” “Restaurant No. 2,” and “Restaurant No.3,” provide a caricature of a metropolitan dining experience, with gloomy dining rooms, damp tables, and oily entrees.

Reminders of totalitarian control are everywhere on display.  Delisle’s narrator observes, for example, that a portrait of former leader Kim Il Sung and his son, current leader Kim Jong Il, appear on the wall of every room in the country, except in the “shitter.”  And a mysterious building that intrigues him is eventually revealed to be an enormous, unfinished opera house – intended to be a symbol of national pride, it is instead a disgraceful affront to the nation’s starving population.

Delisle’s narrator seems almost respectful as he visits various national landmarks, but the respect is mitigated by his justifiable outrage at the complete lack of liberty that the towering symbols represent.

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The flyleaf of Pyongyang asserts that the author was able to observe “more than was intended” while being shepherded by his interpreters/minders.  But however roving the narrator’s wanderings may have been, and however wry the author’s observations may be, the book does not really illuminate what life is like in a repressive totalitarian regime.  Rather, readers share the experience of a disinterested tourist struggling to amuse himself in a downtrodden, dysfunctional nation. 

The narrator’s mockery of the whims of the country’s insane leadership extends indiscriminately to the citizens living under the regime.  They, too, become part of the background of an absurdist drama, of which Delisle is the only three-dimensional character. 

The narrator’s impatience and lack of reflectiveness about the nature of totalitarianism is revealed when he exclaims in disgust, with regard to his interpreters (and North Koreans in general): “Do they really believe the bullshit that’s being forced down their throats?” On the next page he seems to answer his own question, in referring to the state’s feared “re-education camps”: “Officially they don’t exist.  But everyone knows they’re there.” 

If it is fear that prevents the people from acknowledging these camps, what makes the narrator think these men will feel safe confiding to him their true thoughts about anything else?  And how does he know that everyone knows about the camps?  The narrator seems far too arrogant and intellectually incurious to form an accurate impression as to what any North Korean knows or doesn’t know.

The narrator’s frustration with the lockstep thinking of his minders is understandable.  Less understandable is the author’s apparent inability to feel any empathy for the North Koreans he encountered.  Rather, their plight simply becomes the butt of another joke.

Even more troubling are the narrator’s actions, ranging from verbally mocking his associates to casually lending an interpreter a copy of 1984, seem to blithely overlook the fact that these are human beings, subject to real danger for challenging the groupthink of the regime. 

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Delisle the author is of course separate from Delisle the narrator, and the author faithfully represents the reactions of other characters to his narrator’s behavior, suggesting an awareness that the perceptions exhibited in the book are those of a specific character, and not meant to be the author’s objective account.  For example, the narrator finds it funny when another production team loses hundreds of its animation cels as they are blown across a courtyard.  Despite the narrator’s glee at the rival team’s misfortune, the author faithfully reports that another character isn’t quite so amused at the narrator’s retelling of the incident.

Although the author is clearly aware that his narrator/protagonist can behave like a jerk, it’s not clear that this distance between author and narrator is maintained in the narrative’s critical asides.  When Delisle goes off on these narrative tangents, such as an unfunny running joke to “spot the imperialist spy” in a line-up, the same smart-alecky personality exhibited by the character is echoed by the author.  If an ironic boundary between author and narrator is intended, it is a poorly defined one at best, particularly when the book provides shallow commentary on North Korea’s people, as opposed to its repressive government.

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Delisle’s art is precise in its depiction of backgrounds and details, and the spare lines and light shading harmonize with the repressive but surprisingly clean austerity of the Pyongyang streets.

In contrast, the style of his human figures, particularly the narrator himself, is that of a humorous cartoon.  The broad, almost cute, comic-strip style in works like Pyongyang, Persepolis, and Ordinary Victories, contrasted with their serious subject matter, is consistent with many French comics, signifying a different relationship between sequential art and literature from what is usually found in the United States.  The cartoon figures imbue these books with a universal quality, as each broadly sketched protagonist becomes a lens through which readers both perceive and project themselves into the world of the narrative.

The narrator’s keen eye, trained by his experience as an animator, captures details such as the way the portraits on the wall are tilted downward, for example, to facilitate viewing from below.  And he notes the neat visual trick that “animators love” (particularly Bill Plympton, who uses the effect often), as each figure in the picture wears a lapel pin with one or the other leader, creating an infinite loop, which Delisle cleverly illustrates in sequence.

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In contrast to the perceptive, multifaceted view of a comics journalist like Joe Sacco (Palestine), or the insightful, insider view of Marjane Sartrapi (Persepolis), Delisle instead, whether intentionally or not, offers the view of the “ugly Canadian” abroad, seeking to mock rather than understand.  Still, the narrator’s self-awareness provides the occasional suggestion, however slight, that his presentation may be intended as an ironic exercise.  At any rate, and as the title suggests, Pyongyang is an invaluable account of one man’s journey, faithfully reproducing his observations of a land that most of the world will never have the opportunity to experience first-hand.