Portrait of a Body

What is written on the body?

Perhaps that question is the wrong one. Portrait of a Body, the new memoir from Julie Delporte, is certainly a portrait - in images and text, of the author’s body and the way it developed over the years from youthful, awkward encounters with men, to a year of solidary pleasures (Delporte refers to it as “sexual degrowth”), to its current stage of mature, late-in-life lesbianism. But what is written is on or near the body. Delporte works in her characteristic style here; it is more polished than before, with a more confident intention to explore different aspects and angles, drawings that seem always on the verge of spilling off the edges of the pages, withdrawing, retreating, sliding away into nothing, as if they are afraid to show what they really mean - but still within her usual framework of light, ethereal, delicately beautiful images in colored pencil and watercolor. It is accompanied by her familiar and homey cursive script, but the text hovers above, nearby, and beneath the body; never exactly on it.

This may be because Delporte’s body is too fragile in the midst of discovering itself and becoming something new to be so directly intruded upon. Here she explains (or confesses) who and what she has become: a woman learning who she is, and what her body needs and desires. It can wearisome, in this age of social justice language being misused and overdone, to speak of the rich variance of human experience merely as spaces and bodies, reducing the infinite qualities of humanity to the shell that houses it. But nowhere is it more appropriate to speak this way than in Portrait, a literal history of one body’s encounters with others, and how they all seemed alien until Delporte finally learned what her body wanted.

One of several pages in Portrait of a Body inspired by the works of Chantal Akerman, here specifically the 1974 film Je tu il elle.

Delporte has never been shy about others who have inspired her, and she celebrates the writers, artists and thinkers who have shaped her journey constantly in Portrait. She more than wears their influence on her sleeve, she practically has them tattooed on her forehead: Chantal Akerman (the understanding of whose Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a key component of Delporte’s grasp of her own sexual responses), Tove Jansson, Adrienne Rich, others. Reference to them is not mere homage paid to the anxiety of influence, but road markers on a map to a new and strange destination.

French by birth and French-Canadian by residence, Delporte is an artist who has grown in front of us. This website has covered each of her books in translation: Journal (Koyama Press, 2013), Everywhere Antennas (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014), This Woman’s Work (Drawn & Quarterly, 2019). We have watched her bloom from a surprising new talent to a full-fledged indie comics presence, and from a younger woman lamenting the dissolution of her relationship with a man to an older woman who now sees that relationship as something that may as well have happened to another person, from another place. One of the most striking things about Portrait of a Body is that, placed in context with the rest of her work, it seems certain to be not a culmination, but another stage in one artist’s becoming.

Delporte occupies an unusual spot in the pantheon of comics autobiographists. Her work is, strictly speaking, neither confessional nor diaristic; it is easy to feel that she is telling us only what she feels comfortable saying - just as in her striking, small vignettes of nature and humanity, she is only showing us what she wants to show. But in another sense, hers are absolutely autobio comics in their purest sense; Delporte draws a little bit of everything (though, surprisingly, very little of herself, given how personal this work truly is), but she tells us absolutely nothing save for her own mind and body’s journey from being one thing to being another. Or, at least, to being the next thing.

Though there is not a strict narrative throughline in Portrait of a Body; there is a direction, rising and falling action, and a conclusion that is, while not definitive, absolutely appropriate and suitably moving. There are characters, named and unnamed, who appear and disappear along the way: her unnamed partner, her parents, her sister, her therapists, her old boyfriends, and her new friends. Each has something to say about her, and it all forms a tapestry of insight (for better and for worse) into the person she is. It is through their perception of who she is that Delporte is able to understand that question and answer it for herself.

Portrait is not a perfect work. It can be off-putting in the way its inner facing keeps the reader at arm’s length. Though lovely, the art's relationship to the text can often be frustratingly opaque. Delporte speaks frankly of the concept of “political lesbianism,” and the way she conflates the cultural and symbolic markers of sexuality with the realities of sexual want and desire is curiously muddled, as is her relationship to psychology and therapy. It is fair to say that this is not a complete work, in the literary sense; its audience is uncertain, and it can appear as if it consists of fragments of a larger piece, scraps from a journal blown around in the wind.

But more than anything else she has ever done, Portrait of a Body is a work of rare beauty, unexpected depth, and a moving–and occasionally shocking–sense of self. It is the kind of book you find yourself reading from repeatedly, so affecting and insightful that you want to make sure you’ve parsed every page. Work like this requires a radical honesty - and it is that quality, even more than her writing or her art, that Delporte possesses in such great abundance that it commands attention.

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