Kalman the author and Kalman the person

        This is a late post, being published after our class discussion surrounding Maria Kalman and her work Principles of Uncertainty. I received the book late in the mail and had minimal exposure to the material before our Zoom on Thursday evening. Thusly, the conversation that took place positioned my perspective before I had the chance to dive into the work completely. This was not a bad thing, the discussion didn’t include many spoilers luckily, and it molded my understanding of the author and gave the work context within the life in which it was created. 

This has been a reoccurring theme that I found pop up in most of the works we have studied this semester. When I read David Sedaris for the first time, I thought he was arrogant and used crude humor to purvey his messages and lessons. However, when we discussed him in class and did a bit of background research on the man, his works were placed in context and his humor was more apparent to me in his literature. The same can be said for Samantha Irby. Her writing was illuminated when the face, voice, and presence of being were paired with her writing. I am not sure if this has just been a thing for me, though I do not think it is and believe it to be linked with my digression on the studies into sarcasm a few weeks ago; humans perceive human expression much better when they can match the words being expressed with body language, intonation, tone, and the context of the person saying these things. 

For instance, one thing that gave better context to Principles of Uncertainty was our class’s thoughts on Kalman’s background in illustration and the illustrations that appear in the book. Particularly, seeing Kalman herself give context to how she understands the coexistence of illustrative art and its written compatriot opened an opportunity for me to appreciate the duality of the forms in her book when I read it more thoroughly. Moreover, and I forget who brought it up, but briefly, the discussion surrounded the historically accurate images vs the ones with a distorted appearance. I could not help but be drawn back to what Kalman said about how both her illustrations and writings were expressions of her inner voice and when her writing career initially failed she took on illustrations as a way to express her that voice. I believe the characters in her book are represented on a basis of how clear the image is in her mind. As the stories interweave and bring up these figures, Kalman draws them how she remembers them; whether that be with pronounced ruffles along the collar because that is what stuck out to her or a rather close portrayal of President Lincoln. Knowing the background of how Kalman came to be an artist and her motivations to continue expressing her unique self facilitates understanding her art as it exists in parallel with her literature. 

This theme of knowing the person and the context to know humor has been a revelation that I think does not take away from the value of humor on the page in my valuation. I think that it has its place and can be immensely valuable in its own right without background knowledge. However, the fact that the substance of the work can be breathed light into by getting some context of the author demonstrates a core foundational aspect of the human condition. Our animal instincts have conditioned us to react to what is in front of us with the context that we have. When the expression is presented with little context surrounding it, its intended message can be warped. the same goes for humor. In order to understand comedy to its fullest extent, the voice and presence of the purveyor must persist. This is what makes the translation of the form onto the page so hard.