In Black Hole

This reading of Charles Burns's graphic novel Black Hole, and of its four principle characters, Keith, Chris, Rob and Eliza, relies heavily upon ideas drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis: fantasy and symptom, desire and object a, Symbolic and Real as well as the notion of subjective destitution. Freud's understanding of melancholy will aid the last of those discussions. Rumination on the book's title and the mysterious infection, the "bug," which drives the narrative, finds a suggestive analogy in relation to the theme of abjection so abundantly pictured in the text. Building upon the logic of abjection, this essay also seeks to examine the way in which the book's implied social setting abjects those who suffer from the "bug" through a metaphor derived from a definition of "black holes" in a network to think through the social topology presented in the text. The "bug" is an issue in both the biological bodies of infected characters and in the social network from which they came, a network that violently excludes them. Black Hole is positioned as a fiction of abject "reality."