Form, Fetish, and Diastrophism

In our blog roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics there was much discussion of Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism. At the time of the roundtable, neither Caroline Small nor I had read the entire work. So we decided to do so, and then talk about it. Page references are to the 2007 Fantagraphics edition.
_______________________________________

Noah: So one of the discussions we had in the roundtable with Charles Hatfield was about the use of fetishization in Hernandez’s work. And after reading this book, I have to say that I”m more than ever convinced that fetishization is just absolutely central to his comics in a way which I often find both ugly and hypocritical.

As I said before, the fetishization is sometimes worked through in terms of pin-up art; the Dan DeCarlo zaftig curves on Luba, or Pipo or Tonantzin’s perfect proportions. But I think it touches all of his female characters. The cornucopia of body types he presents (tiny Carmen, body-builder Diana, va-va-voom Doralist) or his obsession with imperfections (characters without arms, or with scarring) — there’s just a very insistent emphasis on defining people by surfaces. And I think that ties in to the way Palomar works in general; it’s very much a world of surface; you very rarely get internal monologue or a sense of what’s happening inside character’s heads. Instead, you get caricature and theatrical gesture. And there’s also, as Charles pointed out in Alternative Comics, a insistent formalism — Hernandez leaping from time to time or character to character, fracturing the narrative so that you feel it as narrative construction. The result is for me that the characters don’t have independent life; that Hernandez is pushing them about the board hither and thither for his own amusement. All the frantic insistence on interconnectedness and infidelity and the wonderful variety of people and bodies — the point seems to be “Look at this wonderful web of life!” But to me it feels cynical and dead, the characters worn flat by his obsessive need to run his hands over them.

In that sense, there’s something queasily apropos about Humberto’s statues of all the townspeople sunk beneath the lake. In “Chelo’s Burden,” one of the later stories included in the “Human Diastrophism” Fantagraphics volume, Petra demands to know how Humberto can reproduce people if they haven’t sat for him, and he says he can instantly size people up. “I have a very strong vision for beauty, Senora” he explains, while his coconspirator Augustin agrees and checks out Petra’s chest. Basically, Humberto’s artistic process involves a facile empathy in the interest of creating a world of collectible, “beautiful” fetish objects. It’s condescending…and not the less so because Hernandez is also (perhaps self-reflexively) condescending to Humberto.


Caro: I am struggling mightily with this. I intellectually appreciate the way his insistent formalism allows him to do interesting things with the aesthetic world of surface — Gilbert, much more than Xaime, puts together conceits on par with the most ambitiously literary prose writers. I can, with some effort (and I’ll try to write some of this down), articulate the “cool tricks” of the narrative structure, and they’re mightily impressive — possibly more so in Poison River than here but in both places.

But something makes me feel like this work is “ugly” and prevents me from getting that next step, where I’ve figured it all out and suddenly have a meaningful aesthetic experience. Something makes me feel closed off from this work. I went through the L&R sketchbooks (1and 2), and to be honest, the pin-up art honestly doesn’t offend me. I don’t get a strong sense, out of context, that these characters are objectified.

What I think is happening is that the “insistent formalism” is itself a kind of fetish. There’s a fetishistic character to the surface itself – the formalism isn’t so much playful as it is intricate. He’s “running his hands over” the vocabulary of comics as much as he is the objectifying pulp imagery. The formalism is geeky, rather than decadent.

Out of that narrative context, the pin up art could be read as decadent. But in context, the insistent formalism traps everything in its path, and I get BOTH objectification and control. I’m not having an easy time articulating how this works, but at the level of aesthetics, it’s actually stronger for me in Xaime than in Beto, so maybe it is going to have something to do with the pulp representation, but with regards to the aesthetic overall, not just the representation of bodies. It’s not WHAT bodies are represented to me; it doesn’t matter that they’re a body associated with fetishistic beauty. There’s just something about the way they’re represented. But I’m still not entirely clear what it is…

Noah: “the “insistent formalism” is itself a kind of fetish.”

Yes! Yes yes yes! This is exactly what I was trying to get at in that Poison River page.

The page in question: from Poison River

The way the narrative is insistently broken in order to emphasize formal connections or patterns is a means of turning the characters into their surfaces. The page in that instance becomes about his control of Maria as a formal element; the men in the sequence can’t hold her, but Gilbert can.

That’s a feeling I get form his work in general; that the stories are rigged against the characters and in favor of the formal elements in a way that flattens the characters out. As a simple maybe too literal example, on page 111, the top sequence, where Luba starts laughing uncontrollably following the fight with Guadalupe, and then the book that Guadalupe lost in the tree back on page 36 falls on her head…that to me is such a contrived Seinfeld moment.

What went up at the beginning has to come down at the end in a dramatic fashion — rim shot! It’s this cutesy little sleight of hand joke…and there’s even a joke within the joke, where Guadalupe in the second panel is saying, “make her stop…make her stop…make her…” and then the sound effect in the next panel when the book hits Luba lispingly finishes for her with “THOP”. Luba’s looking up, out of the page at the viewer and/or at the artist, with this excessive display of emotion, and then Hernandez throws the book at her and shuts her up in the interest of completing his narrative arc.

I think you see this in the fracturing of time and space that Hernandez is so fond of. At times it’s like the whole comic can become this one long montage, so that there’s no real now, just a retrospective wash of images as you jump from panel to panel, time to time, place to place. That becomes even more the case as you read more of his work, since all the characters appear in different stories at different points along their timelines. It really is analogous to Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen, except that it’s Hernandez and/or the reader who can see all times at once.

The point of that all the crosscutting is supposed to be to see how everyone’s connected, or the community as a community. But in fact the effect is something like what happens in Watchmen; you break up cause and effect and you break up identity. With past and future accessible with a leap across a gutter, the characters contradictorily become frozen in each panel. When we get a shot of the icon sketch of the murderer as an angel in p. 113; the still (banally ironic) drawing isn’t any more still than the “real” characters with frozen expressions of horror in the preceding panel. Nothing can move because Gilbert sees everything, and everywhen, at once.

It’s an impressive and weird effect, and in a different context I could really like it. I do really like it in Watchmen…and I wouldn’t be surprised if Moore was directly influenced there by Hernandez. But Watchmen is very thematically aware of how the formal elements rob the characters of agency and identity. With Gilbert I feel like he just enjoys fucking with the characters so much he can’t back up and let them live.

I think this is particularly disastrous with Tonantzin’s death…but that’s probably enough from me for this go round….

Caro: I’m rereading and I’m still stuck on trying to really wrap my brain around why I’m so disengaged with this. I’m not willing to say I dislike it — it just isn’t particularly aesthetically or emotionally or narratively exciting for me, though, so the experience of reading it ends up being very self-conscious — figuring out how I am parsing it and why it doesn’t really engage me — rather than about experiencing the story. I don’t think it’s intended to be read with that self-conscious distance, so that’s damaging my experience of it.

I find myself resisting giving attention to the images: most of the time, I’m reading the text and using them just enough to parse who’s talking and where the setting is and some emotional cues, etc. The effect of this, though, is to increase the impact of the visually arresting panels or pages, the ones that are more abstract, sometimes referencing “fine” art. These are quite aesthetically effective and I like them a lot — they’re literally arresting. That sounds good — except I’m feeling thrown off by the fact that the initial function of those arresting bits is also primarily aesthetic and emotional: they are, although I’m still parsing the details, clearly the building blocks of extended metaphors and an overarching conceit, but what’s not happening for me is the quick first-level metaphorical payoff. I feel like I’m supposed to wait for it to build, and enjoy the emotional shifts and cues, and I’m generally impatient with that. I want something conceptual to chew on right away, and what I get right away is visual metaphor in the service of characterization and atmosphere and emotional texture, clearly gesturing toward some upcoming conceptual meat but not plentiful or detailed enough yet to actually offer a meaningful conceit that I can play with while I wait for the bigger one to play out.

The first example of this is page 20 — I get the association of the grimace of childbirth and death (a few pages later it will show up again in the monkeys, who also grimace and chatter, so that the open mouth is a locus for both life and death), I get the allusion of the desolate landscape — to surrealism, to psychology — and I get the contrast of the desolate landscape with that lush jungle imagery (monkeys and elsewhere). But I’m hesitant to connect the dots without more information than I have, so it’s just enough metaphor to make me stop and change gears from surfing along with the storytelling, but it’s not enough metaphor, or rather the metaphors aren’t finished enough, to actually deepen my experience of that emotion. The result is that those bits are actively distracting. They’re interesting enough building blocks that I feel like there will be a payoff, so I’m not actually put off by it — but at the same time, I’m sort of stumbling over them and wishing for something that isn’t there yet.

When I read this the first time I read it quickly, and I did get the sense that the conceit is there, eventually. I read Poison River too and it seemed much, much better — the metaphors get meaningful faster; they rise to the surface more consistently and make more meaning more consistently in that one, so some of this complaint may just be G.Hernandez’s artistic maturity when this book was written. But the reliance on visual metaphors that haven’t yet been woven into a conceit is definitely getting in the way here.

I haven’t found myself particularly distracted in any way by Luba’s large breasts, though (to allude to the problem that initially kicked off this discussion). I don’t really notice them at all, honestly — I’m identifying her by her hair.

Noah: That’s interesting. Disengagement is an important part of my experience as well — even more so on my rereading it today.

In terms of the visual imagery — really, the primary pleasure of the art for me, the main thing I key into, is the fetish stuff. I’ve always thought Beto drew hot girls, and I still think he draws hot girls. I guess that’s shallow…but as I mentioned earlier, he’s an insistently shallow creator in a lot of ways. And it’s not like he doesn’t take some pains to point out that he’s drawing hot girls, either. Luba’s breasts get mentioned more or less incessantly; the narrative draws attention again and again to Pipa’s clothing or lack thereof, and specifically to how it transgresses the sheriff’s modesty decrees (it’s not just sexy — it’s anti-authoritarian, you cheerless Puritans!) And of course a big part of Tonantzin’s insanity is that she dresses in “native” garb, i.e., in next to nothing. And then there’s Maricella’s monologue where she goes on and on about how much she lusts after Tonantzin, declaring at the end that she isn’t sorry about it. Again, both the prurience and the justification for it are explicit (as it were.)

I wouldn’t say that this bothers me — on the contrary, as I said, to the extent I enjoy Hernandez, it’s pretty much as soft-core porn. Nor (again) do I think that that’s unintentional — I know many people in the Blog vs. Professor roundtable said, “well I don’t masturbate to Beto’s work, so it’s obviously not porn,” but come on. The book is wall to wall sex; most of the characterization is about who slept with who; there’s even a scene where Luba flagrantly seduces the art geek character — which is probably in part satire, but I think also has to be seen as fan-service wish-fulfillment. It’s prurient.

I wonder if that’s in part why you find it so alienating? If you’re so uninterested in fetish imagery that you’re identifying Luba by her hair rather than her breasts, it seems like a substantial amount of what Hernandez has to offer visually is going to be wasted on you.

As an example, on p. 41, the second row, where Humberto is thinking about how nothing was strong enough to turn the old time artists away from the light, not money or power, or etc….and then in the second panel Luba’s breast hoves into view, almost like a sun itself, and then there’s Luba herself, giant earth mother switching from inspiration to sexy bodacious distraction. It’s funny; I giggled. But if you’re watching her hair you’re going to lose the joke (not that you didn’t get the joke! Just saying that the fetish stuff is pretty important to what he’s doing throughout.)

I’d say too that the monkeys visual association with childbirth and death (which is a nice point) is actually worked out in some ways through the fetish imagery. Specifically, on page 82, where we get the montage of Borro fucking Luba interspesed with the monkey hunt and with the the efforts to get Tonantzin to eat. Particularly in that upper middle panel, where the “Chit, chit” sound effect of the monkeys is placed so it seems to be Luba making the sounds. Both her mouth and Borro’s (gaping in the background) are contorted so that they look like the monkeys. Appetites for sex, food, and murder are all related visually to animality — and animality is tied to fetish through that center top panel, prominently located and visually arresting. So animal consumption is elaborated and linked insistently to consumable fetish. In a way, the whole town narrative — the violence, the melodrama, the interconnection of relationships — becomes itself a fetish, desirable for its life-like animal vitality and, indeed, for its animal desire.

Which links up to my sense of the story as ethno-kitsch. And I still want to talk about that penultimate page and Tonantzin, and disengagement…but again I’ve gone too long before getting there. So I’ll send it back to you….

Caro:I’m digging this notion that my disengagement has something to do with my interest in fetish imagery — my experience is definitely that there isn’t a lot here for me visually — but I don’t think it’s that I’m uninterested in fetish imagery entirely. Just not particularly intersted in THIS fetish imagery. I mean, I love Barbarella and there’s not much more fetishistic than that. And I actually find the use of fetish imagery in Poison River to be really powerful and meaningful — but it is also significantly more overt than here, and like Barbarella, more campy and theatrical.

I can understand someone seeing this as soft-core porn… It’s really a smorgasboard of sexy women; there’s one no matter what your type, physical or personality. But I’m a straight female, and it’s definitely soft-core: it doesn’t really engage me as porn. The men here aren’t equivalently interesting or appealing. If he’d drawn a smorgasboard of sexy men…

I think there’s more here than the prurient stuff, though — at the story/dialogue level, there are these elements that read a little like Oprah Book Club lit to me, really relationship-centric: girls talking to girls about boys and babies and families and girls talking to boys about stuff. But I don’t really get engaged by Oprah lit either. I talk to women all the time, I do not want to read a book that’s a realistic depiction of the conversations I have with my girlfriends in chat or over a glass of wine. I don’t care how funny it is or how well characterized and emotionally compelling the women are — they will not be better characterized or funnier or more emotionally compelling than my real-life girlfriends and family.

I agree the metaphor of consumption — I like your description of it — is definitely linked to the fetish imagery. There’s a strong contrast for me, though, between the mood of the relationship sections and the mood of those more appetite-driven sections. That gives, for me, a real metaphorical charge to that scene where they’re trying to get Tonantzin to eat — the resistance of female and ethnic self-actualization to the destructive forces of appetite and consumption, here forces immanating from both lust and the limitations of gender and ethnic and social identity. That scene is one of the places where I get enough building blocks to grab onto a metaphor I can work with for awhile…but it’s bracketed by the scene at the beach “I am nothing like Luba” and the scene where Luba is ranting about Khamo, Pipo, and the plastic surgery.

Both of those scenes are very stereotypical female characterizations (well-plotted, consistent with the metaphorical point, but essentially shallow and much less funny than their all-too-common equivalents in chick lit), just like the sex scenes are also pretty stereotypical depictions of lust and sexual social interaction. The book spends a lot of time wallowing in conventional depictions of the very things that the metaphors work to destabilize, rather than letting the metaphor destabilize those depictions throughout.

So I think there are three pieces: the prurient stuff, the Oprah club stuff — and this conceit that circles around self-actualization, resistance, and the limitations of ethnic, gender and social identity. But there’s just not enough of the conceit in this one to really, ahem, turn me on. It’s something created over the course of the book, rather than the lens through which the entire world of the book — character, narrative, setting — is refracted.

He’s definitely more masterful of those metaphorical moving pieces in Poison River than he is here — there the conceit does function as a lens through which all the images are depicted. There’s more sex, more ethnicity and queer identity, more social commentary — everything’s ramped up and id-driven right on the surface, and I find it much more satisfying and edgy and incisive. I think that’s the root of the problem for me here: this is still trodding really familiar territory in really familiar terms, and although you can see the beginnings of him doing something interesting with that territory, he just doesn’t get it to that point here.

Noah:Just a quick note — I wasn’t saying that the fetish imagery’s failure to appeal to you was because you’re a het woman. Lots of heterosexual women love images of fetishized women, as any issue of Cosmo will reveal. And I’ve talked to men who find Hernandez’s fetish depictions completely uninteresting. These things tend to be fairly individual — though obviously gender and sexual orientation play an important role.

The Oprah-lit note is interesting. Are you not that interested in Jane Austen? To me the problem is less that no realistic depiction of women’s conversations is going to be worthwhile than it is that these particular depictions (in HD) are pretty rote. As you say — “I’m not like my mother”, “this is your child,” “I’m getting old and no one will want me any more,” etc. etc. — it’s like a checklist. And the half-assedness of the characterization means it’s just not very compelling as soap-opera or melodrama.

I think Tonantzin is actually the most important example of this. She’s central to a lot of the thematic material you point to — resisting consumption, resisting (while also exemplifying) cultural and gender fetishization and appropriation. I think Charles Hatfield is right in suggesting that the story relies on an identification with Tonantzin for a good part of its emotional effect. That is, the reader’s identification with her is what is supposed to make the ending with her death painful. And it’s that pain which forces the difficult questions about art and life, ethnic identity and exploitation and political engagement, that Charles sees as central in his book. Just to quote Charles’ comment:

The larger plot of the novel questions the social responsibility of artists who create Symbolic representations of trauma, and does so not only through the walk-on recurrence of an earlier character (Howard, the photographer), but also, and more importantly, through the creation of a new character, Humberto, a failed artist who seeks to intervene in real trauma in a merely Symbolic way, thus prolonging and perpetuating the crisis at the heart of the novel.

The “distanced position of privilege” is just what is indicted in the novel’s conclusion. And this is done through the humble tools of serial narrative: the self-immolating girl in the climax is a major recurrent character in Hernandez’s stories, so far readers of the entire novel, and even more so the entire series, her sacrifice is not mediated in the same way that it is for Howard and Cathy.

The problem with this is that, unlike Charles, I really don’t give a fuck what happens to Tonantzin. And that’s not (or not solely) because I’m a cold-hearted bastard. Rather, it’s because I dont’ believe in her for an instant. Of all Hernandez’s unbelievable, shallow, stereotypical characters, she is easily the least believable, the shallowest, and the most stereotypical. Hernandez makes no effort to give her an inner life or a believable consciousness; he just says, “hey, she’s crazy,” and that’s that. He couldn’t be much more flagrant about it really; all of her actions are based on letters sent to her by a character we hardly ever see. Even diagetically, her brain is written by someone else. I always see Hernandez pulling the strings, but with Tonantzin, there’s barely a pretense that she’s anything but a puppet. Go here, go there, take off your clothes, put some clothes back on, and, oh, hey, now kill yourself. Awesome! They’ll have to think this is some profound shit now, huh?

Being a cold-hearted bastard in this way actually puts me in league with Howard on that penultimate page. Which is pretty much where I want to be, as I said on that same thread in response to Charles’ comment:

But thinking it through a little, I realize that indicting the distanced position of privilege is precisely the problem for me. In public tragedies, there’s a massive desire to share in the grief of strangers. If the past decade has shown us anything, it’s that that desire is as likely as not to lead to staggering amounts of bloodshed. Empathy and sentiment are powerful political levers, and where they lever you is often really, really not anywhere good.
That page is indicting the photographer most of all for not caring. It’s not at all clear to me that it’s indicting Cathy as well; I think I find the reading in your book on that matter more persuasive than the one you give here in comments. However, even if it *is* indicting her to a lesser extent, the final oomph, the last sneer, is at the photographer when he turns to other concerns.

But, from my perspective, that’s the one moment when he’s actually being honest. He doesn’t know this person (I mean, he does, because Hernandez has stacked the card to show us how we’re all connected, but he doesn’t know he knows); her death can’t actually be an occasion for grief. So he goes about his business — and doesn’t, say, run off to bomb some random country in order to assuage his emotions. In short, if the problem is imperialism, the solution is not necessarily a sentiment that connects distant people in a web of grief. The solution may well be borders. Isolationism now, as my dear friend Bert Stabler is wont to say.

To me, then, Tonantzin’s fate, and that penultimate page, really sums up for me what I dislike and even more distrust in HD. Its interest in its characters, its empathy for them, seems dependent on turning them into forms and fetishes for the political and sexual aggrandizement of the creator and his readers. Hernandez thematizes this to some extent through Humberto and then through Howard. But the critique misfires because it’s built on arguing that the problem is not enough empathy; that the problem is too much distance. Whereas the difficulties in HD are caused, not by Hernandez’s distance from Palomar, or by his lack of empathy, but rather by the way he is so present in his creation that there isn’t room for anyone else. Empathy becomes a kind of sadism.

Caro:I’m interested in Jane Austen mostly as something nostalgic: I read so much of it as a teenager that I’ve practically memorized it. I don’t go back to it to read and reread, though, not as an adult. I would enjoy it, but I don’t seek it out.

Human Diastrophism is just a double whammy for me on that front: in the women’s life narrative bits, he’s trying to do something I don’t find particularly compelling, and then he’s not getting much past hackneyed. I think it’s competent, though – I guess my standard isn’t “does he get it like Austen” so much as “does this get past fanfic?”

I guess I also just feel sort of inadequate to judge it as melodrama since it seems to be referencing Spanish-language melodrama, which I don’t know anything about…I’d probably be more engaged if it were going after Douglas Sirk, but that’s just a matter of taste and interest, isn’t it? We haven’t really chased down that path but I suppose there is something about viewing a culture I’m not terribly familiar with through the lens of melodrama that doesn’t quite work for me: I can view my own culture, even displaced in time, through the lens of melodrama, but I hesitate about the emotional identifications required for viewing another culture that way. I’m very sensitive to my outsider status here and that may also make the book ultimately resonate less.

You said:

I wasn’t saying that the fetish imagery’s failure to appeal to you was because you’re a het women. Lots of heterosexual women love images of fetishized women, as any issue of Cosmo will reveal. And I’ve talked to men who find Hernandez’s fetish depictions completely uninteresting. These things tend to be fairly individual — though obviously gender and sexual orientation play an important role.

Oh, I didn’t think you were saying that the fetish imagery failed to appeal to me because I’m female and straight. I mentioned Barbarella…it’s just that this feels like very normative everyday heterosexual fetish imagery to me, intended so exclusively for straight men that it makes me just sort of roll my eyes and head into another room. That’s sort of a middlin’ agreement with you: I agree there’s a lot of overt fetish imagery here, but it just isn’t as loud to me. You say you find it both ugly and hypocritical, and I definitely don’t. I find it aesthetically tedious but not ugly. I feel that it overreaches, but it doesn’t hit hypocrisy to me. We’re seeing the same things, I think, and responding to them with different levels of intensity.

I think it’s significant that this same stuff bothers you in both Poison River and Human Diastrophism, because as I alluded to before, I really, really liked Poison River. I think he gets it right there — and I think what that boils down to is that I’m not looking for the same intensity of “life” in the characters as you are. I’m ok with the characters being “reduced” to these metaphoric figures; I just think they don’t successfully get there in Human Diastrophism, so the net effect is not interesting. I guess I could say that in Human Diastrophism, there’s too much life still left in them for me!

Obviously the ideal situation is when the characters are packed with both life and signification, but that’s so very rare. If it wasn’t exceptionally hard to do that, literature wouldn’t have split into that story/abstraction divide that Rick Moody talked about. In many ways this book is a dramatization of that split: the two purposes for the characters never get really synthesized for me. Not even at the end — when I read it immediately after the roundtable discussion, I absolutely saw the conceit that Charles points out in the comment you quote above, the critique of the “distanced position of privilege.” I once complained that Chris Ware loses something when you articulate it, and this doesn’t — if anything it gains when you articulate it, because it’s not tight on the page: when you recap it for the narrative overall, looking back and picking up the elements that go into the conceit, it has more elaborate implications than just the critique of the “symbolic representation of trauma” applied to the specific narrative trauma and the concomitant emotions as we discussed in the comment. The critique also applies to the general traumatic condition of all the characters in the story: there are very few characters in Human Diastrophism who are not experiencing some kind of trauma, small-scale or large. Blunt trauma, emotional trauma, psychological trauma, family trauma, the trauma-lite shocks of childhood, the trauma of sexual objectification and exploitation, the collective trauma of racial otherness and disenfranchisement. He gestures at metafiction there — but the finished conceit undermines his own representation rather than enriching it. The critique in the end is ambivalent, because Hernandez himself creates those representations. At the level of metafiction, the conceit collapses.
I mean, I gotta credit the guy for trying. I LOVE that he tries. HD is, like, the bare minimum of that stuff I need to see to make a book worthwhile for me. But he just doesn’t nail it here. Poison River is significantly stronger — although I think you still find the characterization to be cynical and dead there, whereas I just find it artificial. But in a story with so much camp, the artifice works metafictionally for me, so I like it a lot.

From my perspective, I can’t help but think about Alter’s point from the Genesis discussion about how images are inherently more concrete than words. Of course it’s too extreme, but these are pretty representational images. I wonder if this would be a problem for this specific narrative if there weren’t these pictures. If he told exactly the same story with exactly the same characters and exactly the same metaphors, but had prose descriptions and execution rather than images, would the same conceit hold up metafictionally? It’s hard to know, but there’s at least a possibility that visual art realism is just so much more inherently non-abstract that it always resists elements of metaphoric abstraction. When metaphoric abstraction works in comics, really works the way it works in literature, it’s almost always with more abstract images. Poison River isn’t exactly abstract, but it does make much more use of artifice, which is a kind of abstraction of character…I think that’s why that’s so much more successful to me, and also why I’m generally find realism so much less appealing than abstraction. Getting the metafiction right with a realist component is just a hell of a lot harder than getting it right with matching abstractions.

Maybe I could work this out with more effort, or maybe someone who likes the book more than I do can work it out, but right now what seems particularly telling to me is that I can’t come up with a conceit that really “works” at both the metafictional and the fictional levels. The two levels just don’t send the same message: metafictionally, the conceit critiques distance and privilege and exploitation and the forces that perpetuate social trauma, and yet those things are represented throughout with complete sincerity and realism. At least, I see sincerity in this representation – I know you don’t, but I can’t quite put my finger on why we see it so differently. From your last it sounds like you just distrust the very impulse to metaphorize and abstract these characters, distrust the impulse so much that even the conceptual abstraction itself becomes a signifier of their objectification. It doesn’t quite work for me either but I’m reading it as a sign of overreaching — their abstraction is layered on top of a realist characterization rather than being a lens through which the characters’ representations emerge — which I read as not quite getting how to build a successful conceit. You read it as actual legitimate and suspect objectification, all the way down.

I think we might have to read Poison River to figure out which one of us is right. ;)

24 thoughts on “Form, Fetish, and Diastrophism

  1. I hope this’ll be followed up with a post on Poison River. After all, that was where the original point of contention was, and Caro seems to have a lot she wants to say about it (it’s also far and away the better work, and less requiring of outside context than HD).

  2. Caro and Noah–

    Thanks for this very engaging dialogue. As with Charles Hatfield’s treatment of HD in his book, I’ve come away with a greater appreciation of the book. In this instance, it’s pretty amusing, as Noah doesn’t like it, and Caro certainly has her reservations.

    I’d love to see Poison River get taken on like this.

    A quick correction: I sent this to Noah as an IM, but I don’t know of he got it. Contrary to the inference in Noah’s second section, Watchmen was wrapping up its serial publication just as Human Diastrophism was beginning its run in Love & Rockets. If Moore and Hernandez influenced the other at all, it’s Moore influencing Hernandez.

    Caro–

    Is it your sense that Hernandez’s development of his tropes in HD calls too much attention to itself? Like you’re sitting there thinking, “Oh boy, metaphor coming dead ahead!” I recently posted a review of Lilli Carre’s “The Carnival,” and a key aspect of her tropes is that they initially exist as random details. Their blossoming into something more is often quite surprising, and it gives her work a freshness that Hernandez’s may lack.

    A major issue I have with Hernandez’s work is that his effects tend to come coated with a banal (and at times rather cutesy) irony. A prime example that appears in the accompanying illustrations is the use of the halo drawing to punctuate the murderer’s death. Does this interfere with the work’s effectiveness for you at all?

    I’d like to see you nail down what it is about the book that puts you off at some level. With me, it’s the soapiness, but it’s pretty clear you don’t share my distaste for it.

  3. Hey Robert. Thanks for the correction on Watchmen. I presume Hernandez’s montage style is earlier than HD, though? It seems like Moore could have picked it up from something before this even if not from HD itself?

    I know you’re not talking to me, but…I don’t hate soapiness in and of itself. I’ve been thinking about/watching the Wire, which is a soap opera in a lot of ways, but one which is committed to soap opera virtues — characterization, development, narrative and character influencing each other, etc. Hernandez’s approach to all of that stuff is banal…and it seems to be banal in part because he’s more interested in the fetish of form. Like I said, he wants the characters to be part of his machine rather than to live for themselves. That could work (I just watched Solaris, for example, where it works great — hope to post something about that shortly). But he never manages to be sufficiently smart about it to make it work; the tropes never become self-referentially dumb; they just stay dumb. I think that’s maybe what Caro was saying at the end….

  4. If memory serves, Moore said he got the idea for the technique from a number of people, including William Burroughs and Nicolas Roeg. I think he also gave credit to a comic by Bryan Talbot called Luther Arkwright.

  5. As for the soapiness, it may heighten the feeling of contrivance that bothers you. I don’t know, though. You and I have very different tastes, and that makes the already perilous territory of trying to explicate another’s reactions especially dangerous.

    Did you have my reaction of “Oh, come off it,” when Hernandez interpolated the halo drawing into the sequence of the murderer’s death? If we talk about specific effects, we might be able to figure where we agree and and where we part. With that Poison River page, I always took it as a dramatization of how the character is defined by (and seeks to define herself) with her looks in every circumstance. I think Hernandez engages his own proclivities to very good effect there.

  6. Robert — glad you enjoyed it! It’s possible that it’s just the ordinariness cum banality itself that bothers me. I would like to nail it down too — in all honesty a lot of it is just sheer plain old aesthetics: I just don’t enjoy looking at it, so I’m either working or skimming. But pinning down why I don’t enjoy looking at it is immensely hard: I can give easy answers — it’s not impressionistic or atmospheric enough, it’s too cartoon-realist, there’s too much black and not enough grey, there’s an edge of the grotesque and garish. But none of that adds up to a real answer. Whatever it is — I don’t like it in a lot of other comics either. I would LOVE to be able to nail it down.

    The calling attention to itself is part of it — but the tropes call attention to themselves in Poison River too, and they don’t bother me there. I honestly just think it’s that he moves back and forth between this very narrative stuff and the more metaphorical stuff, and the moving back and forth doesn’t feel seamless to me.

    It’s possible it’s not SUPPOSED to feel seamless, I guess, but it’s definitely the seaminess that’s bothering me rather than the soapiness.

  7. This is one of the worst pieces of critical analysis I’ve read in a long time.

    It’s not just that I disagree with many of your poorly-articulated arguments; it’s that you hammer away at them with such vitriol, as if you were personally offended by Hernandez’s work. I hesitated during the last “roundtable” to even comment because sometimes I think you guys just throw this stuff out there to get a reaction from the rest of us, but as someone who’s spent years studying the Hernandez brothers, I felt like throwing my two cents in.

    First of all, it’s important to understand Luba’s genesis before you dismiss her as merely a “fetish” character and Human Diastrophism as “soft core porn.” Luba was originally based on Richard Corben’s Queen Bitch in Den from Heavy Metal (as well as several other influences, including, notably R. Crumb’s underground work). In “BEM,” where she first appeared, she WAS a fetish object – a savage, bare-breasted shell of a character, an over-sexualized fantasy with no real personality at all. But starting with “Heartbreak Soup,” and especially in “Act of Contrition,” Hernandez began the process of humanizing her.

    However, when he started to bring her into the real world (like Jaime did with Maggie), he had to decide whether to augment her appearance or not. Obviously, he decided not to, so therefore, he was faced with developing a real woman burdened with enormous, I guess you could say “fetishized,” breasts.

    It’s important to note that Hernandez went to great lengths to try to de-glamorize her because he knew some of his more short-sighted fans could not see past “the surface” (i.e – her breasts). Therefore, he gave her “chicken legs” and less attractive features, while playing up his other women characters like Pipo and Tonantzin.

    Also, he realized that that there are real women in the world like this, although admittedly they are rare and often associated (rightly or wrongly) with pornography, and tried to imagine how they would deal with their physical endowments. Part of that humanizing process was exploring how these oversized breasts affected her life, both positively and negatively. You can see this throughout the series and all of his subsequent work (with Luba’s daughters, Maria, Petra and Fritz, etc.) For example, everyone in Palomar has a reaction to them – from Jesus Angel, who, like you, sees them as sexually stimulating, to Carmen and others, who find them disgusting and grotesque. There are dozens of examples. I personally think he handles Luba’s breasts very insightfully, integrating them into her overall characterization, which goes far, far beyond just her physical appearance.

    Also, what you see as “softcore porn” in Gilbert’s work, is actually, I think, his punk attitude toward sexuality. Yes, much of it is physical rather than emotional, and maybe in some cases it’s idealized or overblown, but that is the punk philosophy the Hernandez brothers grew up with. They’ve said as much in interviews. One thing is clear, though. Gilbert does not depict Luba having sex with Humberto (or anybody else) just to titillate his readers (as porn does), or engage in “fan-service wish fulfillment,” as you embarrassingly put it. Rather, she is a woman who loves sex, like many of the women in the punk scene, and she struggles with this weakness over and over again throughout her life (hence the many children out of wedlock, etc.). This character flaw makes her compelling to me, not “surface,” and I see her battle with her own desires as deeply human, not distancing and “fetishized.”

    The accusation that you feel Gilbert is too present in his stories, pulling the strings like some puppeteer, is empty and meaningless. You could say the same about any creator you decide not to like. Plus, what does that even mean? Just because Gilbert’s work is more fragmented in the sequencing of its panels and not as linear in its timeline does not diminish it as a story. In fact, I would argue that it deepens the experience, forcing me as a reader to pay closer attention and immerse myself more fully in what’s going on to keep up. It can feel like a slog if you’re not willing to devote the time, but if you are, Hernandez’s stories are profoundly satisfying (it’s not just me saying this; there’s a reason Tom Spurgeon has called Gilbert “the greatest living cartoonist”).

    Gilbert demands more from his readers than the average comic book storyteller. He operates from the assumption that his readers are intelligent, though, as I noted in my Birdland essay, he sometimes takes it too far.

    I do agree with you about Tonantzin’s character, and the lack of emotional impact her death had, although I don’t know why you take such an indignant tone about it. To me, she was simply a failed character, nothing more, nothing less. Gilbert was trying to portray her as a woman who, following her hostage trauma in “Duck Feet,” snapped and went a little nutty. However, he never really succeeded in fully developing her as a character to begin with, compared to some of the other, more well-defined characters in HB Soup, hence her death’s lack of impact or resonance. The incident was also presented as an afterthought and with very little context, so it felt somewhat contrived. Hernandez has admitted having difficulty with her as a character in interviews. This does not, however, condemn Human Diastrophism’s many other virtues.

    Also, keep in mind that Hernandez was confined by a fixed page count at that time, which may have kept him from fully fleshing out the dozens of character ideas he had at that period in his career. The same constraints became even more pronounced in Poison River and Love & Rockets X.

    I find it both ironic and disheartening that you guys accuse Hernandez of “defining people by surfaces” when this is exactly how you approached Human Diastrophism. Rather than delve into the deeper aspects of the story, you simply go on and on debating “the surface” of the work – that is Luba’s tits and the sex scenes.

    Anyway, I know we’re not going to agree, and that’s fine. I just felt I had to rebut a few of the more egregious accusations I saw in this dialogue.

  8. Marc, I’ll try to reply a little more later, but I just wanted to point out that most of your irritation seems to be with me, not Caro. Caro wasn’t indignant; just a little baffled and put off. Also it’s me who’s interested in the fetish imagery, not her.

    Oh, and arguing from Tom Spurgeon’s authority isn’t going to sway me — I disagree with him on most things!

    Okay — I’ll respond a little more later. Thanks for such a long and thoughtful response though.

  9. I’m not even sure I was actively put off, really. Baffled is pretty descriptive though. I wasn’t exactly bored either — just kind of not captivated. More something missing than something actively wrong. Which, with the exception of the relative maturity here c.f. Poison River, is surely, entirely the fault of my own preferences and perceptions.

    I have this vague sense that if I could actually ever figure out why I don’t like this aesthetic it would be sort of the same experience as completing a course of psychoanalysis…

    I had an experience recently that was a bit of traversing the fantasy, actually: I am suddenly and inexplicably fascinated by the second volume of the Ditko Archives, and I usually have the same “I can’t get into this” experience with Ditko too. (I’m told Ditko was an influence on Hernandez, which may be irrelevant but…)

    The second volume is heavy on the sci-fi — and as a result there’s a lot of emphasis on the backgrounds and set design. They’re not just establishing location, they’re really doing a lot of work.

    So I wonder, how would people who really like Human Diastrophism describe its setting, really its atmosphere?

    To me, the settings in HD are intentionally somewhat secondary to the characters and story arc, except when he’s putting in a metaphor (like the jungle or desert one on page 20 that I mention above). I realize that this might feel a little different if I’d been reading the whole serial and had a more vivid map of Palomar in my head, and I definitely recognized that there were exceptions. But skimming back through, those exceptions are the bits I aesthetically liked. The “art” bits that I found so arresting; the architectural ruins, the landscapes we talk about in the thread, the panels that are entirely symbolic or referential.

    But a lot of scenes are set in somebody’s house or some street or a crowd or some other relatively generic place that is just there as a backdrop to the important character or plot point, and those bits are really uninspiring to me. I don’t mean that they’re poorly composed or anything, just that the attention is heavily on character and plot, which I’m generally not that interested in.

    Not just in Hernandez, though — I feel that way period — I look for this same interplay of atmosphere and metaphor, over and above character and plot, in all other media too, especially movies.

    For the record, to Marc, one of the points of disagreement between me and Noah is that I’m happy about Hernandez defining his characters by surfaces. Feel free to disagree, of course, but I didn’t mean it as a criticism — I just wish he did it as deftly here as he does in Poison River. I was looking for that more seamless integration of the metaphorical themes with the characters. I was focused on the surface because there was so much tantalizing stuff that just didn’t get where I wanted it to go as quickly as I wanted it to get there. The surface is where the best stuff is!

  10. Yeah, I agree with Caro here. I talked about the surfaces because that’s where he’s doing interesting stuff. The interesting stuff he’s doing is dubious in a lot of ways — largely because he’s not willing to abandon the depths as totally as I wish he would — and partially because I think he’s just not that smart about the political material he’s dealing with. But as I said — you just can’t tell me that there’s no fetish imagery here, because to the extent I like the book, it’s for the fetish imagery. (And the point that Luba came from fetish sources doesn’t really seem like an argument against what I’m saying — nor does the point that lots of characters obsessively bring up the fetish imagery, in terms of Luba’s breasts or Pipa’s clothes or what have you. Being obsessed with a fetish doesn’t make it not a fetish. The opposite, really.)

    I mean, if I’m going to talk about not the surfaces, I’m going to be talking about characterization (you’re just like you’re mother, but you hate her!) or imagery (serial killer with religious iconography) or symbols (quaint ethnic community analogized to monkeys.) You don’t want me talking about that, man. Better to stick to the fetish imagery.

    It’s really interesting that you actually agree that Tonantzin doesn’t work. I’m with Charles Hatfield here; I think Tonantzin’s story is quite central to the story’s emotional and thematic points (it’s non-surfaces), and so (and this is where I don’t agree with Charles) the fact that she’s a mess as a character is really a serious, serious problem for what Hernandez seems to want to do with the story.

    Anyway, thanks again for your comment. Take care Marc.

  11. caro-We haven’t really chased down that path but I suppose there is something about viewing a culture I’m not terribly familiar with through the lens of melodrama that doesn’t quite work for me: I can view my own culture, even displaced in time, through the lens of melodrama, but I hesitate about the emotional identifications required for viewing another culture that way. I’m very sensitive to my outsider status here and that may also make the book ultimately resonate less.
    Given that Hernandez grew up in California, I think the knowledge needed to emotionally connect with it is minimal. Not that one shouldn’t proceed with caution, but the book’s signifiers no doubt are equally American, moreso than “Latin” or “Mexican.” I mean, sure, Central America has monkeys but nothing like those in the book. I think your point is more valid, though with something like those Univision telenovelas. Sometimes when I come across them I wonder – am I missing something here? And I say that as someone who grew up with family relatives who would watch them every night. In the end class and education matter more than race when it comes to examples like that.
    An obvious point here, perhaps, but if there ever was a case where a book’s title calls attention not only to itself but the story’s poorly thought out themes. Talk about awkward…
    Anyway, I’m curious what you’d all think of Duck Soup. It’s been years since I read it but to my mind it’s much better than HD.

  12. Hey Steven — thanks for the comment. I did mean that statement to be limited to the melodramatic aspects, not the emotional ones overall — I completely agree with you. I took the melodrama as referencing back to the telenovelas explicitly; do you think that’s wrong?

    My hesitation stemmed from the fact that melodrama is, by nature, so exaggerated, self-parodic to some extent although not always intentionally, but always aiming for a heightened emotional affect through exaggeration. So if you’re not familiar with the baseline that it’s exaggerating from, you might misinterpret either the parody or the emotional effect. It’s more than I don’t TRUST my sense of the melodrama that I don’t detect it, though. I’m sure I’m being overcautious — I’d be less so if I was just reading and not writing. Just hesitant to put forth an analysis based on something I know so little about.

    I guess I was also reading the monkeys as at least partly Latin American because of Frida Kahlo, even though Hernandez’ monkey’s don’t look like hers and I’m sure the reference is more loaded than that. Are they not supposed to be the Mayan monkeys?

  13. That’s a very good question. The thing is, as you pointed out, the scenery is quite pared down if not generic. One doesn’t associate monkeys with desert settings, which is why it never crossed my mind that could be one of his points. If Palomar were in the middle of this dense jungle instead of this arid California/Mexico climate then it would jump out that way to me. Besides that, the town doesn’t seem to have any Mayan influences; it seems to be more in a special “magic realist” world than anything else.

    CaroI took the melodrama as referencing back to the telenovelas explicitly; do you think that’s wrong?

    My hunch is that the base reference point is Garcia Marquez. And if there are any telenovela references at all, it’s more unconscious than predetermined.

    Another likely reference point (if you ask me, anyway) is another type of telenovela- Marvel “Silver Age” comics. I’ve heard Jaime talk about that particular influence more than Gilbert, but even with all the literary trappings in their stories, all the melodrama sure speaks loudly for that influence.

  14. The way the narrative is insistently broken in order to emphasize formal connections or patterns is a means of turning the characters into their surfaces.

    It is not axiomatic that formalism or fragmentation makes characterization superficial. I see no reason to assume that superficiality of character follows from formal experimentation, and much evidence to the contrary in the way the characters are deepened and shaded throughout “Palomar” and Diastrophism. You’ve given me nothing other than an assertion here, bald and unsupported.

    That’s a feeling I get form his work in general; that the stories are rigged against the characters and in favor of the formal elements in a way that flattens the characters out.

    In fact Hernandez’s formalism serves his characterization. You may say otherwise, and your right to say so is just that; however, you have not developed the argument by anything other than bald assertion, and, again, you’re mistaking a personal assertion of (dis)taste as an axiomatic principle. In what way is formalism hostile or damaging to characterization? On the contrary, the narrative’s leapfrogging in time and space brings forth aspects of the characters’ past lives and present troubles vis-a-vis the larger sense of trauma that, as Caro points out, characterizes the entire town.

    With Gilbert I feel like he just enjoys fucking with the characters so much he can’t back up and let them live.

    Again the charge that Gilbert is a sadistic puppeteer, a formal experimenter who treats his characters like specimens afloat in a Petri dish. The charge, which despite your many denials is essentially an ad hominem charge, is not unlike your flattened reading of Clowes v. Enid in Ghost World.

    I can’t get a grip on your POV, Noah, since you say you enjoy the fetishistic elements and prefer the shallows to the depths, and yet find fault with those very elements too, claiming that the characterization is flat, sex-addled, and pandering. The grounds of your criticism seem to shift and buckle and transform opportunistically, but one thing remains the same: your determination to take down your target.

    Whereas the difficulties in HD are caused, not by Hernandez’s distance from Palomar, or by his lack of empathy, but rather by the way he is so present in his creation that there isn’t room for anyone else. Empathy becomes a kind of sadism.

    This is an example of the fundamental incoherence of your critical method. First Hernandez is an arch formalist, putting his characters through rigged exercises and allegedly flattening them as a result; then Hernandez is guilty of excessive and debilitating empathy, feeling too much and making himself too present in the narrative, so that the characters are subject to “sadistic” torture by him. Somehow he’s either a Moore-like formalist or a corny sentimentalist, depending on what you need to think at the moment to make the criticism fly, but none of this gets wrapped up or resolved in any convincing way. Your pithy phrase empathy becomes a kind of sadism wraps up the contradiction pretty nicely, but, pithy though it is, it doesn’t address the incoherence at the bottom of the basket. It’s a gesture, not a resolution. You’re just not making sense here; the contradictions dangle and confuse.

    Of all Hernandez’s unbelievable, shallow, stereotypical characters, [Tonantzin] is easily the least believable, the shallowest, and the most stereotypical. Hernandez makes no effort to give her an inner life or a believable consciousness; he just says, “hey, she’s crazy,” and that’s that.

    That Hernandez ‘makes no effort” is transparently false, as can be demonstrated through repeated examples throughout the larger run of “Palomar.” The character’s longings and credulousness and vulnerability are made manifest in her earliest sustained appearances, and deepened through subsequent stories, of which Diastrophism is the culmination. You may not buy the characterization, but you’re cherry-picking your evidence if you’re arguing that Hernandez tries to do nothing substantive with the character. Sobel makes the point that one can find the character’s fate in Diastrophism unconvincing without resorting, as you have again and again, to the charge of ethnic pandering.

    Noah, your criticism had the virtue of being startling at first, but as I read on I find it more and more barren, ungenerous, and lopsided. I’m afraid you’re going to blunt your considerable gifts on shrill predictability and attack.

    Caro’s critique I find far more nuanced, patient, and questioning, and these are the qualities that, more and more, I value in critics. By contrast, the ever-shifting attacks in your piece, the accusations of pandering to an artist whose precedent-setting work in comics helped make possible the very grounds of the complaint, the incoherent, lunging nature of the critique overall…these all leave me bemused and disheartened. Sigh.

  15. Well, that’s all right. You’re not the first to find my criticism detestable! At least you think I may have gifts, even if squandered. I can live with that.

    I think if I reply to most of what you’ve said here I’ll be repeating myself, which would just be annoying for both of us. Maybe just two things….

    First, the ad hominem charge. Any time you say something about someone’s art, you’re saying something about them personally. Your praise of Gilbert as a thoughtful creator; you’re attribution to him of intentionally dealing with important and moving issues — those are compliments to Gilbert, the person, the artist. On the other hand, if I say that I think the work is derivative and morally and politically really problematic — then, yeah, that says something about him too. So to that extent, it is ad hominem, because people are responsible for the work they create, and get credit or blame for it. If you’re brilliantly exploring the connection between life and art, then you’re brilliant; if you’re using bone-headed fetish imagery, then, yes, it’s hard to avoid the implication that you are bone-headed.

    None of which means that I think Gilbert is a terrible person.I don’t know him. I’ve got nothing against him except that I’ve read several hundred pages of his comics and disliked them. If I ever find a comic by him that I like, I’ll happily say so. Though I may avoid his work for a bit because, you know, so far I don’t like it much, and though you goaded me into reading more of it once already, at some point I think we can all agree that I should stop.

    And I wanted to respond to this:

    “Caro’s critique I find far more nuanced, patient, and questioning, and these are the qualities that, more and more, I value in critics. ”

    Caro’s great; nuance, patience and questioning are cool. But to me, at least, venom and impatience and incredulity are all worthy critical virtues as well.

    Anyway, thanks for reading Charles. And congratulations on your new digs! Take care.

  16. So I was still thinking about this bit, and thought I’d comment a little more.

    Re: “Empathy is sadism.” It’s really not just a pithy one-off that I’m using to make fun of Gilbert. It’s an idea I’ve thought a lot about over the years. I think it’s pretty important to the way liberal humanism and modernity function, from abolition through the Iraq war.

    The way it works in general is that knowledge/sympathy with some other, distant person is figured as being the foundation for moral action (I think this has its roots in 18th century discourses around sentiment, specifically.) Distance, remoteness, leads to cruelty; empathy leads to kindness and understanding.

    So imaginative efforts to make an audience feel like they understand the distant other are a means of promoting moral feeling and political action. Gilbert seems very much in that tradition, especially with the Tonantzin plot. As you point out in your book, that penultimate page is intended to point out that we’re all too distant; the alienating effect of the media, which allows us to witness tragedy through aestheticized imaginary media. This ties into Humberto, too, who gets so focused on his art that he loses site of his real responsibilities. The formal moves which make the people of Palomar all accessible on a single surface; the final move to indict the distance foreigner — even the transposition of English and Spanish, all seem to me like a way to create a connection, following in a long line of narratives that attempt to humanize/naturalize/present a minority group to a distant audience (Zora Neale Hurston comes to mind. And I like Hurston.)

    My point is that the use of empathy, the flattening of distance, seems to me to be part and parcel of the imperial program it often claims to reject. The problem with television is not that it distances, but that it makes near. The difficulty is not the artificiality of art, but the rage to inhabit the real. The empathy of identification is not about helping, but about control. It’s an emotion that demands that we put ourselves everywhere, that we be everywhere, even though, overall, the world really needs less of our sympathy and more of our absence.

    I think that hopefully makes clear how, for me, Gilbert’s obsessive formal control, his sentimentalism, the problematic ethnic material, his political claims, the Tonantzin storyline, and my reading in general fit together. It’s somewhat counterintuitive and it’s linked to opinions and ideas I had before I read HD, but I don’t think that makes it especially incoherent as these things go.

    I should maybe add — part of the lunging and incoherence you’re reacting to is perhaps in part because this is a dialogue rather than a finished essay. The reason I wanted to do it as a dialogue was that I suspected I wouldn’t like the book very much, and I hoped Caro would balance me out. As it turned out, Caro was unfortunately not as into it as I hoped she’d be, and I was every bit as disenchanted as I feared, but that’s the way it goes. In any case, the point is, I think in part the reason my comments are not as rigorous as you’d like is that I was actually trying (failing, not doubt, but trying) to be less confrontational, not more.

  17. Thanks Noah and Charles for the kind words – I’m sorry I didn’t love the book, Noah!

    I don’t often have the experience of being so entirely aesthetically non-responsive to a work as ambitious as this one. So some of the sense that I was questioning may be that I’m just not comfortable enough to critique what I do and don’t like — I think if I could get past my aesthetic response I would really appreciate the formalist elements, but I’m immensely frustrated that I can’t articulate what bothers me so much about this aesthetic.

    It makes me extra-aware, too, how ill-equipped I am, how ill-prepared by my training, to think and talk about aesthetics. Point to Matthias, eh?

    The first time I read Midnight’s Children, actually, I had trouble getting into it too, at first — I really struggled with it for the first 200 pages or so. I thought that would happen here, but whereas the Rushdie really came together and was immensely exciting…this one just didn’t get there. One of these days I’m going to figure out what I don’t like about this aesthetic and then NO FURTHER PUNCHES WILL BE PULLED. :D

    My friend Chris obliquely-but-insightfully pointed out that I really pretty much hate punk rock, too…

  18. Well, I mean that I was non-responsive to the visual aesthetic. I don’t think I’m particularly well-trained to talk about prose aesthetics either, although certainly more so than visual aesthetics.

    Aesthetics was sort of an out-of-bounds topic when I was in grad school, probably due to psychoanalysis, possibly due to professionalism…aesthetics are so very intimate…

  19. It’s not especially a punk rock visual style though, or not what I would think of as one anyway. It isn’t like Ariel Schrag (who I remember you saying also put you off because of the punk visuals) — that is, the technique isn’t unpolished….

    You like Clowes’ visuals better, right? How come?

  20. Pingback: Blvd. Du Cinema | Recommendations

Comments are closed.