Shaenon Gaerrity weighs in on our Ghost World Roundtable. I’ll quote a couple of chunks.
Noah Berlatsky compares Ghost World unfavorably to Ariel Schrag’s coming-of-age trilogy, pointing out how well Schrag captures the intensity of adolescence: “Ariel’s difficulty wasn’t that her world was fading out, but that it was too sharply coming into focus, and there was too much of it. It’s the intensity of her emotions — her crushes, her attachments to friends, and, indeed, her attachment to her art — that makes her life a misery. Sometimes. And, then, at other times, that same intensity becomes a source of strength and beauty and excitement.” That’s an astute assessment of Schrag’s work, but I don’t know if it’s accurate as a sweeping assessment of adolescence. Yes, the intensity can result in the richness of experience Berlatsky sees in Schrag’s comics. But it can also inspire a bleak, apocalyptic, end-of-the-road feeling, which is why teenagers are so attracted to death and morbidity. Teach any writing class for teens, and you’ll have to wade through interminable whines about being numb and hopeless and “unable to feel anything anymore”–and, worse, you’ll probably recognize your own teenage writing in it. Adults feel more, or more easily, than teenagers do. Teenage writers like Schrag, who are able to dive into their lives and confront their emotions fearlessly, are rare and uniquely fascinating….
The one area where Ghost World does fall short, one that several folks on the roundtable have already noted, is Clowes’s failure to imagine any sexuality for Enid. Berlatsky writes that Enid is implausible as a teenage girl because “she’s uninterested in discussing her crushes,” which unfortunately comes off as a bit insulting to teenage girls: gee, if she’s not talking about love, how can you even tell she’s a girl? In fact Enid and Rebecca do talk about boys often, but Enid’s contributions to the discussion are, as Rebecca points out, either negative or disinterested. There are only the briefest hints of what Enid might find attractive: she describes her hipster ideal to Rebecca, then imagines Dan Clowes as the embodiment of that fantasy, only to be brutally disappointed by the reality. Meanwhile, she actively discourages Rebecca’s real-life romantic interests. It’s okay for a teenage girl to be timid about sex and hide it behind bravado and fantasy, but there should be some indication that she at least looks at guys.
It’s interesting that Shaenon accuses me of stereotyping teen girls…but in order to do that she kind of has to arrive at the point where she thinks Ariel Schraeg is somehow a less representative portrayal of teen girls than Enid Coleslaw.
Moreover, I think Shaenon’s point about Enid’s sexuality, or lack thereof, is astute…but I think it’s a more crippling problem for the book than she acknowledges. Specifically, I think Enid’s lack of sexuality is precisely why her whole existential dilemma rings so false. At least for myself as an adolescent, I remember quite vividly that my sense of alienation and despair were very much tied up in sexual and romantic impulses that I wasn’t prepared or able to deal with. I don’t think that’s atypical, and it’s why Enid’s alienation — which is tied up more in nostalgia for her past than in desire— seems so entirely wrong. Nostalgia is the fetish of the middle-aged, not the young.
I also wonder about this. “Adults feel more, or more easily, than teenagers do.”
I just don’t think that’s true. Teenagers may have more difficulty parsing social codes and sublimating their emotions in socially acceptable ways. But they certainly don’t feel less, nor do I agree that they feel less easily. I think it’s insulting to suggest they do, honestly. You know, “hath not a teenager eyes? Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Teenagers aren’t all that much different than, you know, people. In that vein, I think kinukitty’s point is worth repeating
“I don’t recognize them as high school girls, but that is probably secondary to the fact that I don’t even recognize them as human.”
Nnnh, claims about teenage girls being this or that trouble me immensely, and that does seem to be what you’re doing, Noah.
Growing up I knew some very unusual teenagers, and one in particular who was extremely hung up on what one could call nostaligia. As for the link between alienation and sexual desire, my brand of teenage alienation certainly didn’t seem to be tied up with sexuality – it was much more starkly and stereotypically existential: concerned with time, sanity and death.
Sexual identity just wasn’t much of issue for me in my late teens (and Enid is in her late teens, isn’t she?). I fancied girls, I wanted sex, I had a few relationships, I had some sex. Sometimes I got hurt, sometimes I didn’t. What I didn’t do was angst about it particularly.
All that subjectivity was a long way of saying that Enid does strike me as plausible in that I can plot her personality across the map of my own experience. From my point of view the problem, if problem there be, with the nature of Enid as a character isn’t to do with believability but with whether the book would benefit from a more easily recognisable character at its center.
Noah — I think your observation about the way the mid-life-crisis-riddled middle-age man perspective creeps into this book is BRILLIANT.
But what’s leading you to read the childhood stuff at the surface level as nostalgia, rather than as clinging to security objects (like in Suat’s post)?
The phenomenon of “middle-aged men getting nostalgic for their childhood” is also about security objects, so I’m not sure the mashup leads me to “Enid is not well-characterized” so much as it leads to “mid-life crises are returns of adolescence.”
See, but seeing Enid struggle with time, sanity, and death would make sense to me as well. She doesn’t do that. There’s just very little sense of her inner life at all except for cliched statements about hating herself and fetishistic enthusiasms for the detritus of her youth.
Ariel Schrag was pretty unusual for a teenaged girl; she was gay (which isn’t all that common statistically) and she was very butch. Her book is believable in part because the ways she isn’t normal cause her mental and personal static, which becomes part of what the story is about. Enid is unusual in a number of ways , and the book could be about that, but instead it isn’t really acknowledged or explored or thought about. The result is that, as I said, Enid doesn’t really end up with an inner life, in part because Clowes doesn’t seem to have much of a handle on what makes her unique or what doesn’t. Again, I think this goes back to kinukitty’s point that the characters don’t seem human; their detachment and lack of center is what Clowes presents as their essence, which to me feels like a big self-aggrandizing cop-out.
Hey Caro. Well I’m glad somebody thinks I’m brilliant, damn it (I mean besides me. And maybe my mom.)
I think the reason it reads as older nostalgia is because of its insistence, and the way it seems to attach to random objects from her childhood entirely, rather than to a particular obsession. It just reads to me as someone who is idealizing childhood in general (which is a lot easier for older people to do, since they’re farther away from the downsides, like disempowerment). I could see being tied to a particular place or memory or (even more likely) an interest or idea that extended back to childhood, but being in love more or less with just a bunch of really random childhood crap…it just seems like you’re talking about older comics professionals, not actual adolescents.
Again, Schrag’s kind of an interesting example. She’s *very* attached to comforting rituals and ideas. She’s obsessed with Chemistry, for example; she decides she has to has to has to have sex before she’s sixteen because her mother had sex before she was sixteen and told her when she was 8 or something…I mean, there’s tons of stuff like that. But, again, it’s about particular emotional touchstones, not about childhood qua childhood — and it’s not at all kitsch.
With Enid it’s way less clear why she does or feels anything. Clowes seems to think that a disaffected teenager like Enid would just naturally be obsessed with some random theme park from her childhood…and, you know, she could be, but he never fills in the emotional resonance, which leaves it feeling like it’s more his jones for his own kitschy childhood than anything to do with her.
OK, I totally buy all that.
I think a lot of this is a question of how much positive or negative weight we give to particular artistic choices. I got the impression from your first post that you don’t get much out of the very flat, strucuralist, metafictional quality that a lot of contemporary fiction has, and I think that quality is what Clowes is going for — I didn’t see it until you freaked out about it LOL — but I agree with you that he leaves out detailed interiority and mashes up attributes of perspective in a way that’s much more doubled and complex — and, for me, meaningful — than I originally gave him credit for.
The thing is — I think that’s AWESOME and you think it’s a failing. I don’t think he owes us a representation of Enid’s inner life to begin with, but in this case, I think that if he showed us more of her interiority, it would handicap that interplay between “Enid as teenage girl” and “Enid as middle aged man” that to me, now, is where the crux of grown-up meaning in the book lies. If he did what you’re asking for, and gave us a more resonantly teenage Enid, he would diminish the very doubled-ness that makes the book tell an “adult” story as well as that “sweet sentimental story” I originally saw.
I haven’t read the Schrag, but I’ll bet you a beer that I will like it less than I now like Ghost World — for exactly the reasons that you like it more. :-)
Huh, probably a little too strong a rhetorical analogy between “adult” and “complex” there on my part…not really intending the implication that flat structural fiction is more “mature” than other kinds: it’s just what I find more satisfying as an adult.
You should try Likewise. It’s extremely structurally complex; based on Ulysses in part. Lots of careful changes in narrative voice, art style, etc. It’s pretty epic.
I will. (Please tell me the 38,000 odd pages Mark references is hyperbole, because that scares my bookshelves.)
I think the kind of nostalgia that Enid is all about is border-line “adult” style nostalgia; it’s a little too detached, sometimes. But I did know thrift-store clad, teen art girls who had pictures of themselves as infants on their walls, and shelves full of garish anachronisms. But it seemed more emotional, less cynical. None of them were as clever as Enid.They were intelligent, mostly, but they weren’t concerned with snark; their nostalgia was too precious for that.
Maybe that’s what Enid can’t maintain and leaves behind.
Sorry to keep harping, but when you write,
“…seeing Enid struggle with time, sanity, and death would make sense to me as well. She doesn’t do that. There’s just very little sense of her inner life at all except for cliched statements about hating herself and fetishistic enthusiasms for the detritus of her youth.”
…I believe you’re missing the point of how Clowes works. That is emphatically not his thing. He suggests ways to think about his characters through their words and actions and leaves you to fill in the blanks, and — to me at least — he does it extremely well, creating subtle, powerful comics.
I don’t think he’s at all self-aggrandizing — his work is far too serious, reflexive and emotionally honest for that to make sense.
Anyway, I’m sounding like a broken record here. When I next hit up my stored comics I’ll pull out Ghost World for a reread. Thanks for starting this!
I really agree with Matthias, especially about the subtle suggestion stuff: not just through words and actions but through the images too. I’m really fascinated by this strand of 50s imagery which seems to be working as a metaphor for the “comfortingly trapped”, while also blurring the time setting of the novel in some interesting ways that plays into this business of a doubled age for the character.
I have a hard time seeing it all, because I don’t read a lot of comics and my lack of facility means that, at first glimpse, the images tend to reify what they represent on the surface and foreclose a little bit the doubling I talked so much about earlier in this thread. Reading Clowes with you guys has been fantastic for opening up to me the ways in which images can actually play into the doubling rather than shutting them down.
Almost makes me wish I were still teaching so I could share it with someone. Wait, no…
Hey Matthias. Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree, I fear. I wish I’d known you were such a fan of his; I might well have asked you to participate along with Charles!
Caro, I’m glad you’ve enjoyed the roundtable…even if I seem to have convinced you of exactly the opposite opinion from what I intended!
“Moreover, I think Shaenon’s point about Enid’s sexuality, or lack thereof, is astute…but I think it’s a more crippling problem for the book than she acknowledges.”
I’ve read quite a bit of your writing, and it seems to me that your viewpoint is something like this: “The way a work of art deals with sexuality is the most important aspect of said work of art.” I realize that’s a generalization, but it could explain why this aspect of Ghost World bothers you so much.
Umm…well, I don’t know that I’d got that far, at least not in every case. Peanuts and Little Nemo are in contention for my best comics ever, and I don’t think either of them cares about sexuality much at all (I guess you could talk about polymorphous perversity in Little Nemo a little, but the enjoyment is more in the formal ability, surely.) C.S. Lewis’ Prerelandra books are very dicey on sexuality, but it’s one of my favorite series ever. (Til We Have Faces is great on sexuality, and I love that too… Narnia is even worse than the sf stuff, and I love that as well.)
I don’t think it’s going out on a limb to suggest that sex and Freud are extremely important to Clowes, in Ghost World and in general.
You could do Peanuts and the Death Drive, but…that would be sad.
On the back cover of Eightball 17, that’s Freud playing the piano, isn’t it?
Maybe not the Freud of film theory, despite the debt to Lynch, but no way is Freud out of bounds.
Also, see comics journal #234: Erika Clowes’ grad concentration was psychoanalytic lit crit. Freud probably spends a lot of time at their dinner table.