Editorial Update: This is the second post in a roundtable on Ghost World. The first, by kinukitty is here.
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Reading Ghost World again got me to thinking about John Barth’s nihilist novel, The End of the Road. The latter begins at a bus station; the former ends at a bus stop. And much like Barth’s protagonist Jacob Horner, Enid spends the duration of the story searching for an identity, but only succeeds in finding what she’s not. Horner is a middle-aged academic type who’s managed to think himself into a hole, not seeing any potential action as better grounded than another – sort of an infinite regress of self. Thus, he’s sitting in a bus station in a state of existential paralysis, not able to even come up with a good reason to get on a bus and leave his former (non-) life behind. The abiding gloom that pervades all of Ghost World’s vignettes, undercutting Enid’s hipper-than-thou detachment from those around her, is a sense that she’s headed to the same destination as Horner: nowhere.
I figure there must be some consilience here, since kinukitty’s main reason for not liking Clowes’ book – that it’s neither real nor funny – reminds me of Barth’s prefatory defense of his story:
Jacob Horner […] embodies my conviction that one may reach such a degree of self-estrangement as to feel no coherent antecedent for the first-person-singular pronoun. […] If the reader regards [this] egregious [condition] (as embodied by the [narrator]) as merely psychopathological – that is, as symptomatic rather than emblematic – the [novel] make[s] no moral-dramatic sense. [p. viii]
Now, I realize that if one has to defend something as funny, it’s never going to make it so to those not laughing. This is particularly true of existentialist humor, since it’s kind of the obverse of prat falls, namely only funny when it happens to me. So I’m going to stick to the reality of Enid’s predicament. The End of the Road is a bit abstract, where Horner goes through a series of fanciful psychotherapeutic treatments in search of a cure (the search is, of course, at the insistence of a psychiatrist). The most relevant of these is mythotherapy, which involves acting in a chosen character role with the purpose of having it stick through habituation – an irrational solution to a rational psychosis. Clowes treats the identity formation of teenagers in much the same way, but with a recognizant teen who, like Horner, can’t ignore the ontological arbitrariness undergirding the whole process. Just because teens regularly slip into an adult role without much of a hitch doesn’t mean that there’s not a good deal of truth in her depicted inertia.
To be sure, this is a bourgeois dilemma, requiring enough leisure time to reflect on the construction of one’s identity. The working class has to learn their roles quickly if they want to endure. A day laborer in Horner’s place would simply starve. Class division is explicitly drawn out in Enid’s moribund friendship with Becky. Becky just assumes she’ll have to work after high school, whereas Enid’s dad is pressuring her into college. Enid’s intellectual background is alluded to when discussing her dad’s political interests, which she equates to sports. As she explains, since her family would be the “first ones they’d have shot” during a revolution, there’s little point to true political commitment. A choice between academia or the workforce isn’t any more significant. Becky relates to Enid’s views in much the same way that someone who desires the privileges money affords will act towards those who have always taken their wealth for granted. Becky may affect her friend’s class-based despondency, but she begins to be “cured” upon going to work. Meanwhile, Enid continues her search for an authentic self in the same manner that she began the book, analyzing pop culture:
Just like the rest of us, Enid was born into the media-saturated “Society of the Spectacle,” which makes it damn hard to distinguish the real from its image (“spectacle”). There are plenty who’ve given up the fight, claiming that the shadows on Plato’s cave are reality. It’s this crisis that leads to ironic detachment. Consider what R. Fiore calls the Warhol and Anti-Warhol Effects, which Slavoj Žižek suggests in The Fragile Absolute are two sides of the same coin. As sublime imagery became increasingly commodified (think a well-made BMW ad), modern artists increasingly focused on holding the place of Art intact (renewing or creating the “there there,” to borrow a reference from kinukitty). This was done, as a way of separating itself from the beatification of crass commercialism, by filling the spot with crud – a toilet, coke cans and the like. It has the (“Warhol”) effect of focusing the attention on the constraints, or construct, of Art, rather than the depicted object. Capital is quick to adapt, of course, so this shock tactic is of diminishing returns. If I’m correctly following Žižek’s Lacanese, this wide-scale commercial co-optation of not just the aesthetic Sublime, but pretty much anything that once gave off a sense of “authenticity,” has resulted in our no longer being able to identify ourselves in relation to these (formerly) Master Signifiers. Instead, the Self has become fractured, its consistency
[…] sustained by relationship to the pure remainder/trash/excess, to some ‘undignifed’, inherently comic, little bit of the Real; such an identification with the leftover, of course, introduces the mocking-comic mode of existence, the parodic process of the constant subversion of all firm symbolic identifications. [p. 39]
Enid Coleslaw, in other words. Her problem is that she can’t give up the Cartesian ghost; she’s looking for the old-fashioned Cogito, while living in a postmodern world. She tries to define herself by attempting paradoxically to establish defining connections through an ironic detachment from pop culture detritus, as if she can divine an auratic dimension to an anachronism like the Hubba Hubba Diner with its long-haired waiter, Weird Al. Or consider how she “authentically” dresses as a parody of 70s punk. These things can only sustain an identity if a person already believes (or acts if she believes) in their significance, which is exactly what Enid can’t do. All signifiers carry equal weight, which I suggest is hardly a flaw in her reasoning. Hell, it’s not even possible to call her condition “nihilism” without conjuring thoughts of Mike Myers on SNL, or those three phony Germans antagonizing The Dude with a ferret. Mass culture has even detached us from our detachment. Thus, Enid’s one true act (to borrow from the Lacanians again) is to get on the bus, cutting all her symbolic ties – a symbolic suicide. I’m inclined to see all of this as a good deal more than superficial tragedy. But, then again, one might point out that I have the time to blog about a comic book.
My (somewhat glib) one line take on Ghost World is that it is an ironic comic about the limits of irony.
What grade did you get on this?
Well done. Get this guy to blog for you, Noah.
I just did!
You can read Charles on a regular basis (mostly on film) over at Amoeblog.
I’m not really buying this Zizek as support for your point here: a couple of pages after the passage you quote (my pages are different) he says that “identification with the excremental leftover turns around — accomplishes in the opposite direction — the process of symbolic identification.” By Zizek’s logic in the section you’re quoting, the effort to “establish defining connections through an ironic detachment from pop culture detritus” ought to work just fine, because the “healthy” Lacanian subject is non-Cartesian.
I think you might want the bit after the “racist joke” instead: “resemblance is, on the contrary, the guarantor of non-identity.” That seems to me the best Lacan-via-Zizek exlanation for why kinokitty finds GW to feel “not real.”
You know the example Žižek uses of Hegel’s commentary on the hero’s valet not being able to see his master as a hero, because he lacks the “world-historical dimensions,” caught up instead with all the mundane aspects of the hero as just a man? (It’s in the paragraph above the one you quote from.) Well, I see Enid as the valet without having any hero (Master Signifier) to identify with. An example of this is how her image of Clowes as Artist (perfect lover-hero qua Ego-Ideal) is ruined by the crude reality sitting at the comics shop signing with no one in line. What’s not happening for Enid here (or anywhere else) is “the pathology of the objet petit a” (her experience with Clowes the man) serving as “support” for the “Master Signifier, the symbolic mandate of the hero” (Clowes as Ego-Ideal). Instead, she quickly dumps her Master Signifier, her potential Ego-Ideal.
The example you mention of the racist joke (for anyone interested: a gypsy responds to all the words given in a free association test with “fucking Famima,” which he explains to the psychoanalyst is what every word makes him think of) works in Žižek’s analysis of the “healthy” Lacanian subject to point to the role of a central signifier (“fucking Famima”, Art, or “Clowes as Ideal Artist”) in “serv[ing] as the underlying organizing principle of the series” (all the other signifiers that might be used in self-identification). Regardless of whether this “core” is ultimately a void (as Žižek has it) or a substance (as Decartes has it), Enid ain’t got it. That is, she’s lacking the “important lesson” of psychoanalysis “that objet petit a is not simply sublime-elusive, but that, in it, the highest and the lowest coincide.” For her, all the mass crud remains merely crud, which her irony only reinforces.
It’s interesting that in that reading, Charles, Enid’s failure to appreciate Clowes becomes her central failing (or emblematic of her central failing.) To which I say…ick.
Well, she does wipe the slate clean at the end. Joy, joy.
Hm. Zizek’s logic to me — and it’s been a long time, so I could well be forgetting something — seems to be tracking objet a through the Symbolic topology, where its effects are felt, to the center of the Borromean knot, where its existence is manifest as a vanishing point, the “leftover which embodies the fundamental constitutive lack” (as he defines it in Sublime Object.)
Your reading seems to be more substantively Cartesian to me, and consequently more temporal than topological: despite Lacan’s rehabilitation of Cogito against the structuralists, his “I” is nonetheless still the absence inherent to that vanishing point (the negative of Tarrying with the Negative, hence the homology with surplus-value.)
In Zizek’s collection Cogito and the Unconscious, Mladen Dolar’s opening essay has this quote:
“…the existence of cogito as such cannot be sustained – at least not without reverting to the support of the big Other, the figure of God, the subject supposed to know. If the Cogito is indeed just a pure vanishing point of the subject of enunciation, then its existence doesn’t follow from it. It cannot assume an ergo sum. All consistence it has is pinned to a signifier – there is no $ without a signifier – but only as a void that sticks to it and cannot be presented as such.”
That first sentence outlines the same phenomenon you describe when you equate Clowes with the Master Signifier: “What’s not happening for Enid here …is …her experience with Clowes the man serving as “support” for the “Master Signifier, the symbolic mandate of the hero” (Clowes as Ego-Ideal). Instead, she quickly dumps her Master Signifier, her potential Ego-Ideal.”
I can see the reading that she is searching for Cogito when she goes to meet Clowes, but I don’t see Zizek providing support for a theory that rejecting him somehow further destabilizes her.
I think Zizek is restating Dolar’s last sentence when he says “the end of the progressive diacritical division of signifiers reaches its end when we reach a division which is no longer the one between two signifiers of a signifying dyad but a ‘reflexive’ division between the signifier as such with its absence – no longer between S1 and S2, but between S(ignifier) as such and $ the void, the lack of the signifier which “is” the barred subject itself.
That’s why for me, the fact that she dumps her Master Signifier in favor of $ is exactly why Enid is so properly Lacanian a heroine (a heroine “for Erika”, the psychoanalytic critic): that rejection of Clowes and other instances of both S1 and S2 throughout the book is precisely her “assumption” of the lack, what Zizek says is “the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis”, “ to enable the subject-analysand to accomplish the passage from S1 to object petit a.”
That passage is what Zizek says provides the “important lesson” of psychoanalysis, which you quote, “that objet petit a is not simply sublime-elusive, but that, in it, the highest and the lowest coincide.” You say she lacks that lesson, but I don’t see that: in being unable to assume the Master Signifier, she is object a, the “zero-level of symbolic in-difference”, all fantasies are traversed, she has “identified with the way the Other(s) (mis)perceive(s)” her. Isn’t that what creeps Noah out so much?
You say “regardless of whether this “core” is ultimately a void (as Žižek has it) or a substance (as Decartes has it), Enid ain’t got it.” But I take Lacan’s point (and Zizek’s insofar as this section is an exposition of Seminar XI) to be that no-one ‘has’ ‘it,’ that our very subjectivity occurs precisely because we lack it? Or maybe I’m not following what the “core” is?
My ability to follow Lacanian arithmetic is extremely spotty, but I think Caro is closer to my understanding of Zizek than Charles is. Zizek in general seems to reject the idea of big other, or of any transcendent signifier (hereafter referred to as “thingee”) at all. He’s all about radical independence; the constitutive lack would in that case be the lack of a transcendental thingee, which allows/constitutes/shows a good time to the radically free subject.
As such, it’s hard for me to see Zizek cheering Enid on in her quest to turn Clowes (or anything) into a big other. Rather, the shuffling off of Clowes should be a death-of-god moment, and therefore a triumph of sorts. Zizek’s a kill-yr-idols kind of guy.
I’m not exactly sure Clowes is though. In Ghost World Enid’s lack of faith is generally seen as a problem (which is how Charles reads it.) (Or, to look at it another way, Enid can’t get from “I think” to “I am” because she isn’t actually thinking about anything.)
I”d say too that one of my problems with Clowes is that, while he essentially condemns/pities Enid for being vacuous, or at least vacant, he’s not actually willing at any point to draw a line in the sand pointing towards a transcendent other, or value, that he’d like to think about. That is, you can see Ghost World as a satire in some ways, but it’s a satire where the satirist has no positive vision. What you’re left with is a kind of dry, shriveled irony — sneering in a vacuum.
I guess Charles might say that this isn’t a problem with Clowes, but a difficulty with our modern/postmodern existence. There are no values and no freedom; Clowes is just regurgitating the truth of our banal condition, ugly blue-green tint and all.
To which I’m forced to say…yeah, whatever. Because it doesn’t seem like Clowes is struggling with nihilism and morality and love, or trying to represent truth. It feels like he’s bored and lazy; like he’s making fun of a scene and a group of people he doesn’t necessarily know or care that much about, and then adding in some gloss borrowed from Judy Blume so it looks like there’s something going on (yeah…they fall out over a boy! and…she despises herself! that’ll work.)
Except for the last paragraph (thbppp), this is close to where I ended up too, Noah, after I posted this and got out of the topological weeds a bit — as tidily as Lacanian topology maps onto Enid, it just doesn’t quite resonate as right to me.
I think Charles is probably (and justifiably) going to tell me I understand Zizek’s Lacan better than Zizek’s Marx, and the problem with using straight Lacan here, partly due to his really obscure sense of temporal trajectory, is that it becomes so difficult to read that final scene. (Bus transfer-ence would be lame.) It’s obviously a denouement, and Lacanian things tend to stay the same.