In comments, David rephrases Caro’s argument that Likewise ultimately fails to be enough like Ulysses.
Let me see if I’ve got Caro’s basic “Likewise” argument right. The relative newness of the graphic novel as a distinct art form means that it has not yet evolved the deep and complex machinery necessary to successfully compete with the richness of the bi-i-ig novel.
And therefore it’s not very useful to discuss things like “Likewise” using the same concepts and vocabulary, because the bucket just isn’t big enough yet to carry that kind of water.
This isn’t a smash on Schrag; she couldn’t do what couldn’t be done, and her intent wasn’t to write “Ulysses II” anyway. But it is a recognition of the nature of the graphic novel, the state of the art currently, that a “Ulysses II” is not yet possible in the genre. The question then becomes, how does “Likewise” stack *within the current possiblities of the genre*.
My own sense is that the formalist playfulness is there but isn’t extraordinary, nor is it even the strong point of the work; if Schrag hadn’t put the Joyce and Gifford into so many frames, that topic might not even have come up at all. But those who knew me in high school know how I brandished my Kafka and Vlad McNab, so I can absolutely accept why the book plays the role it does. To say the structure of “Likewise” reflects the book in a profound way is to imply that Schrag has given it a profound reading, and I’m not convinced a 19-year-old can read it profoundly. I know that’s true for me; I was 18 the time I first read “Lolita,” and the part I remember liking the best was the games with the license plates in the hotel registeries — “WS 1564” and stuff like that. What a yotz! Reading it now makes my eyes well up.”if Schrag hadn’t put the Joyce and Gifford into so many frames, that topic might not even have come up at all.
I don’t agree with this. It seems to me that Joyce is very important, both as an inspiration for style and structure and as an icon of (male) artistry which Schrag both embraces and I think undermines.
It’s the undermining that is a sticking point for many (Caro says it’s one for her, if I understand her comments aright.) Critics see Schrag’s failure to write like Joyce, or to get Joyce’s level of metatextual control, as a sign of immaturity, or as indicative of the historical difficulties of writing a graphic novel rather than literature, or just as a failure of competence.
To me, though, Schrag’s distance from Joyce seems thematic; it seems to be what the book is about. It’s a feature, not a bug. I actually think that it would be thematically *incoherent* for her to have gotten much closer to the experience of Ulysses than she did. Likewise is really in many ways about not succeeding — at being Joyce, at being an artist, at being a man, at being straight — as it is about succeeding. That failure isn’t tragic; in fact it’s the point; the book ends up accepting the inability to be Joyce, or to be straight, or to be a man, as a kind of triumph.
Caro says at the beginning of her post:
he title of the last volume of Ariel Schrag’s graphic memoir, Likewise, appears four times in Joyce’s Ulysses, most prominently in Episode 7, Aeolus, as one of the hyperbolic newspaper headlines: What? – and Likewise – Where?
(Aeolus is the Greek god of wind and Episode 7 is the chapter where Joyce satirizes “windy and inflated” reporting. Suat might call this poetic irony.)
Schrag’s Likewise, it seems to me, is about inflated rhetoric and desires, about embracing them and stepping away from them at the same time. It’s also about being like and not being like, and about how somewhere between the two you find yourself.
The whole Likewise Roundtable is here.
“Critics see Schrag’s failure to write like Joyce, or to get Joyce’s level of metatextual control”
Definitely the level of metatextual control for me.
Isn’t this sort of the same argument you make about Tucker Stone, Noah? That failure is fine as long as it’s performative?
I think Tucker succeeds at what he’s trying to do. I think you agree with that actually. We just disagree about whether what he’s doing is worthwhile or valid. I don’t see that as much of an analogy to what we’re talking about here.
I think failure is very thoroughly thematized in Likewise, and I think that that fact rather undercuts the kind of criticisms you and David are leveling at the book. It seems like, from here, you can either dispute that the failure is thematized, or you can argue that the techniques she’s using to distance Joyce are ineffective or invalid, for whatever reason.
You and David are a little overstating my point, I think, vis-a-vis Likewise as Ulysses: I agree with you, Noah, that “being Ulysses” was not Schrag’s goal, although I do think that in the second part of the book she makes a lot of gestures toward that, and as you say, makes the effort to “be like Ulysses” into a theme (I don’t think that’s inconsistent with my original post, although we took the comments off in a different direction).
I also agree that the performative elements you identify do add up to a really compelling reading of this book and its relationship to Big Male Books (as well as all the other thematic material.)
But — and I think this is the problem I have with Tucker too and other similar “performative” work — I don’t accept that thematic coherence is sufficient for success. Just because a coherent reading exists that accounts for all the features of a piece of writing doesn’t mean that that piece of writing doesn’t have meaningful flaws.
The concept of performativity often makes coherence easier to find in a work, because all you have to do is incorporate whatever weaknesses you identify back into your thesis. Doing so, using some theme in that way, is very much part of fiction post-deconstruction, but I don’t think that articulating and recognizing the performance and it’s thematic consistency (or not) is sufficient for the act of criticism. A critic who takes that approach only ever scrutinizes the metatext.
If you’re not careful, performativity becomes an excuse — on the part of both writers and critics — for not expecting a high level of craft on both the textual and metatextual levels. Something is lost when critics abandon that expectation. It doesn’t mean that no book can be “worthwhile or valid” unless that craft is demonstrated, but it is a critical principle that is defensible, I believe, at least as a point of comparison: “this book demonstrates craft in these ways and not in these.” The analogy with what Tucker does applies in the sense that reading Likewise using your argument requires us to accept that Schrag made a similar set of choices about how to build a book that Tucker makes about how to build a critique: the choice to privilege performative elements and consistency, metatextual craft, at the expense of the formal elements of textual craft (and I mean text here to include both words and pictures).
I absolutely don’t intend for my argument to be that in order to accomplish her goals, or even worthwhile goals, that Schrag needs to create a simulacrum of Ulysses, and that’s where I disagree with the summation David gave. I find her effort to do so very interesting and appealing because, and here I do agree with David, I would very much like the graphic equivalent of Ulysses (or Gravity’s Rainbow or Underworld or Midnight’s Children or whatever) to exist so that I could enjoy reading it.
But I completely agree with you that the fact that she did not write that book does not make Likewise a failure — although I don’t think we disagree that a simulacrum was not created.
I’m entirely convinced by your argument that the work is thematically consistent. And you may just be reacting to my use of the word “failure” but you seem to be saying that Schrag’s work shows more textual control than I think what’s on the page actually supports.
It just would have been a much tighter work, demonstrating much more craft, if more of the panels worked individually toward the purpose you identify — even if they didn’t do the thick allusive work that modernist prose does — and a much lower percentage of them served primarily atmospheric or narrative purposes.
As I said in my last comment over on yesterday’s post: I do think that lack of textual control makes Likewise less mature. But I’ll admit that failure may be too strong a word — and I don’t think I used it for anything except to notice that she “failed” at something I’m agree she likely did not try to do…
I actually think the way she clearly struggles with formal elements of the art, pushing against her technical limitations in numerous ways for evocative effects, is quite affecting, and I don’t know that my experience of the book would be overall improved if she’d shown a much greater level of control and craft.
I guess my point is that I do have some appreciation of the DIY/punk rock aesthetic. I like the Alan Parsons Project, but I also like the Sex Pistols. I think Ariel does significantly more interesting things with DIY than do the Sex Pistols, though.
Have you read Asterios Polyp? That’s supposed to be the great comic book sweeping formal modernist achievement, if I understand aright. I think Suat’s a fan. (As is Tucker, for that matter.)
Let me harrumph a little and say that I pretty specifically said that Schrag did not intend to write “Ulysses II,” and I don’t accuse the work of the heinous and unforgivable crime of not being “Ulysses II,” but neither Caro nor I would have minded if it were — but as I also said, that wasn’t Schrag’s goal. My points were (a) that the degree to which “Ulysses” *can* inform “Likewise” is necessarily limited by the depth of Schrag’s reading at the time (which are of course not necessarily as puerile as my own at a similar age), and (b) I don’t believe the very format of the graphic novel is yet capable of bearing a “Ulysses II.”
Whether “Likewise” is or isn’t an esthetic success therefore must be judged: does it do what she intended to do in a way true to the artist’s esthetic goals — aware that the selection of these goals is also a matter of artistic choice.
Bingo:
“I don’t know that my experience of the book would be overall improved if she’d shown a much greater level of control and craft. I guess my point is that I do have some appreciation of the DIY/punk rock aesthetic.”
I think that’s probably exactly the kernel of our disagreement. I have such such such a hard time with this, and it is so incredibly common in art comics — except the ones by middle-aged men.
What is UP with that?
David — I think you’re saying that taken on its own terms, rather than in comparison with some set of standards or other Books-We-Love, it is an aesthetic success, and I would agree with that…with the caveat that due to the DIY stuff it was really pretty hard going for me. But that’s my issue, not Schrag’s.
Noah, I was gonna read Asterios Polyp. Then someone said, “hey, Likewise”, and I ended up reading Ulysses instead.
:-D
So David — do you think it succeeds on its own merits? Or haven’t looked at it enough to decide?
Caro…there’s a lot of connections between feminism and punk, so I think that’s probably one reason there’s so much overlap. Guys do it too, though — lot of autobio DIY comics by guys.
Have you seen Edie Fake’s stuff? He’s a queer woman with some DIY influence, but I don’t think you can say he’s not technically in control.
And Fun Home isn’t DIY, really….
Noah — I can’t say I’d thought about it, but now that you say it, that feminism/punk connection is indeed very real, and I’ll bet it’s one of the major reasons why I always found French feminism so much more appealing than Anglo-American feminism; it’s feminist, but it’s very much not punk. Of the Anglo-Americans, I have to go back pre-punk to find a single feminist I can feel an emotional resonance with, and the most resonant is Woolf. It is obviously a huge obstacle for me.
There’s some punk that’s influenced by pop art and that’s less difficult, but even in that case I prefer actual pop art to pop-art punk.
Edie Fake came up recently — what was that in relation to? Was it on here? I can’t remember, but no, I haven’t read it. I will have to check it out, because I’m actually curious now to see how much of this aesthetic squick-response is about formalism and how much of it is a about some other aspect of punk/DIY.
Edie Fake probably came up on here; he’s one of my favorite comics artists.
Do you like Andrea Dworkin? She’s very different from the french feminists, but she is so, so not punk.
Well, Caro, I haven’t said whether or not I consider it an esthetic success, just that it needs to be judged on the right court; I don’t mind struggling with a work but I’m not as thrilled when I sense the artist is also struggling, and the struggle is disproportionate to the desired artistic effect. Noah wants to enfold that struggle into the storytelling itself, since this is a work about someone struggling on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood, so esthetic struggling is thematically appropriate. I’m not of that camp; I’m the hyperborean type and I want to have a sense of deep, deep intentionality, the gold standard being “Ulysses,” where you can literally explain the thematic purpose of each of the eight full stops in the last chapter.
Yeah; I haven’t read Ulysses, but Joyce just isn’t my gold standard in any way. I mean…he’s fine, I like him well enough, but art as a giant imposing puzzle isn’t necessarily my favorite of all possible choices.
Philip K. Dick is somebody else who thematizes structural randomness and incompletion in interesting ways. Very different than Likewise, obviously, but I think there’s an analogy there.
This is what keeps bringing me back to the juvenilia point. Every new work of creation is in some ways experimental, every work of creation in some way tests its creator’s limits. When a creator has hit his or her stride, that testing is a glorious thing. When that stride hasn’t yet been hit, I don’t know whether any given felicitous moment in the artist’s work is intentional and part of the artist’s goals for the work or just a lucky accident (like little Anakin Skywalker just sorta wellwhatdoyouknow knocking out the droid-control ship in “The Phantom Menace”). Immediacy and freshness are not the only virtues. That is why I’m especially curious to see what Schrag thinks she would do differently were she to moved to recreate the story of her senior year now, a decade later.
This is the difference I find between Schrag and someone like Jeff Brown. Brown kind of just has shitty visuals and they sit there, like the shittiness is supposed to be a draw. I think Schrag both tries more different things and incorporates the limits of her art as a theme in Likewise.
Intentionality is a dicey proposition in any case. In general, I don’t really care that much if a felicitous moment is entirely pre-planned or not.
“That’s supposed to be the great comic book sweeping formal modernist achievement, if I understand aright. I think Suat’s a fan.”
Not exactly but that’s a discussion for another day.
Noah — P.K. Dick really is an interesting comparison: I think you’re right that he thematizes some of the same concepts.
But Suat’s post pinged Schrag on being kind of boring and overlong (to oversimplify what he said) and I don’t think Dick is nearly as subject to that critique.
Approaching Likewise in comparison with Ulysses is saying “what could this book do with all that length that would make every panel more significant”. Approaching the question with comparison to Dick is going the other way: “what could have been left out in order to create a tighter and more engaging narrative.”
I think Suat’s really, really put off by the DIY visuals, if I understand him right. I doubt Schrag could do much narratively that would win him over without getting a very different visual style.
If you don’t think Dick was capable of boring and overlong, you haven’t read the Exegesis (I’ve only looked at bits, but he does go on.)
Though admittedly that wasn’t for publication….
I don’t find Likewise hard to read or especially boring — I think I’ve read it four times now, and bits of it more than that! I find her dialogue and story-telling abilities to be in general very strong, even when the narrative starts to get fractured.
We’re all capable of boring and overlong (invoke metatextual moment re these comments threads.)
But I didn’t actually sense a real indictment of the art in Suat’s post. He talks mostly about the lack of narrative mastery, doesn’t he?
He does raise the issue of art here, in this passage, which we really did not give enough attention to, but it’s not really explicitly about DIY:
“Schrag suggests that this rests on the ability of pictures to “ground” the reader (a simplification since there are other attendant implications). This remains a double-edged sword and once led Leo John de Frietas to remark to Dave McKean (and once could easily disagree here) that comics are “just not subtle enough” to make “certain explorations of life.”
“Over the past few decades, some artists have adhered splendidly to simplicity of form while others have been in a continual search for that creative frisson found at the other extreme of comics narrative.”
I can read again, but I did take his critique to be more about narrative than aesthetic.
In comments, though, he notes that the visuals were a huge problem for him, and that he almost wished it had been written as prose without images.
Yeah, I do remember that now. He makes this point though that “the efforts here are clumsy and poorly placed amidst the naturalistic framework of Schrag’s main narrative.”
And that kind of gets to Jason’s point: one of the incoherencies to me is that she invokes both this “authentic autobiographical voice,” which I think has a lot to do with Suat’s “naturalistic framework,” as well as the thickly playful postmodern metatextuality that you identify. But no new thesis of the relationship between those two elements emerges, the playful incoherence is itself the point.
That’s the performativity you identify, but it seems like you end up with this critical principle that performative incoherence is in fact fully coherent.
You can certainly say that performative incoherence is aesthetically pleasurable, and I think you can start to query and analyze that pleasure. But I don’t think you can say that incoherence is coherent. I think if I go back and replace all the places where you talk about thematic coherence with ‘jouissance’, most of the objections I have to your defense of the book go away…
And — YES! — that’s basically the same point I was getting at when I said Likewise is a celebration of queer desire. There’s the intersection point between our readings.
I think incoherence is actually quite coherent in PKD…and his coherence is incoherent. It doesn’t exactly work logically — but that’s part of the charm, or the jouissance if you prefer.
So, Jeffery Brown finally came up again…. I framed it as a joke before, in Noah’s Dick Essay, but it seriously, seriously looks like Sally and Jeffery Brown’s cartoon self getting it on in that posted fantasy panel. Do I need to scan a Jeffery Brown comic and do a side by side comparison? Am I totally off base? Does this have any purpose or meaning at all, or is it another “Rebecca’s legs are apart and awkwardly drawn” moment?
Additionally, I was really surprised to find that Ms. Schrag and myself were born two days apart, which goes a long way to explain the pain that I experienced reading Potential as it came out. I also omit mouths in my comics, much to some of my friend’s consternation. Did I get this from her? Is there another cartoonist that does so, some affectation I just haven’t noticed until now?
The timing’s wrong for it to be Jeff Brown, I think; Schrag completed Likewise a decade ago (2000) and Brown’s first work didn’t come out until 2002. I think it’s just coincidence…and probably the fact that they both come out of the autobio/diy cartooning tradition, so their styles have some similarities (much as it pains me to admit it — though I actually thought Brown’s work for that Simpsons comic was okay.)
I can’t think of other artists who omit mouths…though again, I don’t think you could have gotten it from Schrag, since she doesn’t do it in her earlier work that I remember. …
Somehow I missed this thread. Asterios Polyp doesn’t achieve what it sets out to because of the pedestrian nature of the story. The art is tres modernist cool, if you will–but the story is more like a Hallmark movie of the week.
Garry Trudeau didn’t draw mouths in the early days of Doonesbury. Therefore and ergo…a heavy and important influence on Ariel Schrag.