Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof. – Ulysses, Episode 7
The 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.)
As Noah has pointed out, the role of Ulysses in Likewise is talismanic, not only in the senses that he describes – to be like Sally and to be(come) to Sally what Joyce has been – but also in the rigorously Freudian sense of an object that stands in for an unfulfilled wish. Ulysses acts in these pages as a substitute for Sally.
For this reason, it feels insufficient to argue that this book is about gender identity. The pages of this book are more saturated with the not-unrelated concept of desire: am I desired, do I desire the right people, why is there a mismatch between my biology and the people I desire, and most importantly, her constant and omnipresent desire to make this comic.
Noah rightly talks about Ulysses as phallus and about the phallus as mastery, but he doesn’t explicitly complete the syllogism. Yet Ulysses does indeed stand for mastery: to read it, to understand it, is to become what Lacan calls “The Subject Supposed to Know.” In this case, it’s not only to know Sally (as Noah suggests, although that’s certainly going on) but also to know … well, how to make sense of Ulysses. Ulysses is the ultimate symbol of the writer’s craft, considered the greatest achievement of English prose. As Likewise progresses, Ariel (the character) gets less preoccupied with Sally and questions of homosexual identity and more concerned with her identity as a writer, and those parts of the book are the ones that mimic the structure and rhetorical diversity of Joyce’s novel. The desire for the phallus in Likewise is not only the desire for mastery of the social dynamic of “It”; it is not only the desire for Sally or the desire for a clear identity – it is the striving for mastery of the comic itself: the obsession even greater than the obsession with Sally.
The equivalence of Sally and Ulysses as objects of desire is evident in the book’s mapping techniques (it’s not particularly evident in the memoir’s “plot”). Part I is concerned with mapping the contours of Sally’s body and the relationship between Sally and Ariel, and is mostly traditional: a literary cartography made from lived experience. The remaining parts prioritize grafting Schrag’s narrative onto the structure of Ulysses and are more Baudrillardian: she tries to follow the contours of Ulysses and ends up creating something that is not-quite-a-simulacrum but that certainly aims there.
This effort to make the comic “like” Ulysses plays counterpoint to her frustration over the naturalized ideas of sexual difference. She is frustrated that she can’t fit her own pleasure with the normative biological imagery and by a visceral sense that her homosexuality is biological too. She is frustrated by the actual lived awkwardness of teenage relationships (gay or otherwise), and the difficulties of sexual and emotional intimacy in general.
In contrast, intimacy with Ulysses is achievable — not the typical romance-novel version of “being meant for” or even being desired by, although those make an appearance in her record. The idealized intimacy is “being like.”
The comic demonstrates that similarity allows for a kind of intimacy that is likewise, in both dictionary senses of the adverb:
like•wise
? ?[lahyk-wahyz]
–adverb
1. moreover; in addition; also; too: She is likewise a fine lawyer.
2. in like manner; in the same way; similarly: I’m tempted to do likewise.
This is why this book is, to me, even with all its angst, a celebration of queer desire: desire that is both/and and not either/or.
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The construction of desire is immensely appealing and the most successful aspect of the book, as Noah’s post demonstrates. But it could have been accomplished in far fewer pages. The effort to create a simulacrum is staggeringly ambitious, and it fails spectacularly. It fails, however, primarily for reasons that are not Ariel Schrag’s fault.
Ulysses in many ways triggered the birth of experimental fiction: playing with style, form, structure, language, voice, and the dynamic interplay of meaning, it has exerted some sort of influence on almost every “literary” writer since its widespread publication in the early 1930s. The book is a puzzle-box, itself a simulacrum of The Odyssey and replete with literary references – the most obvious of which is a compendium of literary devices and styles. Pretty much every significant device from the history of Western literature makes it into Ulysses at some point (which is why most people, including Ariel, read it with a copy of Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated close at hand).
Western literature has had about 3000 years to codify devices and build references with widespread cultural relevance. Schrag’s novel suffers from the fact that graphic literature doesn’t have this much history. There isn’t a “Concise Oxford History of Graphic Literary Terms.” Art is much harder to pin down semiotically than literature. The success of Joyce’s novel relies on the fact that his starting point was a fairly rigid and well-established tradition of literary history and technique – it is easy to recognize at the surface level the use of drama, poetry, stream of consciousness, and other devices, even if the precise significance of each is a puzzle.
In contrast, Schrag is working in an idiom with about 100 years of history and an incredibly fluid semiotics. It’s really hard to get granular — and impossible to get granular enough for Joycean pleasure — because the interpretation of artistic variation is so impressionistic. Schrag’s choice to use very DIY visuals exacerbates this.
The deeper problem, I think, is that the Joycean project is fundamentally at odds with the autobiographical one: literary history and device are shared cultural phenomenon, whereas the interest of autobiography (as Suat points out) often comes from the uniqueness of the individual perspective. At 19, Schrag simply wasn’t quite deft enough to knit those two threads together into a completely successful text.
So she failed at the impossible task of writing a graphic equivalent to Ulysses — but fucking hell she tried, and that’s much more ambition than most graphic novelists show. I hope her example will inspire more experimental graphic fiction, because I don’t want to wait 3000 years to get the graphic novel that succeeds.
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Update by Caro: I was convinced by the comments below taking me to task for the sentence saying Ariel “resolved” the gender question. I edited the post to pull that sentence out. It’s not resolved; it’s just less important to me than the issue of desire.
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Update by Noah: The entire Likewise Roundtable is here.
But…Ulysses is autobiographical too…even the date chosen is an autobiographically important one.
And….as McCloud (and now many other critics note), comics’ history definitely extends beyond 100 years–and surely Shrag is aware of that.
Also, Ulysses too is about gender identity–and not just masculine gender identity (esp. the Molly Bloom section, of course). Joyce is quite often preoccupied with “queer” sexual activity, masturbation and etc. (things Schrag too is preoccupied with)
And…Ulysses too expresses quite a bit of anxiety of influence–of trying to live up to, but perhaps not being able to live up to, not only the Odyssey, but also, and especially, Hamlet.
The choice of Ulysses isn’t merely accidental, surely–nor is it Sally’s. Lots of intersections that are pretty obvious…even if I haven’t read Likewise! (just the first three Schrag books)
What a great post! That’s a great way to make sense of the use of Ulysses in the second half of the book (which I didn’t really do especially well.)
I wanted to try to read Ulysses before I wrote my entry…but alas I didn’t get to it. Maybe next time….
A couple of other points::
You say that Ariel resolves the gender identity issue “when she says to the lady at Barnard, “I’m not a woman.””
I don’t see how this resolves it; it’s certainly not meant to be taken as an absolute truth. And I don’t think Ariel ends up believing she’s not a woman (there’s that conversation with Sally where Sally tells her that her belief that she’s manly is from negative social influences, and Ariel thinks “she’s got a point.”
And I don’t see the book as a failure of course — partially because it seems to me that the anxiety of influence, or the failures to measure up, are thematized in the book itself. Ariel talks about the limits of graphic novels (and about her own ambition) explicitly — and the connection between not being a man and not being Joyce seems fairly central to the book.
I would agree that the book fails to be Ulysses. I don’t agree that it was *literally* trying to be Ulysses, or that it fails on its own terms.
Eric — I absolutely agree that the choice of Ulysses is intentional, and that there are thematic elements in common. But I think in Ulysses the thematic elements in themselves, as themselves are vastly subordinate to the way they’re deployed in the book’s overall structure. That’s that famous Joyce quote: “I put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”
To both you and Noah: the gender material just feels minor to me in comparison with the other themes, not absent altogether. I like your phrasing “anxiety of influence” for the Ulysses; the gender elements are more an “anxiety of confluence” — she has too much gender, some of all gender. Perhaps it’s that she really seems to be successfully getting through all that. It just doesn’t feel to me like it matters as MUCH.
I would disagree, Eric, that Ulysses is autobiographical in any significant way, or that any single book other than the Odyssey gets a privileged position in its pantheon of references (although you can build different readings, all successful, by selecting and privileging different references). I think the choice of day is essentially a dedication, and there’s no reason for Joyce to leave autobiography out when everything else goes in, but it’s not central to the book. Joyce’s own life is part of his “anxiety of influence”, but he’s not trying to record that life in the same way Schrag is.
I don’t take the kind of broad genealogy McCloud puts together particularly seriously. I’ve seen the same kind of thing for prose fiction and I don’t think it gets you anywhere. If you can’t pull a useful semiotic reference from it, it’s not part of the genealogy. Schrag doesn’t really make much use of any comics history past the last 50 years, so it’s just sort of a moot point.
(Actually, I find McCloud’s work remarkably theoretically unsophisticated period, especially c.f. Groensteen’s Systeme de la bande dessinée, which nobody ever talks about despite it being 1000 times more rigorous and well-translated into English.)
Noah — you said “And I don’t see the book as a failure of course — partially because it seems to me that the anxiety of influence, or the failures to measure up, are thematized in the book itself.”
I thought about this a lot, because it’s really easy to see the book as deconstructing the modernist project through exactly this thematization. It just didn’t resonate with me enough to think it was right.
Ulysses in this book is too much talisman and not enough simulacra for it to feel like a successful structural choice to me — it’s just a theme. And ultimately the engagement with the modernist work is too slapdash and at too elementary a level for it to be deeply satisfying. That’s why it doesn’t feel successful to me, although I intellectually buy your argument for the alternate reading. There was a quote on one of those pages you sent us to (I can’t remember the context) that “in an illustrated book the pictures illustrate the text; in a comic the pictures are the text” and the pictures here just aren’t weighty and complex enough to carry a full enough engagement with Ulysses.
I understand that was a deliberate choice — it’s just not one that works for me, intellectually or aesthetically. Not for a book as lengthy and ambitious as this one.
I’ll make it over to Suat’s post shortly to raise this issue over there; it looks like you and he ended up at the same place — squarely in the art — in that debate as well.
I love System of Comics. It’s kind of a difficult read–but brilliant.
I agree about McCloud–although it’s a good starting point. I do think we can push comics back a bit though (see David Kunzle more than McCloud)–though that doesn’t mean that Schrag necessarily does.
Can’t take credit for “anxiety of influence”–stolen from Harold Bloom (of all people).
I tend to think that gender has more to do with Joyce than most people give credit. I think there’s alot of self critique in Joyce about the attitudes he has (or used to have) about women. Closing with Molly Bloom in Ulysses is surely not an arbitrary choice–nor is her thought that Poldy “understands women”–Clearly Joyce is making an attempt to do the same in his final section (and elsewhere too–with Gertie and others).
Even the end of Portrait actually strikes me this way. Stephen (clearly a Joyce substitute) writes in his diary at how surprised he is when he chats with the girl/woman he has long admired from afar (can’t remember her name offhand). Stephen expresses surprise that she is nice/funny–“human,” etc. This “revelation” seems more important to me than some of the more overblown revelations that precede and follow it. Stephen begins to see the p-o-v of the “other”–or, in this case, “woman” (or at least acknowledges such a p-o-v exists), which puts quite a bit of pressure on his usual aloof attitude and the “better than thou” perspective he often takes (towards men and women). I’m pretty sure this is Joyce criticizing his younger self.
I see much the same in Gabriel Conroy’s attitude towards women in “The Dead.” Lily (the caretaker’s daughter), Molly Ivors, and Gretta Conroy are all women whom Gabriel “doesn’t see” or treats as secondary enablers of his own life–If anything, his “epiphany” at the end is a realization of his own blindness towards women (although it’s kind of unclear if he actually overcomes it).
This isn’t quite the same as queer sexuality obviously–but I do think that gender in the Joycean ouevre is not really secondary or ancillary to what he’s up to.
Oh…and Hamlet really is central to at least the one section where Stephen provides his own interpretation of it in the library. Its father/son dynamics (anathema to Noah) are obviously central to Ulysses as well.
I do think that Joyce’s life is important to the book too…but it’s certainly not “straight” (ha!) autobiography the way Schrag’s is.
Hey Caro, don’t go over there – stay on this thread. It’s much better reading.
I too liked this summary of how Ulysses pertains to Likewise. However, in relation to your final thoughts on Likewise, I suspect that Noah would absolutely hate for this to happen to Schrag’s work (though it’s obviously her choice to make).
It would make her comics too similar to late period Clowes, Ware, Mazzucchelli or, heaven forbid, Spiegelman (i.e. the white American middle-aged male cartoonist brigade). Many of them still use literary devices but have very consciously referenced comics history, its myriad devices and some very specific comic genres. These aren’t exactly his main points of contention with their works but there’s a certain “coldness” and “distance” (not inevitable) in this approach which I sense he wouldn’t like.
Your thoughts, Noah? Not trying to needle you or anything.
That’s a really interesting point, Suat; eagerly awaiting Noah’s reply. :)
I do think Schrag really aims higher than the male art comics — certainly higher than either Ware or Spiegelman, who tend to dumb down the narrative elements of their work (although Ware less so in the art). It’s just that she was 19, and Ulysses is the most massive work of prose fiction ever conceived in English, and some fictional hybrid Greatest Artist of All Time would have trouble getting enough meaning into little panel drawings to simulate it.
I think this is why the art bothered me so much, besides the aesthetic grate of its teenage-ness. It’s almost a distraction from what she was aiming to do with the concept.
But I do tend to think that’s not uncharacteristic of juvenilia: here you are, writing along, working on the autobiography you started when you were 15, and suddenly you have a Big Idea. So you crowbar it into the project you’re already working on, rather than recognizing that it’s its own thing. And then you end up with a single book that’s really two books, and the two books compete against each other. The autobiography part of this could have been much shorter and more focused on interesting episodes, and the Ulysses part could have been much more successful if it didn’t have to mesh with the life story.
I thought that other thread was pretty fun.
And you are too trying to needle me. Not that I mind.
Your take on my reading of Schrag is pretty much entirely backwards, Suat. I think Schrag’s work is much, much colder than, say, Spiegelman’s or Ware’s. That’s one reason I much prefer it. I also like the way she uses different visual styles thematically — it’s a constant element of her work, and she’s way more sophisticated in doing that than Spiegelman is, certainly (she’s does more interesting things with it in my view than what I’ve seen Clowes do as well, though I don’t think I’ve seen the late period work you’re discussing. and I haven’t read Mazzuchelli either, so can’t comment on that.)
Anyway, I don’t have any problem with formal experimentation. I love Winsor McCay, and formal experimentation is pretty much all there is to his work. So I’d be happy enough to see Schrag go further down that road. In fact, I miss her more experimental instincts in her most recent project.
I’d actually be interested at some point to see Schrag work with another artist. She’s done a bunch of collaborative work, but she’s always the one drawing the pictures (at least from what I’ve seen.) I do like her art, and I very much admire her inventiveness in stretching what she can do and working within her parameters. But there are limits to her technical abilities, and it would be fun to see her collaborating with someone with a different skill set, even if just for a short story.
That option is probably a dead end in American comics (not so much Eurocomics) where collaboration is frequently perceived as just that.
In the light of the last two comments, I have to say that one thing which I deleted from my original blog post is the fact that I often wished that both Potential and Likewise were written in pure prose. Don’t want to get into too much detail here but the lettering, linework and panel compositions really affected my reading experience.
Eric — I think that we’re just disagreeing on the definition of “central.” I don’t disagree with any of your points except insofar as I think they are one-among-many rather than the-thing-itself.
To me, nothing’s definitively central to Ulysses except this project of enigmas and puzzles. That may be due to my own postmodernist inclinations, emphasizing the ways in which Ulysses foreshadowed the coming century of experiments in prose rather than the ways in which it represented a new way to write an old novel, but it’s definitely why you (correctly) sense my downplaying the individual thematic elements in favor of the structural whole.
Let me stick my elbow in on this one, because I’m pretty familiar with “Ulysses” and Caro asked me to take a look at “Likewise” and its Joyce angle even though I’m not in general into the graphic novel scene.
I don’t think Noah is doing “Likewise” any favors by demanding it write checks it can’t cash. It’s a work of juvenilia, a barely mediated diary. Not even Joyce was worth reading at 17 and 18 and 19. Yes, there are prodigies — Shostakovich wrote his first symphony at 19, that sort of thing. But to fulfill the claims Noah makes on its behalf, “Likewise” would have to be the stellar transcendent experience that he alone seems to think it is.
The idea of using different forms to represent different moods or events or transitions — are we really honestly claiming that this is something innovative with Schrag, and it came about because she read “Ulysses”?
What you’ve got is someone writerly but still inchoate and exploratory, writing something whose only real structure is the diary chronology. Not a failure, because it does what it sets out to do — which is to be a lightly dramatized diary of senior year in all its immediacy. Stürm. Drang. Drang. Stürm. Stürm drang stürm. Over and over and over, magnified by the emotional magnifying lens of late adolescence and very tentative adulthood and a willingness to examine, if not overexamine, her ugly side. So give it its due, but don’t overstate the case.
The question I find myself asking is, were Schrag to write it now rather than a decade ago, with another decade of writing under her belt, in what way would it be different? It would be an improvement, unless her artistic development was happening in reverse. (“Portrait” was after all Joyce’s second crack at Stephen, the first one published only posthumously.) I’d expect, for example, that it would be considerably more condensed; Suat is right to point out how difficult some of the slogging is, and I think today’s Ariel might look at “Likewise” and say “too many notes.”
But if it turns out that she’s essentially abandoned the graphic form in the ensuing decade, maybe that’s a recognition that she’d tapped out that particular vein, that it wasn’t the direction that would carry her forward.
I’m certainly one of the more enthusiastic proponents of Likewise, but it’s made several other folks’ best of the year and best of the decade lists, and Schrag is in general a popular and respected creator. There will be a couple of other positive reviews as the roundtable goes along.
I certainly don’t see it as juvenelia myself. It doesn’t seem barely mediated to me at all — nor does Potential for that matter. It’s not Ulysses, certainly — but as I said to Caro, I don’t think it needs to be Ulysses to be successful.
Schrag is still doing comics, though she’s also worked in other mediums (she wrote for television’s the L-word for a while)
Hi David!
Noah, David’s post reminded me of something I wanted to ask you. You do talk about the way she uses all that shifting texture and imagery at the end of the book, and I agree with you that for her project it isn’t necessary for it to map onto Ulysses as tightly as I want it to.
But I’m wondering whether you actually see more direct signification in those panels than I do? You do mention mood and transitions, and events in the sense that there is a correspondence between the pictures and the story, but do you read those pictures as containing meaning that isn’t there otherwise?
I too am postmodernly inclined…and I too like to think of Ulysses as postmodernist rather than modernist…. But that may be as much a product/part of its concern with gender as separate from it. I’ll just refer back to old Andreas Huyssens’ essay I’ve mentioned here before “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” If modernism is gendered male (questionable…but anyway), then the postmodern incorporates elements of mass culture (modernism’s other)–So, the two types of reading aren’t necessarily antithetical.
Suat, I actually think Fun Home works best as prose (not sure about Schrag’s work). It’s a beautifully written novella/short story, really…and rarely (to me) does the art add much to that. For that reason, I kind of think it’s not really such a great “graphic memoir”–It doesn’t really use the “graphic” tools to great effect–as Maus, for instance, does (sorry Noah). I mean, even if we grant Noah that Maus is “ugly” (etc.), which I’m not really willing to do, but for the sake of argument–just the use of animal heads is such a clever device that it makes it worthwhile to tell in comics form. It seems simple, but it’s actually kind of a headbender if you think about it for awhile.
Not that you necessarily should in this thread.
Fun Home’s a nice piece of writing, but it’s “one caption per panel or bust” makes it more of a heavily illustrated novella than a comic.
Eric — do you really feel that Maus uses the graphic tools to great effect? I find the whole thing really kind of obvious. It’s a great pedagogical text, but my recollection of it is that it’s really a one-trick-pony…
Caro, if you’re asking me if I think there are lots of references to other comics, in a Ulysses way — no, I don’t really think that’s happening.
I think she does some things with phallic imagery which are entertaining, and I think the shifts in visual style are significant as shifts. And there are expressive uses of the art (changes in fonts, obsessive delineation at various points, the charcoal drawing of the penis, etc.) But if she’s doing more than that with the art (which she may be) it’s not something I keyed into.
And again Eric —
I probably should have used the word poststructuralist rather than postmodernist. I just find it fairly easy to be inattentive to the gender themes in Ulysses because they feel like themes-among-many-themes rather than “deep structure.” I don’t think gender difference is the supplement here: I think it’s more likely “meaning” itself.
Yup, Noah, that’s what I was after.
I think this all gets back in some ways to my initial point: compared to Modernist literature, this feels like juvenilia. Compared to other graphic novels, maybe not so much.
But how much of that is because graphic novels are still such a young art form that they haven’t had these great swaths of experimentation and aesthetic movements? If you’re steeped in things like Ulysses and Woolf and Pynchon and Delillo, the whole art form seems like it’s just getting started.
That’s how Maus feels to me, for example (although Chris Ware has different problems.) Maus always reeks of “look, you can do this in a graphic novel too!” Which was valuable at the time, but doesn’t really elevate it up there to the Pantheon.It’s probably unfair to call it a one-trick-pony but it’s just not COMPLEX like prose can be. So far I’ve only seen really successful gestures to that type of complexity in Clowes and Eddie Campbell.
I do think that Maus is more complex than it’s being given credit for here…but writing 60 odd pages about it may have that effect. It’s not my favorite book (or even graphic novel) by a long shot…but I do think Noah’s perpetual crapping on it is kind of wrongheaded. I mean “Shadow of No Towers” was pretty bad (and a complete ripoff for the money), but I wouldn’t say the same about Maus. I like the Breakdowns stuff better..
I’m happy to go the poststructuralist route too on Ulysses, but given how many “poststructuralist feminists” or “French feminists,” if you prefer, read Ulysses as the exemplar of ecriture feminine, I still think you have trouble extricating gender from Ulysses.
I’m not sure I see Woolf overly influenced by Ulysses. Yes, she read it (and wrestled with it) while composing Mrs. Dalloway, but she was also reading Proust (which seems equally important)…And I’d point to Katherine Mansfield (who Woolf admired and envied) as a heavier influence. There’s also Conrad and the Russians who she namechecks with regularity in her essays of the period. Joyce was important to her, certainly, but she didn’t see Ulysses as the masterpiece of English lit. Shakespeare pretty much holds that place for her (probably rightly so).
I don’t want to make it sound utterly dismissive when I call it juvenilia. Juvenilia ? juvenile. This isn’t study hall doodling of Batman. But I think it’s the nature of early work to be inescapably uneven, and it’s not accurate to point to a few well-turned segments as evidence of an overarching mastery she hadn’t achieved at that point.
Now, to a certain extent, to use “Ulysses” as your banner and crest is to invite expectations about the degree of minute control of thematic detail — and in particular since “Ulysses” is a playful mapping of Homer onto Bloomsday, I think both Caro and myself were hoping for a similar playful mapping of Bloom’s Progress onto Ariel’s Ordeal. But then it’s not our call to make.
Hi Eric — thanks for expanding. I didn’t mean to say that I wanted to extricate gender from Ulysses; just that I wouldn’t use the word “central” to describe its place and that it’s pretty easy for me to ignore it in favor of the formal elements.
Didn’t Woolf pretty much slam the bejezzus out of Ulysses? My recollection from ages ago is that she really resisted it, for reasons involving both class and patriarchy. I wasn’t suggesting that she was attempting to write simulacra so much as that she was writing alter to Joyce’s project — you can read Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses in a relationship of alterity where in fact gender and class are central.
But I also think that you need Woolf, you need the comparison, to move those issues to the center. You can do a feminist reading of Ulysses where they’re central too, of course — although I think Irigaray at least (much more so than Kristeva or Cixous) follows some of the same trajectory (substituting gender by meaning and focusing on the logical) that I make; French feminism is Lacanian, and gender is an “impossible relation” in Lacan.
But although you can debate for Joyce’s 100 years how those themes knit together, I just think that you lose a lot in Ulysses when you let the themes overshadow the structure. I know I’m open to the opposite critique though, that too much attention to the structure loses equally much.
“I think both Caro and myself were hoping for a similar playful mapping of Bloom’s Progress onto Ariel’s Ordeal. But then it’s not our call to make.”
I definitely was. I think I can describe my experience of reading this as “blinded by a flash of modernism” — it’s just something I want so much to see the graphic idiom reach for, all that layered complexity and semiotic richness and philosophical play, that when Schrag gave me that little taste of it I was like, “Yeah! That! More of that!”
Well, most works are uneven, when it comes to that.
I agree that the comparison with Ulysses is obviously invited — but I think she’s ultimately doing rather different things than Joyce was.
Noah, vis-a-vis Schrag doing different things than Joyce: I’m sort of really intrigued now to compare Schrag’s response to Ulysses with Woolf’s. I’m totally going to go back on what I said earlier to Suat that the Woolf comparison doesn’t help me read Likewise.
David, I do disagree with you here:
“only real structure is the diary chronology. Not a failure, because it does what it sets out to do — which is to be a lightly dramatized diary of senior year in all its immediacy.”
I do think the book tries to find a middle ground between the autobiography and the Modernist novel; I don’t think Ulysses is just a talisman. That move from talisman to objet petit a is one of the things this book does that’s “rather different” from Joyce’s project. And I think the Joyce is very immediate for her.
Looking back, it’s striking to me that the “father of thousands” scene Noah referenced is almost exactly the half-way point in the book and really marks this shift from her interest in actually existing penises (and phalluses) to the more aesthetized “phallus” of her artistic ambitions. That’s what the different drawing meant to me there: “here is the moment where Art becomes a theme.”
Woolf is vexed by Ulysses for sure. She does pinpoint Joyce as someone doing worthwhile writing in “Modern Fiction,” for instance (at the expense of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy). She definitely sees him as a peer and competitor (they were born and died the same year, interestingly enough (as each other–they were not infant prodigies)). Her reaction to such figures was often to criticize them publicly (as she did too for Mansfield). Still, yes, she was critical of Ulysses for its “showoffy” nature and its (for her) crass violation of sexual and scatological taboos. To my knowledge, she doesn’t dive too deeply into criticizing its “masculinity” (unless this comes out in the diaries and the letters, which, I admit to not really knowing all that well by comparison to the novels and essays). She liked that it was breaking ground (in stream of consciousness…and it’s capturing of “life”), but she wasn’t always completely comfortable with the ground it was breaking. She and Leonard turned it down for the Hogarth Press–but she admitted regretting that decision later.
We’re reaching the limits of my knowledge of the connection here. As far as I know, neither Joyce nor Woolf knew Ariel Schrag.
Yeah; Ariel’s talked very specifically about how she uses different art and writing styles in a systematic way through the bookl. I think saying the only structure is the diary chronology isn’t really sustainable. (You could say the other structures aren’t effective, but that’s a somewhat different argument.)
I had tried not to read too much of the prior criticism, other than the posts in the roundtable, or the interview, just to avoid writing in response to the reviews rather than the book. But I’m definitely curious to go back and see what she had to say.
Eric — way back at the beginning you mention the source for “anxiety of influence;” if you haven’t already, check out the Jonathan Lethem essay I linked to in last week’s post about copyright: it riffs on Bloom and comes up with “Ecstasy of Influence.” :-)
Caro, I agree that Schrag does makes some sketches toward applying aesthetic lessons she picked up from Joyce, so I don’t want to say that there is absolutely no flow in that direction. I just find it more of a surface veneer than an organic part fully subsumed within the work. How substantially different would the work have been if Sally was into Flaubert instead, or Bukowski or something? I don’t think it would be that much, and that’s a measure of the Joyciness.
Noah, I agree that her aesthetic is significantly different from Joyce — although you could apply Joyce’s self-description “scrupulous meanness” to Schrag’s take on herself and others.
I like the reference to scrupulous meanness; I think that’s dead on.
” How substantially different would the work have been if Sally was into Flaubert instead, or Bukowski or something?”
I definitely disagree with that. The stream of consciousness narration, the use of different art styles for different sections (based on pretty strict rules) — both of those are central to the book, and would have been very different if Bukowski or Flaubert had been the pick.
I think you’ve also gone a little astray in claiming that it’s all about Sally (at least in terms of the selection of the text.) Ariel’s interest in Joyce is her own; she finds especially his obsession with sex and women very congenial.
The other creator who had a major influence on Likewise, incidentally, is Joe Matt.
“Scrupulous meanness” referred to Dubliners, though…not Ulysses. Those two books are worlds apart.
Maybe she should try that Flaubert book…
She talks about Madame Bovary a bit in Likewise, actually.
No Bukowski that I remember, though.
Noah, I think we’ve got a problem of scale here, which is why we’re not agreeing. It may be that the reliance on Ulysses-related ideas is very deep by graphic novel standards, but it’s pretty thin by “Ulysses” standards, even as it invites comparison to “Ulysses.” I’m fine with that; it might be a reflection of Caro and my backgrounds that we’re seeing it as thin rather than rich, because coming in from Joyceland, where it seems every stone on the beach bristles with thematic energy, it is thin, and I think Schrag would be the first to accept that.
And although the specific phrase “scrupulous meanness” is associated more specifically with “Dubliners,” I think the technique itself persists through Joyce’s work (though I can’t speak to “Finnegan,” which has successfully evaded my occasional attempts and which was handled only briefly in the Joyce seminar I had way back when).
I think it’s “thin” compared to big honking modernist books, at least in some ways, sure. She isn’t actually writing Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow.
I’m okay with that myself; I’m not as enthusiastic about the modernist project as Caro is in any case. And I actually like the way the book both fetishizes modernism and distances it through various techniques (the very lowbrow reliance on diary; the DIY art, parody.)
It’s quite safe to say that Caro is not as enthusiastic about the modernist project as I am, if “Gravity’s Rainbow” is the emblem. But that’s another megillah entirely.
David is probably apopleptic at his desk at the mere notion that I am an enthusiast for the Big Modernist Novel since I am usually so critical of them. Especially Gravity’s Rainbow. Yuk.
Eric and I mentioned this earlier — we actually both approach these books from slightly different postmodernist perspectives. I think high modernism lends itself very well, very genealogically, to postmodern readings.
The DIY stuff in Schrag is an anti-modernist strand though, and that’s what I couldn’t quite get past. It’s not the only strand, but there’s a sort of cacophany and the DIY is clanging too loudly for the other pieces to win the day, even just in terms of the reading experience, without analysis at all.
Isn’t Gravity’s Rainbow considered a pomo novel by most? That thing was really a struggle to hack through.
I don’t see how or why diaries are necessarily anti-modernist. Stephen Dedalus keeps one, after all.
Oh, I wasn’t referring to the diary. I would not call that anti-modernist. I was referring to the punk look-and-feel of the art — the zine feel to the visual aesthetic in places.
I think it’s a little contested but yes, I think overall GR is considered pomo. But “post-things” contain the thing they are “post” to…
Eric: an example of something I consider anti-modernist is Kathy Acker’s Pussycat Fever.
Some of the East Coast 70s and 80s punk scene was pretty postmodern due to the influence of pop art, but I think the kind of thing Acker was doing really is just opposed to the tradition.
Noah, do you know if Schrag was aware of Acker at all?
Alan Moore friends with Acker–unless I’m getting my research confused.
Non-sequitor…
Yes! Also with Neil Gaiman.
I don’t remember Schrag ever mentioning Kathy Acker. It’s possible that she knew about her, certainly, but she hasn’t come up as an influence.
I found Acker’s stuff mostly unreadable. I think it’s also odd that you argue for her as anti-modernist. The post-Burroughs collage thing…that’s out of dada and other art movements which certainly get included in some definitions of modernism, don’t they? Acker also builds on previous texts in a way that’s not miles away from Ulysses it seems like, in concept if not in execution.
Similarly, the very raw sketches in Likewise; it seems like that’s a modernist move in some ways, isn’t it?
Eric, there are certainly high-brow writerly journals. Schrag is coming out of teen-girl diaries, though — and that’s a pretty low-brow (or even no-brow) form of writing.
Wait, are we talking about Ariel Schrag’s comics here ? Really?
I don’t buy it for a second.
I think Noah is turning his fetish into a monument.
The phallic imagery…it cannot be escaped.
Burroughs’ cut-ups and Dada both feel anti-modernist to me, in their embrace of anarchy and disorder and epiphenomena. Didn’t Dada even have some explicit anti-modernism in their manifestos? (I’ll have to look that up.)
I’ll buy the criticism that I’m not rigorous enough about it, though — modernism is such an umbrella term, different in different genres, to no small extent tied as much to a historical moment as to some consistent philosophy, I have to check my work a lot.
I find Acker really hard slogging too, but her handmade books and zines were pretty cool.
I googled Ariel and “Diane DiMassa” who drew that Acker book I linked to, and they show up in a number of anthologies together, but that’s probably due to the queer interest rather than any more formalist connection.
Diane DiMassa is Hothead Paisan, right? That stuff is really funny.
I think it’s probably one of those “modernisms” rather than just “modernism” things.
There’s a modernism of control and a modernism of randomness, I think…which can map onto a modernism treating art as the construction of a sacred temple and modernism treating art as defilement of the temple. They’re opposed in a lot of ways, but united in being in the same temple.
One of the interesting things about the second part of Likewise is that Schrag is taking Joycean inspiration (use different modes to tell different parts of the story) but translates it into a modernism of randomness (relying on whatever happens to be recorded on tape, using unfinished sketches, etc.) It seems to me like a nice structural metaphor for the ways she is both attracted to and different from Joyce.
Dada can be defined as modernist temporally–but it’s effort to destroy high art/mass art distinction can be read as anti-modernist. This kind of problem is part of the reason why current modernist scholars prefer to talk about “modernisms”–since lots of things called modernist at various times work against each other in some ways–and so calling them all the same thing can be problematic. This also spawns distinctions between “high modernism” (Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence in Britain (and in literature)–Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Henry James (?), Gertrude Stein (?) in America (or hanging out in France and Spain, if you prefer))—and other kinds of modernism. This distinction too is problematic. These terms are mostly applied after the fact….while many of these figures did see each other as fellow travelers, they didn’t wear blue t-shirts that had a big “M” on them (like the Fantastic Four).
It mostly depends on which elements of texts/authors you want to emphasize. Burroughs, for instance, is someone I would see as more postmodern–but a case can be made that his cut-up technique isn’t really that different from Eliot’s Waste Land in form–etc. etc.
Eric — much better articulation of what I wanted to say. :-)
The proliferation of modernisms was just getting going full speed when I was in grad school back in the ’90s, and I was always very ambivalent about it: it’s obviously the only way out of a very totalizing narrative about modernism that doesn’t fit historical reality, but at the same time it is such a historicized approach that it makes it a little more difficult to talk about trends in ideas over time, throughout the century. Modernism wasn’t my period — I worked on the origins of post-modernism and the Beats, and it would have been so nice to have the tidy little boxes like “dada” and “futurist” that art history has to demarcate different strands of ideas. But it just doesn’t appear to work for literary modernism the way it does for art.
(I so now wanna read the Fantastic Four starring Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Lawrence.)
To be clear: the reason it’s an issue in literature is that modernist writers (of whatever subcategory) didn’t create those tidy boxes the way artists did. The terms themselves are historical in art history: “modernism” (which dates from 1929) is the only historical one we have in literature, and we’ve decided it’s insufficient. I think that’s unfortunate…
Noah said: “Ariel talks about the limits of graphic novels (and about her own ambition) explicitly — and the connection between not being a man and not being Joyce seems fairly central to the book.”
One of the things we haven’t really talked about is length – it came up in Suat’s post but kind of got dropped. I think, Noah, that although I agree with you on almost every point about what this book does, I also think that not every panel in the book directly serves that purpose. A lot of the panels are just for atmosphere or narrative, and that makes it less tight.
I think despite all the hullabaloo about modernism, that’s actually the real reason why it feels like juvenilia to me.
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.
As Caro can tell you, I have at least as much to say about “Gravity’s Rainbow” as I do about “Ulysses,” and I will go so far as to say that I am pretty familiar with it, but it’s off-topic.
I’ve responded to David’s last here.