Following links from Noah’s kickoff post through Matthias’ earlier essay on Asterios Polyp and on into the plethora of reviews gives a tour de force of puzzle-book annotation: Hellenistic references, astronomy, symmetry, architecture and fine art, the metaphorical/symbolic use of color and styles of linework, the yin-yang, and so forth. All of this clever, creative, and well-executed formalism works in the service of the book’s themes, which, the critics tell us, are myriad permutations on emotional naturalism and the limitations of duality – pretty much every duality you can think of.
What this emphasis on parsing the puzzle pieces and tracking the themes all adds up to is another tour-de-force: this time of modernist reading. Matthias sums up it up when he asserts, beautifully and certainly accurately, that the “graphic representation happens on a narrative level above that directly experienced by the characters, directing the reader’s understanding of their inner lives and states of mind.”
I’m going to pick on Matthias here, kindly I hope, because I found his essay to be far and away the most sophisticated and compelling articulation of this approach to interpreting Asterios Polyp — but it’s an approach that I find neither sophisticated nor compelling. With attribution to Bart Beaty (although Doug Wolk also makes the point), Matthias describes all this meaning-rich formalism as a “delayed Modernism,” and to some extent it is – particularly the Joycean puzzle-box elements and the self-conscious effort to push and expand the ways the form can make meaning. But for whatever motivation, this Modernism is small in a way that the more timely Modernisms of the early- to mid-20th century were not: it is primarily a modernism of technique rather than a modernism of ideas. Pound’s dictum of “Make it new!” finds its manifestation here not in new ideas about the world, but in new ways of representing and documenting old ideas about the world using the comics medium. Taking on the project of modernism 75 years after its time has passed is art in the defensive mode: starting from the assumption that comics has something to prove rather than something to offer.
I want to posit for the sake of argument that Asterios Polyp is in fact not a work of Modernist fiction that yields its greatest insights and makes its strongest contribution through this puzzle-box formalist reading but that it is a work of Postmodernist fiction that yields equally well to readings of its “deep structure.” This is, I think, somewhat inaccurate: Mazzucchelli clearly intended all those clever references and allusions and manipulations of formal elements, and it is unarguable that they form the most impressive and coherent texture of meaning in the book.
But there is content in the form overall: it’s apparent when we redirect the attention we’ve been paying to Asterios and Hana as archetypes of gendered characters and instead abstract them into archetypes of cultural genealogy and influence: the Hellenistic and the Japanese. The book works passably well – although it is difficult to knit all the elements in – as an allegory for the gradual shift of Western culture (particularly art culture) away from rigid Hellenism to incorporate the more fluid and holistic perspective of the East. Read diachronically, it is a representation of the history of this evolution across the 20th century; read synchronically, it depicts their aggregated and therefore simultaneous presense in contemporary art and culture. (This reading accounts for all those niggling elements that felt anachronistic, but renders many of the specifics of the formalism irrelevant.)
I’m going to pick on Matthias again – I think this is extremely literary. But I want to take a fairly passioned exception to the assumptions about literary meaning – and even to the definition of “literary” – implicit in sentences like this one: “A textbook example for the literary crowd if one is needed — and it might well be — that graphic novels are not, actually, novels with pictures in them.”
There are two obvious ways to respond to the contempt for the “literary crowd” that drips from this sentence. The first is to point out that any literary-minded person who has been paying attention to graphic novels enough to have an opinion at all by now should be fully aware of this fact. The second is to point out that the main reason why a literary-minded person who is paying attention would agree with the statement “graphic novels are not, actually, novels with pictures in them” is that graphic novels are not, yet, consistently rising to the level where a literary person would grant the appellation “novel.” (Asterios Polyp indeed comes closer than most.)
For “literary” people, “literary” entirely stopped denoting “tightly constructed narrative story” sometime between Joyce and Coover. The deconstruction of that idea, of the very concept of narrative coherence as a “literary” attribute, was the project and product of literary Modernism. Statements like these miss that entirely:
Furthermore, the centrality of autobiography as a genre to the development of the European comic book is almost by default primarily a literary achievement. And, almost without exception, the artists who have found greater audiences – the Satrapis, the Sfars and the Trondheims – work within relatively traditional visual idioms and privilege their storytelling over graphic experiments.
“The point being, firstly, that most of the visual innovators of the last couple of decades have primarily explored the already existing visual tropes and strategies of narrative cartooning, rather than go beyond them, and secondly, that they have predominantly done so in service of a tightly constructed, “literary” narrative.
Both the quotes and my stock responses reproduce a contrived and unnecessary distinction — even a hostility — between the literary and the visual. Both ignore the extent to which that binary – that particular binary – is not only just as false as any of the binaries in Asterios Polyp, but specifically, and inherently, and inescapably false in comics more than in any other medium. Claiming that comics are a visual medium and not also a literary one is not only misunderstanding what literature is after Modernism, it is using as the model for “art comics” a “formalism” more like what literature espoused before Modernism.
And that is the great failure of both this book and its critics: this subject matter and medium in the hands of our greatest literary figures would not be just a meditation on history or emotional naturalism or the limitations of binaries; it would be a performative enactment of the ways in which comics defies the binary between literary fiction and visual art. Cartooning by definition deconstructs its “constitutive binary logic.”
The formalist instantiation of that deconstruction is the great opportunity for “metafiction” that is missed here.
As Noah rightly pointed out, this book pays disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.” Neither Mazzucchelli nor his reviewers learned the book’s lesson – at least not as anything more than an aphorism. The result is the reiteration – on the level of performance if not assertion – of a hierarchical division between “the literary” and the “graphical”: a dichotomy that is aggressive and dismissive in precisely the same way as Asterios’ treatment of Hana. It is completely uninformed about how literary fiction works. It creates a destructive incoherence at the center of the book.
The “delayed Modernist” project in comics, especially insofar as it describes a formal project focused on making the medium’s visual components more fully saturated with meaningfulness, arrogantly rejects – against the spirit of Modernism – any exploration of the ways in which the experiments in prose conducted in literary modernism and postmodernism are applicable to the graphic form. This disciplinary prioritization of the visual is not delayed Modernism. It is delayed Enlightenment. But comics were always already postmodern. So this is also nostalgia, in academic’s clothing.
Comics rightly should stimulate conversation between the best of literary post/Modernism and the best of visual post/Modernism, with the aim of generating increasingly subtle and sophisticated hybrids and an increasingly subtle and sophisticated understanding of the possibilities and internal logics of those hybrids. For whatever reason – be it the technical demands of drawing, the training of art school, or just plain imaginative disposition – the dominant trend is to privilege and prioritise the “visual” over the “literary” – a category which critics and cartoonists seem incapable of understanding as anything other than a synonym for “well-wrought prose storytelling.” I hope comics won’t have to lose an eye before you figure out how stupid that is.
Note: updated for clarification June 6 1:20pm.
Update by Noah: You can read the entire Asterios Polyp roundtable here.
Update by Noah 6/20/10: This comments thread was damaged in a blog outage. I have manually restored the damage, but time stamps are off and one or two comments may be out of order. Please let me know in comments if you notice errors.
I appreciate that you have synced form and content by advocating for literariness and at the same time including no pictures. That gave me a chuckle….
I spent a couple of hours trying to draw diagrams for some of this and determined that I was illuminating nothing except my own inability to draw good diagrams. And I just didn’t bother to defend my own “postmodern” reading with evidentiary examples. So this can probably be attributed to incompetence and laziness rather than philosophy! But chuckle away…
To your main point; I’m not sure that I agree that the problem is too much focus on pictures and not enough on the literary. Rather, I think the problem really is form/content, for both art and writing. That is, the comics formal sophistication isn’t matched (in either art or writing) by a corresponding sophistication in theme or idea.
I think this is true even for your effort to make it about Western/Japanese art — you end up reading it as allegory, I think, right? Which seems like fairly simplistic content. A lot of it seems like that; more like one-to-one codes than like an actual integrated thematic whole.
I may try to do another post with examples to try to make that more clear if I can….
I think allegory is the best you can do at that level with this book. I did look for more; I wanted it to be there. But it’s not there. I think the allegory is really there — it’s not entirely formalist — but I completely agree with you that it’s simplistic content and one-to-one codes. I just think that simplicity is most obvious, though, when it’s contrasted against contemporary literary standards.
Or any literary standards, really. I edited this post to make the point that the model for the “visual” experimentation that’s getting praised as an antidote to “literariness” actually works awfully similarly to literature before Modernism. It’s not like literature has never mapped out one-to-one codes; reading Asterios Polyp is really more like reading Idylls of the King than it is like reading Joyce. And there’s nothing wrong with Idylls of the King, but it’s hardly Modernist.
It’s just obvious that although he’s looked at experimental pictures, he hasn’t read experimental prose, by which I don’t mean “non-trite stories”. And especially since his big theme is the limitations of binaries, the binary between pictures and prose stands out as a massive limitation. Isn’t modernism supposed to be about transcendence?
But I think Mazzucchelli is also a product of his culture: a big part of what goes awry in so many art comics with regards to “sophistication in theme or idea” starts with this contempt for “the literary” that just proliferates in some of the smartest comics criticism. It’s smart in every other way, but it reproduces this academic disciplinary binary between art and literature without even a bit of self-consciousness. And yet art and literature are not all that far apart. Even the academy is less rigid in this distinction than art comics culture.
It’s like there’s a willful ignorance of everything that literature has accomplished since Joyce on the grounds that pictures need defending from this awful “literariness” that overpowers comics as a “visual” medium. Except every time anybody talks about what that “literariness” is, it isn’t particularly literary at all…
I should say, Noah, I do think the synchronic reading isn’t allegory. But it also isn’t very strong and is still conceptually simple…
The thing is…contemporary art is often more complicated than this in its use of words and images too. I’m not enough of an expert to give a list of examples, unfortunately…but for example I think “Piss Christ” works with and against its title in layers of irony and not-irony in a way that is a lot more complicated than anything happening in AP. For that matter, classic zen ink drawings deal with the spaces and resonances between text and image in very subtle ways that could serve as a image-centered, non-literary model for greater complexity, but haven’t been taken up as of yet in that way as far as I’ve seen.
Or, somebody we’ve talked about before, Jeff Wall does really interesting things with narrative content, to take a contemporary Western model. Or even John Currin in some ways.
I guess I feel like you could as easily argue that the missing other here is contemporary art (rather than just illustration) as that it’s contemporary literature.
I don’t think it holds up superwell against Tennyson either, unfortunately…though one of the things I was thinking as I read this was that it was sort of too bad he didn’t just illustrate a pre-existing story in some sense — a fairy tale or a myth. He does do that in the Orpheus section, of course, which is lovely — but unfortunately his alterations of the myth are both predictable and staid, and serve (in my view) to undercut the magic by turning it into a familiar domestic drama, rather than (as I think its supposed to) elevate the domestic drama through the use of magic.
What I’m arguing is that the missing other here is BOTH contemporary art and literature.
I don’t mean to exclude contemporary art; I did include it in the first sentence of the last paragraph! — but I just don’t buy this idea that comics are visual art and not literature. Comics are both visual art and literature. And despite the incredibly common myth that comics are currently better at being literature than they are at being visual art (which seems to be based on the fact that most comics CRITICS/academics come from literature), comics are actually better at being visual art than at being literature.
That would be the impressive “next step forward,” not just to get the kinds of insights and games you see in contemporary art into comics or to get the kind of insights and games you see in contemporary fiction into comics, but to ask, through comics, what contemporary fiction has to say about contemporary art and vice versa, and allow the overlap to re-inform the very idea of what a comic is. That’s what “formalist experimentation” in modernism meant — not figuring out how to get a code into a picture or a sentence.
But instead, we get binaries: it’s not literary; it’s a comic!
The real author of the concept of modernism in comics is Jan Baetens. It was in _Frigobox_ # 5 (December, 1995: 31 – 37) that Jan Baetens published his essay “Autarcic Comix” (an European alternative comics convention: Brussels, October 6 – 8, 1995) where he noted: “Autarcic Comics […] is not postmodern. Conversely it is – and that alone is an event – an aspiration that’s decidedly modern.”
Here’s one of his essays about modernism:
http://tinyurl.com/3yj8lyf
The comics milieu was always two things (and I’m not excluding any other characteristics): 1) furiously anti-intellectual; 2) image-centric. I don’t see why would David Mazzucchelli be any different. It’s the tradition.
One of the things that I don’t understand is why do people count words in comics? To them, if the panel has too many words it’s not a comic (and I hope that no one asks me who are “them;” I read this in many comics theory books, but I’m too lazy to search for them, sorry…). I love Lynda Barry’s work and it would never cross my mind to count how many words she writes in every caption (she writes plenty most of the times; in _Raw_ Art Spiegelman asked her not too; see what I mean?).
Domingos, I love Baetens’ neologism for how postmodernism troubles the Modernist “purity of the media” into a mediasphere. That’s what I would love to see, a mediasphere of art comics “in which the distinction between practices is no longer determined by the dispatching and grouping of technical parameters, but by the way these parameters are logically used.”
He is talking about scholarship on Modernism but it surely also applies to imagining art as well. But it’s only possible if that anti-intellectualism goes away first, because the idea that literature is a logic rather than a practice or a “medium” is very intellectual. But it is such a wonderful way to think about literature!
I’ve seen that business about too many words in comics too. Is Diary of a Teenage Girl not a comic because it has extended prose passages? Surely Fate of the Artist is a comic. And I feel completely comfortable calling W the Whore Makes Her Tracks literature — of the highest order — despite it having very few words at all.
I don’t disagree, that would be great, but you seem to imply that comics are words and pictures together. I don’t buy that. I don’t buy any other definition either…
Is that last for me, Domingos? Because of the phrase about “visual art and literature”? That doesn’t mean “words and pictures” — I really resist the idea that literature is made of words (and also I suppose the idea that pictures are not made of words in the same way that all things are texts.)
That’s what bothers me most about the way Matthias uses the word. (I’m sorry, Matthias, for picking on you! I really like your essay a lot!)
Literature is not prose or story. It is a register, a cluster of ways of making sense and making meaning that makes sense (or that meaningfully makes non-sense). It is a register that is almost always associated with words, but “word-thing” is not any sort of essence of literature to me. It is more “thing, often with words.” Or like Baetens says “a way that parameters are logically used.” The parameters are usually words, but that is just the “dispatch.” Once literature means how the parameter is used it can be made of anything.
I would presume that would also work for visual art as well…although does the discipline of art have a word equivalent to “literature” that we can muddy up that way?
Caro: Thanks for the clarication.
Isn’t the concept of art muddied enough already?
This is art (by Robert Barry):
http://tinyurl.com/3y28d63
Caroline, I was nodding in agreement all through your piece and then was pleasantly surprised to see my own little book get a mention.
Here’s a thing that is perhaps related tangentially to the argument vis-a-vis “the dominant trend is to privilege and prioritise the “visual” over the “literary”. In an interview I did a few days ago the interviewer used the phrase ‘mere illustration.” I take it to mean that the artist is allowing his drawing to be subservient to the written word. But when did illustration become ‘mere’? I’m lifting Walt Reed’s The Illustrator in America 1860-2000 from my shelf and scanning the cavalcade of great men and women in its pages. All of these great artists are adding pictures to a pre-existing text but none of them look to me like they are in a position of subservience. What happened?
Hi Eddie. Thanks for stopping by.
I think the point you make is why it feels odd to me to say, as Caro does, that the visual is privileged over the literary. In AP, the reason it can feel (at least to me) too straightforward is that the narrative seems so fixedly primary. That is, the formal elements are so tied to particular narrative devices. Colors illustrating emotion; balloons showing the character of individuals. It does feel like *mere* illustration, in that the point seems to be to find a visual analog to go along with the story or sequence. The text talks to the illustrations, but the illustrations don’t talk back to the text (at least form my perspective.)
Another counter-example would be Beardsley — whose illustrations not only elaborated, but also undermined, unearthed subtexts, satirized, and generally wrestled enthusiastically for dominance with the texts he was illustrating. A more modern counter-example (which will give Suat conniptions) is, I’d argue, Ariel Schrag, who uses different styles to comment on, undermine, or complicate meanings in her book.
Schrag’s interesting too because the more complicated relationship between text and art comes out of a thoroughgoing engagement with literary modernism — which puts us back in sync with Caro’s point.
Noah: I don’t see why you call balloons and colors “visual analogs.” Balloons and colors *are* the narrative as much as words.
I think they can be…and always are in some sense. I don’t think they’re treated that way in AP, though.
With regard to ‘literary’. I said this elsewhere in a different argument, but it’s relevant here. When Will Eisner pitched the concept of the ‘graphic novel’, size wasn’t the thing he was reaching for, that was incidental, but rather literariness. In wanting to make comics ‘literary’ he aimed for being taken seriously by an adult readership and having an extended life on the shelf. If readers argued that Contract with God wasn’t technically a novel but a suite of short stories, they had missed the point. The point is that it was literary, as a novel is literary (not that it was 70,000 words long like a novel). The problem, if there is one, is that Eisner’s concept of literary ran from Ring Lardner to Booth Tarkington. Nothing wrong with that except he could have done his thing in the 1930s instead of the 1980s. Literary had moved on in the meantime. When Caro writes “Literature is not prose or story. It is a register…” Will would certainly have been baffled. But when our medium (and its aspirations to be literary) is discussed, Will’s work tends to be the one of the first things put forward in evidence. The problem is that on the whole the spokespeople for comics at best can’t really tell the difference and at worst are complete nitwits.
(sigh… when I write words like the last ones I always shudder in anxiety as I picture Dirk putting them at the top of his next day’s column)
Probably the first thing that comes up these days when comics literariness is put forward is Maus, yes?
Maus is certainly aware of 1980s literary fiction, post-modern storytelling techniques, etc. And it uses the history of the medium in a self-reflexive way (funny animals, etc.) To me, it still feels like AP though in that the images seem “merely” illustrational and the effects produced between words and images kind of simplistic. When Spiegelman does question or confront the use of mice, distance from reality, etc., it seems really heavy-handed and dumb compared to, say, the way metaphor and image are dealt with in Wallace Stevens (who is maybe cruel to bring in…and yet isn’t Spiegelman as lauded in his field as Stevens is in his?)
I don’t know; have you read Maus, Caro? Do you think it has similar problems to AP, or does it navigate these issues better?
Noah: “I think “Piss Christ” works with and against its title in layers of irony and not-irony in a way that is a lot more complicated than anything happening in AP.”
God protect us from the banality of works like “Piss Christ”. I hope that won’t be the gold standard by which comics will be judged in the future.
I think I see what you’re getting at here Caro and it is, arguably, a noble goal for comics to aim to “stimulate conversation between the best of literary post/Modernism and the best of visual post/Modernism, with the aim of generating increasingly subtle and sophisticated hybrid”. The problem is that most cartoonist don’t see this as of primary importance. Rather they see comics as an art in itself with a sea of possibilities and peculiarities (largely intrinsic and restricted to the form and only occasionally a subset of such hybridizations) not yet imagined by writers and artists. What hybridizations exist still stem largely from the basic building blocks of language and art. A melding of already complex idea and forms (both from literature and art) might result in a barely readable and commercially unviable bastardization; a problem for cartoonists to solve over the course of time but not one which has an immediate priority in an artistic climate of slow but methodical education and progress, and a world governed by mammon. In like manner, one might also ask why there is so little interest in the film arts (comics closest cousin when it comes to such hybridizations) with such effects. They do exist of course but I imagine they constitute the tiniest fraction of the output of the industry with an equally small number (Resnais, Brakhage, Cocteau et al.) figuring on any “best of” list. As for:
“not just to get the kinds of insights and games you see in contemporary art into comics or to get the kind of insights and games you see in contemporary fiction into comics, but to ask, through comics, what contemporary fiction has to say about contemporary art and vice versa, and allow the overlap to re-inform the very idea of what a comic is.”
I think you might find more of this in European comics – maybe Domingos or Matthias can help us out here. Perhaps the works of Martin Vaughn-James, Martin tom Dieck etc. …?
I’m with Noah when he says that the most pressing problem for comics at present is “form/content, for both art and writing. That is, the comics formal sophistication isn’t matched (in either art or writing) by a corresponding sophistication in theme or idea.”
I’m not Caro but I suspect that Maus doesn’t quite attain the ideals she is looking for. It’s a crucial first step for comics and certainly superior to AP but it’s not high art by any stretch of the imagination.
Noah, the book that navigates these issues better really is The Fate of the Artist. Just as an example, the conceit (quoted from the inside cover) is “the author will conduct an investigation into his own sudden disappearance,” which I read as a deliciously witty transposition — into detective fiction! after a fashion…— of author theory and autobiography theory. I can’t even see the name Roland Barthes now without smiling and thinking of Eddie Campbell. And that’s only about 1/100th of the total smart-stuff in there, yet throughout the narrative is very alive and engaging; it isn’t stiff or academic. The images are semiotically rich and emotionally compelling, and they are holding hands and skipping with the words. There’s no hierarchy or competition or sense of subordination at all — it is entirely of a piece. It’s really an extraordinary book.
Thank you for making it, Eddie! It was the first graphic novel I read all the way through – it was the first comic I read all the way through – and when my friend Chris gave it to me he said “if you want to be convinced that comics can do and say as much as the prose you like, you need to read this.” It’s funny and smart and really really satisfying.
I had to read part of Maus in grad school; I read the required excerpt and surfed through the rest without really “reading.” My general sense is that I’d agree with you that the effects are simplistic. I certainly don’t think of Art Spiegelman every time I see the name Hitler. (Actually, I think of Dylan Moran, which is probably a coping mechanism.)
I want to clear up what may be a slight misunderstanding, Noah: In Asterios Polyp, I do think the visual gets more attention than the “literary,” but I think you made that point sufficiently well in your essay. What’s important to me is attributing this limitation to that “trend” that says that too much literariness reduces the pictures to “mere illustration” (and assorted variations on that theme). The trend pre-exists its manifestation in Asterios Polyp. I don’t know that this “lets Mazzucchelli off the hook” necessarily, but I think it’s worth noticing, as Domingos points out, that he is working in a culture that encourages this kind of unbalanced image-centrism and that is often wilfully anti-intellectual when it comes to ideas and techniques and insights that are native to literature. Literature is often devalued and disrespected, reduced to the technical elements of “well-wrought prose.” I don’t know the answer to Eddie’s question about what happened to cause that idea to become so powerful but I’d also very much like to know. Domingos seems to think it’s been around long enough to be a “tradition.”
“…when comics literariness is put forward is Maus, yes?
Maus is certainly aware of 1980s literary fiction, post-modern storytelling techniques, etc. And it uses the history of the medium in a self-reflexive way”
There’s a danger of thinking about literariness as something happening elsewhere or in a mainstream that you have to nod to. Eisner shows his age in having a restricting sense of the difference between high and low culture. When he tried to write poetry he would pull out phrases like ‘vernal equinox’. I wonder if anyone ever said, “you don’t need to do that, Will… the Spirit story ‘ten minutes’ is a fine urban poem of its time.”
It took a lot of work on Spiegelman’s part to drain those mice of everything extraneous to his purpose (compare the older version of the Maus idea) including anything playful or anything that could be interpreted as ‘style’. having conceived the whole structure of the book it was then necessary to simply put the players on the page and make them speak their parts without interruption or deviation. When you look at the variety and formal cleverness of all the other work Spiegelmaus has done, you can imagine that wasn’t easy. I’m wary of a custom in some comics enthusiasts of looking for effects between pictures and words. It’s not always what the work is or should be about.
Suat, this is a lovely articulation:
Rather they see comics as an art in itself with a sea of possibilities and peculiarities (largely intrinsic and restricted to the form and only occasionally a subset of such hybridizations) not yet imagined by writers and artists.
If they are peculiar to comics then it is unsurprising that writers and artists wouldn’t have imagined them, but what is an example of this that isn’t mere technique? Our present example is leaning very heavily on writing, and we all seem to be in agreement that it’s pretty conventional and banal writing.
I am all for experimental comics narrative that fulfills the project you articulate. I just haven’t seen a lot of it, and I’m extraordinarily skeptical of the notion that comics are somehow fully dissociated from visual art and literature, when visual art and literature represent such powerful and basic human impulses. Setting comics entirely apart from them makes it an alien art form.
I’m fascinated by the possibility of that, but usually I just see books that don’t quite even get to hybrid…
might result in a barely readable and commercially unviable bastardization
As barely unreadable and commercially unviable as, perhaps, Ulysses? (wink)
I meant to ask Domingos earlier whether his description of this “anti-intellectual, image-centric” tradition applied to European comics as well. Domingos, help us out?
while I was writing my comment, Caro was flattering me in hers. Thanks muchly. I’ll slink off now before I ruin it by showing what a clot i really am…..
It’s not flattery if it’s true! I just want everybody to read the book.
I’m very keen on this observation:
There’s a danger of thinking about literariness as something happening elsewhere or in a mainstream that you have to nod to.
It has two facets: one is Suat’s idea of a literariness “native” to comics, and the other is the idea that comics inhabit the same country as literature — they are not “elsewhere” to begin with. I don’t see these as counter to each other. Being in conversation with other art forms and aware of and interested in their “literariness” doesn’t somehow transmogrify comics into something unnatural or dishonest. Suat, I think that’s the error I see in this idea that comics are an “art in itself.” Nothing is an art in itself…
W the Whore Makes Her Tracks is also an example, Noah. I’d also put it forward before Maus. It’s sparse on words, but gloriously sophisticated conceptually, and definitely in conversation with things important to Matthias’ “literary crowd.”
I think Maus still comes up just because it’s so widely recognized among book folk and because Spiegelman has made such a conscientious and tireless effort to be an advocate and spokesperson for comics to anybody who reads. The simplicity of its themes are double-edged: it is highly accessible to people who are scared of comics, but it doesn’t demonstrate how much of an intellectual thrill ride a comic can be.
“Suat, I think that’s the error I see in this idea that comics are an “art in itself.” Nothing is an art in itself…”
ah-hah!
indeed.
(I’ve attempted elsewhere to address this one. Along the lines of ‘why do we have to declare the objects of our enthusiasm to be art-forms?”)
Hi Caroline—
You know how much I’ve appreciated some of your earlier pieces, so perhaps you’ll forgive me when I say I find your argument here a bit bizarre. Not that I disagree with the conclusions, especially as to the value of both book and criticism, but some of the argumentation you deploy and the assumptions you seem to make in the process I think may need a bit of clarification. I am referring specifically to your conclusion as to what the book should or should not have done, as well as to your deployment of the Modernist/Postmodernist dichotomy.
You write:
“And that is the great failure of both this book and its critics: this subject matter and medium in the hands of our greatest literary figures would not be just a meditation on history or emotional naturalism or the limitations of binaries; it would be a performative enactment of the ways in which comics defies the binary between literary fiction and visual art. Cartooning by definition deconstructs its “constitutive binary logic.”//The formalist instantiation of that deconstruction is the great opportunity for “metafiction” that is missed here.”
To begin with, that reference to “our greatest literary figures” makes me uneasy: why criticize this one *specific* book for failing to do what some (generalized, unspecific) “greatest literary figures” *might* have done? You are building some unattainable, Platonic ideal of a perfect “literary” achievement in comics, against which (as tends to be the case with all Platonic ideals) no single work can measure. Already that seems like a strange way to define the failure of a single artwork (by that measure, *all* artworks are failures). Moreover, though, it seems to me rather to imply a measuring up of the entire medium of comics against the medium of, ahem, “literary fiction” (sorry, I hate that term, it’s basically a marketing category… But I digress), and finding that it comes up short. I don’t see any other reason to expect a single, finite work to have undertaken a deconstruction of the medium, and then to fault it for not having fulfilled your agenda. Rather, the implication seems to be that, if this vaunted work is the best that the medium of comics has to offer, just see how much better literature is than it. This goes hand in hand with the strange assumption that “our greatest literary figures” would have any competency in handling this medium if it were put in their hands. From everything that I’ve seen so far, novelists who attempt to write comics tend to have no knowledge of the mechanics of comics writing, and, even when ultimately they prove competent at it (usually after more than one try), they have little understanding of the complete mode of signification of the medium, and so the resulting comics tend to be straightforward illustrated narrative with no hint of the Modernist/Postmodernist exploration you are interested in.
In any case—“the formalist instantiation of that deconstruction” that you are looking for has already been performed in the medium—I would suggest (as Suat already has), in the work of Martin Vaughn-James, most obviously. I have argued elsewhere that MVJ’s work is particularly literary, coming not from the “nouveau roman,” as conventional wisdom has it, but from the “roman textuel” of the late ‘sixties; and yet he was a painter, primarily. I think you would find in his work a perfect example of the way the complex achievements of literary Post/modernism can be taken over and subsumed into the development of “experimental” comics. Perhaps not as concertedly, similar developments can be found in the work of John Hankiewicz (I would suggest, especially, “Tepid” summer 2001 and 2003), Gary Panter, Kevin Huizenga (his earlier stuff especially), Pushwagner, parts of Spiegelman’s “Breakdowns,” etc etc.
All right, this is getting too long. I’ll have to discuss the Mo/PoMo thing another time.
Noah, Hi!
Suat, “this is the project of adolescence” – pace, but when’s the kid leaving home and getting a job?
Domingos, old friend, I hope we’re not going to get into one of those blistering arguments that we used to have ten years ago on the TCJ board with Scott McCloud.
I’m leaving it to Andrei.
Oh, I don’t disagree and I do believe that many thinking cartoonists in their heart of hearts would agree with Caro and Eddie as well. But this is the project of adolescence (the stage at which comics are) – the assertion, however false or important, of individuality and uniqueness.
Eddie (hi!, how are you my friend!, glad to “see you” around!): “Ten Minutes” was written by Jules Feiffer. I think that Gary Groth warned Will Eisner in an article that, as usual with Gary’s best pieces, pissed everybody off (Will included). To be right before your own time is never a great thing.
As for Art Spiegelman, he has pretty sophisticated things in _Breakdowns_. But maybe he thought that the autobio needed a more straightforward approach?
Caro: yes, the European tradition is not very different from the American one. But when I say image-centric I mean 19th century Academic art-centric, not avant-garde-centric. I mean Hal Foster and Frank Frazetta and (at best) Moebius and Bilal. Japanese comics complicated things on both sides of the Atlantic, I guess, but I’m out of my turf, there… This doesn’t mean that caricature people like Charles Schulz or Hergé aren’t admired also. Or Jack Kirby, by the way… The only real links that I can think of with the avant-garde are Lyonel Feininger, Cliff Sterrett and Geo Herriman.
“God protect us from the banality of works like “Piss Christ”. I hope that won’t be the gold standard by which comics will be judged in the future.”
Ah, well. I think Piss Christ is a lovely and moving piece — though lots of people disagree obviously. I make an argument for it here for what that’s worth.
Suat’s noted before that comics is an adolescent medium — but it’s not really clear to me why it should be. It’s not significantly younger than film is it? And movies don’t seem adolescent in artistic accomplishment, and they have a more sophisticated critical tradition. As Eddie suggests, I think the “it’s just adolescence, it will pass” argument starts to seem like special pleading at some point.
“I think Maus still comes up just because it’s so widely recognized among book folk and because Spiegelman has made such a conscientious and tireless effort to be an advocate and spokesperson for comics to anybody who reads.”
I think that’s right…but I dont’ think it’s a “just.” Artistic mediums are permeable, as you and Eddie say, but they’re also formed in large part by their specific histories. Maus’ success means that it sets the standard in many ways for how image/text work together, what counts as “literary” in comics, what sorts of concerns are important, and on and on. I think there is actually a connection between how Eisner approaches making a literary comic (as Eddie implies, with anxiety and a certain cluelessness) and how Spiegelman does (with less cluelessness, but I think still with a certain anxiety.)
Which is to say…I think using a metaphor of human life-stages is probably less useful than looking at particular historical choices if you want to know why comics in the U.S. are where they are.
“I want to clear up what may be a slight misunderstanding, Noah: In Asterios Polyp, I do think the visual gets more attention than the “literary,” but I think you made that point sufficiently well in your essay. What’s important to me is attributing this limitation to that “trend” that says that too much literariness reduces the pictures to “mere illustration” (and assorted variations on that theme). ”
Ah. Yes, I kind of think the inverse of this; that the eschewal of thematic complexity ends up treating the pictures as mere illustration of narrative, rather than synthesizing the two.
I think manga is actually better than doing this…often not through literariness, though, but rather through more developed genre and or formal conventions for the art. You can get bored by shojo conventions…but you have to admit that they’re a developed part of the genre, in a way that doesn’t really exist in Western comics in terms of the art. Part of the reason super-hero art is such a mess often is precisely because the genre defines itself by the story rather than by the art, which means the art ends up being illustrational rather than integrated into the narrative conceptually.
From a more art perspective — Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel is actually a book that is a lot like AP in that it’s obsessed with form and is wittily sophisticated. It’s much more willing to have the narrative be the images, and vice versa though — especially since it’s wordless (sort of — there are annotations which are important to the overall effect, I think.) It’s also a very surfacey book, but the surface is much more suggestive. It’s working off a pomo tradition that includes folks like PKD and Murakami — but it uses those influences in an entirely comics way that, for example, doesn’t rely on novelistic characters. It’s much less anxious about it’s status as literary (or art) than I think an American comic would be.
In that vein: part of the reason I don’t see AP as rejecting literariness is a lot of the problems with its narrative are about asserting literariness by embracing tropes from the genre of literary fiction.
“Suat’s noted before that comics is an adolescent medium — but it’s not really clear to me why it should be. It’s not significantly younger than film is it?”
It’s not an excuse but a diagnosis, one which has nothing to do with chronological age. I think we can still see its main practitioners struggling with the medium in a way you don’t find in film. And the above discussion would suggest that comics critics are still wrestling with some very basic issues concerning the form.
It’s well known that comics have suffered from a kind of developmental delay (the reasons for this abound but there’s little point in dwelling on them). I think we’ve see some progress in comics over the last 50 years and this should give us reason to hope that there will be more changes in the decades to come. Still, it’s entirely possible that this is as good as it gets.
Andrei: from some of this it looks like my prose just wasn’t up to the task. It’s entirely possible we’ll still disagree or that I’ll have to make a correction but let me start by just stepping through the clarifications and seeing where that gets us.
your deployment of the Modernist/Postmodernist dichotomy.
I know you didn’t get into this below but let me affirm that from my own perspective they’re not two separate things, which is why I used the phrasing post/Modernist at the end. What I was trying to get at is that the “delayed Modernism” isn’t informed by “postmodernism.” I don’t know if that’s deliberate; I’m imagining it’s a function of that “comics are art in itself” approach Suat described.
To begin with, that reference to “our greatest literary figures” makes me uneasy: why criticize this one *specific* book for failing to do what some (generalized, unspecific) “greatest literary figures” *might* have done?
That “greatest literary” phrasing was meant to hark back to the idea that “literature” has ideas to offer to comics even though it’s made of words, and how you’d get a different outcome from an author steeped in the literary tradition, which is what’s missing from so many of the books that take this “delayed Modernist” approach to making comics. It wasn’t meant to scoff “any decent writer could have done this better.” (Oh lord no.)
There’s that idea of the “pure form” of the media in Modernism – I think Jan Baetens talks about it in the essay Domingos sent us – and since comics has decided that the pure media here is “comics,” so that the touchpoint/tradition is the history of cartooning (and whatever visual art, I guess, has precendents in the history of cartooning). So there is a choice or a refusal – I don’t think I can speak to the motivation – not to be steeped in literature. That affects the choices available to these writers when they craft the structure of their works. To a “great literary figure,” meaning an abstract person who had been steeped in literature, I think this particular, specific metafictional element would have been less likely to slip by.
It’s not meant to be a Platonic ideal, although I can see how it kind of is. But it’s meant to point out a specific thing that this book overlooked because the author wasn’t looking at the book with this particular set of background.
I don’t see any other reason to expect a single, finite work to have undertaken a deconstruction of the medium, and then to fault it for not having fulfilled your agenda. Rather, the implication seems to be that, if this vaunted work is the best that the medium of comics has to offer, just see how much better literature is than it.
I think we might disagree here: I think that the a touch of “deconstruction of the medium” is something that I always check for in contemporary fiction. Well, maybe deconstruction is too loaded of a word: just more a self-awareness of how and whether the materiality and history of the medium resonate or compete against the central theme of the narrative, and some effort to document that self-awareness in the work. The “self-consciousness” of literary postmodernism is one of those things Mazzucchelli seems unaware of, due to his not paying attention to literature. Especially in a book so concerned with history and the materiality of the medium as this one, that seems a serious oversight. It really does weaken the book significantly for me.
This goes hand in hand with the strange assumption that “our greatest literary figures” would have any competency in handling this medium if it were put in their hands.
Right, that would be a very strange assumption. It’s not what I mean. Does the paragraph above help clear it up? What’s bugging me about Asterios Polyp is that it is appears uninformed about literature since – to kind of shoot buckshot here –, say 1955, and I’m blaming that particular skew in his perspective for a lot of the things that Noah and I didn’t like about the book. I can just reiterate that I don’t think any actually existing “great literary figure” would have done any better: they likely would have messed up the comics far more than Mazzucchelli messed up the fiction. (Maybe not Dos Passos!)
Andrei, two more quick things:
What I was trying to get at is that the “delayed Modernism” isn’t informed by “postmodernism.”
This, specifically in Baetens’ sense: “Studies on Modernism in (European) literature have many things in common, but their most distinctive common feature is probably this: in almost all cases, Modernism is studied as if Postmodernism had never taken place; as if, in other words, it were possible to look at the former from a vantage point somehow unaffected by the latter.”
That’s why I brought up Latour. There is a “false purification” going on when this stream of binaries is invoked: postmodernism/Modernism; art/literature, etc.
Given that an important theme of AP is the limitations of binaries, the uncritical metadiscursive instantiation of these two binaries is problematic.
Also, I didn’t say it above but the “greatest literary” phrasing is obviously just bad. What I said had nothing to do with what I meant. I’ll leave it given our discussion in comments, but the correction is taken. Don’t know what I was thinking.
Very interesting piece, Caro! Sorry to join the conversation so late. I agree wholeheartedly with your basic point that comics should avoid falling pray to the false binary you describe, even if I’m less enthusiastic about your wish for comics to address issues in visual art and literature — the medium primary goal should not be metadiscourse, even if that is more or less what I perceive Asterios Polyp to be.
But more on that and some of the other issues you raise in my post tomorrow — I want to address a few tangential points here:
I don’t buy your claim that comics have somehow paid “disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.” That’s an extremely literary take on things, the problems of which are compounded by the notion that comics, or indeed any form that incorporates both text and images, is somehow “hybrid” — art and literature has done this since antiquity; it is only in the (early) modern era that the two were sundered in high culture.
Comics and cartooning as we know them are as popular/mass medium that evolved in a low culture context where such integration was less problematic, and they developed their own vocabulary and conventions through the modern era, occasionally achieving great things on their own premises. This is what Mazzucchelli is addressing, and it is what we should be addressing first when critiquing comics and cartoons, instead of exerting that they “consistently [rise] to the level where a literary person would grant the appellation “novel.” (I should add that if one comes at comics from a high art perspective, they come up short in very similar ways).
Don’t get me wrong, I welcome the developments in comics that seem to be integrating into their vocabulary insights gained previously in literature, just as I am excited about new approaches to rendering comics that expand their field of expression into domains traditionally occupied by high art. And I do agree that there’s a palpable anti-intellectualism and anti-snobbism to much of comics fandom and even criticism.
When I wrote disparagingly about the ‘literary crowd’ however, I was objecting precisely to the tendency to view comics as an incomplete form of literature that should somehow live up to the achievements of the great novels of yesteryear to be taken seriously.
I was objecting to the tendency by publishers jumping on the graphic novel bandwagon to publish comics that seem more like storyboards than comics, illustrating some “serious” story that would have been served better by straight prose (oh, and just to make things clear: I don’t regard illustration as “mere”, but it shouldn’t be a commercial afterthought either, at least not if you want a compelling result).
And I was objecting to the tendency in comics criticism to do the exact opposite of what you suggest to be the case: privileging the elements that are closest to literature as traditionally understood and addressing the “art” merely as “visual analogs”, to take Noah’s formulation, to the story elements — as Domingos says, the art *is* the work as much as the text. We really need to develop a more sophisticated vocabulary for talking about this, as Suat also suggests.
And before anybody pulls out that quote from my review of Bart Beaty’s Unpopular Comics again, I should add that it’s taken out of a specific context, where I was addressing Bart’s claim that the new wave of European comics has been primarily an achievement in the visual domain. Beaty brought up the binary and I felt it needed to be addressed, since I see the importance of that particular development in comics primarily to be the articulation in comics form of insights learned from literature written in words, rather than from visual art.
Let me say first before getting into Matthias’ comment that I think it’s worth noting that film has had a series of extremely intellectual practitioners, many of them in France – starting with the surrealists and moving through the New Wave. The surrealists were legitimately “avant-garde” and the New Wave was highly engaged with the intellectual debates of the 1960s. Comics does not have an intellectual genealogy that’s precisely comparable.
the medium primary goal should not be metadiscourse, even if that is more or less what I perceive Asterios Polyp to be.
I’m hesitant to respond to this because I feel like we tend to fall into extremes: but…I think metadiscourse is something that any ambitious work of art in 2010 needs to be attentive to. It doesn’t mean that the outcome of all creative endeavor is to create a “work of metadiscourse.” But there’s a difference between making something the point of your book and demonstrating that you understand it. Jonathan Lethem’s books are not “metadiscourses.” But when it matters, where it is relevant, it is obvious that he gets it. I don’t feel comfortable letting cartoonists off the hook for that. I don’t feel comfortable letting painters off the hook for that. I don’t feel comfortable letting filmmakers off the hook for that. The artistic conversation around metadiscourse was a significant achievement of the late 20th century. Ignoring it just bothers me.
I don’t buy your claim that comics have somehow paid “disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.” That’s an extremely literary take on things, the problems of which are compounded by the notion that comics, or indeed any form that incorporates both text and images, is somehow “hybrid” — art and literature has done this since antiquity; it is only in the (early) modern era that the two were sundered in high culture.
I don’t entirely understand why you think this is a literary assertion. Does it help if I get theoretical and say that “hybrid” here is in Latour’s sense – I think he agrees with the idea that the hybrids predated the purification out into their constituent parts. But I think the experience of Asterios Polyp is one of a strong distinction between the “literary” elements and the “visual” elements. That binary is instantiated in this book. The point of my critique is that it is an immensely outdated binary and that I can’t believe it’s actually in play here. It is not an inherent binary: it is not operable at all in Fate of the Artist. But I would consider Fate of the Artist to be far more “literary” than Asterios Polyp. Maybe here is where we are miscommunicating…
When you use the word “literary” it feels like a dirty word. But then the elements you pinpoint as “literary” don’t feel literary to me: the feel like things fiction hasn’t prioritized since the 19th and very early 20th centuries. Although there’s obviously a plethora of other issues here, there’s something awry there that I can’t put my finger on.
Comics and cartooning as we know them are as popular/mass medium that evolved in a low culture context where such integration was less problematic,
!!!!! Literature wouldn’t have considered the integration of multiple media a problem since, well, I could argue for John Dos Passos, but probably William Burroughs. They weren’t particularly good at it, especially by today’s standards, but there is absolutely nothing in the way literary people think about literature that makes this integration problematic. I mean, ads and music videos can be literature. Maybe fine art had bigger issues with this, but getting rid of the notion that literature is about words is really important. Literature is not an “art form” – it’s a register. I jokingly said in the car this morning that it’s “anything that’s semiotically rich and has a spine.” (Which actually means that Andrei is literature. )
and they developed their own vocabulary and conventions through the modern era, occasionally achieving great things on their own premises. This is what Mazzucchelli is addressing, and it is what we should be addressing first when critiquing comics and cartoons, instead of exerting that they “consistently [rise] to the level where a literary person would grant the appellation “novel.” (I should add that if one comes at comics from a high art perspective, they come up short in very similar ways).
I’m not sure how to get into this: I mean, you could say much of this about science fiction too. But there is still Sam Delany, demanding of both science fiction and literature that the divide between high and low be reconfigured. This doesn’t seem like an excuse to me. The history of comics as a “low” medium doesn’t seem like the ground on which you want to build the identity of “comics.”
That’s setting up that “art in the defensive mode” I complained about in the original piece. The Baetens article Domingos sent speaks to that as well with regards to the idea that you can’t take history on its own terms…
When I wrote disparagingly about the ‘literary crowd’ however, I was objecting precisely to the tendency to view comics as an incomplete form of literature that should somehow live up to the achievements of the great novels of yesteryear to be taken seriously.
I think this gets back to your very strict discipinary sense of what “literature” is. Literary people and high art people talk about the same things right now, and we largely have done so since the 1960s. This is especially true for literary people influenced by French theory. Obviously we come at these issues from different perspectives, but we’re having the same conversation (or at least we’re all at the same cocktail party.) Comics like Asterios Polyp seem unaware of this conversation. From my perspective, it’s the cartoonists who are insisting on this distinction between literature and art. Fine artists talk about the things I consider to be literary. Cartoonists don’t. At least, they do it less than they do this other thing. Tom Kaczynski does it; Austin English does; Feuchtenberger and Cambpell we’ve already mentioned…it’s a trend, not a universal. But it’s a trend in cartooning, not a trend in literature or art.
And I was objecting to the tendency in comics criticism to do the exact opposite of what you suggest to be the case: privileging the elements that are closest to literature as traditionally understood and addressing the “art” merely as “visual analogs”, to take Noah’s formulation, to the story elements — as Domingos says, the art *is* the work as much as the text. We really need to develop a more sophisticated vocabulary for talking about this, as Suat also suggests.
But theory already has ways of talking about this that cartoonists aren’t drawing on as the starting place for their own efforts. Think about how often somebody talks about Thierry Groensteen relative to Scott McCloud.
the articulation in comics form of insights learned from literature written in words, rather than from visual art.
It’s just really difficult for me to see how you get here. From my literary perspective, comics overall hasn’t incorporated the insights from literature written in words from the last 75 years. There are a handful of gems that have done so — and pushed the discourse in new ways — but that is incredibly rare. Cartoonists by in large are still tinkering, hesitantly, with insights from literature written no later than the 19-teens. The lessons of Barth and Coover and Burroughs, of Kathy Acker and Sam Delany, of Mark Leyner, of Derrida and Eco — those insights are not here.
Reading over the comments, it occurs to me that comics has no compelling reason to incorporate the “lessons” of contemporary art, lessons that have denigrated craftsmanship, eliminated narrative, emphasized and elevated nebulous concepts such as intent and idea to the exclusion of all other elements. What seems to be missing from this discussion (with the exception of Mr. Campbell and his comments on illustration) is the fact that even the most basic of art styles requires a tremendous amount of craft to execute in a consistent manner. What role does craft play in contemporary art, say, of the past 30 years? To the contemporary art critic, craft is a novelty. To the contemporary fine artist, craft is something you pay someone else to do for you.
This level of craftsmanship required has practical implications that work to limit some of the formal gamesplaying that a young (or underpayed) cartoonist can engage in, which is my guess as to why so many of the most formally adventurous comics have such a low level of craft in evidence. I have a page sitting on my drawing board right now in process, with partially inked figures and nebulous, sketchy backgrounds. Every hour I spend fixing the perspective on the first panel, making sure the figures don’t float on the ground plane, making the crowd in the distance “read” as far away people and not little white blobs is another hour not spent on tying together the concept, on deepening the themes.
I’m sorry, I think this is nonsense. Fine art has a complicated relationship to craft, but suggesting that it eschews craft entirely is the sort of defensive anti-intellectualism that has landed comics in the mess it’s in. To point to just artists I’ve mentioned in this thread already, John Currin, Andres Serrano, and Jeff Wall are all very successful fine artists and highly talented craftspeople. Fine artist Ernesto Caivano to take just one illustrational example, is a breathtaking draftsman.
The difference in craft between fine art and comics is not that comics creators are more committed to a higher level of craftsmanship; it’s that comics creators tend to have a relatively simplistic view of what craft is and how it should be incorporated into their work. Really, in general, the level of craft in fine art is higher than the average level of craft in Western comics, which is embarrassingly low. But fine art doesn’t fetishize craft at the expense of other features the way comics does — or, rather, it does fetishize craft, but in a (not always, but often) thoughtful way that makes the approach to craft an element of the aesthetic experience.
Also, the notion that comics are a uniquely difficult art form is much brooted, and, I think, just a horrible example of the medium’s self-pity. If comics want to stop sucking, the first thing it needs to do is get out of the defensive crouch in which it’s been stooped for decades.
I hope that didn’t come off as too, too harsh, Sean. I don’t mean to say that making comics isn’t difficult. I just think that the difficulty you talk about between creating pleasing form and including interesting content is one that all artists face. I’ve written poetry and drawn fine art and even made some comics, and you’re description of the struggles you face are very familiar to me from all those endeavors.
Noah-
I didn’t say that the “average level” of craft is higher in Western comics than it is in the fine arts world. I was pointing out that the functional aspect of comics, i.e. someone has to have a continuous reading experience that isn’t disrupted by being unable to parse the art, mean that craft is continually a consideration for the reader, and hopefully the critic. It has to be- unconsidered, it will interfere with or obscure the message. Whereas in the fine arts world, as I said, trending in the past thirty years, craft itself is a novelty. John Currin has distinguished himself by bucking this trend- he’s defined in opposition to the prevailing trends in his own promotional materials. These are the bald facts of my art school experience- more time was spent talking about artist staments than talking about perspective. “Illustrator” was a word applied only with the intent to insult. Now, we’re talking eight years ago now, and two particular universities. It could be that there have been sweeping changes in the fine arts world, but if that’s the case I haven’t been witness to them.
As far as the “defensive crouch”- do you think it’s any coincidence that the Japanese system has produced so many wonderful comics? The one comics system in the world that’s heavily capitalized enough to be able to support many assitants working under one person? I’m obviously oversimplifying here- but the amount of labor and time involved to produce a page that someone will read in a matter of seconds is certainly a factor to be considered- not neccesarily as a factor in the criticism of a specific work, but as part of someone’s global understanding of the function and creation of comics. I would love to hear about an art form that combines as many disciplines as making comics. How many solo film makers are there out there?
More solo filmmakers than there used to be, with advances in technology.
Art school can suck, and lots of fine artists are idiots. But collaborative work is not necessarily more or less difficult than solo work. And, again, the difficulties of form and content are ones all artists face. Those difficulties — which are also creative pleasures, I think — kind of define art, whatever the medium.
I”m sure the mega-successful John Currin portrays himself as a rebel in his promotional materials. One should approach marketing copy with a certain skepticism, though.
Sean, are you saying that the way “conceptual art” is thought about and taught is the source of this notion of “mere illustration” that Eddie pointed out? I’m very interested in the idea that this is a pedagogical problem rather than a philosophical one.
Isn’t the collaborative nature of film more because it’s in many ways a performing art than because it’s too hard to do alone? Someone mentioned Brakhage above and I’m sure we could come up with other examples of solo filmmakers, but logistically the easiest thing is to have at least two, before and behind the camera…
I realize it’s time-consuming to put both craft and concept into a work of art, especially if you’re the only person working. But I wonder to what extent this idea that “graphic novels have to be long” is part of the problem there rather than any more philosophical obstacle. I’d rather have three pages of really smart work than a compromised piece because the artist felt like (s)he had to make 300 pages.
Don Delillo lately has been writing almost exclusively short fiction, novella-length. He’s gotten some grief for this, but I think he’s evolved to become a “prose sculptor” — his books are “conceptual art” in the medium of prose. They’re so visual in their construction and use of metaphor, as well as their imagery, and they speak so directly to the power of the visual sense and visual imagery in our culture, that people I know who are not visual, who are not good at parsing conceptual art or comics, also struggle with parsing Delillo. There is as much meaning there as in a longer novel, but it’s compressed, I think largely by means of these visual referents and influences. Possibly because of that, I feel like taking “the extended prose novel” of high modernism as the model for art comics is making something difficult that doesn’t have to be — in that sense, I agree with Matthias that this is a “literary” tactic. (I just think literature is mostly beyond it.) It takes a great deal of craft, though, for Delillo to pull that off. But it’s definitely craft deployed in a very different way from what you see in Joyce or Philip Roth or even (but less so) Rushdie.
It’s definitely a pedogogical problem. The problem isn’t that “art school can suck”- the problem is that art school really is an accurate reflection of the demands of the fine art marketplace. The proliferation of art schools and art professors on the periphery of the industry have conspired to codify the most extreme trends of the past half-century, those trends being a focus on concept and artist identity (and often biography) to the exclusion of all else.
You can observe this at any gallery you want, whether it’s the MOMA or (my local museum) Seattle’s Fry or SAM. Go to an exhibition and watch the patrons walk around the room. Take a look at what they look at first as they approach a new piece. Chances are they glance at the art itself very briefly, and then their eyes flick to the explanatory text mounted on the wall or in their guidebook. When they’ve absorbed the background information on the piece or artist, or have adequately solved the “puzzle” of the conceptual underpinnings, they give one last glance at the actual artwork and they move on.
This primacy of the creator and concept is now fully ingrained in the fine art world, so much so that it extends back in time to envelop the art of past eras as well. The art itself is no longer a physical object to be analyzed- it is a kind of meta-object that encompasses the story of the artist, the time period in which it was created, every story that has been told about the object itself.
And as Noah pointed out, it’s not that craftsmanship is missing from the equation. It’s just incidental. It’s something that happens along the way to the idea or the artist statement. And, in the fine art world, the hands that are responsible for that craftsmanship are not seen as important at all.
I think that illustration didn’t make the grade for the professors I knew for a variety of reasons- commercial use or utility to the art, reproduction (also a nasty word), and emphasis on narrative being the chief strikes against the work (narrative having been beaten out of the fine arts world with the rise of film, just as realism was beaten back by photography). But certainly another aspect could be the previously-described primacy of the creator- the supposition being that illustration is always subservient to the text itself.
Sorry that this is so off-track. I’ve spent five years teaching high school art, seeing students hunger for craft, and raising my own craft to meet their needs and expectation, and in those five years, I’ve had lots of time to consider just how woefully underprepared I was by my art school education.
There’s definitely some prejudice against illustration in certain corners of the art establishment…and there’s also a very well-established discourse on the part of comics folks of art school as worthless, pretentious, and focused on conceptual nonsense to the detriment of craft.
This particular back and forth is probably helpful to neither art or comics — but it seems to have done more damage to comics overall, inasmuch as there’s a ton of fine art that relies on very high levels of craft as well as a strong and respected tradition of fine art illustration, whereas conceptually-sophisticated comics are much less thick on the ground (and even the notion that there should or can be such things is, as Sean demonstrates, contested.)
It’s kind of too bad Bert isn’t reading this; he’s taught high school art for 8 years, I think, and I believe he has a very different take on the place of art and craft in both art education and fine art generally.
I don’t think craft is incidental. When I go to galleries or museums, as I said, I see lots of work that has high levels of craft, and in which the particular kind of craft is central to the meaning and conception of the piece. For example, the amazing full body suits of Nick Cave (not the singer.) You don’t need to look at wall text to get the point here, I don’t think.
And Nick Cave isn’t obscure or unsuccessful — he’s a very validated artist, who people love because he makes amazing, meticulous, beautiful objects.
Illustration is often denigrated…though not always by any means (the Paper Rad folks are both influential in fine art and validated by galleries.)
I don’t deny the pompous preening of fine artists, or the unmitigated awfulness of many an artist statement. But, to me, contemporary fine art is a lot more stimulating, diverse, and exciting than contemporary comics. And that has a lot to do with fine arts’ engagement with theory and conceptual complexity on the one hand, and with comics’ defensive disavowal of same on the other.
Noah- I certainly didn’t say that “conceptually sophisticated” comics can’t exist- I said that there are specific difficulties with the medium that make some experiments less likely to appear in comics than they do in other media, in prose, for instance. I brought up film because, as I pointed out in Derik’s comment thread, it’s another medium in which there are few unqualified masterpieces. In the case of film, the difficulty has always been the coordination of the immense technical resources neccesary, and expense and all of the attendant commercial concessions. In comics, I’m suggesting that it’s the labor involved, and the divergent skills required.
Caroline- There’s a certain kind of complexity and a certain kind of narrative that, at least from my viewpoint, can only be achieved through length. That being said, someone looking for Noah’s elusive “conceptually sophisticated” comics could probably find a disproportionate amount of intelligent, consistent and well-thought out comics among smaller works than longer ones, probably for the reasons we’ve been discussing, and possibly because it’s easier to make ten pages hang together than a thousand. The possible stumbling block for the “shorter might be better” argument is a simple design problem- the more elements you have to juggle on a page, the harder it is to create a clear, attractive design.
Just re-read Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Painted Word’…so I’m a Philistine, so sue me…
I’d like to hang the last critic with the guts of the last theorician.
(Anti-intellectual enough?)
That would be especially dramatic, Alex, since I think you qualify as a critic….
This idea, “primacy of the creator and concept is now fully ingrained in the fine art world” — I’m so surprised by that…I guess I didn’t realize how much more tied to commercial fine art (gallery culture?, I don’t know what to call it) art school was than academic literature. I don’t think BA programs are like that in writing…I know MFAs are professor training programs and pretty academic…
The “primacy of the creator and the concept” is a thing in the publishing business — J.K. Rowling, need I say more? — but it’s so much less so in literature, probably mostly due to Barthes but also just to the “cultural turn.”
From what I’ve heard of how the American professional art world is run, it makes the comics world seem sane and wise by comparison. Which is not to say that there’s no great contemporary art; of course there is, and I see plenty of it. But it comes out of an environment that is toxic, to say the least.
A side note on the perceived anti-intellectualism of cartoonists and their unwillingness to engage with theory: I suspect a lot of that comes from most cartoonists either being outright derided in art school for cartooning (something that does seem to be easing in the past decade), or going to a school where cartooning is taught that had little in the way of integrating theory with practice. I think there’s a definite pedgagogical gap here for cartoonists; unlike other artistic fields, it simply hasn’t been a part of the culture to study literary theory or art crit at any kind of a formal level. It’ll be interesting to see how this changes in the next decade or so.
Rob —
I realize I’ve sounded like an apologist for academic literature in much of this thread. That’s somewhat odd, because your phrasing really resonates with me: I left academia because I personally found it environmentally toxic (although I swear it sounds healthier than Fine Art!). Your comment gives me an excellent opportunity to point this out: one of the things I love most about HU and the comics community in general is that, despite the anti-intellectual strain we’ve been talking about, there is also so much committment and enthusiasm that it’s one of the few places, in the US at least, where you can find something approximating a “public intellectual” — someone who is not a professor, not teaching in a university, maybe not even affiliated with a university, but still engaged with human creativity in a really committed way. For all that I grumble about Understanding Comics, how cool is it that a practitioner of comics took on the project of theorizing them? For all that we’re bashing this “delayed Modernism,” how extraordinary is it for all these perspectives to collide and engage?
The online comics community, and possibly the offline as well, is really the closest thing “late postmodernity” (or whatever we want to call our historical moment) has to the old “artistic subcultures” that dominated artistic culture in the early 20th century. Those subcultures were not ideologically or aesthetically homogeneous either, but they were passionate and fecund. People who love comics, even as readers, tend to live a “life in art,” and I find that exceptional. I’m also very curious to see what comes out of this community over the next decade — my expectations are high!
I don’t know. I have peripheral contact with the fine art community in Chicago. Lots of interesting creative people doing lots of exciting projects, collaborative and otherwise. Lots of engagement with social and community activism on the one hand and with the music scene on the other.
There are problems. The gallery scene and constant networking are tiresome; there’s lots of snobbishness to go round, etc. etc. The possibility, however remote, of fame and money obtained essentially through connections and faddishness has a corrosive effect. But overall I think it’s less toxic than the hideously insular world of contemporary poetry — or than the sometimes painfully provincial comics scene.
I should say though, that despite all my bitching about the comics community, I’ve certainly found a lot of great people here who I enjoy talking to. So maybe I’m just perpetually cranky and Caro’s rosier assessment is closer to the truth.
I can’t even begin to stress how much I agree with Caro and Noah. I’m very glad to notice how I’m finally in the right place.
Cézanne and all the modernism (essentialism) that followed him are responsible for the bias against illustration and literature in the visual arts: “And to want to force the expression of nature, to twist the trees, to make the stones grimace, like Gustave Doré, or even to refine, like Da Vinci, that’s all still literature.”
Commercial art is also responsible because what comes to one’s mind when we think “illustration” is the kitsch of Rockwell, Rackham, Pyle, Frazetta, et al…
Domingos, is that a quote from Cezanne? It’s an awesome malevolent aesthetic dictat, whoever said it.
Contemporary poetry is hideously insular. My experience of the kind of arts community you’re describing is that it is usually fairly socially homogeneous, particularly with regards to age, very closed off to academic sorts, and localized in a way that makes it a crap shoot whether your local version of it will be worthwhile or not. No group of people is going to be without problems, but comics, especially the comics internet (and especially HU!), seems to have done a great job of fostering conversations among people of different generations and backgrounds and dispositions and in making those conversations just as accessible to people in Pekin, Illinois as in New York City. That’s pretty fantastic.
I’m waiting to hear from Domingos where the quote came from too!
I googled! The Cezanne quote is here. The speech begins: “Either you see a picture immediately or you never see it at all.” Looks like it’s from ~1912, from Joachim Gasquet’s Cezanne. The introduction to the excerpt above says “they remind us forcefully of that meridional literary culture upon which Cezanne fed, and which he also in many ways rejected.” How appropriate!
caroline,
i enjoyed your article and comments.
i feel like literature and art have a prerequisite expectation to enter into a meta dialogue that addresses (and blurs the distinction between) critics, creators, and readers.
this dialogue is relatively silent in comics.
i like how you make it plain that, as a critic, you want to have this dialogue, and you are frustrated with those who are not willing to speak to you.
i understand why ‘postmodern’ might seem like a desirable term to use here, because it addresses ‘meta’ issues, but i’m uncomfortable using it except as a historical indicator. i haven’t read asterios polyp, but i assume that, since it came out last year, it is inherently postmodern, just like every other cultural product made today. i doubt there is any pre-postmodern culture still alive (in our western vicinity, at least).
Hey Blaise. I think there’s something of a question (which Caro and Andrei were kicking around a little bit) of whether the modernism/post-modernism distinction is really useful; you could pretty easily see the last 100+ years as similar enough in approach/methods etc. that you could just call it all modernism and be done with it. Even calling yourself “post-modernism” — in its insistence on looking forward, weariness with after history, etc. etc. — could be seen as a modernist move.
At least, I think that’s what Caro and Andrei were talking about…I may have misinterpreted though….
Wow, lots of interesting points being made here! Caro, I just want to address some of the questions you raise re: my earlier post:
“I think metadiscourse is something that any ambitious work of art in 2010 needs to be attentive to. It doesn’t mean that the outcome of all creative endeavor is to create a “work of metadiscourse.”… I don’t feel comfortable letting cartoonists off the hook for that. I don’t feel comfortable letting painters off the hook for that. I don’t feel comfortable letting filmmakers off the hook for that. The artistic conversation around metadiscourse was a significant achievement of the late 20th century. Ignoring it just bothers me.”
I’m not sure I follow: could you explain why this is so important?
re: “Hybrid”:
“I don’t entirely understand why you think this is a literary assertion. Does it help if I get theoretical and say that “hybrid” here is in Latour’s sense – I think he agrees with the idea that the hybrids predated the purification out into their constituent parts. But I think the experience of Asterios Polyp is one of a strong distinction between the “literary” elements and the “visual” elements. That binary is instantiated in this book. The point of my critique is that it is an immensely outdated binary and that I can’t believe it’s actually in play here. It is not an inherent binary: it is not operable at all in Fate of the Artist. But I would consider Fate of the Artist to be far more “literary” than Asterios Polyp. Maybe here is where we are miscommunicating…
Perhaps; I’m not sure, but I’m certain that the reason the binary is at play in AP is because Mazzucchelli wants it to be. More on that in my post tomorrow.
I haven’t read Latour, but “hybrid” to me sounds like a slightly pejorative designation — as if we’re talking about an impure mix of two pure forms. I realize that your understanding is more sophisticated than that, but I still find the term problematic.
“When you use the word “literary” it feels like a dirty word. But then the elements you pinpoint as “literary” don’t feel literary to me: the feel like things fiction hasn’t prioritized since the 19th and very early 20th centuries. Although there’s obviously a plethora of other issues here, there’s something awry there that I can’t put my finger on… getting rid of the notion that literature is about words is really important. Literature is not an “art form” – it’s a register.”
I’m aware that ‘literary’ as a term has been extended to mean almost anything *by theorists of literature*, and that’s fair enough, although I’m not sure what it means then and I’m skeptical of the concomitant idea that everything is suddenly a “text”. I don’t “read” and image, thank you very much.
My usage of ‘literary’ as you’ve extracted it has all been in fairly specific contrasts where I was referring either to comics learning from literature (of the written kind), or of contemporary so-called graphic novels in which the term itself has been taken a little too, yes, literally.
But just to be clear, I don’t think ‘literary’ is a dirty word — it’s a very important, lovely and useful one!
“Comics and cartooning as we know them are as popular/mass medium that evolved in a low culture context where such integration was less problematic,
!!!!! Literature wouldn’t have considered the integration of multiple media a problem since, well, I could argue for John Dos Passos, but probably William Burroughs.”
I was talking about the birth of comics in the 19th century and their development through the early 20th century and the “modernist era,” not comics or literature today. Still, the authors you mention remain pretty marginal — most books for grownups don’t have pictures in them.
“…there is still Sam Delany, demanding of both science fiction and literature that the divide between high and low be reconfigured. This doesn’t seem like an excuse to me. The history of comics as a “low” medium doesn’t seem like the ground on which you want to build the identity of “comics.” …That’s setting up that “art in the defensive mode” I complained about in the original piece.”
Oh, absolutely, what I was describing however was comics as an historical tradition. If one wishes to engage with that; if one believes the forms it developed have validity — like Mazzucchelli does in AP — one has to accept that it evolved as a low/mass medium trading in arche-/stereotypes. Processing that does result in “defensive” work in certain cases, but it’s also just the way it is, and I believe Mazzucchelli’s project is more than a mere defense.
“Literary people and high art people talk about the same things right now, and we largely have done so since the 1960s. This is especially true for literary people influenced by French theory. Obviously we come at these issues from different perspectives, but we’re having the same conversation (or at least we’re all at the same cocktail party.) Comics like Asterios Polyp seem unaware of this conversation. From my perspective, it’s the cartoonists who are insisting on this distinction between literature and art. Fine artists talk about the things I consider to be literary. Cartoonists don’t. At least, they do it less than they do this other thing. Tom Kaczynski does it; Austin English does; Feuchtenberger and Cambpell we’ve already mentioned…it’s a trend, not a universal. But it’s a trend in cartooning, not a trend in literature or art.”
I would agree that a greater degree of literary or theoretical awareness would benefit some cartoonists, but art is not theory and it shouldn’t be expected to be.
“But theory already has ways of talking about this that cartoonists aren’t drawing on as the starting place for their own efforts. Think about how often somebody talks about Thierry Groensteen relative to Scott McCloud.”
What do you mean? Many more people in comics talk about Scott McCloud. And I, for one, find Groensteen’s “Système de la bande dessinée” almost useless for addressing the issues I’m talking about. Some of his later writings, however, raise the bar.
“the articulation in comics form of insights learned from literature written in words, rather than from visual art.
It’s just really difficult for me to see how you get here. From my literary perspective, comics overall hasn’t incorporated the insights from literature written in words from the last 75 years.”
But that wasn’t what I was talking about. I was talking about the development in European comics Bart describes in his “Unpopular Culture” — the innovations of that new wave to me are predominantly inspired by things that have happened in (written) literature, as opposed to things that have happened in fine art. I wasn’t talking about which (written) literature specifically, but there are certainly many European cartoonists that are aware of developments more recent than 75 years ago. The OuBaPo group is just one obvious example.
That being said, I sympathize with the idea of raising the ‘literary’ bar in comics.
That’s it for now — more tomorrow!
seeing the argument get restated and overstated and derailed, and obscured in the details. as always happens in the comments no matter how carefully we select our words in the original post, i thought it might be useful to restate the essential point, as I understand it (tell me if I’m wrong);
it’s fine for the medium of comics to go on as it always has, producing light entertainment of occasional quality, but once it has declared that it wants to contribute to the important cultural discourse of our time, as the best in Literature and Art do, it needs to show that it is at least aware of where the discourse is up to. Notwithstanding that we all like Asterios Polyp, it has been put to the test on the above challenge.
I can sign on to that.
Oh, I don’t disagree at all — I just think that Mazzucchelli tries to achieve it by employing the conventions and archetypes of cartooning, because he believes them to have something to offer said discourse.
damn
‘wtf’ happened to the comments?
The site is totally fucked up. We lost comments throughout the archive, including here. There’s some hope that they’ll be restored
This… makes me really sad :(
Yeah; it looks like there’s actually more hope for restoration than originally appeared to be the case. Cross your fingers.
And thank you for the sympathy. It is appreciated — it’s been a crappy day.
I’m in denial.
Isn’t that a river in Egypt?
I am again jumping in the deep water, and without having done my homework. So forgive me if this is both to late and redundant (I skimmed much of this).
I would like to mention a few things (with the up most respect for those who comment above and to the cartoonist mentioned in this context):
At the risk of taking a Modernist stance (unusual for me), would it not be acceptably and expected of Mazzucchelli to use primarily the visual story over the literary. Especially if you take into consideration his goal (as I mentioned before on another post) to come full circle to the cran comic strip he did of Batman, Robin and Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich at the age of five. He studied in Visual Arts and teaches now at an Art School (which yes, focuses on writing more then most). His body of work is evidence that he has always been concerned primarily with the visual.
Will Eisner’s attempt to re-frame comics as Graphic Novels done with Sequential Art methods was in my mind (and others) an attempt to freshen up a history that we should be proud of, not embarrassed by. Who gives a crap what others who don’t appreciate it think? Why do we need to be included into a broader or elevated club? One that underestimates the breadth of comics influence, the longevity of intellectual artistic merits and the work ethic in face of adversity that brought it to light. I don’t blame Eisner for trying to open doors wrongfully shut in his face. But I am proud of my BFA and MFA in Sequential Art no more then if it was in Comics. So with that in mind I feel no less intellectually competitive with another medium. Comics are doing fine without the critic of another struggling form (i.e. literature).
Comics will always be best when the focus is on the visual. There is nothing more intimate, artistic and intellectual in comics then a well done silent comic. Comics are at their best with pithy text or no text at all. That said, the history of redundancy in visual combined with text is prevalent. The history of poor wording is evident. I am in no position to defend that (as I am notoriously unaware of my written mistakes). I admire greatly a comic that embraces the craft of a word smith with as much dedication, skill, innovation and whit as the visual. But I see no reason to strive to be more Literary. And I reject the idea that comics haven’t always had examples of quality without pandering to “Fine Art” or “Literature.”
As for Asterios Polyp, the discussion is evidence enough that it is an important work. As a life long student of the craft, I found it refreshing and a valuable lesson in my pursuit of quality as a cartoonist.
Thanks All.
“There is nothing more intimate, artistic and intellectual in comics then a well done silent comic. Comics are at their best with pithy text or no text at all.”
That’s a broad, generalizing statement, that I must disagree with. To take a single (and hopefully inarguable) great comic: Krazy Kat. Where would it be without that wonderful, overflowing verbiage by Herriman?
“Taking on the project of modernism 75 years after its time has passed is art in the defensive mode: starting from the assumption that comics has something to prove rather than something to offer.”
Nice. Mazzucchelli seems to use sophistication (modernism, experimentalism, etc.) in the same way Mary Fleener is exploring cubism. It’s kitschy, stylish – you understand exactly where he’s going with it. It reminds me of the more programmatic strains of conceptual art, but executed masterfully (though somewhat dully). I feel like the narrative content/conceptual aspect of comics has way more interesting places to go than this. Asterios Polyp, to me, seems to be employing the most obvious conceptual conceit to be used in comics, x discrete thing has specific attributes associated with it, “speaks” in it’s own particular voice, etc, failing to question the basic supposition that discrete objects exist at all (though cartoons naturally lend themselves to definitive particularization).
Agreed, Derik! Formalism like this, where silent “picture-writing” is the penultimate form of co-mix really annoys me. There’s no reason to accept this tautology. Viva la Herriman, la Panter, la JTM!
RSS READERS PLEASE NOTE: I’m currently manually reinserting deleted comments on this thread. If you are getting the rss comments feed, this is going to look like a confusing mess. My apologies for this; this is the best way I can figure out to do this unfortunately. Thank you for your patience.
All right;time stamps are not necessarily correct, and one or two things may be slightly out of order, but comments should now be more or less restored. Please let me know if you see errors, though.
Noah- you are awesome! I’m very glad to see everything on the site functioning properly once more.
A nit to pick- I think Caroline’s comment, currently numbered 44, should be in the 41 position, as there are responses to it in the current 41 and 42 slots. (feel free to delete this comment.!)
Sean, I think Caro’s comment goes after mine but before yours. Hopefully I”ve fixed it.
Thank you for checking it.