Don’t play with me, cause you’re playing with fire…
I hadn’t expected that a roundtable on my book Alternative Comics would become a referendum on Gilbert Hernandez’s work. But something like that happened last week, thanks to the one-two punch of Noah and Robert and their comments about my book’s investment in Hernandez, followed by vigorous point-counterpoint in the comments section, followed by Suat’s considered response to and extension of Noah’s critique of Hernandez in the form of a smart retake on Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism—a retake I’m inclined to disagree with, but articulated well.
I’ll not go too deeply into the arguments that raged here last week. Regarding Noah’s critique of Hernandez’s work in Poison River, and specifically the page (above) that fetishizes Maria’s ever-changing form, well, first, a reminder may be in order. Noah:
If Maria is a doll, it’s Hernandez who made her; it’s he who poured her into those bombastic proportions and then into those boldly-patterned clothes. It’s Hernandez who decided to make Maria a Dan DeCarlo pin-up, and then decided to make this page a fashion spread. She’s his Barbie, and much of the pleasure of this sequence, for both him and the readers, must be precisely the erotic montage; the excitement of seeing that form manipulated, thrown out of sequence and out of her clothes, as her life-in-time is chopped up into consumable images of those giant breasts, which are always front and center. […] Maria’s desirability is validated by the many men who want her, and her availability is confirmed by their failure. Only the creator/reader truly has her in all her surface voluptuousness — a surface which is, of course, all there is to her. In its insistent formalism, the page makes of Maria a form that can be possessed, both by her creator and by those who appreciate his skill. […]
Hernandez’s portrayal of female bodies is insistently fetishistic, and that fetishism seems only fitfully integrated into his often-stressed concern for women. In terms of his female characters, he eroticizes stereotypes at the same time as he critiques them, and the results, to me, often seem callous or banal rather than insightful.
I’m not going to argue that Gilbert’s above or beyond the pinup. Essentially I’m arguing here that Hernandez approaches self-parody, that the aesthetics of that passage, indeed of Poison River as a whole, are baroque, self-reflexive, and frankly decadent (in several senses), and that what he is doing with the Maria-fetish can best be understood in terms of the book’s overall agenda. Arguments like these—that such excessive, disturbing, and arguably self-mocking elements have some value other than masturbatory or shock value—depend on the arguers’ shared knowledge of the larger context of the work, so I don’t know how to explain or defend my argument to one (Noah!) who admits not having read the work in question. We’re at an impasse.
Jeet Heer put it well in the comments section:
…the “fetishized women” in Poison River are part of a much larger narrative tapestry, one that includes a powerful critique of macho culture and a very sympathetic exploration of all sorts of sexual diversity (not just bisexuality and homosexuality but also transgender issues). If you glance at a page of Hernandez’s work and just say “fetishized women” you’re immediately conflating it with all the other images of “fetishized women” in our culture—pin-ups and beer ads and what not. But if you actually sit down and read Hernandez’s stories […] you’ll see that there is much more at work and at play in his stories.
Yes. Exactly my point when I told that anecdote last week about Hernandez reflecting on, or complaining about, the way some prospective readers would skim but not read the work and come away thinking they knew what was going on and that they had sized up the work and its worth at a glance. To point selectively to loaded imagery without respect to context is the strategy of censors, not critics.
I will say, with the benefit of hindsight, that I think Poison River, which has often been criticized by even loyal Hernandez readers as cruel and lacking in warmth, marks a turning point in Gilbert’s work, and that some of the would-be shocking moves he has made in recent projects such as Speak of the Devil or Chance in Hell or his recent Love & Rockets short stories partake of this same coldly satiric, sometimes self-parodic, tone. These days I prefer “Duck Feet,” Human Diastrophism, and some of the other early Palomar tales to Poison River, but—I’ll grant you this one, Noah—I was totally seduced by form when it came to working through that chapter of the book. That’s okay; no one in academia had paid such sustained attention to Hernandez’s use of form by that point, and, anyway, Poison River is a masterwork of form and remains a fascinating comic. The work of Gilbert Hernandez is rich enough to sustain a lot of different readings over time, from multiple and overlapping perspectives, and I keep on finding myself shifting around inside it, thinking and rethinking about it.
In regard to Noah’s critique of Human Diastrophism, in particular its ending (as expressed in the comments section), I think this critique is essentially unanswerable because it contains a trap that does not allow any way out. Specifically, Noah—and this is similar to what he does in his criticism of my Calvin and Hobbes example from Watterson—says that anything that rubs him the wrong way does so because it’s transparently a “cliché,” that its triteness is self-evident, that the work couldn’t possibly be powerful or revelatory because, well, apparently, Noah has seen it all before. Me, I had seen nothing like Diastrophism in comics before, and the book’s climax hit me like a hammer. That climax, and the way it connected to other things I had been reading—for example, Sontag’s critique of the would-be political uses of photography—made me think hard about issues I had never before considered. The very scene that Noah ridicules because, basically, every single interpretive option is already, in his view, a cliché, is one that wrung me out and really had me reconsidering comics and art. My affective response to the work is so very different from Noah’s, and his response is so invested in finding every element in the work that moved me hopelessly clichéd, that I can hardly get a critical toehold and respond intelligently.
All I can say is, Noah, your characterization of Hernandez as an opportunistic exploiter of packaged “ethnicity” (oppression porn, bone-headed exploitation of one’s own ethnic identity, etc.) is borderline contemptuous, and I can understand why it drove Jeet through the roof. It is also unfounded, an anachronistic judgment based on ignorance of the work’s original publication context and the fact that stories like Diastrophism were initially published against a backdrop of almost complete critical silence about the issues of ethnicity and politics raised in them. It could not have been an easy or complacent choice for Hernandez to have undertaken those stories, and I’m surprised, Noah, to see you making ad hominem judgments of this loose sort. It’s as if you’re unloading a larger concern—say, your distaste for the way the literary critical establishment encourages the “self-commodification” of ethnicity—onto a body of work you’ve only cursorily read, or not read at all. I can’t buy that.
Suat’s critique of Diastrophism‘s ending is the more sustained—and sustainable—and also gratifying insofar as it focuses attention back on the work, on its rhythms and patterns and changes, rather than simply on some presumed ideological fault. I was happy to see discussion revert to Hernandez’s story itself rather than merely furthering our contentious back-and-forth. I agree with Suat—that is, I think he is accurate when he says—that the story’s ending is more obviously didactic than what has come before, and that this sequence brings a notable shift in the rhythm and textual density of the work. I would even agree that there is a kind of moral signposting going on here. I don’t agree, though, that such didacticism is necessarily a blot on the story, and of course I don’t agree that the ideology promoted here is “tired” or that the sentiment is unearned. This debate reminds me of our discussion of “understatement,” and in particular Jeet’s and my point, that a critical preference for understatement is not natural, inevitable, or value-neutral, but rather culturally contingent, hence ideological. Such preferences can become blunt instruments. (I’m reminded of Steve Solomos’ hectoring interview of Chester Brown in Crash magazine #1 [Fall 1994] in which he faulted Brown’s The Playboy and “The Little Man” for their use of verbal exposition and pointed verbal/visual irony—qualities that I think enrich and complicate those works in interesting ways. Brown should not have taken Solomos’ criticisms to heart.)
The curious thing about Suat’s critique is that it begins with a self-canceling claim, one that in effect belies his own careful work:
It is possible to see the virtues and faults in a single page of comic art without relating them to the whole.
Suat then proceeds to shore up and extend Noah’s critique on the basis of work that Noah himself did not do. I think Suat’s performance here, far from supporting his initial claim, undercuts it, because Suat ties the ending into a larger understanding of the book’s patterning and themes. In any case, I maintain that, no, it isn’t possible to spot the virtues and faults of a page from a book-length comic without recourse to its larger narrative context. Not when you’re doing the real work of criticism. Of course it’s possible, often necessary, to make such judgments as a “consumer”—I admit that I’m often guided by such quick impressions when shopping for comics—but when it comes to rendering considered judgments of a work, judgments that may include not only aesthetic but also ideological determinations (as in Noah’s critique), I believe we have to put in the hard work.
One last anecdote about Hernandez: Back in the, oh, mid-nineties I taught Human Diastrophism (Blood of Palomar) for the first time, probably a bit before I began writing about Hernandez in earnest. The context was a “Literature and Composition” course, workshop-style, at the U of Connecticut. The course, designed to give practice in writing analytically about literature, dealt quickly with multiple genres, including comics, though Blood of Palomar was the only book of comics that we got to. This was one of my odder syllabi, in hindsight, yoking together Samuel Johnson’s droll Menippean satire Rasselas, various short lyrics, probably a prose novel of some kind, a play—Shakespeare, maybe?—and Gilbert Hernandez. I had one student, an articulate, mature, and determined one, memorably Australian, who was perhaps the only one to “get” Rasselas and who found himself growing into the course and loving it—until Blood of Palomar. This was a student whose engagement, and awareness of his own progress, was a pleasure to see, and I valued his good opinion. Palomar, though, seemed to ruin everything for him.
Hernandez’s work, which came at the end of term, cheated him, he argued, of the opportunity to demonstrate the skills he had been working on and improving throughout the term. The work didn’t demonstrate the complexity he wanted—this despite the complexity of plot, characterization, and theme that I thought manifestly obvious in the work—and, worse yet, it was simply, he declared in class one day, pornographic.
Wow. I was nonplussed, but I tried to field the accusation and seize the, as we say, teachable moment. What ensued was a discussion, or my attempt at a discussion—I was young to teaching then, and fairly overwhelmed by any sort of strife in the classroom—of what pornography is, and what it does, that is, what its use value is. I probably stirred some feathers by pointing out that, in our usual understanding of porn, it serves as a masturbation aid. Yes? Was this a fair description of Blood of Palomar? I also asked students to examine the scenes of sex and lovemaking in the novel—before, during, and after—and to consider Luba’s notorious bed-hopping in light of what her character wanted and what she lacked. I questioned whether the sex in the book was utopian, uncomplicated, simple, glamorous, uniformly superficial. I asked why sex could be an acceptable element of characterization in, say, a prose novel, but was unacceptable in overt visual form. I pointed out that in fact Hernandez had done porn (Birdland), and that it was tonally quite different from the book we were reading.
The charge that the book was pornographic seemed to underlie everything else that my unhappy student had said; for him, any pornographic element or potential was ipso facto proof that Blood of Palomar was a simplistic, artistically unworthy text. In other words, he lashed his moralistic critique to his artistic one. I therefore felt that we, as a class, had no way to go forward except by directly examining the book’s fictive sex. We had to confront the “pornography” charge. I’m not confident that I did so entirely effectively, but I did try, and I did have to say things that, for all of us, were awkward. That day remains one of my most memorable teaching days at UConn in an eleven-year run.
What I realized was that, for at least one student—and the most articulate and intellectually engaged student in that particular class, at that—it was axiomatic that a visual text that dealt explicitly with sexuality could not be anything other than porn, and therefore could not be serious by any measure. Certainly no sexually explicit comic could be. Nothing else—not the social critique in the novel (that which Noah has so bluntly dismissed), not the multifaceted characterization, not the embedding of themes relating to art, social responsibility, and social change—nothing else mattered. My student would not engage on any of the other interpretive fronts offered by the text—not even to the extent of intelligently finding fault with plot, with characterization, etc.—because he was simply offended. The text was flattened out, and my student’s usual good attention blunted, because of the comic’s candor and extravagance.
If we cannot bring such texts forward along with the more decorous comics that have achieved canonical status in classrooms in the years since, if we cannot have a discussion that gets beyond a censorious kneejerk attitude toward such images—if we cannot do those things, then we have not seriously challenged the misguided intellectual iconoclasm (iconophobia, really) that cramps the understanding of comics. We have not really attacked these problems and prejudices at their roots. We have not understood the challenges that comics pose to high-culture assumptions about images in relation to ignorance, childishness, and crudeness. I’ll keep on teaching Gilbert Hernandez because he doesn’t allow me to surrender to those assumptions, and because he makes great comics.
Hey Charles. Thanks so much for this impassioned response. I have a ton to say in response, and I think I am actually going to try therefore to respond in an additional post, if you don’t find that too tiresome.
I do want to just note two things quickly.
First, I would never suggest that Gilbert’s work be censored, or that you stop teaching it.
Second: your effort to put me in a box labeled “Puritan” is completely misguided, as you’d probably realize if you had read more of my criticism (not that you should!) Anyway, if you want a better sense of where I’m coming on with this sort of thing, you might look here; here and here (scroll to the end on that last one for my ecstatic appreciation of explicit sex with giant insects.) Or read my ridiculously extended discussion of Wonder Woman on this blog, which is pretty much all about how much I did what Marston and Peter do with explicitly fetish material.
Thanks again Charles. I think this has clarified a number of things for me, and I’m very grateful for the time and effort you put into responding. More soon.
Noah, I wasn’t suggesting that your response to Hernandez was identical to the censorious response of my student (in the classroom anecdote). I know enough of your work to know better. :)
I’d say that I was more nearly responding to Robert’s embrace of decorous and canonized comics at the expense of Hernandez’s.
My underlying concern here is twofold:
1. A kind of iconophobia that hampers the critical reception of comics, one that often causes even intelligent readers who can happily read sexually explicit fiction to balk at seeing similar things represented in comics. (I’m not implicating you in that comment, Noah.)
2. The attitude that one can read off meaning from a comics page without respect to its larger context. My insistence on this methodological point may be getting tiresome, but I do regard it as a crucial point. (This is directed more at Suat’s defense of such decontextualized reading.)
Fair enough! I think the methodological point is central to your book, actually, and so it makes sense that you would want to emphasize it.
Charles–
The issue is not, I believe, with the depiction of sex so much as the manner of that depiction. One can find depictions of sex, in varying degrees of explicitness, in virtually all of the crossover efforts I’ve mentioned. The difference is that Hernandez puts the reader in the position of identifying with the physicality of the act. The others tend to use sex to render the characters’ emotional states; they’re not looking to evoke the characters’ lust and rub the reader’s nose in it.
Putting the audience in the position of identifying with sex’s physicality is exactly the same strategy employed by pornography. Hernandez’s goals are, of course, different. However, I don’t think one can fault people who make the connection and find Hernandez’s work objectionable. To do so is the same as asking them to spend time with work they consider an affront in order to recognize the error of their response. One can’t blame them for thinking they have better things to do with their time.
By the way, I take considerable exception to being identified with your student’s attitudes, which I emphatically do not share. If you go back and read the paragraph about Hernandez in my essay, you will see that I’m not talking about my own opinion so much as I am describing the responses of people other than myself that I identify with a particular market demographic. Just because I can see where they are coming from doesn’t mean I agree with their opinion.
Just because I can see where they are coming from doesn’t mean I agree with their opinion.
Fair enough, Robert. But if you’re prescribing what a critic should write about, or presuming the define the proper horizons of criticism, and using commonplace opinions to set your criteria, then the difference IMO is merely semantic.
The others tend to use sex to render the characters’ emotional states; they’re not looking to evoke the characters’ lust and rub the reader’s nose in it.
A. Since when is this an either/or?
B. Observe Luba having sex in Diastrophism, observe it closely, and then tell me that you don’t see a rendering of the character’s emotional states there. And tell me that a more discreet depiction of her sexual behavior would accomplish that characterization with the same power. I don’t think so.
To do so is the same as asking them to spend time with work they consider an affront in order to recognize the error of their response.
Without wishing to be needlessly aggressive, I’d like to point out that teaching sometimes entails just that. If I removed works that I considered likely to cause affront from my courses, I’d have very little left to teach. To affront is to challenge, and one can (and IMO should) expect to challenge without being belligerent.
In any case, I put no stock in the idea of “crossover efforts” as somehow more legitimate or deserving of study (or of teaching). That’s because I see myself as being in the business of unsettling, rather than reconfirming, prejudices.
The nub of the issue remains unaddressed: why should it be that sexually provocative or even explicit literary material can be addressed critically but visual material of the same explicitness cannot? And why should criticism accede to a situation in which comics are specially handicapped because they happen to be, well, comics?
Those are my concerns. I apologize if it seems that I am making you a straw man, Robert, to bear those concerns, but I see what I’m doing as teasing out the logical implications of our arguments here. I want to point out that the critical opinions that shape what is considered acceptable or canonical within the larger culture are not sacrosanct, and that at times they partake of the frank prejudices mentioned in my anecdote above.
Charles–
This is getting to the point where I’m starting to see animus on both sides, so I’m going to bow out after this response. You and I agree far more than we disagree, and I don’t want to see those disagreements create a rift.
I wrote that your book was “perhaps the finest book-length work of comics criticism to date,” which is a judgment I stand by. I also wrote that your essay on Gilbert Hernandez “is probably the best critical survey of a single cartoonist’s œuvre that I’ve read,” and I stand by that, too.
Beyond that, I think we’re talking past each other on some points, and we’re never going to agree on others. Let’s just agree to disagree and move on.
Robert–
You’re right. I want to stand up for my positions, but I don’t want to bog this down in what might seem like merely a testy personal exchange.
What I’ve tried to do is extrapolate from all we’ve said here in order to identify and tackle some, I think, underlying issues re: the critical reception of comics and the purposes of comics criticism. But it’s always risky making someone else the repository of the issues or problems you want to deal with. Suffice to say that I did, and do, disagree with some of the claims made in your initial posting, but I’m also grateful for your attention and time and critical effort.
And if I’ve extrapolated from your statements in ways that reveal more about my positions and concerns than they do about your own positions, I can only apologize, and plead my enthusiasm for this kind of work!
Here I am another male (heterosexual…not that that makes a difference) voice in this wilderness of objectifying female form at risk of pornography. I should be referring to my wife, female therapist friends, female feminist friends, my pal Kelly Thompson over at CBR. Never the less as a feminist male (well borderline…gender often undermines intent), and a male cartoonist that shares Gilbert’s plausible purpose and aesthetics (actually more of a Jamie guy, but but more for the inking) I find it appropriate to speak up here.
Are there masturbatory elements, well my teen-once-upon-a-time-self says “HELL YEAH!” However, on actually reading the work and thinking about the context it is made in and by whom it becomes far more complex and sympathetic.
Not all of America is bread in the same puritanical heritage which makes our views of sexuality behind the times, like kids in a candy store and riddled with guilt. Perhaps Gilberto’s perspective is fundamentally healthier, more mature and open then ours. Perhaps sexuality is not as big a deal.
Diversity of form is consistent in his women, as it s with their character. I can not look at his work in the context of one panel or arch. It is an evolving world that consistently diversified form and character that is as much cartoony as it is based in the world he lives in.
Sure some, most of his principle characters are female and they are voluptuous (sometimes hourglass, sometimes pear, sometimes top-heavy, often varied in weight…that can and does change for individual characters). His fetish (hell my fetish) or not in a society that defines beauty with ideal female forms that change from generation to generation. Our society markets consistently absurdly skinny in comparison to the population that this ideal is psychologically harmfully marketed too.
In this context, Gilberto’s fetish is often (or so we are told) celebrated by real women (as is Crumb for the same reason). Most of Gilberto’s women that are significantly curvy are two things related to each other (genetically predisposed) and CARTOONS (so he is not braking new ground with exstraordinarally large breast, hips or butts…Al Capp, Frazetta, Crumb, Jamie, rocky and bullwinkle, Blondie, ect….) And unlike Eric Larsen and most superhero comic book artist since the late 80’s his forms are found naturally in the real world (yes in those proportions practically). And when they are naked gravity (sometimes, but not always cartoon gravity) takes effect.
With our society increasingly over weight this disparity of form in pop culture only serves to undermine women’s efforts to be healthy, regardless of the weight and proportions that are natural, psychologically and physically healthy. Regardless of Gilbert’s intent purposely virtuous, culturally expressive and/or fetish his point of view even as a man’s is needed in comics and American society. I would suggest for men it is needed as well, for we are pressured to have our natural sexual desires conform to these same cultural expectations.
As Latin, African American and Eastern European perspective on sex, female form and a physical reality reflected in our populous becomes a larger part of the demographics it would seem only natural this curvy representation in inked line would be appropriate. Especially in pornography. Which this is not, but apparently America has yet to grow up and correctly define it.
Gilbert’s character may present iconic exaggerated sexually fetishes form (although I see possible arguments for it being balanced and accurate cartoony forms that reflect reality), nevertheless, they are well rounded characters of diverse thought and plot that reflect positively on women without pandering.
I maybe projecting here, but when I depict women in my comics they reflect my world through my eyes, my empathy and my libido. I must consciously include thin women (perhaps Gilberto does too). There is no reason why I should sensors this, since I am reflecting the world I experience through my lens with purpose that is consciously communicating without malice or exploitation. Or at least that is the intent, and a storytellers job is to take what he or she sees and thinks and mash it up into a story that entertains and communicates with purpose through truth and lies. You should not simply write as a male about men only any more then you should just right about yourself (some do of course).
Gilberto work is evidence of his hart and mind. How the audience interpreted it is conditioned by their divergent perspectives and commitment to participation. I see little evidence that Gilberto has failed them with the body of work he has left on my shelf.
Charles, I agree entirely with what you’re saying on how dominant elitist ideology privileges certain modes of expression and, as implied by my last DWYCK piece, concomitantly believe that comics offer an instructive corrective.
Gilbert Hernandez, to me, is an instructive example — while often expressive and broad, even didactic, in his choices, he simultaneously commands ambiguity and subtle, suggestive characterization like few others in comics, or indeed more broadly.
Oh, one more point: one particular bugbear of elitist ideology is “cliché”, another is “didacticism” — and if you look closely enough and bring enough experience as a reader to your effort, to can describe almost anything to fit those categories of exclusion. This despite the fact that *they work*, that people enjoy, appreciate and learn from works that employ them. To eschew them categorically is to eschew much that’s great in art — whither Dickens or Capra, for example?
Experience as related through these registers can be just as true as that evoked by modes more acceptable high culture. Sometimes, a “didactic” message such as that delivered by Chaplin at the end of “The Great Dictator” resonates, and sometimes the world *does feel the way it does in that Calvin & Hobbes strip that Noah singled out for ridicule.
I have lots of problems with lots of Dickens. His portrayal of women is…well, it’s riddled with cliches. Not good ones, either. And I tend to enjoy Capra for Jimmy Stewart flipping out, not for the idealization of American kitsch.
Experience as related through these registers is true in part because we think of experience through those registers. Calvin and Hobbes’ nostalgic view of childhood helps make that view of childhood real. The view of childhood as a timeless lovely landscape frozen for our return in memory has everything to do with how we treat children. Which is, in case you’re wondering, not especially well.
That’s a much larger, more complex debate, of course, but I don’t think that Calvin and Hobbes simplistically perpetuates any such malignant dogma. There’s plenty of subversive subtext in that strip. But would you deny, that the world sometimes looks like that, whether in childhood or adulthood?
Sure, there are problems in Dickens and Capra, but that’s my point (from the other discussion), really — I still think they great artists (Dickens especially), and manage to capture widely and perceptively important aspects of the human experience.
BTW: is idealization bad?
The view of childhood as a timeless lovely landscape frozen for our return in memory has everything to do with how we treat children. Which is, in case you’re wondering, not especially well.
This I happen to agree with wholeheartedly. Such a critique informs the way I teach children’s literature.
I agree with Matthias that Watterson does not perpetuate such simplistic views of childhood.
Dickens is undeniably a great artist. The greatness tends for me to be despite his treatment of women, not because of it. I find the Esther Summerson parts of Bleak House really infuriating, for example, though in other respects that book is one of my favorite novels.
“I don’t think that Calvin and Hobbes simplistically perpetuates any such malignant dogma. There’s plenty of subversive subtext in that strip.”
I think the strip Charles picked was a particularly crappy Calvin and Hobbes (despite its formal elan). Many of the strips are funny or clever. I don’t think they’re ever subversive (a term that gets thrown around way too often anyway.) In any case, as I said, the world looks like what it looks like because of the way we portray it. If there’s an unmediated view of the world, I don’t know how we’d even know what it is. So I don’t see letting a piece of art off the hook because it describes real experiences as an especially useful construction.
I wouldn’t say idealization is always good or always bad. It would depend on the context or the individual instance.
I’m getting caught up after my weekend got eaten by my day job, and I realize that the Linda Williams tangent of this topic has gone other places on other threads, but I just wanted to share a germane reference: the second part of the intro to Williams’ book, Porn Studies, is also about the difficulties of teaching porn in the classroom, and she recounts an interesting anecdote that is somewhat similar to Charles’.
I’ll reserve any additional comments until I’ve actually caught up on all the threads.
Gah! That anecdote cuts off just when it gets interesting! Damn Google Books….
Yeah — it runs all the way to page 20, so you can get the overview, but it’s missing a couple of good chunks.
Finally read through what I could of the Linda Williams anecdote. It’s interesting the ways it is and is not analagous to Charle’s discussion. In her class Williams was having her students watch actual pornography which was labeled as such, so obviously there was no outraged “this is pornography!” moment. Instead, the painful classroom moment came when one of the students asked other (male) students if they were or were not turned on by one of the films (a gay male film.)
In Charles’ anecdote, the tension was around whether the comic is meant to excite desire — with both Charles and the student appearing to agree that such excitation would be illegitimate or pornographic (I could be misunderstanding Charles’ position, but that seemed to be where he was coming from.) In Williams, there’s a general acceptance that (at least one) intention, or possibility, is desire, but the uncomfortable tension is around what sort of desire is excited and whether/how to talk about it.
I think Maria here is figured as an object of desire not just for the men on the page, but for men (and others) reading the page as well. To me that seems worth discussing.
Just quickly, re: Calvin & Hobbes, because I left it hanging:
The subversion I was pointing to was the obvious implication of the strips that Calvin is a lonely child, borderline dysfunctional even, if you want to take the analysis that far. Watterson never makes it obvious, but it lurks at the edges of his daydreaming and has, of course, be picked up in parodies.
Calling that particular strip “crappy” seems to me to be missing the point. I take it you don’t like it because it’s sentimental — the implication being that it is fake or simplistic — but we sometimes do get sentimental and Calvin’s lone afternoons are sort of melancholy, if also beautiful places to go. Far from fake or simplistic.
As far as representing real experience, I don’t get your beef. Art often resonates because we recognize what it represents, and because it makes us reflect upon it. *Of course* there’s no unmediated view of the world — that’s the whole point. Essential to most art is the success of its mediation.
Matthias, I don’t really see how making Calvin a lonely child is especially subversive? The image of the lonely, imaginative child is hardly an unusual one.
“Art often resonates because we recognize what it represents, and because it makes us reflect upon it. *Of course* there’s no unmediated view of the world — that’s the whole point. Essential to most art is the success of its mediation.”
But if you make the success of the mediation dependent upon its congruence with reality, you’re automatically assuming you have access to an unmediated reality against which you can judge that success, yes?
No no, you’re just making an artwork that resonates with others, who’ve had similar experiences, or who appreciate your representation of experience for some other reason. That seems to me one of the ways we intersubjectively create notions of art, not to mention great art.
I don’t really wish to argue here the value of the concept ‘subversive’, which as you say is overused, but merely wanted to note that in relation to C&H, your apparent notion that the strip is simplistically, and perniciously, sentimental is subverted by the strip’s subtext, which Watterson mobilized in disparate, funny and quite moving ways through his years on it.
So any artwork that resonates with anyone is on those ground uncriticizeable? Or if it resonates with enough people it shouldn’t be criticized? I’m sure you’re not saying that, but I’m not sure where else this argument leads….
Anyway, I don’t deny that the C&H strip resonates with other representations of childhood as a frozen, replicated, and therefore consumable piece of sentimental kitsch. I just find those representations ugly and tiresome. And the lonely child meme you talk about which adds piquancy to the image doesn’t seem to me to subvert the sentimentality, especially. Quite the opposite.
I don’t know…as an alternative, I think Peanuts avoids sentimentality and the commodification of childhood (not always, but often) not through Charlie Brown’s travails (which are not my favorite part of the strip by a long shot) but by messing with his kids status as kids, as well as by making the line between reality and fantasy a lot more permeable than it is in C & H. Bloom County is somewhat like Peanuts in this way as well, which is why I like that strip a lot more than I like C & H (despite the fact that Watterson is clearly a much better artist than Breathed.)
No artwork — nothing really — is, or should be, uncriticizable. That’s not what I’m saying — I’m merely pointing out that appealing to people’s emotions in a way that really resonates, isn’t nothing. And doing it while being hysterically funny even less so.
I think C&H earns its sentimental moments fully by integrating them into a celebratory but also critical depiction of childhood, which definitely implicates the more problematic aspects of how we view it. I think it’s reductive and rather ungenerous merely to describe something as imaginative and intelligent as pandering, pernicious kitsch. I mean, come on, celebrating imagination, whether in childhood or not, and actually being able to exemplify it on paper convincingly, isn’t *evil, is it?
I don’t deny that Peanuts is better, but Bloom County… er, I dunno.
Yeah, nobody gives Bloom County props, damn it.
I don’t think celebrating imagination is in itself necessarily in itself laudabel — especially since I often don’t find C & H especially imaginative. But there are lots worse things, no doubt, and I often find the strip funny and entertaining. I don’t think it’s evil; just overrated.