Being a critic is kind of like writing an autobiography. It’s an arrogant act to say, Listen to meeeee, for what I say is important!
The thing is, what I say isn’t all that important. I’m not going to be in the majority on this one, and I doubt that many people will care about my opinion one way or the other in the grand scheme of things. This particular comic has been praised by lots of big names and it’s liked by lots of people, and their voices have more impact than mine, and….I’m fine with that, actually.
I’m explaining that not because it’s suddenly all humility hour here at HU (are you kidding?), but because situating myself in the reality of my impact and the smallness of my perspective’s importance is the first step in analyzing The Years Have Pants.
See, the comic is about Alec, Eddie’s self-insert, and as far as I can tell, Alec doesn’t get that the world is not about him or that other people’s entire existence isn’t there just to prop up his journey of self-discovery and truthiness seeking.
It’s a recurring theme, that Alec’s view of the world is some kind of truth, and that his buddy-at-the-bar bullshitting is a glimpse into…well, art, beauty, truth, humanity, love, whatever.
And sometimes after a lot of beer you can see things with a mystical clarity. Like the shortsighted man putting on glasses for the first time. (Alec was always getting on the wrong bus.)
p. 12, panel 3
Seriously? No, wait, seriously? Truth is at the bottom of a beer glass. Wow, deeeeeep, man.
So, Alec goes on some more about the hot chick in the bar, right?
She’s living in the here and now. No ‘buts’ or ‘if onlys’, or save the cash in case better comes. Of course, I’m projecting my own ideals onto her… [VM: Ya think?]
And Danny replies:
doesn’t lessen what you’re saying.
Yes, yes, it does. This woman in the bar has nothing to do with Alec. She’s a completely different person with her own ideas, thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Maybe she’s just come into a lot of money and is celebrating her grandmother’s death by playing the darts her grandfather loved. Maybe she just got a job promotion. Maybe she just got a job demotion. Maybe she doesn’t have a job. Maybe she’s just sold plasma for beer and peanut money. Maybe she’s wealthy but likes to dress on the cheap. Maybe she’s actually a parakeet in disguise. Who knows?
But Alec clearly doesn’t. (He does go on to say, “Maybe she’s just in love,” but that doesn’t stop my point, which is that the only thing that matters to Alec and Danny in this situation is their own ideas, not the woman herself, and Danny even says, “Same results.”)
The whole comic uses walk-on players who exist primarily for Alec to react to or who function to prop him up. They never seem to be their own people, with their own existence.
Yes, this is an autobiography, but the form does not require bit players without motivation and without checks and balances outside the main character. For instance, anyone who follows personal blogs for a while will begin to know the people in that person’s life, the way we know characters in a sitcom or a soap. Finding out about those others, the children, bosses, relatives, pets, becomes its own end at times. That never seems to happen here.
Which is fine, it’s Eddie’s comic.
But it does add to the solipsistic flavor.
And so what next?
Typical boozing with dashes of relationship shenanigans and poetry readings.
It’s just really boring. Some of the lines are old recycled jokes. “Is that a bottle in front of me or a frontal lobotomy?” Ba dump bump. [panel 2, page 70]
Gosh, that’s art.
I want to be clear. I didn’t hate this comic. I just found it boring and irritating, like a blowhard at a bar who won’t shut up, and I wished I could signal a friend with my eyes to get me the hell out of there or that I could excuse myself to go pee and just never return. To say that I hated it would be to give the comic too much credit–it never stirred that much emotion.
It reminded me of the many autobiographies I’ve heard in cafes and coffeeshops, from artist types who moan about how painful the creation of art is, who bitch about having to work for a living, and who name-drop the hot in-crowd artist in order to make themselves look good, and whose primary interest in life appears to be a) beer/pot/whiskey and b) sordid sexual dramas of various kinds.
These artist types are sometimes writers, sometimes painters, sometimes illustrators, sometimes poets, often otherwise interesting people but who I end up fleeing because life is too short to hear one more “and then I got drunk and we talked about Jackson Pollack/Barthes/Jori Graham and the Meaning of Art and fucked and it was all really sordid/deep/meaningful/listen to meeeee” story.
Yeah, I’ve heard all that before.
Sure, there lots of stories out there where someone has a monomania and tells their story about it and their life. Julie and Julia was pretty good, as movies go, and it had many of the same elements (art, boring/painful day jobs, meaning, sexual fooling around, a famous person as granting importance, painful self interest), so I’m not against such autobios as such, and I was looking forward to this one, but it’s just not very good. (Yes, this is an evaluative statement, but that’s what I’m getting non-paid for.) If I’m going to spend an afternoon reading a new autobio, it doesn’t need to be about a specific topic (comics, art, knitting, food, whatever), it just has to hold my damn interest.
But look, here’s p. 147.
Back when the VM was a wee tot, her college boyfriend xeroxed himself in the back of the library as a lark, because it was 2 am and he’d been studying for twenty-three hours and he had a dime so why not. Drunk employees do this at corporate Christmas parties. I’ve seen it on internet memes. People, I have seen as much xeroxed pubic hair as I want to see, OK? I do not need to see any more. No. REALLY.
It doesn’t make me think of mythic beasts, it just makes me grab a wet wipe every time I fix the copier.
I find most of the comic is this way–what could be an interesting anecdote is sapped of its meaning by shallow treatment or fart jokes or rehashing a cliche. I don’t already care about Alec/Edie, he needs to make me care, but he never does. Getting boozed up and falling asleep at a turnpike….I mean, I know people like that already or I’ve read about them a bunch of times. Borrrrrring.
Anyone outside him, well. Those who could be likable additional characters don’t get enough screen time or throughlines to be particularly real. It’s as if, outside of Alec’s life, these people cease to exist.
I find the results both dull and claustrophobic.
I’m going to talk about one last, final short and then I’m done, I promise!, and we can go back to everyone else’s positive appreciation takes on the structure or meaning or what-have-you. (I suspect most people backbuttoned out long ago.)
Take a look. [p. 407]
This is a single-page short. It’s titled Flying Neil Gaiman In. If you don’t know who Gaiman is, this whole short will mean nothing.
We’ve got Alec/Eddie talking on the phone with a doctor who is performing a medical procedure with an un-named, unshown patient. Instead of paying attention to the medical procedure and the patient, the doc is gabbing on about snooty wines and Neil Gaiman with some comic artist.
And you know, that’s just kind of a crappy way to treat people.
Look. I don’t know what the medical procedure is, I don’t know if that’s a rectal thermometer or a speculum, but other people’s real-life bodies and thoughts are more important than fancy wines and name dropping. Their body is used as window dressing for Alec/Eddie to play status games about who’s the bigger wine judge and it’s just gross.
This is a particularly egregious example, and I don’t know whether it happened in real life or not. But if it did happen in real life, it was a crappy thing to draw and put into a comic book. I don’t need to see some poor schmuck’s bare legs and medical procedure in order to learn about Alec/Eddie’s nifty dinner partay and yet that’s how the whole comic feels, although mostly to a lesser degree (thank god). It’s confessional tales about Alec as the center of the universe, and the only existence other people appear to have is as setting for his life, no matter how minor a moment it might be for him and no matter how serious a matter it might be for them.
And you know, thanks, but I’ll pass.
If it moves you, it moves you, but I find it the dullest sort of self-confessional pulp, right down to the cat butt grass-dangly short (and isn’t everyone glad I didn’t write about that? I’m sure you are.)
I’m not saying this to harsh anyone’s squee. I’m saying it because it’s a roundtable. If this were in the wild, I’d have just slapped the book shut around page 10 and moved on to other things. But this is a roundtable and the point is to get a variety of views.
This is one of those times that it’s helpful to know one’s general might in the universe. I’m small, small potatoes and no one really cares what I think. I can go: pffffffft at the great pants book all day long and it won’t change a thing about its sales numbers or anything else. I’m not shifting minds here or creating new paradigms. I just think the book is boring. In two months or ten, no one is going to remember this. I’m not struggling with an Odyssean voyage, I’m just writing a blog post. Does that mean it was effortless? Hell no, this sucker took hours since I’m pretty sure it will piss off everyone. But you know, it’s still just a blog post about a comic, and I like that.
Consider it kind of an anti-hero’s journey.
_____________
Update: The entire roundtable on The Years Have Pants is here.
Obviously I’m on board here. You’ve given some specifics to my feelings that the book kind of aggressively excluded other viewpoints. The Neil Gaiman anecdote is especially painful.
I sort of wonder if people who like it feel that that is being critiqued…that Campbell is supposed to be criticizing himself for treating others as players in his drama rather than as people in their own right? I don’t really see that happening, but perhaps others do….
Yeah, that may be. I don’t have the book in front of me, but there’s the bit where I think it’s Danny who complains that Alec sees all the poetry as written for him and his adoration of Penny. I also remember people telling Alec he’s selfish, but I dunno, it doesn’t really work for me enough to convince me it’s on purpose or enough of a balance.
Yes; and in that page about his child being born he says some mea culpa’s about it being all about him.
That sort of thing is just much more effective when you actually get to see things from somebody else’s perspective though (which isn’t *that* hard to accomplish or infrequent in autobiography.) Event that fairly funny page Suat highlighted where his wife is yelling at him for all the icky things he does; we’re not really seeing her perspective. We’re seeing her freak out for kind of no reason, which he watches with affection and bemusement. I think that’s one of my favorite pages, despite the sitcomness…but it still doesn’t actually multiply perspectives…
It seems to me the key to understanding that last page with the doctor is to look at it as a poetic-license juxtaposition, rather than look at it with bloody literal-mindedness. Of course this conversation didn’t happen while the doctor was doing something delicate to a patient. The point is that this man does significant things, but is concerned about insignificant topics. One might reasonably suppose Mr. Campbell is thinking about the triviality of his interactions with a person who does important work; the disconnect between the man’s role in life and his role in Eddie’s life is the subject here.
VM suggests it might not have happened, though.
You could look at it as saying that he’s ironically concerned with trivia despite the important things he does. Or you could look at it as reducing the patient to triviality in order to emphasize the importance of what Campbell does.
“Borrrrrring.”
Wow! Homer Simpson is in the house!
Haven’t read the book, but the doctor thing looks to me like a visual gag. Its a way of splicing up what would otherwise be a fairly visually dull talking heads scene. (Now i’m getting into craft versus criticism alluded to in that recent post)
I think there’s clearly incongruence in whats happening with the art versus what’s literally drawn, though its a bit subtle since the doctor has a phone in hand and this possibly could have happened. (If the patient was unconscious, i guess this could have occured. I find it very hard to believe a doctor could have gotten away with this with a live patient. I think most likely though, it never happened and is a visual gag.)
Craft only takes you so far though. It’s still fair to talk about what the scene is doing in terms of theme/narrative/etc. and why.
It’s definitely a sit-com moment…but sit-coms are often fairly crassly solipsistic; bit characters get reduced essentially to gag props in the main character’s story.
” Or you could look at it as reducing the patient to triviality in order to emphasize the importance of what Campbell does.”
That’s hard to swallow . Eddie Campbell thinks healing patients is trivial next to his chitchatty dealings? C’mon.
Hey Aaron. I know others disagree, but that kind of solipsism is really what I got from the book. It’s why I didn’t like it.
I’ve only dealt with Eddie Campbell personally very tangentially, but he always seemed smart and thoughtful. I don’t have any reason to think he’s personally any more egocentric than anyone else. But that doesn’t mean he can’t have written a bad book (or a bad book in my estimation, in any case.)
It could be irony or a gag, but either way, it didn’t work for me.
I mean, in another comic I might just go WTFFBBQ, but in this case it doesn’t seem all that out of character for Alec. He slept with a daughter and a mom, fer instance, which, TACKY. If you read it as poetic irony, that’s cool, but I think there’s room for my reading too.
“in this case it doesn’t seem all that out of character for Alec.”
What doesn’t? I don’t see to what that “it” refers. Besides, all Alec does in this page is talk to a doctor about harmless, if trivial, things.
I have a lot of trouble with the “Alec/Eddie”. If Campbell wanted Alec to be Eddie, he could have just used his own name. They’re different, and I feel like you — uh, Noah and Vom — aren’t putting enough space between the author and the character. I think you end up in a slightly different place if you give Campbell any credit at all for not being completely unaware of how irritating it is for the patient that the doctor’s not paying attention.
What about reading it as commentary on how seductive celebrities are? Or reading the solipsism as something intentionally represented? I don’t think you’re wrong to notice that the scene has this particular problematic element: I just think you’re stopping too soon with what it means that the problematic element is there.
Which, you know — as Vom says, if it puts you off it puts you off; you’re allowed to hate it. But the implication that Campbell-the-author wasn’t thoughtful about the places where he depicted Alec as flawed, even seriously flawed, seems wrong to me.
Hmm, looks like my comment from earlier got swallowed whole by the interwebs…
Basically, I was going to chime in and say that I didn’t think the reading of “reducing the patient to triviality in order to emphasize the importance of what Campbell does” doesn’t really seemed supported by the text at all. I can see disliking the “knowing attitude towards one’s own solipsism” tack, but saying that the attitude just isn’t present, and that Campbell really thinks everything he presents is just as important as Alec/Campbell thinks it is, is way, way off. I’d go so far as to say there is not actually room for that reading, and that sticking to that reading is being willfully simplistic and literal about the text.
I also am with Caro on the importance of the fact that Alec is named Alec and not Eddie. Distancing was clearly very important to Campbell in the earlier works, and I think it’s a significant part of the book (as a single volume) when he drops the conceit, and refers to the character by his own name. It coincides with the relaxing of Alec’s insistency on seeing the world as his own epic struggle and older Campbell’s settling into viewing it as an absurdist comedy, with himself being one of the absurd elements.
Caro and Jason, the difficulty for me is…I think there are actually lots of places where there’s distancing. I think it’s fair to say that Eddie is presenting Alec as wrapped up in his own hero’s journey. As I tried to say in my piece (and as I think VM gets at as well) undercutting the heroic isn’t actually an unheroic mode. The opposite of solipsism is not a critique of solipsism; you don’t make it not about yourself by pointing out that you’re talking about yourself.
You make it not all, endlessly about yourself by writing the thing as if there are other people in the world and they matter. The solipsism isn’t just in the critiqued solipsism, it’s in the critique itself.
I still haven’t read Caro’s piece though, so perhaps I will be convinced…or at least argued to a halt….
My piece is about How to Be An Artist pretty exclusively, and this stuff works differently there. He’s more overt about the distancing.
But I didn’t find the book solipsistic period. I can see that it’s introverted, and that the point is the character’s interior life, but I didn’t get solipsism, probably because the distance between the character and the author was so significant to me that I read from that vantage point throughout. I don’t really talk about it as questioning the solipsism. I would have talked about self-centeredness in some of the earlier pieces, maybe, but I still think Campbell’s got distance on it and that was really palpable to me throughout.
I’m very big on “autobiography is fiction,” though, and the death of the author and whatnot, so that just wasn’t my experience of the book at all.
*sigh* I’m not being willfully simplistic, promise. I just see it differently.
If you want to read the comic as perpetuating the crafting of those solpsistic depictions and at the same time distancing itself from approving them, then that’s fine.
But as I see it, there are a whole lot of POV techniques an artist/writer can use to either indicate external narrator POV (omniscient, artist/writer perspective) or to in-clue about other stand-ins for authorial authority (e.g., Churchill in the King’s Speech, contra history). I’m not seeing those used here.
I’m guessing that part of it is that I run in a culture where people spend a lot of time crafting self-insert stories and dissecting them. When I read a self-insert story, I’m likely to actually talk to the person who wrote it. I’m very unlike the folks who come from a lit-theory crowd, in that to me, the bottom line gut-instinct I have is author-talking-to-author, not critic to a work divorced from its creator. And, partly it’s just that I come across these kinds of stories all the time–alllll the time. They’re sort of a plague. I’ve seen a lot of them and many of the things I suspect others found new and interesting are things I’ve read before (right down to the mother-daughter thing, although usually it’s siblings).
Noah, you dislike this sort of story in prose fiction too, don’t you? I seem to remember this coming up in relation to Asterios Polyp.
Part of what makes Alec so particularly literary, though, Vom, is precisely that he does not use those POV techniques: he lets the narrative stand from the character’s POV, and uses only structural and grammatical techniques for the distancing. If he did do those things, it would push it more in the direction of conventional bio-historical narrative, where the author’s voice is present, and I think that would really diminish what makes it so smart and effective.
Like this: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm
Caro, I think you’re answered on the other thread….
Yeah, I have read autobios without the narrative distancing techniques. I mean, plenty of them.
I’ve read so many they bore me. I’m not saying he has to use these techniques. I’m saying that NOT using these techniques is a choice, and part of that choice results in a solipsistic story that’s all Alec all the time for some readers. I run in a fairly sophisticated crowd of writers at times, and we play POV games all the time, and we also run across unsophisticated Suethors a lot, and Campbell reads like a Suethor.
I mean, this is someone who xeroxed their pubic hair and wrote about their cat smearing poop on their door. If it’s art for you, it’s art for you. But I don’t think it’s a wild reading to say that this is someone who thinks I should pay attention to his cat’s poop and I think, well, I don’t want to, because I don’t actually give shit about his cat’s poop. Why the hell would I? (And I say this as someone who spent years on a pet board helping to diagnose poop issues.)
I’ve read the Beats, and I don’t like them either. They bore me. And this whole comic reads like a Suethor tween drunk on the Beats. I’m sorry, but that’s just where I’m at.
I don’t think he thinks you should pay attention to his cat’s poop at all. I think he thinks you should recognize that, given the banality of that plot point, you should probably be looking around to see what else is going on there, thematically or formally.
It just seems like you’re reading for story and not noticing anything else. Point of view is just not where the interesting stuff is in this book. It’s strengths are thematic and logical and formal.
But if the Beats bore you too, it doesn’t surprise me that this does as well. This doesn’t really work like Beat writing, but it’s definitely in that tradition. I love the Beats too!
Vommarlowe,
I’m terribly sorry that your wealth of life experience removes, systemically, any ability of enjoying any part of the story at hand. Since all of your criticisms seem to stem from personal experiences to which I cannot speak, I can’t really say anything to your dislike of them. So, um, yeah. That’s that, I suppose?
It occurs to me that my comment reads maybe 33% more snippy than I mean it. Really, your criticisms seem to boil down to personal preference rather than debatable point, particularly since I see the irony regarding solipsism to be so obvious as to be genuinely confused at anyone’s inability to see it, that I really wouldn’t know what else to say in response to the Suethor bits you proffer.
I’m also pretty leery about your possibly bringing in The King’s Speech as an example of anything positive regarding writing or narrative. Not sure where you’re going with that…
Caro,
I noticed other things, but I wanted to stick to the pictures and story because everybody was going to hate me anyway and I just didn’t want to bother getting into it.
Here’s how I see the cat butt. As an artist he can draw whatever he wants. He can use whatever images he chooses to create his vision of formalism and theme, so each time he makes an image (of anything) I would argue that he’s saying, “Pay attention to this.”
It’s not the end of the tale, no, but it’s part of the tale. And I’m just burnt out on the fart jokes and gross bits if they’re not part of something else that’s enough to make up for it. Partly, it’s that I’ve read too many TMI stories and I just don’t want to read any more. There’s other ways to get the point across, and if it had been just one cat butt story, I’d probably have just shrugged, but there were two, and it just hit my tipping point for it. And the other reason I suspect I see it as more self-focused than others is that to me, depicting himself or a self-insert reads as pay attention to me. Like I said, I’ve read other autobios and liked them fine, so it’s not inherently a hatred of navel-gazing, but I find I can enjoy them more when they take a different approach.
Now, maybe I’m wrong (I’m sure lots of people will tell me that I am), but to me the main theme of the book is that life is in the service of art (even the gross bits of life) and the power of the vision of art. So I’m seeing the point of the gross stuff, but eh, I don’t take that view of art and he’s not convincing me.
Jason,
I mentioned the King’s Speech not because I loved the movie (I thought it was pretty meh, I took my mom who adored it) but because there’s been a lot of discussion about the narrative use of Churchill.
Historically, Churchill supported Edward. In the movie, he supports Albert/George. So, it’s a historical error, but as a narrative device, what the script writers did was have a powerful, easily recognizable figure say Albert/George was teh awesome. So, functionally, the movie is using Churchill to bolster the nervous would-be king. It’s just a handy example of a common device to provide semi-omniscient narrative authority that doesn’t break the POV wall. (And it can be used to show disapproval, whatever.) I could probably find you links to the discussion if you’re really interested. I assumed other people had been reading the stuff I read, but we don’t all overlap.
As I said in the initial review, really, this is just not my kind of book. I knew lots of people weren’t going to agree, and I’m only providing an explanation of my perspective.
Ah, okay. I would argue, then, that The Churchill Gambit is a terrible, dishonest, hacky narrative device, and that arguing that Campbell might have employed it is pretty insulting to the much more subtle and (to my mind) effective narrative devices he does employ. But again, diffr’nt strokes, or however that’s supposed to be alternately punctuated.
VM:
“but other people’s real-life bodies and thoughts are more important than fancy wines and name dropping. Their body is used as window dressing for Alec/Eddie to play status games about who’s the bigger wine judge and it’s just gross.”
Oh, come on. That’s real life. Doctors do that sort of thing all the time, you know? It’s obvious Campbell isn’t retailing this to increase his cool factor. It’s black comedy.
And, VM, you spend far too much space in your ‘I’m a lone voice in the wilderness drowned out by the chorus of praise’ bit. It’s trying to a) disarm your presumed critics ahead of time, and b) enhance your status as a loner, a rebel, Dottie.
It’s all the more awkward as most of the roundtable has been negative towards the book, starting with Noah’s opening blast. Your stance scarcely seems original or heroic.
And, at the risk of shocking you speechless…young men fantasize about attractive young women seen in bars. That’s what they DO. The horrid cads.
Alex, it’s partially just unfortunate timing. There are many more positive takes on the book…there all just back-loaded because pulling reviews out of this roundtable has been…difficult. I think because it’s just soooo long. (The book, I mean; not the reviews necessarily.)
I’m sure VM isn’t shocked that (many) men fantasize about women. The point is that the book reifies and validates that view…inasmuch as the world is there to be turned into art (which isn’t that different from “there to be turned into fantasy object.)
I don’t really see why it can’t be black comedy and there to increase the cool factor. That’s often how black comedy is used.
Alex,
Hate to burst your view of my random lone-wolfness, but when I wrote it, everyone else in the roundtable, except Noah, loved the book. We talked about it; I wrote my essay based on that information. There were a bunch of other people here and elsewhere who were supposed to love on it first. There will be plenty other stuff for you to read in the positive vein. hth
My review is pretty long. :D It’s also very positive! Which I confirm: Vom knew ahead of time.
Caro,
Did you see the article in the Chronicle about a national digital library? Kind of a cool discussion of open access issues if you haven’t seen it.
I did not; I will definitely check that out. Thanks!