Jeeves and Social Change

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Philip Smith

When I was thirteen years old my reading habits, which had previously been limited to J. R. Tolkien, W .E. Johns, and their ilk, expanded. Filled with intellectual curiosity and a massively inflated sense of my own understanding of the world, I tried to tackle books which, in retrospect, were far too intellectually unwieldy for me at the time. I dutifully read a volume by Eric Hobsbawm cover-to-cover despite understanding only one sentence in five. Orwell spoke to me (as he does to every teenager) although I could not quite square his politics with the smattering of Marxism I had read. Plath, of course, resonated.

One gem I uncovered during that period was the English comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse and when I look back on my formative years as a reader I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for me to set aside the weighter tomes (all those hours spent looking at Shakespeare) for a while and instead have devoted myself fully to the task of devouring the Wodehouse canon.

I found Jeeves and Wooster to be Wodehouses’ most compelling creation (history appears to be on my side on this point). Each J. and W. story follows, broadly, the same plot; Bertram Wooster, a well-meaning but somewhat, to use Jeeves’ affectionate words ‘mentally deficient’ man-child of independent means, gets into some kind of a mess and Jeeves, his faithful butler, rescues him from it. Bertie’s misadventures are rarely his own doing – they are generally instigated by an old school chum who has had a fall-out with his affianced and in need of help, or an aunt who is trying to out-maneuver her husband. Bertie’s problems are almost entirely external; left to his own devices he can generally be found sitting around in his New York or London apartment, spending time with his friends at the Drones (a gentleman’s club for boisterous – fourth sons with a lot of money and no occupation) or some of the more fashionable areas of France, reading a pulp detective novel, recovering from a hangover, or indulging in a little gambling. He occasionally finds himself temporarily besotted with a member of the opposite sex, but the danger soon passes. As each novel progresses a comedy of errors ensues. Various parties appear to foil the plans of Bertie and those he holds dear, often in the form of some terrifying patriarch who, as a result of some misunderstanding, wants to tear our young hero limb from limb. Just as we reach the moment when all seems lost, Jeeves swoops in with one of his ingenious plans and the whole matter is resolved.

One does not read Jeeves and Wooster for the story, of course, but for the language. One can let a Wodehouse novel fall open and, briefly surveying the page, find a marvelously-wrought sentence. Consider, for example, the following, found in Carry On, Jeeves:

Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy overpowering sort of dashed female. Not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew that they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips this season.

In just three sentences Wodehouse leaps from the theatre (‘o.p.’ and ‘prompt side’ being opposite sides of a stage) to the language of fashion. The word ‘dashed’ wonderfully evokes not just a language but a world-view laden-heavy with the Edwardian era. His very phrasing at once evokes and gently ridicules a world of waistcoats, high collars, and entitlement.

Despite the oft quoted phrase that analysing Wodehouse is like ‘taking a spade to a souffle’, we have a variety of terms which we can bring to bear upon the numerous literary devices found in his prose. He is the master of dramatic irony (in Right Ho Jeeves Bertie sips a cocktail and feels like ‘Cesar having one in his tent the day he overcame Nervii’) and the transferred epithet (‘I pronged a moody forkful’). It is perhaps his bathos which produces in me the most glee. In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, as a pair of lovers have a tearful and passionate reunion Bertie, witnessing the scene, muses that the toast he is eating is a bit cold, but that’s quite alright – he rather likes cold toast so long as it has plenty of butter on it.

We can describe the mechanics of Wodehouse’s prose, then, but there is a gulf between taxonomy and analysis. Here the spade soufflé analogy becomes apt, as Wodehouse’s works are often determinedly detached from historical and social realities. Evelyn Waugh, writing in praise of his peer, describes the world Wodehouse presents works as ‘idyllic’, and Auden described him as ‘one of the great English experts on Eden’. The two wars which Wodehouse lived through, including internment in a Nazi prison in France and a shattered reputation in England, never intrude upon his works. As a professional book botherer and Wodehouse fan one would think I would have a lot to say on his works, but I often find that there is little in Wodehouse which is not already on the page.

The quaint and insular world of the English gentry which Wodehouse presents is not entirely apolitical, however. Some have found in Wodehouse a reversal of roles and an unbalancing of the social order. Sophie Ratcliffe argues that in Wodehouse stories those of the lower social orders (butlers, chorus girls), often prove themselves to be more capable than those who were seen as their social betters. She defends the point by observing that in his correspondence Wodehouse shows a ‘lack of snobbery and prejudice’, being as diligent in writing to a former housekeeper as to George Orwell.

Following Ratcliffe, one can read Wodehouse as social critique. Bertie is unwittingly snobbish and child-like. He is a well-educated imbecile who wields his impressive vocabulary like a blunderbuss. He has achieved almost nothing in life (the prize for scriptural knowledge which he won as a child comes up with comical regularity). His opulence and unconscious disregard for anyone outside of his social class is striking. He worries, often, about Marxist radicals baying for his blood and when one sees how he lives one can understand why. It is a testament to the insularity of his world view that Bertie’s implied reader is one of his own (‘I don’t know if you were at Cannes this year…’ he writes).

Despite the heroic role given to the lower classes in Wodehouse’s works, it is rare we have more than a few lines of dialogue from the subaltern. Even Jeeves lives a life largely shrouded in mystery, appearing only to assist the young master in his time of need. We know that Jeeves likes to bet. He sometimes takes fishing trips. He has an extended family which is particularly replete with aunts. He routinely quotes Shakespeare and Tennyson, but these things appear only as glimpses of a larger, submerged, whole. We see him only through Bertie’s eyes – as a kind of dutiful sorcerer (he eats a lot of fish) and idealised mother rather than a human being. Even when Jeeves narrates one of the short stories he sticks to the particularities of the matter at hand. His inner life remains, frustratingly, obfuscated.

When Sebastian Faulks took the reigns he pushed this criticism a little further – his version of Jeeves lost a relative in the Boer War and, when he reports this, receives no sympathy. Some of Bertie’s lot lost money when Emily Davison threw herself before a racehorse and they are far more concerned about a poor bet than the social changes promised by women’s liberation. Faulks, unlike Wodehouse, situates Jeeves and Bertie in history, even if that history seems to pass them by, making their time on this earth jarringly finite (in one of his letters Wodehouse laments that his novels would become ‘historical’ after the war given that Bertie would not be able to afford a butler with income tax as it was).

This is not to say that the changing political climate in England never pushes against the boundaries of Bertie’s world in Woodehouse’s books. Plum was fully conscious that he was capturing the dying days of the British aristocracy; Bertie attempts (unsuccessfully) to learn how to darn his own socks, and at one point witnesses a Marxist rally (only because a chum was trying to win over a lady there present). The world never pushed too hard, however. Bertie encounters threats to his way of life, but those threats, like those internal to his world, are always resolved.

It is hard to read too much social criticism in Wodehouse, then, because there is no sting. Wodehouse does not want to see the British gentry come to an end – his work is a celebration of useless people. Bertie’s shortsightedness does not make him a monster, but a child, and Wodehouse, if anything, wants to protect him. We find Bertie, like my thirteen year old self, poised, precariously, on the cusp of adulthood, but (unlike self) he never quite falls. This is, perhaps, why he has such fondness for overbearing aunts, why he is terrified by father figures such as Robert Spode, (who reminds him of his old schoolmaster and tries to talk to him like an adult). Marriage is a prospect Bertie often, in moments of madness, embraces and then seeks to escape from. Bertie, Peter Pan-like, lives out a fantasy of perpetual youth. He belongs to a world of no responsibilities, where nothing really changes, where Jeeves’ maternal embrace will always encircle him. The predictability and insularity of Bertie’s life is comforting. Aunts will be disappointed. Old school chums will fall in, and out, and back in love. Fearsome men like Roderick Spode will make sincere attempts to kill Bertie. Social change looms. But at the end of the day Jeeves sweeps in and fixes everything.

Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Philip Smith

I first encountered Donald Barthleme by way of The New Yorker Fiction podcast where I heard an excellent reading of his story “I Bought a Little City”. I consequently set about devouring everything of his I could find. He now holds a secure place in my pantheon of favourite writers, wedged somewhere between Richard McGuire and P. G. Woodehouse.

One has the sense when reading Barthleme’s work of the empirical and the insane being held in tight proximity to one another. In his handling of form Barthleme can be highly precise on both the sentence and story level. He had a background in architecture, which perhaps lent him a drive toward the empirical. At the same time, within and around this precisely measured prose, Barthelme’s writing is often experimental, and chaotic. One of his stories, for example, is a single perfectly correct sentence which runs for several pages. His protagonists, similarly, in perfectly rational terms contained within a perfectly rational structure, display extremes of emotional instability and indulge in behavior which borders upon insanity.

One of my favourite Barthleme stories (of which there are many) is “Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces an Aircraft between Milbertshofen and Cambrai, March 1916”. The story is a meager two and a half pages of prose which detail, as the title suggests, the disappearance of an aircraft. Exactly how or why the aircraft in question has come to be misplaced is never explained. This, for me, epitomizes Barthleme’s brilliance – for an aircraft to vanish is implausible (they are large and thus hard to misplace), and yet the fact of not seeing the thing one expects to see – the thing one could have sworn was there a moment ago, the rising panic as one realises that one will be tasked with providing an explanation for an error which remains beyond one’s own understanding – feels very familiar.

The disappearance of the plane is described alternately by the eponymous Paul Klee, and by the Secret Police, who have been watching him. The title and the style of the prose suggests the exacting empiricism of an inquest. The Secret Police prove to be equally baffled by the aircraft’s disappearance as Klee, however. Indeed, the Secret Police are less concerned about the missing aircraft or apportioning blame and far more concerned about their own loneliness, which borders upon existential dread. ‘There is a secret sigh that we sigh, secretly’ The Secret Police say. ‘We yearn to be known, acknowledged, admired even.’ When Paul Klee decides to alter the manifest, thereby hiding his error, the Secret Police applaud this decision, adding ‘[w]e would like to embrace him as a comrade and brother but unfortunately we are not embraceable.’

Barthleme speaks to me because he has little truck with power. His sympathy is not with those who demand explanations, but with the poor souls caught in the business of being human. He embraces the ways in which rational structures, be they literary, legal, or political, can contain and even exacerbate those volatile and emotionally-charged elements which would appear to be their antitheses. We often view madness and marginalisation as connected – that madness disqualifies one from holding any kind of power. Indeed, it is many a lazy writer who makes an antagonist or clown ‘crazy’ in order to discourage examination or viewer empathy. Barthleme shows us, however, that those individuals who have apparent power – soldiers protecting nuclear missiles, teachers, billionaires, the secret service – are just as ‘mad’ as the powerless. Indeed, Paul Klee seems to suffer far less than the individuals who police him – he likes to draw, he eats chocolate, he has a romantic partner, whereas the ‘omniscient’ Secret Police just want to be loved.

Barthleme also appeals to me because he realises that human beings are ridiculous. For Barthleme, above and within the humdrum of the everyday is a palpable turmoil, where the decisions made by the hegemony seem to be founded upon eminently non-empirical motivations. What separates Barthleme from the Kafkas of the world is his pathos. All of his characters, even the most unhinged and dangerous, seem to be palpably human, and Barthleme, if he does not love them for it, at least allows them to exist as they are without judgment. The Secret Police, like so many of Barthleme’s characters, stagger under the weight of a power they are utterly unsuited to wield. They do not realise it, but their power and their sorrow are deeply imbricated. Barthelme does not hate the Secret Police – he wants to throw a blanket over their shoulders and tell them that everything is going to be okay. Their ridiculousness is protected and even facilitated by the unbending structures which surround them. Humanity, perfectly broken as it is, endures through chaos in Barthleme’s works. Aircraft vanish, careers come under peril, nuclear warheads are guarded by maniacs, cities are purchased by love-sick tyrants, and yet, as Paul Klee says ‘drawings and chocolate go on forever.’

The Naked Tragedy

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Philip Smith

Podcasting is a fairly new form of media. It has precursors in the twentieth century, but has only existed in its current form over the last fifteen years. It resembles radio. Indeed, many professional podcasters work, or formerly worked, in radio and many podcasts are re-edits of radio broadcasts. Podcasts are quite different, though – many are financed through listener donations in addition to advertising, they exist in perpetuity, allowing for ‘binge’ listening, and their independent format means that they can feature content which would not be suitable for public radio. Perhaps most importantly, podcasts do not need to adhere to a set time limit, allowing for greater freedom in terms of broadcast length. By far the most noteworthy podcast of recent years has been Serial. I found Serial utterly compelling and, with the first episode of the new series having dropped, I want to unpack why.

In its most simple description, the first season of Serial was a true crime story. It is, in fact, two narratives – the story of a murder and ensuing trial, and the story of Sarah Koenig exploring that story. The very first words of Serial series one were ‘For the last year, I’ve spent every working day trying to figure out where a high school kid was for an hour after school one day in 1999– or if you want to get technical about it, and apparently I do, where a high school kid was for 21 minutes after school one day in 1999.’ She begins, in other words, not with her subject, but her own narrative. Accordingly, she begins not by interviewing the people involved but people from her own life. Koenig’s presence in the story as a substitute for the audience works wonderfully because she often voices the same thoughts as the listener and, unlike the author of fiction, the resolution of the story is equally unavailable to her as to the listener.

In some ways the story which unfolds resembles fiction; Koenig asserts of the first season ‘on paper, the case was like a Shakespearean mashup– young lovers from different worlds thwarting their families, secret assignations, jealousy, suspicion, and honor besmirched, the villain not a Moor exactly, but a Muslim all the same, and a final act of murderous revenge.’ In other ways, however, Serial is compelling because it captures the way in which real life stubbornly refuses to resemble fiction. In Arden of Faversham, another Elizabethan play, this time presenting a version of a real murder, the following is asserted;

Gentlemen, we hope you’ll pardon this naked tragedy,
Wherein no fil’d points are foisted in
To make it gracious to the ear or eye ;
For simple truth is gracious enough,
And needs no other points of glosing stuff.

True crime, in other words, is not beautiful. Serial bears out this assertion. In the new season Koenig begins by explaining (not apologizing for) the presence of microwave ‘bing’s, the sound of a dog scratching, and other intrusions of life in all of its imperfection. Often the voices are distorted, as is the case over Skype or other media. These signs of authenticity make the podcast all the more engrossing because we have a sense that what we are listening to has its own life beyond the narrative.

What ultimately made the first season of Serial work is that Koenig, brilliantly, presented within the murder story, two narratives. One where Adnan killed Hae Min Lee, and one where he did not. Both narratives involve versions of the same characters, and both narratives are entirely plausible, but only one can be true. Here, again, the refusal of life to work the same way as fiction is present – both narratives are flawed and subject to mistakes and lies. Facts are presented which contradict one another. As the story grows, like a good detective story, the possibility of resolution apparently becomes more remote, except, in this version, when we reach the final chapter all we have is a fascinating mess, because, as we know from Arden of Faversham, a true naked tragedy is not beautiful.

‘Playing On’ Shakespeare

Posted on November 4, 2015 by Philip Smith

Edwin Landseer,(1848)

I spend a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare.

One of the reasons I spend a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare is that, like everything I enjoy, Shakespeare, or, to be more precise, the things we do with Shakespeare, often pulls me in conflicting directions. Attending a performance of Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre brings me genuine pleasure. At the same time, however, I also recognise that the cult of Shakespeare arose in concert with the colonial agenda of the British Empire. Today Shakespeare remains the archetypal dead white man who continues to dominate the literary canon and the reverence with which he is routinely treated, I believe, is less to do with his literary brilliance and more to do with the repackaging of the colonial myth of Western artistic dominance. I love watching Shakespeare, but I also love seeing people thumb their nose at Shakespeare in clever ways.

I do not like to see Shakespeare reduced. When I encounter Shakespeare adaptations or reinterpretations in the wild I recognise that the fact that I am familiar with something does not give me any authority over how it is used. Shakespeare belongs to everyone equally and I have no right to tell someone else what to do with his works. At the same time, I do not like the idea that Shakespeare needs to be reinvented, particularly when the reinvention occurs on the ground of ‘accessibility’.

One of the reasons why making Shakespeare ‘accessible’ irks me is that I feel it demeans the audience. Last year, while living in Indonesia, I taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream to both of my English Literature classes. Most of my students were born and raised in Jakarta and spoke Indonesian (or in a small minority of cases Dutch or Chinese) at home. They were all in their mid-teens. We spent several months working our way through the play. We stomped our way around the classroom to understand meter, we wrote messages to each other in early modern English, we performed short scenes, memorised monologues, watched sections from films, summarised readings of the play, wrote essays, flew to Singapore to watch Shakespeare’s Globe perform and, finally, performed a full version of the play as our annual school production. (Over the course of the year I made sure we challenged the myth of Shakespeare as being without peer, and I also made sure that female authors and writers of colour were well-represented in the rest of the syllabus.)

They loved it. In fact, they loved Dream more than any other text we looked at. They struggled with the language but they were up to the challenge. I was extremely proud of all they accomplished. The experience left me convinced that my love of Shakespeare was transmissible, and that teenagers are often a lot smarter than some would give them credit for.

It is because of this experience that I can empathise with those such as James Shapiro, Bitter Gertrude, or the numerous scholars on the listservs to which I subscribe, who have voiced concerns over the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On project to ‘translate’ all of Shakespeare’s plays (at least, all which are available and currently considered a part of the canon) into modern English. The grounds for this reinvention, it seems, is to make the works more readily understandable for actors and audiences. The idea that Shakespeare needs to be ‘translated’ conjures for me images of audiences who want to feel cultured, but also don’t want to have to work as hard as my students and I did.

My objections are, of course, horribly presentist. Those who, like me, hold that OFS are giving in to lazy audiences tend to see this as a departure from the ways in which we have always approached Shakespeare. We are wrong. There is good reason to assume that, during his lifetime and beyond, Shakespeare’s plays have been subject to revision, rewriting, and shifting fashions in theatre based upon audience tastes. Until the early eighteenth century the idea of textual fidelity as we understand it today simply did not exist. Companies frequently added to, edited, and completely reinvented Shakespeare’s plays. During a large part of its performance history, King Lear, for example, was played with a happy ending. Our modern way of giving Shakespeare (even with Elizabethan dress on the stage at The Globe and with original pronunciation) is not a pure transmission from the Elizabethan stage, but the product of editing, shifting fashions in performance, convention, and guesswork. So much of Elizabethan and Jacobean stagecraft has been lost to history that even when we deliberately seek to present ‘authentic’ Shakespeare today, we are at a loss as to what, exactly, that would look like.

Historically Shakespeare’s editors have altered the plays in ways which would seem somewhat daring, if not profane, today. To cite just a few pertinent examples, in 1807 James Bowlder published the first volume of The Family Shakespeare which omitted and rewrote words and passages which, in Bowlder’s view, were unsuitable for young minds. In the same year Charles and Mary Lamb published Tales from Shakespeare which used very little language from Shakespeare and, similarly, was aimed at children. Significantly, both of these volumes were instrumental in disseminating Shakespeare and elevating him to his modern standing. Modernising and rewriting Shakespeare in print, clearly, is not a new phenomena. In modern times Shakespeare-inspired films such as Scotland PA, and the No Fear Shakespeare study texts have continued to be popular. Indeed, the possibility of adapting Shakespeare has given rise to texts which seek to challenge the myth of Anglophone cultural dominance perpetuated through Shakespeare. Suzuki Tadashi’s King Lear, for example, forges an intercultural space which draws liberally upon both Shakespeare and Asian theatrical traditions without feeling the need to adhere completely to either. We might also note Inoue Hidenori’s overtly irreverent pop adaptations of Shakespeare or the intercultural texts Kathkali King Lear or Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha.

I would argue, then, that the question is not why we (I) do not like to see Shakespeare being ‘translated’ to suit audience tastes, but why now? What makes OFS’s departure from modern conventions around Shakespeare particularly repugnant? When we consider all that has been done to Shakespeare over the centuries we have had his works, the idea that a particular fashion of modern performance needs to be protected is, if anything, an aberration. After centuries of reinvention, we can safely assume that Shakespeare and Shakespeare adaptation is not a zero sum game.

If my apparently ill-founded annoyance at the idea of Shakespeare being adapted to suit audience tastes is to hold any legitimacy then perhaps the question I need to ask, then, is not if we should rewrite Shakespeare, but why? OFS write ‘[i]t is our hope and expectation that these translations will inspire audience members to return to Shakespeare’s original words, ideally with even greater understanding and enjoyment’ and as I read these words, even with history against me, I cannot help but feel uncomfortable. Will these modern translations be a bridge to the ‘original’? Or will they, for certain audience members, be a substitute? Will OFS deprive audiences of the pleasure and sense of accomplishment my tenth and eleventh graders felt? Given that Shakespeare’s plots were, themselves, almost entirely borrowed, if we take away his language then what we are left with is not what he created but what he preserved. OFS’s Play On project might, then, be effectively described using Dennis Kennedy’s eminently applicable term ‘Shakespeare without Shakespeare’; the final version of the Play On plays may be infused with the plots that made Shakespeare famous but empty of his language to the point that they constitute little more than an extended Shakespeare reference. To rid Shakespeare of Shakespeare for the sake of ‘understanding and enjoyment’, I still think, is an insult to one’s audience.

Lego System

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Philip Smith

I first encountered Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO concentration camp kits (1996) when I was writing on Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Both Libera and Spiegelman, famously, used a medium typically associated with children in a self-effacing attempt to depict the Holocaust. Libera’s work offered an interesting counterpoint to Maus because, despite the apparent conceptual similarities, while Spiegelman’s masterpiece has been almost universally celebrated, Libera has been called an anti-Semite, has been asked to withdraw his work from exhibitions, and has been accused (perhaps correctly) of offering a glib pop-culture commentary on the largest and genocide – the most terrible event – in human history. I wanted to examine the two texts beside one another in order to work out what made them different and how each reflected the politics of Holocaust representation. Ultimately, as inevitably happens, the work took a different shape and when the time came to submit the final draft of my manuscript I had said everything I wanted to say about Maus but Libera had been reduced to a footnote and, finally, removed entirely. The Lego System kits still bother me, though, and I would like to explore why they bother me here.

Libera worked with the LEGO Corporation of Denmark to produce three kits, each made up of seven boxes of Lego. Each box contains all of the materials needed to construct a Lego simulacra of some aspect of a Nazi death camp. Boxes include buildings, a gallows, inmates, guards, and barbed wire. The scenes depicted include a lynching, the beating of an inmate, medical experiments, and corpses being carried from the gas chambers.

One way we might read Libera’s work is as a hyperbolic form of historiographical metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism to describe works which show ‘fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured.’ By adopting an abstract form and a demonstrably impossible alternative history, certain texts, Hutcheon argues, point implicitly to the failure of any representation to capture the ineffable reality of historical events. The impossibility of articulation is doubly true of the Holocaust which, as many, many critics and writers have argued, defies our capacity for either imagination or expression. If we were to read Libera’s Lego System in such a vein then we would understand his use of a toy to depict the Holocaust as (like Spiegelman’s Maus) demonstrative of the failure of any means of articulation to approximate to the torture, humiliation, and murder of millions.

I understand this line of argument but I can not subscribe to it as a blanket excuse for every ironic or self-consciously inaccurate attempt to depict the Holocaust. Concessions made to the concept of historical accuracy with regards to the Nazi killing project are in danger of offering a degree of legitimacy to more extreme revisionist perspectives. Under the umbrella of representational impossibility Libera’s work unnecessarily distorts what occurred; his commandant, as Stephen C. Feinstein argues, bears more similarity to the Soviet gulag than the Nazi death camp and the entry gate lacks the well-known inscription. He appears to see the historiographical metafiction argument as license to abandon any form of historical accuracy.

Even if full representation is impossible, I can not help but feel that where we can offer accuracy we have a moral obligation to do so. The ‘how’ of the Holocaust, Robert Eaglestone argues, should never be neglected in favour of artistic license. Inaccuracies (of which there is a wide spectrum from allegory to outright lies and denial) are dangerous to understanding. To foreground a fundamental responsibility to historical truth in Shoah art and literature is to echo the final line of Levi’s introduction to If This Is A Man: ‘[i]t seems to me unnecessary to add that none of these facts are invented’. After the terror inflicted during the Holocaust, the Nazi’s attempts to destroy the camps and remove evidence of what had gone on, and subsequent attempts in some quarters at revisionism and denial, an earnest attempt at fidelity, even if true representation is impossible, is, I can not help but feel, imperative. It is here, incidentally, where Libera and Spiegelman part ways – while Maus articulates a failure to represent the Holocaust, Spiegelman went to great pains to research and, where possible, accurately depict his subject.

It would be easy, then, to simply dismiss Lebera’s Lego System as an ironic, transparently provocative, and deeply offensive play on, what is for others, an earnest and hard-fought attempt to bring some understanding to the worst event in human history. While I stand by my earlier assertions, I find it hard to dismiss the Lego kits as entirely vapid. I find the fact that the kits were built using existing Lego parts (modified slightly using paint in some cases) as an unsettling assertion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that rather than being an aberration in an otherwise rational society, the anti-Semitism which informed the Shoah had roots in the pervading logic of pre-World War II European cultures. The component parts of genocide, the Lego kits could be read to assert, not only pre-date the Holocaust, but continue into modern society. The Holocaust did not occur in spite of, but relied upon the industrial model which built, and continues to build modern civilisation (the factory, trains, timekeeping, coordination, a drive toward efficiency). The reproducibility of the Lego medium (Libera made three sets but some people asked if they would become commercially available) suggests, terrifyingly, that the events (loosely) depicted can not be safely confined to history, but can easily be reconstructed from those apparently innocuous elements upon which modern society has been built. As Spiegelman asserts ‘Western Civilization ended at Auschwitz. And we still haven’t noticed.’

I am, of course, not the first writer to find myself grappling with these questions when it comes to Holocaust representation, and in many ways I find myself treading already well-worn pathways. I find myself simultaneously recoiling from the apparently glib treatment of the Holocaust in Libera’s Lego System, while simultaneously wondering if the confinement of the Nazi killing project to history (of which the argument for Holocaust exceptionalism is a component) is a way for us to avoid confronting the possibility of its reproducibility.

Sex Comics and 9/11 in Multiple Warheads

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Philip Smith

I came to Brandon Graham’s Multiple Warheads by way of the Best American Comics 2014 collection and so I was unaware, when I began reading, that it had started life as a sex comic. It came as some surprise, then, when, after around 200 pages of visually packed images, surreal Soviet landscapes and cheap but charming puns, I turned the page to find images of the main protagonist, Sexica, having a large phallic object inserted into her anus, attaching a werewolf penis to her boyfriend, and then having sex with him while he transforms into a wolf.

None of this was entirely without precedent in the chronology of the collected edition – that the main characters enjoy an active sexual relationship is apparent throughout the story. On several occasions they are shown either in bed or lounging around in states of undress and on two other occasions we see the main couple engage in sexual activity.

However, on these occasions, as Eric Mesa argues, Sexia is not drawn as unrealistically proportioned, and the sexual acts depicted (including cunnilinguis) are as much to do with female pleasure as male desire. I would not describe the comic as a shining, or even good, example of pro-sex feminism (if such an ideal even exists) because Graham also consciously presents Sexica as erotic spectacle (at one point he reflects on a 2007 comic ‘I sure drew a lot of butts’). I don’t see the comic as particularly feminist, but I can at least understand Eric Mesa’s argument.

The sex comic, therefore, was not a complete thematic break, but it did run counter to many of the representations of sex and gender in other episodes of the comic. It reverses all of the points Mesa raises. Sexica is drawn with exaggerated proportions. She expresses her discomfort at being anally penetrated and is told that this course of action is better because her unnamed smuggling contact gets to ‘shove it up your butt’. The smuggling contact gives a satisfied ‘Heh’ upon successfully penetrating her. The following series of panels seem to take gleeful delight in depicting her walking with discomfort.

The male gaze is also given more explicit form; when Sexica passes through the security scanner the x-ray labels her body parts ‘tits … ass … leg… leg’ and informs anyone looking at the scanner that her breasts are unevenly sized. This image breaks a female character into parts and presents the male gaze as objective. In sum, the sex comic is problematic not only because of its use of the female body, because it undermines the potentially positive readings which rest of the comic might elicit.

This mix of misogynistic humor and cartoonish eroticism was punctuated, bizarrely, by several overt references to the September 11th terrorist attacks. As the object is fully inserted into Sexica’s anus the sound she makes is represented by an image of the second plane about to hit the Twin Towers.

Later, two security officers monitoring an x-ray scanner are too busy sharing jokes to notice, first, that Sexica is smuggling an illegal item inside her body and, second, two men carrying a comically large explosive device labelled ‘blow yer ass*up’.

I understand what misogynistic erotica was doing in the comic, but why the references to 9/11?

I really don’t know what is happening here, but I have a few ideas. My first thought is that the (perhaps inappropriate) connection between sexual and territorial violation with regard to the September 11th terrorist attacks is well-trodden ground. In Sam Glanzman’s short comic ‘There Were Tears In Her Eyes’ for the collection 9-11: Artists Respond, one character (problematically) compares the destruction of the Twin Towers to the Statue of Liberty being raped. Tonally, however, Multiple Warheads has little in common with the theme of mourning in the 9-11 collection. If anything, Graham seems to engage with what occurred using a discordantly light-hearted register.

This, in itself, could be read as a way to manage one’s fears by parodying them. Graham is a New York resident and, while we cannot presume to know how he was personally affected, I think it is reasonable to assume that it had some impact on him. Perhaps transforming trauma into something visual and tangible, even darkly humorous, is a way to reduce and contain it?

Conversely, the handling of the September 11th terrorist attacks might be read as a tribute to the taboo-breaking which characterised the Underground Comix movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Underground Comix were, broadly speaking, designed, among other things, to offend the sensibilities of white, hawkish, church-going Americans. Many artists used their medium as a means to give shape to their darker fantasies simply to draw the most violent and depraved acts they could imagine. No topic, however taboo, was off limits. As Sabin argues ‘the comix revelled in every kind of sex imaginable [and] took bloodshed to extremes’ This openness, inevitably, spilled over into misogyny as the genre’s commitment to bearing all positively embraced political insensitivity – if you were offended, Comix declared, that was your problem.

If read as a stylist continuation of the Underground Comix genre, we might therefore understand this episode of Multiple Warheads as designed primarily to test and outright violate boundaries of good taste. The taboos of crypto-beastiality, sexual violence, and of making light of national tragedy seem all to exist within a continuum.

These are all just guesses, though. I am still baffled by the mix of cartoonish eroticism, grotesque and misogynistic humour, and national trauma, and perhaps my theories are just me trying to make sense of something which was never meant to bear analysis. I would be interested to know how others read this.

1998 in Indonesian Comics

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Philip Smith

‘And through the breach did march into the streets,
Where, meeting the rest, ‘Kill, kill’ they cried.
Frighted with this confused noise, I rose,
And, looking from a turret, might behold
Young infants swimming in their parent’s blood,
Headless carcasses piled up in heaps,
Virgins, half-dead, dragg’d by their golden hair,
And with main force flung on a ring of pikes,
Old men with swords thrust through their aged sides,
Kneeing for mercy to a Greekish lad,
Who, with steel pole-axes dash’d out their brains’
(Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage 2.1.189-200)

1998 is a significant year in Indonesia’s political history. After a 32 year rule characterised by economic prosperity and an authoritarian regime, the Asian financial crisis had weakened the rule of then-President Suharto. In May 1998 riots broke out in several Indonesian cities. The estimated death toll from the days that followed varies wildly. Jemma Purdey, perhaps one of the most reliable sources, suggests that around 1,000 people died, many of them beaten, shot, or burned alive. Women were raped and then thrown out of windows, shops were looted and then burned to the ground with their owner’s still inside. Calls to the police went unanswered. For some time the army stood by without intervening. Colleagues of mine who were in Jakarta at the time saw people stripped naked and left by the side of the road on the way to the airport. One described the bizarre scene of soldiers breaking away from a gunfight in order to ask her and the other expatriates she was with to pose for a photograph. People stayed in their homes and listened to screams and gunfire on the streets outside.

For many of the perpetrators of violence in 1998 the riots offered a fresh opportunity to target Chinese Indonesians. Historically, Chinese Indonesians acted as middle-men between the native Indonesian population and the Dutch. Both during and after Dutch rule they have been subject to periodic outbursts of wide-scale violence including not only massacres but mass-expulsions from Indonesian cities. During the decades under Suharto many Chinese Indonesians were killed under the guise of wiping out communist activity. During the 1998 riots, in many cases the violence toward Chinese Indonesians was misplaced – it was those Chinese Indonesians who were least wealthy who were most vulnerable to attacks. Chinese Indonesians were not the only victims of violence during the riots, but they were certainly singled out as targets.

On May 21 1998 Suharto was removed from power. The era which has followed has been characterised by a movement from dictatorship to democracy, with greater recognition of Indonesia’s multi-racial and multi-religious status. While these changes have largely been beneficial for Indonesia as a whole they have also, as several commentators have argued, been accompanied by an unwillingness to examine what took place during the May riots. This is true in a legal sense – attempts to bring suspects to court were unsuccessful, and those rape victims who did come forward have failed to have their rapists identified or convicted. It is also true in a cultural sense. As Abidin Kusno persuasively demonstrates, the building of the Glodok Plaza Mall at the site of one of the major massacres is emblematic of the cultural work which took place after the riots; it prioritises progress over commemoration in the hope that the spectacle of the new will distract people from the violence of the past. Despite its pervasiveness in Indonesian consciousness, literary and artistic responses to what went on seem, surprisingly, to be few and far between. I have written elsewhere on the work of artist FX Harsono, but in what follows I want to look at some of the comic books created in the aftermath of the violence.

In Tita Larasati’s comic Bloemen Blij, Plukken Wij which appears in the volume Liquid City: Volume 3, the protagonist learns that she has Chinese Indonesian ancestors. The riots, in contrast to the predominantly green and yellow pastel panels elsewhere in the comic, are represented as a blood-red band cutting across one page.

This image, I feel, comes close to representing what 1998 meant, or has come to mean, for Chinese Indonesian communities. Buildings are burning, busses are being pushed over, bodies are lying in the street. Each figure is captured in just a few lines. The image focuses less on the individual acts of violence than the scale of the event. Indonesia is ablaze.

Muhammad Mice Misrad (Mice Cartoon)’s Indonesia 1998 offers a very different vision of what occurred. It is a collection of single-page comics drawn between 1998 and 1999. The collection was published last year. They document the conditions which led up to the May riots, most significantly the crippling effects of inflation during the late 1990s. One series of panels shows people trying to buy basic necessities only to discover that prices have increased dramatically in just a few days. The author reports that publishers are closing down, he attempts to buy paper to document the problems himself, only to discover that paper, too, has rocketed in price. He is only able to draw because his brother can steal paper for him from his workplace. In the panel below he tightens his belt while a child warns ‘Don’t pull to hard, sir, or you’ll sever it! Belts are expensive now too!’

The May riots are, in this context, presented as the inevitable result of a starved and impoverished population trying to feed themselves. In comparison to the several pages describing the economic conditions which anticipated the violence, the riots themselves occupy just one page. In the image below one looter is excited to have stolen a gift for his mother, who then scolds him for bringing illegally-acquired goods into her home. Another family is excited at having acquired a two-month supply of Indomie instant noodles. One remarks, ironically, how lucky they are in such a crisis. In the final panel a woman, presumably a maid for a Chinese Indonesian household talks to a friend on the phone – her boss has fled the country and so the domestic staff (Muchilis – most likely the family’s driver) is watching soccer on television. The absent family’s portrait, characterised by round cheeks and squinty eyes, hangs on the wall.

What strikes me about these images is the absence of any reference to the acts of murder and sexual assault which sit at the heart of Chinese Indonesian and other victims’ accounts of 1998. The goofy characters and cartoon violence belie the very real bloodshed which occurred. The Chinese Indonesian family we see in the picture, we are assured, have left town.

Mice Cartoon’s comics are cheeky, iconoclastic, and witty. This charm, in this case, disguises the wilful marginalisation of the victim’s experience. This is far from trivial – the unwillingness to recognise the suffering of Chinese Indonesians and other victims in Indonesian discourse after 1998 is a necessary prerequisite to the lack of public recognition of what occurred. Chinese Indonesians are rich, popular discourse seems to declare. They can take it.

One image from the comic which I find captivating is the visualisation of the new era of free speech. A government minister tentatively removes the padlock which has closed the mouth of Indonesia’s press, revealing a sharp-toothed monster ready to bite into politicians.

I find the image less interesting for the way in which it attests to the status of the modern Indonesian press – it simplifies a movement away from the prohibition of the Suharto era to modern Indonesia. In reality, as the wildly varying 2014 election result announcements demonstrated, Indonesia’s press continues to be controlled by those in power (even if that power is now primarily financial rather than political). The internet is censored and Indonesia currently boasts an unimpressive rank of 138 out of 180 countries in the Press Freedom Index. What I find captivating about the image is its representation of violence unleashed. This gleeful creature with a giant mouth and razor-sharp teeth, set to chew all in its path, I think, approximates what 1998 must have looked like for those who lived during and after the violence.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Philip Smith