Category Archives: Roundtables

Lunch Hour on Parnassus

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[this critic] while[s] away his lunch hour with the immortals on Parnassus

Eddie Campbell

What comics give us most of all is the experience of comics. What I mean is the way a given cartoonist portrays the world- the particular kind of subjectivity that is the cartoonist’s special privilege- and the way the cartoonist tells his story from panel to panel. You can get this experience from comics whose intellectual content is fairly negligible.

R. Fiore

Waitaminnit!! This isn’t a normal library…it’s a graphic novel library!!! NOOOOOOOO!!

Sinus O’Gynus

Part One: Cicero Speaks

So there I was on Mount Parnassus, eating the usual lunchtime fare of cheese, honey, meal and Pramnian wine. Most of the Literary Greats throughout  history were there — yours truly of course, as well as Aristophanes, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Stan Lee, and so forth. Herodotus had just started on what he promised would be an especially salacious anecdote about Darius, when in sailed Rabelais, or Big Rab as we call him at the club. Strictly speaking, he’s not one of the Greats — one of the Moderately Larges, at best — but we let him hang around anyway, out of the sort of pity one might feel towards a chap born without any arms or legs, or somebody who writes about comics on the internet.

“What ho, chaps,” he cried.

“What ho,” we replied as one.

“You’ll never believe what a frightful brouhaha there’s been down amongst the plebs. It seems that some fellows or other have dared to label the majority of EC comics mediocre qua literature, which has made them, the fellows I mean,  a bit of an m. among all the nations. Now tons of other fellows have been sharpening the slings and arrows of fortune against them, the first fellows that did the daring, not the second lot.”

“Bit hard to ‘sharpen a sling’, I should think,” I said. “One of yours, Rab?”

“What’s an ‘EC comics’?” asked Cicero, who, being an old-fashioned type, had not kept across the exciting developments in modern mass media.

“Sort of a Grecian urn in papyrus form,” said Rabelais.

I was struggling inwardly with the temptation to begin a Pat and Mike routine about the identity of a Grecian urn, when Cicero burst forth again.

“Then let’s give these other fellows what for. Let us crush them; let us smite them; let us grind their bones to dust. For, just as Ulysses, the wily one, the Ithacan, the decade-wanderer, did, his boat at long last having reached home, with many ruses the suitors of faithful Penelope deceive, lest one amongst them, having known him for who he was, should cast his affairs into confusion, so too should we

Part Two: Lo, There Shall Cometh a Straw Man

But let’s cut the great orator off there, and get right to the heart of the issue: what’s wrong with “the literaries”? Eddie Campbell’s written  a combination j’accuse and manifesto against them, naming in particular Chris Mautner and Ng Suat Tong as exemplifying the type in their harsh criticism of EC comics. It’s far from clear, however, who’s really being j’accused and which manies are supposed to be fested.

Now, one way to proceed here would be to closely analyse Campbell’s piece and the reviews by Mautner and Ng, to analyse them all and tease out the different claims under contention.

That’s one way to proceed, but it would be incredibly boring for all concerned. Who cares what so-and-so said, and whether what they said was foolish under the natural interpretation, and whether their words have been taken out of context, and all the usual blah-de-blah crap that inevitably results from an internet back-and-forth?

So: let’s not try to score points or win the internet; let’s just try to figure out what’s the most reasonable position here.

With all that by way of elaborate throat-clearing, I’m going to offer a limited defence of the practice of measuring comics — at least some of the time and in certain respects — against the yardstick of literature, and, further, of sometimes judging some of them to fall short. I’ll do this by listing a set of aesthetic propositions, stated as clearly as possible, that seem to me either undeniable or at least highly plausible.

(One more throat-clear: I have zero expertise in philosophical aesthetics; I hardly know my Ars Poetica from my elbow. So what follows, the work of an arrogant dilletante, no doubt contains many fallacies and stupidities. If you know better, please rip me a new one in comments)

Here goes.

(1) Different artforms cover a cluster of different features.

Duh. Music has rhythm, melody…film has cinematography, editing…video games have playability, control schemes…and so on.

(2) Nonetheless, some of those features are shared across different artforms.

Narrative literature and film have plots, characterisation, &c. Film and painting have visual symmetry (or asymmetry), &c. &c. &c.

(3) To some extent, however limited, we can evaluate some of the features of any particular artwork independently of one another.

Thus, it makes sense to say of a comic: “the colour washes are great, but the lettering is terrible”. Or of a film: “the performances deserved a better script”. As I say, we can evaluate these features individually only to a limited extent, but even a limited extent is some extent.

Let’s now add:

(4) Some comics share some features with literature.

Specifically, narrative comics share narrative features with narrative literature — and, thereby with other narrative forms such as epic poetry, theatre or film. The Fourth World saga has a plot, as does As You Like It. Doonesbury has dialogue, as does Tristram Shandy. Lost Girls and Tropic of Cancer both have people fucking. Let’s just call these features “Narrative Features”, by which we’ll mean specifically “features shared between narrative comics and narrative literature”; and let’s call the other features of comics (wait for it…) the “Other Features”.

What counts as “narrative”?You know it when you see it, but we can perhaps say a little bit more than that. How about this: narrative content is stuff that you can describe verbally to create the same experience you would have in experiencing the artwork directly, and without losing important information. So I can say of a Fantastic Four comic that it’s set in a fictional European country called Latveria, that it features a guy in a metal suit called Dr Doom, ruler of Latveria and nemesis of the leader of the Fantastic Four.  I can also say that Jack Kirby draws Latveria as a sort of comic opera European country, complete with guys in lederhosen and those funny little hats with a feather stuck on the side. This is all narrative content.

What I can’t describe verbally are the specifics of exactly how Kirby designs and draws Latveria, its people or its architecture. I can’t describe verbally the cumulative effect of Kirby’s rhythmically steady layouts, or how the placement of word balloons and narration boxes contributes to, or detracts from, the way our eyes scan the page. And so on. It’s not that I can’t say anything about these things; rather, it’s that whatever I say will be inadequate to capturing the experience of reading them for yourself. So all this stuff is non-narrative content.

This is obviously far from water-tight, but hopefully even a leaky boat will be enough to sail on with.

(5) We can evaluate to some extent, however limited, the Narrative Features of a comic, independently of the Other Features

Again, to me this seems like a duh. We can evaluate the dialogue, plot, narrative suspense, psychological plausibility…of a comic to some extent independently of, say, overall page design, colour scheme, suggestion of movement from panel to panel, and all that. Certainly, the Narrative Features are expressed through the means of the Other Features, but the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for (e.g.) film. (That is, things like plot, dialogue and character — common to film and literature — are expressed in film through means specific to film, such as actors speaking the dialogue or shots showing the action and setting.)

Note that nothing I’ve said so far entails that the Other Features of comics are merely a means to an end. The Other Features are, certainly, the means through which Narrative Features are expressed, but we might also take to them to have intrinsic value as ends in themselves. Indeed, I think they have intrinsic value, and the reason I think that is because they do have intrinsic value.

Nor does anything I’ve said entail that the Narrative Features are more important than the Other Features.

Nor does anything I’ve said entail that the Narrative Features are more important than the features that comics shares with, say, non-narrative visual art.

All I’ve said is that…well, shit, you can read (5) again for yourself.

Now, everything that I’ve said seems to me to be incontrovertible — bearing in mind that, to borrow a line from the old windbag Cicero himself, there’s nothing so stupid but that someone has said it in a comments thread, especially at The Hooded Utilitarian or comicbookresources.com. So if you want to controvert any of what I’ve said so far, go right ahead. But, anyway, if (1)-(5) were the only things in play, there’d be no “controversy” or disagreement.

The controversy comes in, I think, with the following claim, or something much like it:

(6) The Narrative Features of a comic are really important

Here’s where I’ll repeat — it would be totes omg booooring to perform an elaborate hermeneutics on who  thinks what, and whether they actually think that or I’m merely putting sentiments into their mouths, or zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…  But I do think it’s clear, from Mautner’s and Ng’s reviews, that they would agree to (6). And, if not, then I’ll put up my hand for it — I agree to (6). The Narrative Features of a comic are really important.

But of course, the question immediately arises: what the hell does “really important” mean?

The answer is: it depends, and what it depends on is who you’re asking. We can distinguish between stronger and weaker versions of “really important”.

(6.1) The Narrative Features of a comic are the only ones that matter

Another way of putting this: having good Narrative Features is a sufficient condition for being a good comic. Pretty much no one, I take it, will would sign on for this very, very strong claim.

(6.2) The Narrative Features of a comic are so important that they outweigh the Other Features — “outweigh” in the sense that a comic with average or below-average Other Features but very good Narratve Features is thereby a very good comic

Another way of putting this: having good Narrative Features is a sufficient condition for being a good comic, unless everything about the comic is really, really, really, and I mean really horrible.

Again, it would be hard to get anyone to admit to this somewhat weaker, but still quite strong claim. But, if you wanted to build some straw men, you might speculate that that’s what’s going on when certain middling comics get a lot of praise from the non-comics press and public: they’re judged as great comics because the stories they tell are decent (say) memoirs like other literary memoirs, never mind whether they’re good comics or not.

(I totally chose the example of memoir at random, and not at all because there are a bunch of best-selling comic memoirs that are, nonetheless, really shitty comics. I could also have chosen, again as a totally random example, just about every webcomic ever)

(6.3) The Narrative Features of a comic are so important that a good comic must at least have good Narrative Features.

Another way of putting this: having good Narrative Features is a necessary condition for being a good comic. Or: having a shitty plot, dialogue, etc. disqualifies you from being a good comic. Good Narrative Features aren’t enough by themselves, but they do have to be there.

This is finally something somebody might explicitly avow. But I want to throw in one more option, closely related, which seems still more reasonable.

(6.4) The Narrative Features of a comic are so important that a good comic with poor Narrative Features has to have really very good Other Features

I’ve saved the best for last, for this to me sounds exactly right. If a comic has a stupid plot, paper-thin characters, zero ambience and banal dialogue, relies on cliche, is pretentious, panders to its audience…and so forth, then it better be one hell of a good-fucking-looking comic, you know?

I’m almost inclined to just it at that, because it seems so obviously commonsense. Surely at least part of what makes a good comic are Narrative Features, and so comics that have  bad Narrative Features — in the very broad sense outlined above, where “Narrative” stretches beyond plot to include characterization, dialogue, etc. — need to have a lot of other good stuff going for them, or else they’re just crap.

So what goes on when someone like Ng or Mautner disses various EC comics? Again, I don’t want to get into hermeneutic disputes, so rather than putting words into their mouths, I’ll put myself forward as someone thoroughly unimpressed by at least the first two EC reprints in Fantagraphics’ new reprint series. These two are Corpse on the Imjin, a collection of Harvey Kurtzman’s war comics, drawn by himself or other artists, and Came the Dawn, a collection of Wally Wood’s horror and crime comics, and most of them, IMO, are claptrap unredeemed by visual virtuosity.

The main exceptions, for mine, are the two Kurtzman stories illustrated by Alex Toth, which are minimalist masterpieces. And what makes them such is precisely that the narrative elements are entirely superfluous. They might as well have no story whatsoever; indeed, in one sense they do have no story. These are comics that don’t need a plot or characters or anything else; they’re elevated into greatness through Toth’s design sense for the bare, the stark, the absence of everything but the absolute essential. But most of the other comics in these two volumes just don’t compare; whatever their many other virtues, the banal narratives drag them down.

Let me stress: the position here isn’t that a comic needs to have a great plot, dialogue etc. The position is that all stuff sure helps and, if you ain’t got it, then you’d better have everything. And it also implies that, when two comics are otherwise equal in all Other respects, the one with better Narrative — the one, in other words, that’s better “written”, whether that means written by a scripter or plotter independent of the cartoonist, or by the cartoonist herself — is the better comic.

Who could disagree?

But, if this is right, then it’s perfectly appropriate to measure a comic — at least in part — by the yardstick of literature and, perhaps, to judge it as falling short. I don’t care what you say, Kingdom Come just isn’t as well-written as The Brothers Karamazov.

Part Three: The Wet Fart Heard ‘Round the World

“But,” you might ask, “how could you possibly think that Narrative Features are so important? You like lots of Kirby’s comics, and he hardly wrote with Proustian modulation. You like Little Orphan Annie, which deals in the hoariest of crowd-pleasing coincidences, comeuppances and characters who barely have one dimension, let alone two. You like Little Nemo, which…dude, have you ever even tried to read the speech bubbles in those strips?”

Okay, first, you’re right. Second, it’s, um, a little creepy that you know that much about what I like and what I don’t like. I’m starting to feel uncomfortable here. Third, where did my underwear go, it was just here last night in the dirty clothes hamper, did — did you steal my worn underpants? Did you break into my house in the middle of the night, steal my underpants, and then go home to ask me mildly confrontational questions on the internet? Fourth oh shit the calls are coming from inside the house

Now, the natural response to this would be something along the lines of “don’t try to change the subject”.

All right, so yes — I like lots of comics that don’t have good Narrative Features, on a very impoverished and simple-minded notion of what counts as “good Narrative Features”.  But the relevant comparisons for Kirby are not Proust or Henry James; they’re, among others, Ariosto and  Homer; the comparisons for Annie are, among others, the great Middle English morality plays . There isn’t a single measure of what makes a great work of literature a great work of literature. Some of the greats are great because they’re XYZ, some are great because they’re ABC, some are great because they’re AQZ, and so on ad if not quite infinitum then at least ad quite-a-lot-of-um.

So we shouldn’t suppose that a comic needs to mimic Shakespeare or whoever to be great, any more than we should suppose that a novel or play needs to do the same. There’s lots of different ways for a Narrative to be great, and (say) depth of theme, or sophistication of dialogue — or whatever you think Austen and Trollope have that Kirby and Grey lack — are only one way to greatness.

Here’s where I really do feel the need to turn to Eddie Campbell directly. Forgot all that shit I said at the start of Part Two, about being all reasonable and all that baloney. Let’s win us the internet!

Campbell writes, a propos of Ng unfavourably comparing Kurtzman’s MAD to Aristophanes:

would we want to be stuck in [a room] with some guy who would ask: Since we already have Aristophanes, who needs Kurtzman? Since we have Erasmus of Rotterdam, why would we want Steve Martin? With Wagner still available, who cares about the Firehouse Five? Furthermore, would we let that guy organize the party music?

Granted, that build-up and punchline are lolworthy — S.J. Perelman would be proud. But, apart from that, this is an astoundingly dunder-headed characterisation of how “the literaries” feel — that, or astoundingly disingenuous. Does Campbell really think that this is why “the literaries” have come to think that, say, much of EC’s output was mediocre and a poor representative of “great comics”? Does he really think that it’s, essentially, because they’re all dickheads with a stick jammed up their arse?

To judge by his own fine comics, Campbell is no dunder-head, so this looks like it’s just an underhanded rhetorical flourish. Campbell is painting himself here as those fun-loving guys from Delta fraternity, and the “literaries” as the stuffed-shirt Dean; himself as Ferris Bueller and the literaries as the school principal; himself as Kevin Bacon and the literaries as John Lithgow. Why does the Man want to stop us having fun, man?

As self-appointed devil’s advocate for the literaries, let me say that I don’t, personally, care for Steve Martin, but: I think PG Wodehouse, and Johnny R., and Borat, and Dan Harmon’s Community, and John Stanley, and the golden years of The Simpsons, and EC Segar, and Eiji Nonaka, and Kiminori Wakasugi are as funny, if not funnier, than Aristophanes or Apuleius or, yes, Erasmus of frickin’ Rotterdam — and I think that they are therefore at least as great, as capital-G with bells on Great, as any of those guys or anything they ever did. But I also think that Ng is correct: most of MAD falls far short of that. And that’s not because I’m some snooty, hoity-toity, pointy-headed, nose-in-the-air, hifalutin, pretentious (&c. &c.) snob. It’s because, judged by the same standards that we apply to any work of comedy, it’s not that funny, nor is its satire as pointed.

Similarly, the reason I don’t think, say, Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol is a work for the ages isn’t that it’s too low-brow, too populist, too plebeian. My favourite comedies include gags about Eastern Europeans not understanding toilets, scat metal, and homosexual anal rape. Hell, let’s repeat this, with extra emphasis:

My favourite comedies include gags about Eastern Europeans not understanding toilets, a music genre called “scat metal”, and homosexual anal rape.

[Hello federal investigators monitoring the internet for potential sex offenders! SWM, 35, in search of SWM police officer pretending that he knows what a One Direction is and that he can’t remember September 11 because he wasn’t born yet. Must be disease/drug-free, BYO rubber chicken. No weirdos!]

[Also: toilets, scat metal and anal rape…do I detect a theme here?]

No, the reason I think Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol sucks is, well, that it sucks.

The issue is not high-brow versus low-brow, however much Campbell tries to make it into that. Granted, Kurtzman’s war comics and Wood’s preachies were created by not terribly well paid cartoonists in a profession whose prestige in the broader art community ranged all the way from middling to none, to be printed shoddily and sold to children of average intelligence and education, using their meagre disposable funds. But suppose instead those comics had been created by an incognito team of Ezra Pound, Max Ernst and, on inks, the ghost of Voltaire, lettered by 72 artisanal manuscript illuminators descended in a direct line from the great medieval illuminators and bred for that sole purpose, printed on priceless antique palimpsests in inks made from crushed caviar and truffles, to be sold only to MENSA members who could pass an eight-hour exam on the topic of Wagner’s use of minor chords in Die Meistersinger, at a price of seven million dollars apiece or the equivalent street-value in blood diamonds.

They’d still suck.

They’d still be dopey, ham-fisted, banal and simple-minded.

Certainly, you can disagree. About EC comics,  I mean, not Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol — there’s no room for disagreement on that one. But if anyone does want to step forth and defend [insert any strip from, say, the first dozen issues of MAD that is generally agreed to be weak tea] as a rib-tickling, thigh-slapping laugh riot that’ll leave you in stitches, go for your life. But to defend it, you have three options:

i) Defend the Narrative Features — that is, argue that I’m making a mistake when I say (for example) that its satire is unfunny and ineffective. But this is just to accept that Narrative Features matter.

ii) Defend the Other Features as redeeming the comic –that is, argue that the rendering (for example) redeems the lack of humour or bite. But, again, this is to accept that Narrative Features matter, and thus that the comic needs more in order to compensate

iii) Argue that we — the “literaries” shouldn’t value Narrative Features as highly as we do

Campbell seems to me to circle around this option without quite crossing that line. It sometimes gets insinuated — particularly in the comments thread after Campbell’s piece: the literaries aren’t comicky enough, that we don’t love comics for what they really are, that we’re phonies. To which I say: pffft. Is this really what it comes down to, that the literaries are just a bunch of fake geek girls? Really?

Part Four: Advertisements For Myself

I’ll close with some remarks about my own artistic efforts of late, inspired by R. Fiore’s account of what makes comics great, which Campbell approvingly cites. Over the past few years, I’ve pioneered a brand-new artform to be performed for an audience of one; it involves me smashing them in the face with a cricket bat, urinating on their trousers, blasting into their ears a 300 decibel recording of a million crates of beer bottles being smashed, tattooing obscenities on their genitals, and finally I take a dump on their mom’s grave while watching Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol. I call this new artform “smashing them in the face with a cricket bat, urinating on their trousers, blasting into their ears a 300 decibel recording of a million crates of beer bottles being smashed, tattooing obscenities on their genitals, and finally I take a dump on their mom’s grave while watching Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol“, or STITFWACBUOTTBITEA300dROAMCOBBBSTOOTGAFITADOTMGWWPA4:COP for short.

(I wanted to call it “The Aristocrats”, but apparently that was already taken)

Now, some critics don’t understand this new artform, this Tenth Art; they claim it cannot measure up to the artistic heights of something like The Big Bang Theory or Curb, the debut album by mainstream grunge superstars Nickelback. They say that it has no artistic merit; it’s not funny, or interesting, or clever, or illuminating, or skilful, or anything else that any work of art in any other medium has ever given us.

But these critics — the “Artistics” — miss the point entirely of STITFWACBUOTTBITEA300dROAMCOBBBSTOOTGAFITADOTMGWWPA4:COP.

STITFWACBUOTTBITEA300dROAMCOBBBSTOOTGAFITADOTMGWWPA4:COP cannot be reduced to its bare parts as if it were a mere combination of being smashed in the face with a cricket and having your trousers pissed on and the rest of it. STITFWACBUOTTBITEA300dROAMCOBBBSTOOTGAFITADOTMGWWPA4:COP is an alchemy of all those things to create something new under the sun; STITFWACBUOTTBITEA300dROAMCOBBBSTOOTGAFITADOTMGWWPA4:COP provides that ineffable something, the je ne sais quoi that is the BYUWACBUOYTBTSOAMBBBSA300DIYEAFIJOOYMGWWPA4COPist’s special privilege, the experience, most of all, of BYUWACBUOYTBTSOAMBBBSA300DIYEAFIJOOYMGWWPA4COP.

Besides, if I might borrow one last line from Cicero:

Your mom was totally into it.

…there, is that literary enough for ya?

Image attribution: John Belushi in Animal House. Image taken from here, although I don’t think they created it.

The entire Attack of the Literaries roundtable is here.

Eddie Campbell on How the Literaries Turned Hamlet Into a Plot Summary

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This week we’re running a series of replies to a piece Eddie Campbell ran in The Comics Journal. Eddie Campbell himself was kind enough to post an interesting series of replies in comments. I thought I’d highlight them below…so here’s Campbell’s further thoughts on the literaries.

Jaelinque wrote: “The original Campbell’s piece is perplexing. Or am I the only one seeing confusion between ‘literary quality’ and complexity/sophistication of the plot there? As if a ‘literary’ element of a work of art equals the retelling of its plot. This… is not how literature works. True, you can’t explain the value of Casablanca by its plot, but it’s not like you can do it for Anna Karenina either.”

You are very right. A couple of years back I was asked to write a blurb for Nicki Greenberg’s comics adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I wrote succinctly about the ways in which Nicki’s cartoons added to, enhanced and decorated the original, to the best of my ability. When I later saw a dummy of the book I was surprised to see that my blurb had been replaced by a plot summary. I got on the phone and argued the matter, saying you wouldn’t put a plot summary on the back of Shakespeare’s Shakespeare, why are you doing it on the back of Greenberg’s? In the end my original blurb was reinstated in an edited form.
A quick check on the internet shows that they are back to using the plot summary:
“Denmark is in turmoil. The palace is seething with treachery, suspicion and intrigue. On a mission to avenge his father’s murder, Prince Hamlet tries to claw free of the moral decay all around him. But in the ever-deepening nest of plots, of plays within plays, nothing is what it seems. Doubt and betrayal torment the Prince until he is propelled into a spiral of unstoppable violence.”
source:
http://www.thenile.com.au/books/Nicki-Greenberg/Shakespeares-Hamlet/9781741756425/?gclid=CNr7iuDHsrUCFUE3pgoddiAAew

You are right to say this is not how literature should work. But a book publisher seems to think it’s how comics should work. Is this a depressing sign of the times, or a depressing sign of the relative esteem in which comics are held?
_____
In that online ad for the book, there is little about it being Nicki Greenberg’s graphic rendition of the play. It is presented as though it was, not even just the words, but just the plot, which is less than everything. Anybody with half a brain can get the plot in an instant google. The space allotted to that summary is surely wasted. It should have been a clever lure, if not mine then somebody else’s. Or am I overestimating ordinary people?
____
Before anybody goes making stuff up again, my original blurb went like this (from the back of the book, as finally published):

“The finest thing about Shakespearean drama is that the work can be restaged for every generation and in so many different ways. In Nicki Greenberg’s version, Hamlet is played by an inkblot with a crowquill in his scabbard. The settings sparkle; the interior of the castle has a decor of suspended clock parts, curious only until we realise that “time is out of joint.” Polonius pops in and out of a sheet of paper as he reads Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia, and Ophelia walks us physically through the botanicals so we don’t need opera glasses to follow the symbolism of the flowers. Greenberg’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby was entirely in monochrome and it’s exciting this time around to see her unpack a palette of riotous colour.”

I didn’t think of it at the time, but this is a precise example of my original argument. Book publisher doesn’t quite get comics and wants to replace apt description of the work, from an artist and former self-publisher of comics, with a potted plot summary. And we’re talking about Hamlet.

 

hamlet_panel01
From Nicki Greenberg’s Hamlet (more images here.

)
 

Batroc! Fights! Billie Holiday!!!!!

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In his recent piece decrying the comparison of comics to literature, Eddie Campbell, somewhat surprisingly, argues that it might be better to compare comics to jazz.

By way of a comparison, think of the great Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit”. It is a fine literary poem, set to music, and its author could have found no better singer to put it across. But a die-hard fan of Billie Holiday, the kind who has most of her recordings, is more likely to put on something from her earlier Columbia series of recordings, like “You’re a Lucky Guy” or “Billie’s Blues” (“I ain’t good looking, and my hair ain’t curled.”). A good number of the songs she had to sing during that period weren’t particularly good songs by high critical standards, and she didn’t have much choice in the matter, but the important thing is the musical alchemy by which she turned them into something precious. That and the happy accident of the first rate jazz musicians she found herself playing with, such as Teddy Wilson and Lester Young. Every time she sang she told her own story, whatever the material she was working with. I’m not talking here about technique, a set of applications that can be learned, or about an aesthetic aspect of the work that can be separated from the work’s primary purpose. The performer’s story is the essence of jazz music. The question should not be whether the ostensible ‘story,’ the plot and all its detail, is worth our time; stories tend to all go one way or another. The question should be whether the person or persons performing the story, whether in pictures or speech or dance or song, or all of the above, have made it their own and have made it worthy.

The truth is that this analysis is a little garbled. “Strange Fruit” is a mediocre song in no small part because the lyrics are lugubrious — the song’s lurid imagery and emotion sink into a clogged and ponderous earnestness. On the other hand, while it’s true that some of Holiday’s early sides weren’t especially great lyrically, many of them were. She sang “Summertime,”by Gershwin, arguably one of the greatest lyrics in the American songbook. She sang “A Fine Romance,” which means you get to hear Billie Holiday declaim, with great relish, “You’re calmer than the seals/In the arctic ocean/ At least they flap their fins/To express emotion.” She sang “St. Louis Blues” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It”. And, again, even a piece of fluff like the song “Who Wants Love?” is, in its simple unpretension, a good bit better lyrically than the overwrought “Strange Fruit.”

In other words, Campbell takes one of Holiday’s worst written song, declares it one of the best written, and then says that other tracks were better despite the writing rather than because of it.

But be that as it may. Let’s take Campbell’s contention at face value. We can look at “Who Wants Love?” which, as I said, doesn’t have especially great lyrics. “Love is a dream of weaving moonbeams in patterns rare/Love is a child believing/Stories of castles in the air” — that could be worse, but anytime you’re comparing love to moonbeams and having children build castles in the air, you’re not exactly in the realm of great poetry. So I think it’s fair to see this as an instance of a great artist trying to make mediocre material her own.
 

 
Campbell in his discussion seems to be suggesting that the content of Holiday’s songs is entirely beside the point; that the story, or lyrics, can be put aside, and the song can become purely about the artist’s achievement. But the achievement isn’t separate from the content…and Holiday doesn’t ignore the lyrics, or their slightness. Rather, her performance is in no small part about acknowledging and using the nothing she’s given. In her first words, she draws out that title, “Who wants love?”, putting more weight on it than the offhand phrase can bear — and so suggesting an intensity that can’t be contained in the song. That’s continued throughout; her exquisite sense of timing — swinging phrases so they stretch out against the beat — doesn’t ignore the song so much as emphasize her distance from it. She doesn’t mean what she’s saying, because what she’s saying doesn’t have enough meaning — not enough joy,not enough sorrow, not enough life.

The slightness of the song, then — its weak writing — becomes, for Holiday, a resource. And, as such, the weak writing is no longer weak. Holiday makes the writing mean more than the writer meant; it is not, as Campbell says, that she is telling her own story whatever the words say, but rather that her interpretation of the words is a great story. Campbell suggests that the song is not literary, but that Holiday makes it great anyway. What I’m saying, on the contrary, is that part of how Holiday makes the song great is that she transforms the words into great literature. And again, she does that not by ignoring what the words tell her — not by eschewing the literary — but by paying closer attention to what the words are saying and doing than the writer did, or than almost anyone can. Holiday’s triumph as a singer is in no small part her triumph as a reader — and as a writer. To deprive her of her literariness is I think in no small part to denigrate her art.

So let’s turn now to the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby page that Campbell presents as an example of counter-literariness and “improvisation” — a word that, coming as it does shortly after the discussion of Billie Holiday, can’t help but suggest jazz.

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Campbell argues that this page is shaped importantly by the fact that it used the Marvel method. The art came first, and then the writing was done afterwards. Thus, Campbell argues, the Lee/Kirby collaboration “tends to elude conventional literary analysis.” For Campbell, the anti-literariness of the page is a result of process, and so the most important aesthetic content of the sequence, its most essential comicness, is dictated not by the creators, but by what are basically commercial logistics.

As I said,Campbell’s fear of, and misunderstanding of, conventional literary analysis reduced Holiday’s achievement. By the same token, his eagerness to place comics formally beyond the bounds of the literary denigrates the conscious artistry of Lee and Kirby. That’s in no small part because the conscious artistry in this page is precisely about addressing the literary.

Like the Billie Holiday song, the page’s narrative is pretty much empty genre default. Holiday used nuance and subtlety to explore the distance between her and her tropes. Kirby, on the other hand, employs stentorian volume to belligerently bash down the distinction between speech and noise altogether. The fight scene occurs nowhere in no space; the actors throwing themselves together in a series of almost contextless poses against a background of expressionist, blaring lines.Towards the end, Batroc starts to disappear altogether into the sturm und drung; his hands floating in an explosion of purple, his body returning to the white space that bore it.

Lee’s captions here, are, then, not mere filligree — they actually show a remarkable attentiveness to what Kirby is doing. As Campbell says, the captions establish additional characters — not just Cap and Batroc, but Jack and Stan, as well as the reader as audience. Moreover, Lee’s winking text boxes present the page not as a narrative about the battle between Cap and Batroc, but as a performance by Kirby (and, indeed, by Lee himself.) Thus, the heroic narrative is not about Captain America’s victory, but about Kirby’s Ab-Ex dramatic self-assertion — not about the triumphant outcome of battle, but about the triumphant rush of forms across the page.

Campbell, then, is right that Lee and Kirby are sidelining the superhero narrative. He’s wrong, however, to see that sidelining as formal or default. It isn’t that the comics form naturally or automatically eschews literariness. It’s that Lee and Kirby on this particular page are, very consciously, eschewing the literary. Campbell is in effect taking the particular achievement of Lee and Kirby, and ascribing it to comics as a whole. It’s like reading Moby Dick and concluding that literature is awesome because it has whales in it.

Moreover, while I think it is right in some sense to say (as I do above) that Lee and Kirby are turning away from the literary, it’s pretty important to realize that that turning away presupposes and requires a quite thorough investment in, and understanding of, the literary and how it functions in their art. In fact, I think that you get a better sense of what they’re doing if you see it, not as pushing aside the literary entirely, but rather as substituting one story for another.

Specifically, Lee and Kirby substitute for the story of Cap the story of Jack. The page is not about Cap’s feats, but — deliberately, insistently — about Kirby’s. Thus, the story Campbell tells about this page — that it is about Kirby and comicness rather than about Cap and his story — is itself a story. And it’s a story that Lee and Kirby are quite aware of, and which they deliberately chose to tell.

Which, since Campbell has raised the issue, brings up the question — how does the story Lee and Kirby are telling compare to the story Billie Holiday is telling?

For me, at least, the answer is clear enough. While the Lee/Kirby page has its virtues, the Holiday song is a much greater work of art. This is again, in large part, because Holiday and her band accept, understand, and then work with, the inconsequentiality of the song. Listen, for example, to the Bunny Berigan solo — all bright, brassy good spirits, until that final, wavering, hesitant dropping note reveals the cheer as a bittersweet facade. Berigan isn’t using words, but he’s absolutely telling a story — and that story is about how what the pop song can’t say is a song in itself. Tied up in the vapid tune, Berigan slips free by acknowledging that he can’t get free — his capitulation, his vulnerability, is his triumph.

Kirby’s insistent triumph, on the other hand, is his capitulation. There is no space in the Batroc battle for vulnerability or vacillation. Instead, the art booms out the greatness of Kirby without qualification — which is a problem inasmuch as the greatness is thoroughly and painfully qualified. The story Kirby is telling may be about his own mastery of form, but that mastery can’t escape from the stale genre conventions — and, worse, seems oblivious to its own hidebound inevitability. If Kirby is truly such a heroic individual, why does the individuality seem to resort to such half-measures? The art seems to boast of its thoroughgoing idiosyncrasy and extremity — but when it comes down to it, it won’t and can’t abandon the by-the-numbers battle for full on abstraction. Why can’t we just have bursts of colored lines in every panel? Why not turn the forms actually into forms, rather than leaving them as recognizable combatants? In this context, Lee’s captions almost seem like taunts, praising “Jolly Jack’s great actions scenes” as beyond words, when they are, in fact, perfectly congruent with the hoariest narrative clichés. The hyperbolic indescribable fight scene is, after all, just a fight scene. Holiday knows and uses the fact that her pop song is just a pop song, but Kirby the uncontainable doesn’t even seem to realize how thoroughly he has been contained.

You could certainly argue that the Batroc battle is more successful than I think it is. You might insist, for example, that Kirby’s struggle with the stupid superhero milieu is a kind of tragedy, and that the interest is in seeing him pull something worthwhile from the dreck. Again, that’s not exactly what I get out of it, but if you wanted to do a reading that told that story, I’d be willing to listen.

Whatever one’s evaluation of Kirby, there does in fact have to be an evaluation. If the point of art is to reveal whether the artist performing a story has made it their own and has made it worthy, then there has to be some possibility that the artist in question has not done either. But Campbell’s refusal to countenance comparison, his insistence that (following R. Fiore) comics are comics and that that is there main virtue, comes perilously close to making the comicness of comics their sole virtue. Comicness becomes the all in all — so that the production method of the corporate behemoth in whose bowels Kirby toiled becomes more important than whatever Kirby was doing within those bowels. In an effort to put Kirby beyond criticism by bashing literariness, Campbell paradoxically ends up elevating the genre narrative, with no way to praise Kirby’s efforts (successful or otherwise) to leave those narratives behind. If literature has nothing to do with comics, then Kirby’s efforts to blow up genre narrative into abstraction and form become meaningless. If Kirby can’t fail, then he can’t succeed, either.

The truth, of course, is that art simply isn’t segregated the way Campbell wants it to be. There is literariness in comics, just as there is rhythm in prose and imagery in music. Artists — even comics artists — don’t fit themselves into boxes. Why shouldn’t a singer or an artist tell stories and think about narrative? What favor do you do them by pretending that they can’t or won’t react to and use the words and the narratives that are part and parcel of their chosen mediums? I like Kirby less than I like Billie Holiday, but both of them are greater artists than Eddie Campbell will allow.
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You can read the entire roundtable on Eddie Campbell and the literaries here.

The Comics Journal and Eddie Campbell: In Defense of Shit and Poor Logic

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Once upon a time, there was a bastion of comics criticism which, it has been opined, stood against the hordes of barbarians trumpeting the works of John Byrne, Todd McFarlane and assorted other idolaters of caped beings. But time withers all, and like Saint Gregory of Rome, the rulers of that holy organ negotiated a separate peace with the hordes — the “empire” surviving but now a rotten shambles and a mockery of what it once stood for. It has been said that the purported ideals of that magazine never existed in the first place. That past is debatable, the present less so.

What was once a hotbed of disagreement and debate has now become one of affirmation and boot licking acceptance. The rallying cry heard last week was a sermon to the converted, an affirmation of the god-like status of various revered cartoonists — that their comics remain untarnished by dint of an indefinable comic-ness

Like many rallying cries, Campbell’s piece is long on rhetoric but short on substance. His primary example as to the brilliance of the EC War line is the cover to Two-Fisted Tales #26.

Two Fisted Tales 26

“Some say us marines retreated from the Changjin Reservoir! …Heck!…we didn’t retreat! We just advanced in another direction!” – Harvey Kurtzman

“Let me fix the Kurtzman war comic in the reader’s mind before moving on. Here is the cover of Two-Fisted Tales #26, March 1952. There is a whole story in it and the way the story is told is quite sophisticated. A soldier in the middle of a historical action is already referring to it in the past tense. The first time I saw Kurtzman’s war comic art I wondered how on Earth he was able to get away with something so radical as that choppy cartooning, so far removed from what one would expect in war art…”  – Eddie Campbell

Now Campbell gives my name quite a bit of play in his article. He mentions it again here as if I was denying Kurtzman’s skillful storytelling in certain stories done for the EC war line — as if no juice could possibly be pressed from mediocre fruit. I would ask interested readers to read the article he cites to see for themselves if I have denied Kurtzman’s talent for cartooning as Campbell’s hysterical pronouncements seem to suggest.

Readers not predisposed to give Campbell carte blanche might be slightly confused by the logic of his arguments. The second half of his article assails us with an example of a superior comic-ness which deserves praise, but his half-hearted readings of the EC war comics don’t match this aesthetic appeal and simply revert to typical descriptions of the narrative and the art—Kurtzman’s “choppy cartooning” and the questionable narrative genius of the cover illustration in question:

 “…there is a whole story in it” with “a soldier in the middle of a historical action […] already referring to it in the past tense.”

The first question one should ask is why this is especially notable or the mark of a great talent for comics. Are the soldier’s words a prophetic utterance which lodges itself into the entire fabric of Kurtzman’s Changjin Reservoir issue, or is it a philosophical discursion on the paradoxical nature of time and fate?

For those not inclined to read the comic or use their brains, let me just say that the answer is “no” to both these possibilities  My suggestions seem utterly ridiculous because the answer is plainly obvious to any reader who regards the cover as a whole. There can be little doubt that the illustration and narrative communicate the language of cover advertising and propaganda.

The disheveled fighting man carrying his wounded comrade; the brilliant brush work twisting and turning—melding the two into one single beast straggling across a snow swept battle field; defiantly disabusing all non-combatants and the foolish crowd of onlookers (journalists and naysayers) of the possibility of any lack of bravery or incompetence. This is not a place for cowards or laggards but one for heroes (misunderstood, at the bottom of the chain of command, injured, or dead), who are not fighting for any abstract concept but just to survive.

What Campbell’s statement suggest is a solitary interest in technicalities, and how this differentiates him from the fans who flocked to superhero conventions during comic’s early years, I’m not entirely sure. When it comes to the spiritual content of Kurtzman’s work, he seems quite deaf or purposefully blind.

Lodged within Campbell’s thin description are other questions —whether we should judge a piece of art as a whole or by its parts; and if we accept that art can achieve greatness purely on the basis of its narrative skill or artistry, is that artistry of a level that we can forgive almost everything else (McCay’s Little Nemo comes to mind immediately).

Kim Thompson latches on to this in the comments section and I quote:

“Complaining that a comic is no good because the story is no good is like complaining that water isn’t a good liquid because oxygen isn’t wet. Bravo, Mr. Campbell.” – Kim Thompson

Thompson’s metaphor is of course thoroughly imperfect since oxygen is frequently found in its “wet” state in our modern world but let’s see what he’s getting at here. In Thompson’s comment, comics are likened to water, which every elementary school kid is taught is composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms.  In other words, through the combination of art (hydrogen) and story (oxygen), a new, fastidious, and fabulous art form is created known as comics (water). This art form bears only a cursory relation to those things which constitute it and is neither art nor story but something entirely new which obeys no “laws” of aesthetics except those which are conjured up in the rectum of Eddie Campbell (and, maybe, his editor Dan Nadel).

Of course, this line of thought is irrelevant if one assumes that a cartoonist-critic is interested purely in the utilitarian aspects of the art in question. If one simply wants to emulate Kurtzman’s drawing line or his almost extradiegetic storytelling, the absolute quality of the art in question is extraneous.

If we mean to be “critics” interested in the formation (or reassertion) of a canon, then the absolute aesthetic appeal of a comic takes on more importance. This was certainly one of the motivations behind The Comics Journal‘s Top 100 comics list (where the EC line plays a prominent part) — a list mired in the concept that as the roots of comics reside in degradation and populism, they should conform to and be judged by those criteria only.  As such, when The Comics Journal Top 100 comics list was produced, it was not so much an exercise in choosing comics of artistic merit but a process of choosing the best smelling shit — shit which, presumably, has no relevance or connection to the world at large.

Campbells’ other argument for the genius of the EC war comics comes at the close of his piece:

“If comics are any kind of art at all, it’s the art of ordinary people. With regard to Kurtzman’s war comics, don’t forget that the artists on those books were nearer to the real thing than you and I will ever be. Jack Davis and John Severin were stationed in the Pacific, Will Elder was at the liberation of Paris. Maybe we should pay attention to the details.”

In this, he trots out an age old argument in buttressing these comics — their authenticity. And who can doubt this? For participation in war and killing (voluntarily or involuntarily) is self-legitimizing — the only truth when it comes to battle. The entire fighting corpus is like a single amoeba with a single mind and a single all-encompassing viewpoint. And why even consider the enemy, the dead, the relatives of the dead, or those who oppose war? Can a cartooning genius ever be limited in his vision or politics? Can he ever be sentimental and derivative? Can a cartooning genius ever be wrong?

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The other points in Eddie Campbell’s article will be dealt with in the rest of the roundtable.

Why I Won’t Be Contributing to the Twilight Roundtable

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The entire Twilight Roundtable is here.
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Originally, I had intended on writing something about the fourth and final book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, but I just couldn’t do it and wrote an email to Noah explaining why. He asked if I’d put the email up as a post, so here it is, slightly modified (but only slightly).

Oh Noah,

I’ve gotta bail on the Twilight roundtable. I have been dealing with a few extra things of late, but really it’s just because I don’t give enough of a shit to write anything on what was the most terrible book that I’ve ever finished (there’s been worse — e.g., Malazon book 1 — but I wisely quit them). At least I know what women, many of whom are my friends, are reading in their fixation on YA novels. Then again, maybe I wish I didn’t know. Reading the book only confirmed what I thought about the movies, but with a whole lot more repetitious moaning and anxiety thrown in. The filmmakers had the good sense, or were forced by the demands of their medium, to either throw a lot of that out or turn it into a ludicrous over-sexualized spectacle of yearning. The movies were fun, the books aren’t. But even regarding politics, there wasn’t much of a surprise for me: the Cullens are representative of realpolitik America, who use the threat of overwhelming power to keep the evil others, the Volturi, at bay. As Edward says, they’re cowards below the surface. And I really don’t disagree with the pop feminists out there about this book. The men and women take traditional roles: Alice likes clothing, Esme is a homemaker, Edward is the artist, Carlisle the intellectual, etc.. And then there’s Bella who finally achieves self satisfaction by being admired by Edward. She’ll never have to work for eternity. Her child is so perfect, as described on every page. What are her interests in music, books, or anything else? Meyer doesn’t know or care. What we do know is that Bella’s interested in babies and husbands. Of course, Meyer rigs all this with rules for her fantasy that make all this knuckledragging wish fulfillment seem okay. And it is in the diegesis, just like Dirty Harry‘s fascism, but not so much if one wants a life like this. A truly obnoxious read in just about every way: stylistically, ideologically … even plot-wise (the structure seemed to be made ad hoc without an editor).

Anyway, I just don’t want to spend any more time thinking about such idiocy. Sorry, man.

Bella As a Mormon Goddess In Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight

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250px-TwilightbookMuch has been made of the fact that Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon and that her wildly popular Twilight series contains a romance that demands no sex before marriage for fantastical reasons that at times stretch the bounds of credulity. Some have argued that this is a kind of proselytizing technique, a different version of the Mormon missionaries knocking on your door and converting your daughters to the bizarre religion. While I think that Meyer’s Mormonism deeply affects her writing, as religious beliefs and other worldviews necessarily affect any writer, the more interesting Mormon doctrine infusing Twilight is, in my opinion, the uniquely Mormon version of the Garden of Eden story. That apple on the front cover is not there for nothing. And it isn’t the temptation of sex at all that is at the heart of the controversial Mormon doctrine. It’s all about female power.

To begin with, I am going to admit that I am not a typical nor a conservative Mormon. My own beliefs are in process, so it is possible that I may end up distorting some doctrines without intending to. I will also try to point out what is doctrine and what is my own implications to be drawn from the doctrine. I also need to state up front that while I believe that understanding Mormonism is a useful way to understand some parts of Twilight, I do not by any means think that the series can be reduced to Mormonism. No writer of any interest simply parrots a religious belief, and I think Meyer has been extremely inventive in her retelling of this Mormon myth. I do not know if this was done consciously or not and it hardly matters.

In either case, there is no intention here to slam Meyer, her book, or to continue the rather disturbing trend of making a book written by a woman and loved by many women young and old into a point for denigrating women and their interests or achievements. I recently wrote an essay called In Defense of Twilight in which I reacted to a recent writing convention I had gone to where multiple panels ended up being “Twilight bashing.” The panelists openly admitted to never having read a single sentence of the series, but still felt perfectly well qualified to mock it and its proponents because it wasn’t “real literature” or because whatever version they had heard was “simply ridiculous.”

This reminded me too sharply of my years in graduate school at Princeton in the 1990s, when women students asked the all-male professors on staff why we had no female role models and we were told there were simply no women — on the planet —who were qualified to be hired at Princeton. In addition, when I asked a professor why, in a course of German Romanticism, there was not a single woman listed on the list of course materials, he replied that we simply had “no time” to study the “minor authors of Romanticism.” We were at Princeton, so of course, we were going to study all the “important” authors who were the men that had been venerated since Romanticism itself. We were certainly not going to investigate the patriarchy that had chosen those men as “most important” from the first.

After spending several years teaching German at a university, I eventually gave up academia in pursuit of a career as a young adult fantasy writer. In the past several years since I was published, I have become increasingly disturbed by the outcries (by men) in various news outlets since J.K. Rowling and Meyer have become both wealthy and powerful by writing children’s stories. What is the world coming to, if women writers (not to mention women editors) are taking control of the publishing industry? Where are the books for boys?

We are supposedly facing a national crisis because there are NO books written for boys and our poor young men will be forced to read that “icky” Twilight if there is nothing to counter this trend. Young men reading Twilight is surely the proof that our civilization has reached its nadir, because no one wants young men learning to have sexual self-control in a relationship with a woman, nor do we want them to be that dangerously “feminized” Edward Cullen who can read minds and has become a “vegetarian.” (Worse still would be women becoming used to the idea that attractive young men might rip off their shirts and display their washboard abs at every moment to the catcalls of the crowd, because only men should be able to demand a sexual display like that, yes?)
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The Mormon story of the Garden of Eden is a variant of the original. Adam and Eve were placed in the garden and were told not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree because it would mean their deaths. But Mormons do not believe in original sin. They call the choice Adam and Eve made a “transgression” rather than a “sin”. What this means is that they took the fruit knowing that it would make them mortal and send them out of God’s presence and into the world. They broke a law, but it was a law that they had to break. It was only by being forced out of the garden that the rest of the “Plan of Salvation” or “Plan of Happiness” could come to be. Mormon scholar Daniel Judd argues that the Fall was a step downward, but also a step “forward.”

Furthermore, Mormons do not believe that Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden because of a sexual transgression. Sex is, in Mormon theology, not an evil to be avoided by the most pure. Quite the contrary (despite what you may think, based on the accusations that Meyer is attempting to convert young readers to sexual abstinence), sex is considered a holy act. Dallin H. Oaks, one of the current “apostles” of the Mormon Church writes “The power to create mortal life is the most exalted power God has given his children”. Mormons insist on the use of sex only within the bonds of marriage, but there is no psychic spiritual guilt to be associated with the act itself. Mormon couples are generally assured that sex is good for their marriage and that it is not only because they are meant to multiple and replenish the Earth (a commandment that many Mormons take to heart), but also to build bonds of love and commitment between spouses.

Finally, instead of seeing Eve as a figure of hatred or blame, Mormons praise Eve for her decision to take the fruit first, because she saw more wisely than Adam did that living a life of joy would also entail experiencing pain. There are some Mormons who believe (and at this point I will say that this is not doctrine, but rather speculation I have heard repeated inside the church) that Adam and Eve engaged in a thousand year long debate on the topic of the fruit and whether or not to take it. Adam and Eve could not have children in the garden and therefore could not fulfill the other commandment which God had given them, in addition to not partaking of the fruit, which was to have children. Again, in Mormon theology this is not because they could not have sex, but only because their bodies were not mortal and were not fully capable of producing children. Speculation again is all I can use to answer why. Perhaps because having children inherently causes pain (in childbirth, but also in many other ways) and pain could not be part of the Garden of Eden.

I am not the first scholar to see Twilight through the lens of the Mormon creation story. Lisa Lampert-Weissing has written a fascinating study of Twilight as a retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost. She sees Twilight in the long tradition of women writers following Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley, who wrote about the “monster” in Frankenstein that is in many ways Eve’s side of the story of the creation and the Fall. Though Frankenstein’s monster is purportedly male, he enacts many female dilemmas, as being created second and seen as a dark creature, full of sin. Lampert-Weissing wisely sees the importance of free will and “agency” in Mormon doctrine and cleverly argues that Bella herself is engaged in a project of making herself an equal to Edward by becoming a vampire. She wants to not only be Lois Lane, but Superman. She wants to be able to protect herself and her child and not depend on Edward for that. She wants the power that becoming a vampire will give her, the eternal youth that will make her Edward’s equal in eternal beauty, and she wants to be god-like, as he is. In this way, Lampert-Weissig sees Bella as a feminist hero, demanding equality and making her own choices rather than allowing herself to be told what to do by the authoritarian Edward or the other god-like Cullens.

But the Mormon story of creation as it informs Twilight goes deeper than simply the story of Eve’s free will to choose to fall in taking the fruit. It is not only in becoming a vampire that Bella becomes god-like. She gains immortality, yes, but that is at the hands (or teeth) of Edward, the patriarch of all patriarchs here. She forces him to it by coming close to death in childbirth. And it is in childbirth that Mormon doctrine ennobles women. Thus, the argument that Meyer’s Twilight is all about keeping women in traditional roles is true. But it also has a powerful demand that women in these roles be seen as heroic, even as super-human. Immortality in Mormonism comes to women through their work as wives and mothers quite literally.

Mormons believe in a universal resurrection and in a nearly universal heaven. The only hell in Mormon theology is a waiting space like purgatory, but which Mormons call “spirit prison” where those who do not acknowledge Christ await missionaries to come to them and teach them. As soon as they are converted and have temple work done (thus the Mormon need to continually do ordinances for those who are dead), they can cross from “spirit prison” into “spirit paradise” where all the righteous converted dwell.

Once the final judgment happens, all will be allowed to choose a kingdom (celestial, telestial, terrestrial) depending on where they are most comfortable. Each kingdom will be ruled over by a member of the Godhead, and only a very small handful of God’s children will be sent to a place called “Outer Darkness” where they are forever cut off from the presence of God (and even these will be immortal in resurrected bodies). My understanding of this doctrine is that there is likely to be movement between the kingdoms in the eternities, and that ultimately, all will eventually complete the path to godhood. But this whole plan is dependent on women. Why? Because only women can give birth to bodies, and it is these bodies which are the stuff of immortality.

Mormons believe that God Himself has a body, that it is a necessary part of godhood to be flesh and blood (though exalted, immortal, resurrected flesh and blood). According to Joseph Smith, God was at one point a mortal man, and He became a god through the same process that will be open to all men. Women, on the other hand, may have a slightly different path to immortality and godhood, and that path demands becoming wives and mothers, because only through women can all of the waiting spirits of God’s children, begin the path to finding their own bodies which can be transformed into godly stuff.

In Twilight, Bella does not realize that she can get pregnant when she and Edward consummate their marriage. She assumes, in fact, that she can’t. Nonetheless, when she is given the choice between saving her own (physical, mortal) life and saving the life of her child, she chooses her child. Now, many read this as Meyer’s Mormonism stepping in to argue against abortion. I won’t say absolutely this isn’t true, but it is at the very least incomplete. For Bella to choose completing a pregnancy over saving her own life, is, in the Mormon view of women’s possible godhood, her choosing immortality over mortality.

In the final and fourth book of the series, Breaking Dawn, Edward has to bite Bella to make her a vampire, but it is her child through whom Bella saves the world. Even if Edward had let Bella die, the story of Twilight demands that we believe that Renee-esmee is the most important person ever born. Bella is, in this situation, a new Mary. She has given birth to a new Christ who will save the vampires (and possibly humans). Whether Bella lives or dies after that is almost insignificant. She has been elevated to godhood already, by making the god of all gods, the vampire of all vampires.

Valerie Hudson Cassler, a convert to Mormonism from Catholicism, argues passionately that of Christian religions, Mormonism is the most feminist because of the Mormon view of Eve as a wise woman who made the right choice to leave the paradise of Eden and accept the pain of mortality and motherhood. Cassler argues that other versions of Christianity teach “that a woman’s body is unclean, that God meant women to submit to their husbands and in general be subservient to men, and that divinity is male and male alone.” Mormons, by contrast, teach in their temples that women will becomes “priestesses” and “goddesses” alongside their husbands.

Cassler writes

It is through women that souls journey to mortality and gain their agency, and in general it is through the nurturing of women, their nurturing love of their children, that the light of Christ is awakened within each soul. And we should include in that list of souls Jesus the Christ. Even Christ our Lord was escorted to mortality and veiled in flesh through the gift of a woman, fed at his mother’s breast, and awakened to all that is good and sweet in the world. Women escort every soul through the veil to mortal life and full agency. It is interesting to think that even Adam, who was created before Eve, entered into full mortality and full agency by accepting the gift of the First Tree from the hand of a woman. In a sense, Adam himself was born of Eve.

Mormon men have the priesthood which allows them to seal families together, and in essence, to return these families to God, thus healing the wound that the Fall created. In a sense, the Mormon Edward officiates over Bella’s passage through death back to eternal life.

But Bella’s female and divine power is separate from Edward’s. She cannot make herself a vampire, true. But she has a far more important role. Within the Mormon context of male/female relationships, Bella is equal to and perhaps more powerful than Edward. Her female “sphere” of giving birth isn’t a “curse” that follows because of Eve’s choice to take the fruit in the Garden of Eden and thus ensure the suffering and death of all mankind. Rather, she clings to her own power despite the cost and the voices around her demanding that she cede all power to Edward. She makes the choice, and, as in the Mormon version of the Fall, the reluctant Adam/Edward follows after. Ultimately, Edward is forced to admit that this Fall was also a fortunate one, that all his years of debating with Bella, he was wrong and she was right. She was always meant to be a vampire at his side, a “monster” who has power over life and death in her femininity. Bella takes up the Mormon role of motherhood to become the divine path to birth and life on Earth, a role as important as Mormon priesthood, which rules over death and the final approach to immortality.

Twilight is by no means a typical feminist narrative. Instead of demanding that women are capable of taking over male roles (a vital part of Amerian political feminism), Twilight glorifies the traditional female roles of wife and motherhood and points out the power inherent in those. I don’t mean to argue that this point of view should be accepted without question. Certainly, within the Mormon Church and in plenty of other churches and cultures, women have been told that if they only accept their role, they will find power within the existing structure of patriarchy. I am suspicious of Mormonism’s exclusively male priesthood and the insistence that men and women are eternally different with different roles. But on the other hand, I am equally suspicious of being told that there is no power in motherhood, since as a mother, I have felt tremendous satisfaction and yes, even power. Twilight is a powerful story about a woman finding power in motherhood and if that seems regressive, I think that is not seeing the story deeply enough in its reconception of divine female power within the Mormon mythos.

Manic Pixie Dream Edward

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The entire Twilight Roundtable is here.
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images-1The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, as Wikipedia will tell you, is a stock character in films whose purpose is to be free, free like a wind bunny who is free, and also to make the main male character childlike and happy and wind bunnyish as well. Think Zooey Descahnel in…well, just about anything.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is obviously a gendered trope. She’s got “girl” right there in her name…and in a lot of ways she’s a caricature of femininiity — childlike, innocent, cute, and, of course, sexy and sexualized. Ergo, there are no Manic Pixie Dream Guys. The manic pixies are always girls.

Or so you’d think. The truth, though, is that there are male characters who function much like MPDG. For instance, take the character of George in “A Room With a View”. Like a MPDG, George’s main function is to connect the main character, Lucy Honeychurch, to her own inner wonderfulness and passion. Before she meets George and his father, Mr. Emerson, Lucy is boring, conventional and worst of all insincere. The only sign that she has depths is her marvelous piano playing, which prompts one bystander to comment, “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her.”

Of course, she does eventually start to live as she plays…and the reason is George, her own MPDG, who leaps naked from pools and kisses her amidst violets and divests her of all her stifling armor of convention.

Still, the divesting, not to mention the armor, works a little differently than when the MPDG is a woman. Again, gender is central to the pixie dream girl trope; if you make the pixie a guy, he not only looks a bit different, he functions differently as well. In Yes Man, the MPDG’s goofy femme unconventionality frees Jim Carrey from his hidebound, sexless boringness — she teaches the stultified man the feminine beauty of having no responsibilities. In A Room With a View, the terms are shuffled a bit — a shuffling shown in part, perhaps, by the fact that we see much more of Lucy’s relationship with Mr. Emerson (George’s father) than we see of her relationship with George himself. Where Carrey gets to be a child, Lucy learns from, and gets strength from, a father. Deschanal inspires Carrey to let go of his life; George, and particularly George’s father, inspires Lucy to grab hold of hers. Similarly, in the Lord of the Rings films, Eowyn is attracted to Aragorn even more strongly when she learns that he’s old enough to be her grandfather, because what attracts her to him is in fact his mystical, hyperbolic fatherness; his stature and power and fighting arm, all of which she desires for herself, and so desires in him.
 

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Part of the poignance of the Eowyn/Aragorn relationship — and a big part of the reason the MPDG has more emotional heft when the genders are switched — is because it’s pretty clearly a reaction to sexism. Eowyn speaks repeatedly and eloquently about her frustration with the limits placed on her as a woman — about how she longs to be a warrior and fight for her people and her king, but is instead continually shunted off to cook and tend to children and the elderly. For Jim Carrey, the MPDG is a sop to make up for the fact that his ex dumped him. That sop takes the form of fantasy woman who acts as his ego appendage, which tends to diminish sympathy inasmuch as it suggests that his ex maybe knew what she was doing when she left him in the first place. For Eowyn, on the other hand, the magic man is a sop to make up for the fact that she is trapped by sexism. It’s not a good solution, perhaps (as the film realizes) — but that only makes her predicament more tragic.

Another example of this is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which is basically a brutal critique of the Manic Pixie Dream Guy — or, in this case, of the Somber Genius Dream Daddy. Dorothea marries Casaubon because she sees him as a kind of intellectual phallus — a quintessential father who can usher her into the male world of thought and meaningfulness. In the event, though, it turns out that he is not the phallus, but a selfish old man. A romantic partner is just a person, not a gateway to a new self. In Middlemarch, other people can’t transform you — at least, not all at once, and generally not for the better. Which doesn’t mean that Eliot condemns Dorothea. On the contrary, Dorothea’s essentially feminist wish to escape her limited circumstances as a woman is seen as entirely reasonable. Looking to a man to help her do that is obviously not ideal and doesn’t turn out well — but limited options lead to less than ideal decisions.

Bringing us to Twilight. Meyer’s story is often seen as anti-feminist because Bella gives up everything — her friends, college, her human life — in order to be with Edward.
I think, though, that this is a fundamental misreading of the series. Bella doesn’t give up her life for Edward. Rather, Edward exists for Bella, in the same way that Manic Pixie Dream Girls exist for the guys they save.

In fact, Meyer goes out of her way to reiterate again and again that Bella’s specialness precedes Edward, and in some sense calls him into being — just as Lucy’s passionate Beethoven precedes, and structurally necessitates, her encounter with George. Much of the first part of the first novel of Twilight is given over to descriptions of how out of place Bella feels among her peers. We also learn that she has always been able to smell blood like a vampire does, rather than like a human — and of course Edward can’t read her thoughts, and finds her scent almost magically appetizing. In short, Bella, like Lucy, has depths. When she chooses Edward, she does not turn her back on her wonderful, magical life — she picks it up.

Edward, then, is less a character than he is an embodiment of Bella’s desire for herself — a kind of projected self-actualization. Meyer’s genius for giving Bella not just what she wants, but what she wants to be, is, then, at the heart of the book’s considerable appeal. Edward is both (old, siring) father and young lover, both dark vampire and sparkly elf, both safe (he’s reluctant to even kiss her) and dangerous, both outsider and — with his weird, incestuous, close-knit Mormon family — insider. Most of all, though, he is power. And that power is specifically the power to get out of the boring conventions of tween high school girlness — the clothes shopping, the gossip, the high school interpersonal angst that Bella clearly loathes — and into adventure and danger and superpowers and magic. If the choice is between going to prom and being stalked by a vampire, Bella would much prefer being stalked by a vampire — as she says at the end of the first book, when she is disappointed that Edward is taking her to the dance rather than changing her into one of the undead.

Again, there’s genius in Edward’s pixie dream guyness, not least in the fact that he is clearly marked as fantasy or dream — as a sparkling elf, who literally carries Bella off into the magic woods. George grants Lucy her own inner passion; Edward does the same for Bella, while acknowledging more explicitly that this dream is her dream. George is a bit indistinct to the extent that he’s supposed to be real — Edward, in being a figment, is significantly more vivid.

This is not an unalloyed good by any means. Edward as wish has the striking, indelible energy of Superman or Peter Pan — or, for that matter, of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl herself. But Twilight is ostensibly supposed to be not (only) a fairy tale, but (at least in part) a romance. In that context, Edward’s transparent non-existence ceases to make him iconic, and just makes him tiresome. Edward as idealized portal to NeverNeverLand has at least the power of its own over-determined longing. Edward as actual lover, though, runs aground in the same way that MPDG romances always do. The MPDG, after all, is not a person in her own right; she’s a trope whose purpose is to help the main character self-actualize.

You can certainly see why young girls might respond to Twilight. Cultural products in which the male ego gets to annex all the world are almost as prevalent as male egos themselves. But cultural products in which tween girls are themselves and their lovers and superpowered sprites as well are much less common. Still, while I can see the charm, I have to say that rereading the first volume was not exactly painful, but not especially enjoyable either. For me, at least Twilight fails not because Bella is erased by, or loses herself in, Edward, but rather because there isn’t ever an Edward there at all. The only problem with that magic pixie too good to be true is that he isn’t true. For a romance to succeed, there need to be two people present. When Bella talks to Edward, though, it’s hard to escape the conviction that she’s engaged in a lengthy and self-aggrandizing monologue.