Tag Archives: Ariel Schrag

How Much Alike Is Likewise?

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In comments, David rephrases Caro’s argument that Likewise ultimately fails to be enough like Ulysses.

Let me see if I’ve got Caro’s basic “Likewise” argument right. The relative newness of the graphic novel as a distinct art form means that it has not yet evolved the deep and complex machinery necessary to successfully compete with the richness of the bi-i-ig novel.

And therefore it’s not very useful to discuss things like “Likewise” using the same concepts and vocabulary, because the bucket just isn’t big enough yet to carry that kind of water.

This isn’t a smash on Schrag; she couldn’t do what couldn’t be done, and her intent wasn’t to write “Ulysses II” anyway. But it is a recognition of the nature of the graphic novel, the state of the art currently, that a “Ulysses II” is not yet possible in the genre. The question then becomes, how does “Likewise” stack *within the current possiblities of the genre*.

My own sense is that the formalist playfulness is there but isn’t extraordinary, nor is it even the strong point of the work; if Schrag hadn’t put the Joyce and Gifford into so many frames, that topic might not even have come up at all. But those who knew me in high school know how I brandished my Kafka and Vlad McNab, so I can absolutely accept why the book plays the role it does. To say the structure of “Likewise” reflects the book in a profound way is to imply that Schrag has given it a profound reading, and I’m not convinced a 19-year-old can read it profoundly. I know that’s true for me; I was 18 the time I first read “Lolita,” and the part I remember liking the best was the games with the license plates in the hotel registeries — “WS 1564” and stuff like that. What a yotz! Reading it now makes my eyes well up.”if Schrag hadn’t put the Joyce and Gifford into so many frames, that topic might not even have come up at all.

I don’t agree with this. It seems to me that Joyce is very important, both as an inspiration for style and structure and as an icon of (male) artistry which Schrag both embraces and I think undermines.

It’s the undermining that is a sticking point for many (Caro says it’s one for her, if I understand her comments aright.) Critics see Schrag’s failure to write like Joyce, or to get Joyce’s level of metatextual control, as a sign of immaturity, or as indicative of the historical difficulties of writing a graphic novel rather than literature, or just as a failure of competence.

To me, though, Schrag’s distance from Joyce seems thematic; it seems to be what the book is about. It’s a feature, not a bug. I actually think that it would be thematically *incoherent* for her to have gotten much closer to the experience of Ulysses than she did. Likewise is really in many ways about not succeeding — at being Joyce, at being an artist, at being a man, at being straight — as it is about succeeding. That failure isn’t tragic; in fact it’s the point; the book ends up accepting the inability to be Joyce, or to be straight, or to be a man, as a kind of triumph.

Caro says at the beginning of her post:

he title of the last volume of Ariel Schrag’s graphic memoir, Likewise, appears four times in Joyce’s Ulysses, most prominently in Episode 7, Aeolus, as one of the hyperbolic newspaper headlines: What? – and Likewise – Where?

(Aeolus is the Greek god of wind and Episode 7 is the chapter where Joyce satirizes “windy and inflated” reporting. Suat might call this poetic irony.)

Schrag’s Likewise, it seems to me, is about inflated rhetoric and desires, about embracing them and stepping away from them at the same time. It’s also about being like and not being like, and about how somewhere between the two you find yourself.

The whole Likewise Roundtable is here.

Likewise Desire

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Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof. – Ulysses, Episode 7

The title of the last volume of Ariel Schrag’s graphic memoir, Likewise, appears four times in Joyce’s Ulysses, most prominently in Episode 7, Aeolus, as one of the hyperbolic newspaper headlines: What? – and Likewise – Where?

(Aeolus is the Greek god of wind and Episode 7 is the chapter where Joyce satirizes “windy and inflated” reporting. Suat might call this poetic irony.)

As Noah has pointed out, the role of Ulysses in Likewise is talismanic, not only in the senses that he describes – to be like Sally and to be(come) to Sally what Joyce has been – but also in the rigorously Freudian sense of an object that stands in for an unfulfilled wish. Ulysses acts in these pages as a substitute for Sally.

For this reason, it feels insufficient to argue that this book is about gender identity. The pages of this book are more saturated with the not-unrelated concept of desire: am I desired, do I desire the right people, why is there a mismatch between my biology and the people I desire, and most importantly, her constant and omnipresent desire to make this comic.

Noah rightly talks about Ulysses as phallus and about the phallus as mastery, but he doesn’t explicitly complete the syllogism. Yet Ulysses does indeed stand for mastery: to read it, to understand it, is to become what Lacan calls “The Subject Supposed to Know.” In this case, it’s not only to know Sally (as Noah suggests, although that’s certainly going on) but also to know … well, how to make sense of Ulysses. Ulysses is the ultimate symbol of the writer’s craft, considered the greatest achievement of English prose. As Likewise progresses, Ariel (the character) gets less preoccupied with Sally and questions of homosexual identity and more concerned with her identity as a writer, and those parts of the book are the ones that mimic the structure and rhetorical diversity of Joyce’s novel. The desire for the phallus in Likewise is not only the desire for mastery of the social dynamic of “It”; it is not only the desire for Sally or the desire for a clear identity – it is the striving for mastery of the comic itself: the obsession even greater than the obsession with Sally.

The equivalence of Sally and Ulysses as objects of desire is evident in the book’s mapping techniques (it’s not particularly evident in the memoir’s “plot”). Part I is concerned with mapping the contours of Sally’s body and the relationship between Sally and Ariel, and is mostly traditional: a literary cartography made from lived experience. The remaining parts prioritize grafting Schrag’s narrative onto the structure of Ulysses and are more Baudrillardian: she tries to follow the contours of Ulysses and ends up creating something that is not-quite-a-simulacrum but that certainly aims there.

This effort to make the comic “like” Ulysses plays counterpoint to her frustration over the naturalized ideas of sexual difference. She is frustrated that she can’t fit her own pleasure with the normative biological imagery and by a visceral sense that her homosexuality is biological too. She is frustrated by the actual lived awkwardness of teenage relationships (gay or otherwise), and the difficulties of sexual and emotional intimacy in general.

In contrast, intimacy with Ulysses is achievable — not the typical romance-novel version of “being meant for” or even being desired by, although those make an appearance in her record. The idealized intimacy is “being like.”

The comic demonstrates that similarity allows for a kind of intimacy that is likewise, in both dictionary senses of the adverb:

like•wise
? ?[lahyk-wahyz]
–adverb
1. moreover; in addition; also; too: She is likewise a fine lawyer.
2. in like manner; in the same way; similarly: I’m tempted to do likewise.

This is why this book is, to me, even with all its angst, a celebration of queer desire: desire that is both/and and not either/or.

=========================

The construction of desire is immensely appealing and the most successful aspect of the book, as Noah’s post demonstrates. But it could have been accomplished in far fewer pages. The effort to create a simulacrum is staggeringly ambitious, and it fails spectacularly. It fails, however, primarily for reasons that are not Ariel Schrag’s fault.

Ulysses in many ways triggered the birth of experimental fiction: playing with style, form, structure, language, voice, and the dynamic interplay of meaning, it has exerted some sort of influence on almost every “literary” writer since its widespread publication in the early 1930s. The book is a puzzle-box, itself a simulacrum of The Odyssey and replete with literary references – the most obvious of which is a compendium of literary devices and styles. Pretty much every significant device from the history of Western literature makes it into Ulysses at some point (which is why most people, including Ariel, read it with a copy of Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated close at hand).

Western literature has had about 3000 years to codify devices and build references with widespread cultural relevance. Schrag’s novel suffers from the fact that graphic literature doesn’t have this much history. There isn’t a “Concise Oxford History of Graphic Literary Terms.” Art is much harder to pin down semiotically than literature. The success of Joyce’s novel relies on the fact that his starting point was a fairly rigid and well-established tradition of literary history and technique – it is easy to recognize at the surface level the use of drama, poetry, stream of consciousness, and other devices, even if the precise significance of each is a puzzle.

In contrast, Schrag is working in an idiom with about 100 years of history and an incredibly fluid semiotics. It’s really hard to get granular — and impossible to get granular enough for Joycean pleasure — because the interpretation of artistic variation is so impressionistic. Schrag’s choice to use very DIY visuals exacerbates this.

The deeper problem, I think, is that the Joycean project is fundamentally at odds with the autobiographical one: literary history and device are shared cultural phenomenon, whereas the interest of autobiography (as Suat points out) often comes from the uniqueness of the individual perspective. At 19, Schrag simply wasn’t quite deft enough to knit those two threads together into a completely successful text.

So she failed at the impossible task of writing a graphic equivalent to Ulysses — but fucking hell she tried, and that’s much more ambition than most graphic novelists show. I hope her example will inspire more experimental graphic fiction, because I don’t want to wait 3000 years to get the graphic novel that succeeds.

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Update by Caro: I was convinced by the comments below taking me to task for the sentence saying Ariel “resolved” the gender question. I edited the post to pull that sentence out. It’s not resolved; it’s just less important to me than the issue of desire.

_____________
Update by Noah: The entire Likewise Roundtable is here.

Battle At the Likewise Roundtable!

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I disagree with so much in Suat’s recent post it’s difficult to know where to begin. But perhaps I’ll start here.

The plot [of Potential in summary is simple: Ariel goes to high school, “discovers” that she is a lesbian, meets other girls and has occasional sex and alcohol.”

Um…no, i’ts not. The plot of Potential does begin with Ariel discovering she’s a lesbian. But it focuses on her developing, and increasingly disastrous, relationship with one particular girl, Sally. That development is not “simple” either — Sally and Ariel’s characters and interactions are both complex and nuanced. As an example (and to help Suat with a scene that seems to have left him non-plussed) — Ariel’s decision to have sex with a boy before she turns 16 is clearly linked to her general obsession with ritual rights-of-passage. That obsession (which isn’t spelled out — you have to be reading carefully enough to actually follow what the characters are doing) becomes a major bone of contention with Sally, and is tied, too, into Ariel’s general possessiveness and control issues.

I could go on; those themes are also linked, for example, to Ariel’s increasingly fraught interactions with her parents. But the point is: the relationship between Sally and Ariel is absolutely central to both Potential and Likewise. Yet, in his 2000 plus word review, Suat mentions Sally exactly once (when he, again somewhat bemusedly, discusses a scene where Ariel imagines her girlfriend turning into an alien.)

Suat’s a very intelligent and perceptive critic. So how exactly did he go about missing the main narrative and thematic feature of not one, but two books? Well, I think he did it this way:

I found little here which was emotionally moving or disturbing… I literally had difficulty concentrating on the comic from panel to panel.

Suat missed the plots of Potential and Likewise because he found the books so boring he couldn’t pay attention to them.

I don’t actually have a problem with that. Different people are interested in different things. Some people don’t like metal. Some people don’t like horror films. Some people don’t want to read yaoi. And some people don’t want to read journals (which Suat refers to disparagingly throughout his essay), or read about the trials of queer youth, or look at visual art which isn’t polished or accomplished in a particular way. That’s the way it goes.

Ideally, a critic would realize when his or her disinterest in generic and formal elements is so overwhelming as to be essentially insurmountable. Suat doesn’t do that here, unfortunately — instead he doubles down.

Noah would say in Schrag’s defense that this betrays a lack of interest on my (or other like- minded reader’s) part in the life and thoughts of teenage girls. I would suggest rather that it betrays a lack of interest in the life of just any teenage girl. In the same way that not all autobiographies are worth reading, not every teenage journal is worthy of our attention or approbation.

The point I think is that Suat is only interested in teenaged girls if they make art “worthy of our attention.” But…what if, just as a possibility, the disinterest in the everyday life of teenaged girls actually prevents you from noticing art that might be worthy of your attention if it were about something that you found more absorbing?

As an example of how such a blind spot might work…here’s Suat giving my review of Potential what for:

Where Berlatsky sees sublime confusion, I see only a poorly edited journal. I much prefer the artist who prunes and refines a piece to one who rattles on however authentically. Quite simply put, these are comics which contain little in the way of beauty of form or language.

So, reading that little bit, you’d think that I admired Schrag’s work for its “sublime confusion,” and authenticity — because she was punk rock, and just let her feelings flow.

But here’s my actual last paragraph from that review:

Schrag herself never comes out and says any of this; indeed, her touch with the material is so deft that it’s easy to feel that she’s not shaping it at all. She could have written with a heavier hand, spelling out every moral ambiguity and explicating each psychological nuance. Instead, Potential is messy and confusing, filled with shifting perspectives, odd random details, and sudden moments of despair and love. If it were easier to classify, it would have a larger audience, but it wouldn’t be nearly as great.

I do talk about the book’s messiness, but I explicitly say that this messiness is a result, not of authentic spewing, but of her deft touch. I note that it’s “easy to feel that she’s not shaping” the material — by which I quite clearly mean that she is shaping it, and very carefully too. In fact, one of the reasons I have trouble writing about Schrag (which I do) is that I think her writing, plotting, and characterization is extremely subtle. You really have to pay attention to figure out what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. I often have the uncomfortable sense that she’s smarter than I am, which, for a critic, is somewhat intimidating.

Anyway, the point here is that Suat spends his entire review soundly trouncing me for an opinion (“authentic unmediated autobiography is superior!”) that I don’t hold. I like Likewise better than Fun Home not because I think Fun Home is too artificial, but for almost the opposite reason. I think Fun Home is too clumsy.

Again, Suat’s usually a good bit more perceptive than that. I think it’s just hard for him to believe that anyone would find Schrag’s comics subtle — and no wonder, since, as we’ve established, he finds them so off-putting for various reasons that he has difficulty even figuring out the plot.

For the most part, Suat’s review is hard to get too upset about…his prose is, as always, enjoyable, and, since his eyes are closed throughout, he isn’t able to land too many punches. The end, though, crosses over from merely exasperating into something more problematic. Suat starts this final section by defending Kristian Williams, who I had accused of condescension. Suat’s riposte is more effective than perhaps he intended — certainly, Williams doesn’t look very condescending at all compared to Suat.

Even highly individual works have the capacity to appeal to certain sections of society. Potential speaks distinctly and eloquently to the milieu being depicted within its pages as well as those who feel that almost inexplicable “connection”. Works like these make little effort to draw in readers beyond their narrow confines. This is both one of their deepest strengths and greatest weaknesses.

For those left unmoved by Schrag’s narrative, the text remains of passing interest as personal history, social anthropology and as evidence of the growth of a young writer on her way to better things. Time will tell but I have my doubts if this will be a work which most will look back with reverence and affection in the coming decades.

I think Suat is actually trying to throw me (and Schrag enthusiasts generally) a bone here…and I wish he’d just stuck to castigating her and us. Because it’s in trying to explain the appeal of Schrag’s work to others that he most explicitly naturalizes his own alienation. Folks like Suat who find nothing in Schrag are, he suggests, the normal baseline, on the right side of posterity. Schrag’s work as it stands can only appeal to a small in-group (of young people, queers, and fellow travelers, presumably). Schrag is for for the few, whereas something like Maus is, I guess, for the ages, since everyone wants to see poorly drawn middle-class male mice whining about their relationships with their fathers at interminable length. (Plus…the Holocaust!)

This particular argument — that Schrag somehow has innately limited appeal — resonates in really unfortunate ways with mainstream discussions of queerness, of women, and of kids. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Suat disliking the book, nor in his attempting to explain why in terms of craft, theme, writing, or what have you. But in the last couple of paragraphs, he seems to be trying to cast the book onto the dustbin of history because it appeals to groups of people whose stories Suat isn’t especially interested in. Since those groups of people also happen to have suffered from various kinds of political marginalization, the implications of Suat’s argument here are not happy ones.

Update: The full Likewise Roundtable is here.

In Search of “It”: A response to a review of Potential

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My first contact with the work of Ariel Schrag occurred almost ten years ago following the release of Potential from Slave Labor Graphics. My renewed interest in her work stems from my host’s, Noah Berlatsky’s, enthusiasm for her comics which he considers among the best produced this past decade.

Noah is probably Schrag’s most articulate apologists and I was especially interested in hearing his views on her work before I found a review he did for The Chicago Reader which neatly summarizes his affection for the book (it might be wise to read Noah’s review before continuing with this response to that piece of criticism):

” Written while Schrag was still an adolescent, Potential seems pitched more toward her peer group than the New York Times editorial board. It doesn’t have the purple rhetorical flourishes of Fun Home or the pomo magical realist tics of Maus. Its focus is the non-highbrow subject of teen-girl angst.”

Continue reading →

Dick Talk (Likewise Roundtable)

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For a memoir about a lesbian coming of age, Likewise is absolutely full to bursting with penises. There are Schrodinger’s penises attached to various possible boys who may or may not be fucking Ariel’s not-nearly-gay-enough ex Sally. There’s a much touted artificial penis which Ariel purchases on her eighteenth birthday. There are daydream penises, which keep intruding, somewhat queasily, into Ariel’s masturbatory fantasies. And there are even some real live honest to goodness actual penises attached to guys with whom Ariel does assorted non-lesbian type things.

In short, to get all alliterative, the penis-to-panel proportion is patently preposterous. Even the most drooling male sybarite fueled by the most unforgiving mid-life crisis (Kingsley Amis, say, or Dan Clowes) couldn’t have conceived that teen lesbians were this obsessed with male genitalia. I mean, really, it’s difficult to imagine that straight women think about it that much.

Which is sort of the point. Ariel thinks about penises the way constipated people think about their bowels. When your bowels are in good shape, they only draw your attention every so often, and otherwise you don’t need to worry about them. If your bowels are off though — well, you focus on them a lot.

As it happens, in one of the rare interludes when Likewise is not focusing on penises, it turns instead lightly to thoughts of…bowels.

That bit above occurs during what is possibly the most searingly embarrassing sequence in the book; a 30+ page marathon gab session in which Ariel and several friends try with all the earnest might of high school seniors to define It — that elusive virtue which casts a glamor on the doings of some, and the absence of which turns others, despite their best efforts, into lame assholes. Ariel is, in the manner of these things, fairly certain that she has It, even though her asshole is, alas, exceedingly lame, and keeps dragging her off to the bathroom.

So what is It? Ariel defines It as “sort of like an appreciation of certain things in the world…that like not very many people have, but you can tell if someone or something has it.” She also says, “you either have It or you don’t and it has to do with like getting to the root of things? like when you talk about something you talk about what it essentially is.” It, then, is cool; It’s ease with authority; It’s mastery. I think Freud would call it the phallus.

Which makes Ariel’s thoughts about Sally elsewhere in the conversation very a propos:

“crazy=perfect=It=I can’t deal?! hush, I have It. oh god, what if Sally doesn’t think I have It….Yeah, I think I’m going to throw up.”

Thinking about Sally makes Ariel worry that she doesn’t have It — which makes sense since, during their relationship, the thing that Ariel always worried was lacking, the thing she feared that maybe-not-so-gay Sally wanted, was the very thing, a penis.

Anxiety about Sally, then, leads to thoughts of penises, and to efforts to grasp and wield them. As in this scene:

Ariel’s fantasy here starts with Sally naked…and then spins off in somewhat unexpected directions. The person fucking Sally is not Ariel, but a man — and the way Ariel seems to be sliding off her slanting bed in the top right panel and onto the similarly slanting guy in the panel below suggests that she may be fantasizing herself as the man. Then, in the last panel, the person being fucked isn’t Sally but someone who, with the glasses and the larger chest, seems like it might be Ariel herself, or perhaps Ariel combined with Sally. Schrag uses the repetitive panel compositions (the starred bed cover across the bottom of the panel, the white space) to emphasize the substitution of identities and desires; the phallus-as-fetish seems to move about the empty half-dream world, looking for the perfect place to attach and center. Wanting Sally leads to chasing the phallus around and around, or in and out, until mastery is finally both achieved and not-so-much:

for the climax we shift back to Sally on the bed…but the guy who is, presumably, climaxing has lost his mouth, which makes him look more than a little ridiculous. He looks, in fact, surprised — and quite a bit like Ariel in the top left of the last facing page, who has also misplaced an orifice, and is also looking at Sally (Ariel is looking at her and Sally’s prom picture):

The man and Ariel both look at Sally the same way; with both desire and alienation. You try to grasp the phallus but the phallus escapes, leaving you nonplussed, gaping, and forced to try to grasp the phallus again. Or just wondering where it is:

I kind of want to get that put on a T-shirt.

As a man, it’s easy to relate to Ariel’s worries about measuring up — worries about measuring up being pretty much what masculinity is about. Ariel’s struggles are especially fraught, though, because it’s not clear what victory would look like. Guys know they want to be Superman, more or less. But Ariel? Succeeding in being a man is, from her perspective, even worse than failing.

That last panel, where she thinks “I’m not a woman” — that’s not a victory. Being taken for a man doesn’t make her a man; it unsexes her. When her phallus is most manifest is when she measures up least.

So the book is a self-hating tale of how a young lesbian wants to be a man, but can’t quite measure up? Well, no. Ariel, like lots of queer high school students, does have got a certain amount of internalized homophobia to work through, as she’d be the first to acknowledge. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on. On the contrary, far from being constitutionally inadequate, Likewise is, in the way of ambitious art, swaggering. If the book’s about wondering where your dick is, it’s also about pointing down and saying, “check this motherfucker!” The long discussion of “It”, for example, contains some of Schrag’s most detailed, obsessive drawing, with carefully delineated leaf placed next to carefully delineated leaf, until the virtuoso craft of the background almost overwhelms the vacuous teen discussion of virtuoso It in the foreground. When Ariel in the comic decares “my comic has It,” it’s both wishful thinking and, in the care and beauty of the drawing, actually true. The very way in which Ariel’s bowel problems undercut her hold on the phallus are in fact a laugh-out-loud delight in playing with It. She demonstrates she has the thing by the skill and humor with which she shows she doesn’t.

Creativity, in short, is the biggest, most potent penis of all — which is why Ariel comes while holding her pen.

It’s also why Ulysses is so important to this book. My sense is that many readers (like Kristian Williams) see the Joyce influence in Likewise as a more or less insufferable late adolescent affectation. I think this rather misses the point, which is that Joyce in Likewise is thematically presented, not as random anonymous affectation, but as deliberate, specific, lifeline. Ariel is drawn to Ulysses because Sally suggested it. In part, she picks the book up to be like Sally — but in part she picks it up to be to Sally what Joyce has been:

There’s Ulysses standing straight up, a huge tower on the bookshelf, while Ariel thinks “when did she [Sally] read it? whole thing, and made her who she is. under belt, gone. whole book passed through her, blacked her in”. The vision of Ulysses as phallus entering Sally couldn’t be much more clear…and we then move from that, to the next page, where Ariel starts contemplating her own lack of Itness and inadequacy in relation to Sally.

Ariel’s sudden realization that she can have the book is accompanied by grasping It and clutching it to her chest while holding onto that suggestively shaped bedpole. Then she curls under the covers…and starts reading, not Joyce, but the frontmatter account of the obscenity trial. The book is pornography, both because it’s about sex and because it’s instrumental — Ariel is using it to get It up. The page is both triumphant and self-mocking; there’s a recognition I think that metaphor can remake gender, and also a recognition that it can’t. Reading Joyce can turn Ariel into Joyce, and it also really can’t. I find that last panel heartbreakingly funny; big-eyed Ariel clutching the little sliver of light that’s going to keep all that darkness back, so certain she’s found the secret formula that she’s even going to read the boring damn introduction.

The Joyce-as-penis analogy is made even more explicitly later in the book:

In this sequence, Ariel’s reading Ulysses, and she comes to a section where Joyce describes a penis. He calls it “father of thousands” comparing it to Saxifragia stolonifera, a plant that “spreads by runners that seem to float its flowers” according to the reference book she’s using.

Ariel is wowed: “Oh my god, that is so perfect,” she thinks. This is supposed to refer to Joyce’s genius. But I think it also refers to his penis, especially given the way Schrag draws it — as a sensuously expressive charcoal illustration, perhaps the most beautiful image in the comic.

The best bit here, though, is not the visionary penis, but rather the vision itself. The wobbly panel borders above are not just filligree; they’re there because Ariel’s stoned. Her paean to Joyce’s penis can partially be read as “Joyce — he is a genius, and I appreciate him.” But it can also be read as, “Wow—like— everything’s really meaningful when you’re stoned, dude.” Literary critics singing modernism’s hosannahs are deftly equated with gently tripping potheads.

Joyce’s penis in this passage is, then, lovely, ridiculous — and also feminine. The “father of thousands” is based on the mother of thousands; woman by metaphor, becomes man. Ariel, as creator and character, attempts something similar; taking Joyce’s rhetoric makes her him. She is no longer just a high school journal keeper. She’s an artist, with exactly the kind of It that Sally likes.

Of course, Ariel isn’t actually Joyce. The Inkwell Bookstore blog notes that Schrag’s stream-of-consciousness reads at moments “like a slam poetry parody of Ulysses.” But surely that’s intentional — or, at least, self-aware and thematized. Being Joyce isn’t a realistic option any more than being a man is a realistic option — which is to say, it is and it isn’t. Ariel can buy a dildo and enjoy aspects of her butchness

And she can enjoy Joyce and adopt bits of his language and mojo. But none of that magically give her a phallus.

Or perhaps the real problem is that it does. The phallus is basically a magic totem anyway. If Alan Moore can worship an imaginary snake deity and derive real power from it, then Ariel Schrag can surely get the same effect by worshiping an actual historical Joyce. But precisely because they have power, metaphors have consequences. If you’re going to use Joyce as your phallus, then you’re committed to rotating round that center. Ariel picks up Ulysses in order to possess Sally — and as long as she’s holding Ulysses, she can’t let Sally go.

Ulysses is, for Schrag, a metaphor for run-on sexual obsession. Which is why, Ariel’s decision to move on with her live has to be accompanied by a decision to stop talking like (a slam poetry version of) Joyce.

Up to this moment, about two-thirds of the way through the book, Schrag has mostly been using stream of consciousness, and mostly writing about Sally. In this scene, though, she pulls back to a meta-moment; we see her typing on the computer…and what she’s typing is that she’s sick of writing about Sally.

In my interview with Schrag she explained the stylistic shift in the book following this scene as follows:

what happened in the senior year, the ways I was recording everything became more important than what was happening…I was totally removed from my surroundings. So the way in which I recorded the present ended up dominating everything. So halfway through the book, the stream of consciousness narration sort of recedes and the story is only told through these three different methods: what’s typed on a computer, what’s handwritten in a journal, and what’s recorded on a handheld tape recorder. So halfway through the book the methods are…I mean the methods are introduced as recording methods in the beginning, but the narration is just her stream of consciousness, but later in the book the narration changes so it’s the actual typed words or the actual words in the notebook, or the actual tape recording. Things that are typed on the computer, the text box is actual computer type and the drawing is done with an ink wash; things that are hand-written in a journal, the text is scrawled and the drawings are very loose and rough; things that are tape recorded, there’s no narration, and the dialogue appears in square boxes, and it’s done all in black and white. I wanted to shift between those modes of recording and have which mode was being used be more obvious.

Here Schrag sees the stylistic change in the book as a meta-pocalypse; a swallowing of reality by recording. I think it’s also possible to see it, though, as about rejection of both Sally and the Joycean penis that Ariel has been carrying for her. Almost immediately following the stylistic change, Ariel deliberately pees in Sally’s car:

Peeing your pants pretty much defines infantilizing — it’s not, in any case, very masterful, and certainly not It. And yet, at the same time, Ariel obviously sees it as a kind of triumph — “fainting failed – throw up not possible, pee= last resort you must!” Peeing here is a calculated tantrum; a rejection of one of the earliest-learned social conventions, which is also a rejection of the law, or phallus.

The rest of the book follows from there, as the obsessively controlled Schrag goes about, just as obsessively, releasing control. The focus on the means of recording becomes (in a proud avant-garde tradition) a way of introducing randomness into the creative process, of finessing authorial intent. Long passages of the comic are direct transcriptions of tape recordings, complete with tape hiss and scenes ending whenever someone happens to turn the machine off. Other sections are taken directly from Ariel’s journal notes, with the drawings done as uncompleted sketches.

The effect of both of these choices is to create narratives that are closer, in some ways, to Schrag’s earlier comics than to the first part of Likewise. A sequence taken from recordings made by Ariel and her friend Julia at a comic convention is built around laugh-out-loud dialogue, acid observation, and gossip, and has the episodic structure of much of Awkward and Definition.

Analogously, Schrag’s sketchy pencil drawings evoke the cruder style of Awkward, her first comic done when she was a sophomore.

There’s also a long section in which Ariel and her friend Zally go to a strip club to see if Ariel can get off, which is very reminiscent of the long episode in Potential when Ariel and Zally planned and executed Ariel’s loss of virginity (complete with anticlimactic, though ultimately satisfying, ending). And, perhaps most obviously, as the book moves towards its conclusion, Ariel starts messing around with a guy, pointing back to her freshman and sophomore years, when she identified as straight or bi.

As this suggests, though Joyce and It are in some sense shelved, penises still pop up throughout the last portion of the book.

Ariel isn’t really, after all, going back to her older work (which, in any case, featured a certain number of penises itself.) She’s not so much laying down her desire to measure up as she is looking around for different modes, shifting away from Joyce’s style in order to experiment with different modes and ideas — in a way which is also (as she mentioned in our interview) inspired by Ulysses. She’s not returning to an unconscious childhood, but rather reworking her past into something she can use now. Her sketches look like Awkward, and may be inspired by Awkward, but they’re definitely not Awkward, either in their origin or their execution. The drawings in Awkward were cute but restrained — they looked like cartoons. The sketches here, on the other hand, look like artist’s sketches; the lines are quick, with a messy, expressive brio, and the shading (when there is any) has a delightful, scribbly energy. Purely as art, they may be my favorite of her drawings,and they can convey remarkable subtlety. In the sequence below, for example, there’s a sensuality in the way Mary’s shaded form bends back and forth towards Ariel as they walk, while all the figures around them dissolve into background blobs.

I also love the panicked violence in the panels below, as Ariel’s distorted arms sweep across her desk looking for her protractor, and then the clumsy heaviness of her body in the second panel, contrasting with the vibrating scribbles of the dark.

If this is Awkward, it’s Awkward that’s gotten older and wiser and cockier; Awkward with a swagger.

Perhaps the best account of where Ariel’s phallus seems to have gone and why is in the strip club scene with Zally. Here’s the back and forth about that section from the interview I did with her:

That’s interesting. Because there’s also the scene where you go to the strip club with Zally, and you seem to be really trying to approach it in a guy way — a kind of swaggering, I’m going to get off on this approach.

The thing I thought about was funny in the whole scene…Zally went to the strip club and the girl rubbed on him and came, and I’m thinking, so that’s what I’m going to do…a five-minute ordeal. And then my experience is this long ordeal and I’m intellectualizing and over-thinking and it’s like the opposite. What I wanted was the macho posturing, but instead there’s this twenty minute ramble about every minute detail.

It seems to me that that’s kind of reflected in your comics as well though. That is, part of the reason that you have trouble getting off is that you are thinking about what the woman is thinking, or you’re interested in that. In your comics in general, even though they’re autobiography, you’re really interested in other people.

I don’t really understand comics that don’t have more about other people. I mean if I’m writing in my diary I’m going to write down the quotes that other people said, I’m not going to write down what I said to other people.

What happens at the strip club is that Ariel doesn’t get off…essentially because she doesn’t have a penis.

And yet, if she doesn’t have a penis, she does have a phallus:

The tape-recorder itself functions through the last part of the book as a violent stick; Ariel’s always shoving it into people’s faces and trying to get them to talk about sex. She uses it to control the other people’s responses, and to control the narrative (by trying to record what’s going on, sometimes even surreptitiously.)

But if it’s a phallus, it’s a phallus that’s about conversation and connection, rather than about the more self-contained drives in Ariel’s Joycean stream-of-consciousness. The fun here is about back and forth; about figuring out what the girl is thinking and then analyzing the experience by talking it over with a friend rather than by internalized obsession.

In the interview, I characterized Schrag’s take on the strip club as gendered female, in comparison to some male autobio writers. I think that’s defensible — but I also think that one thing that happens in Ariel’s experience in the strip club is that the exact gender implications become hard to pin down. Is talking sex over with your friends really gendered feminine? That’s an awfully guy thing to do. Similarly, jerking off with a friend in a club seems definition male homosocial.

In this narrative mode, though, the sliding back and forth and around the phallus, or lack thereof, doesn’t seem nearly as fraught; if the lap dance was kind of uncomfortable, it was also funny, and if she didn’t cum from that, she can always cum later with a buddy. Similarly, her sexual encounters with various friends, and even her interactions with Sally (with whom she finally, finally breaks up), become less emotionally overwhelming. Is that the distancing of meta; the constant drive to observe and record herself pushing authentic reality away? Or is it working through different ways of holding onto reality — and maybe finding that grasping it a little less firmly makes it easier to hold?

“man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition…modern man’s plight is choice” That’s a gendered statement; we’re talking about man, and, indeed, about the way Ariel relates to Joyce and to It in the beginning of the book. She wants to repeat her experience with Sally; she wants the mastery of choosing and control.

In the second part of the book, though, she escapes both these things, at least provisionally. She finds a way to create which to some extent undercuts choice, and in so doing ceases to try quite so hard for repetition.

The last page of the book returns to the Joycean stream-of-consciousness, but not to any penises that I can find. Instead, the sequence is about Ariel popping her zits, and she seems contented enough. The stream-of-consciousness seems not like a self-circling outlet for obsession, nor a way to wow and possess, but just another style she can use. “This is the most important year of my life, and this is what I do with my time,” she concludes, staring into the mirror with the last pimple popped.

The “this” she’s doing with her time is in part finishing her book— a massive, ambitious work of art which she can pull out and brandish to awe and stun the neighbors. But “this” is also the everyday task of popping pimples. To finally have capital-It is to know you don’t need It after all. Which leaves your hands free for all sorts of things, both trivial and otherwise.

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This is the second post in the Likewise Roundtable. The first post surveying reviews of Likewise is here.

You can read the entire LIkewise Roundtable here.

Reviewing the Reviews: Likewise

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This week, HU is going to do a roundtable on Ariel Schrag’s Likewise. We’ll have guest posts by Jason Thompson, one of my favorite comics critics…and by Ariel Schrag herself, who has kindly agreed to weigh in at the end.

So, in preparation for that, I thought I’d look at what’s been written about Likewise thus far on the old internets. A little while back Suat looked at the extant reviews of Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button and found them wanting. Likewise was considerably lower profile…but nonetheless, I was surprised to find how little had been written about it. I was certain, for example, that the folks at Comics Worth Reading would have something to say about it…but nope. Nothing at Comics Reporter either, which has run reviews of Schrag in the past (I know…I wrote one of them!) Nor did the Comics Journal review it…though, given the lag time with the magazine, it’s possible that something is still in the works, I suppose.

Schrag conveniently lists a number of shorter reviews on her website, though these are mostly of the quick descriptive sort that Suat dismisses rather roughly in his post. I’m not the completist (and/or masochist) Suat is, so I can’t say I read them all closely, but they’re basically (to paraphrase Suat) more interested in giving you a sense of whether you want to buy the thing, rather than in trying to analyze it.

The Kirkus Reviews blurb is a good example — traumas are listed (parent’s divorce, struggles with homosexual identity, conflicted relationship with straight girlfriend); literary references are cited (Ulysses, Brothers Karamazov); metatextual aspects are briefly touched on; the varied art styles are highlighted, and the whole thing summed up positively as “A big leap of artistic ambition and self-discovery; Schrag saved the best for last.”

The best of these buyer’s guide efforts may be Shauna Miller at NPR who bases her piece upon the assumption that Schrag wrote Likewise a decade after the events depicted…a perfect peg for the piece, save for the one unfortunate fact that it happens to be false. (Schrag wrote and drew the entire book in the year following her graduation from high school; it just took her a decade to ink and publish it.)

I did manage to find three substantial reviews of Likewise.

The first is by tcj.com stalwart, Rob Clough Clough’s review is more a series of impressions than a sustained single argument. He does make several nice points: I liked his take on the very end as an anticlimax. As he puts it, “The book ends on a goofy, self-effacing note, deflating both the expectations of senior year of high school and her own obsessions.”

Still, overall, the review felt to me like Clough had trouble coming to grips with the (admittedly difficult) book. He notes the connection to Ulysses, mentions Ariel’s obsessive disorder, talks about her focus on school science subjects, notes that the book gets faster as it approaches the end…and finally throws up his hands, resting his assessment not on the work, but on his vision of the author’s strength of character. Or, as he puts it “Reading LIKEWISE is frequently a rocky and frustrating experience, but Schrag’s sheer ambition and drive behind this comic is so compelling that one can’t help but get swept along.”

The second long review I found is by Kristian Williams. Like Rob Clough’s review, this one is frustrating, though for somewhat different reasons. To me, a big part of the interest of Likewise is the way the book shifts between different styles for different scenes, trying to match visual and emotional content. Instead of trying to engage with this variation, Williams just punts and declares it chaos:

The best thing that can be said about Likewise is it shows Schrag’s expanding range as an artist. Unfortunately, where her earlier volumes used changes in style and technique sparingly to create mood or convey information about the character’s subjective experience, here the style changes frequently, sometimes for no apparent reason. It feels like Schrag just periodically got bored with what she was doing, and decided to try something else, often mid-page. In fact, dozens of pages are left un-done, with polished panels appearing alongside sketches of barely-humanoid blobs with speech balloons tacked to them.

The unwillingness to entertain the idea that Schrag might actually know what she’s doing is especially irritating because Williams is in some ways an astute reader. He notes, for example, that one of the effects of Schrag’s style towards the end of the book is that “Without time, causation and character development become impossibilities as well” — which is surely what Schrag is aiming for. He adds “The border between the story and the life blurs, producing a confused life and a confused story. And given the nature of autobiography, Ariel — writing the story of a relationship that’s still somewhere in the process of collapsing — ends up living a lot in the past.” But instead of trying to see how this works out in specifics, he simply dismisses it because “it still reads like somebody knocked the manuscript off the desk, and just didn’t bother to get the pages back into the right order.”

In short, Williams recognizes that Schrag is working in a modernist idiom, where form follows function. He finds this alienating. He recognizes that the alienation is a deliberate artistic decision. And he responds by…sneering at Schrag for successfully alienating him when she should be writing entertaining, unambitious anecdotes, since that is what high-school girls do best.

The saddest part about that is, with a devoted editor and 200 fewer pages, Likewise could have been a pretty good book. Schrag just needed to go back to the format of Awkward. The story of Likewise is not well suited to the novel form; it would work better as a loose series of vignettes that show us pieces of the life of a young girl, without any grand claims about Life, Love, Art, and the rest of it. Perhaps Schrag wanted to push her talents to the limit. The problem is, she found it.

I mean, if you don’t like highbrow modernism, go after highbrow modernism. It’s a worthy target; I’ve been known to take shots at it myself. But the recognition, on the one hand, of the successful fusing of form and content, the refusal to figure out why you find that fusion alienating, and the conclusion that the alienation has something to do with the fact that a high school girl has gotten too big for her britches — to me that all seems profoundly condescending. Williams would rather dismiss the book altogether than treat a high-school girl as a potential equal — someone who could, and in fact did, write a book that is too highbrow for his tastes.

The last substantial review is by the Inkwell Bookstore and is easily my favorite of the bunch. It’s true that it’s short, and not especially detailed. But in its limited space, it very thoughtfully compares Schrag’s work to that of Dash Shaw and Alison Bechdel, arguing that Schrag is better than either of them at using structural elements of her comic to emotional effect:

With Likewise, Schrag has crafted a comic that is as structurally daring as it is emotionally affecting. Every time she plays with panel layouts or switches art styles or f**ks up her fonts, she is intentionally entrancing the reader with an explicit expressionistic effect. Sometimes it’s giddy, drunken glee, sometimes it’s the harrowing disorientation of a recurring heartbreak, but there’s always an extra layer of emotional imbalance being added.

The review also notes that Schrag’s Joycean monologue sometimes reads as a “slam poetry parody of Ulysses, which is a palpable hit (though I think the effect may be somewhat more intentional than the review suggests.)

Also Inkwell credits my interview with Schrag for pushing him to read the book. So that obviously proves his superior taste.

Despite Inkwell’s review, though, I was overall quite disappointed Schrag’s book is a lengthy, ambitious, complicated, long-awaited work by a well know creator. And the critical response to it has been, for the most part, indifference, dismissive praise, and confusion.

Admittedly, Likewise isn’t an easy book, and our roundtable next week may well not get to grips with it either. We’ll give it a try, though, starting tomorrow.

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Update: You can see all posts in the roundtable here.

Update 2: Kristian Williams defends himself here.

Update 3: Ed Howard has an interesting short take on Likewise in his round up of the decades best comics.

Female Creators Roundtable: Ariel Schrag, Like Who?

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Both longtime blog readers are probably aware that I’m a big fan of Ariel Schrag’s work in general and of her most recent book, Likewise in particular. One of the things I find most interesting about Schrag is how different her work is from male comics creators like Jeff Brown or David Heatley. Specifically, for folks like Brown and Heatley, autobio comics are generally a way to say “me me me me me me me” for thirty to a hundred pages or whatever; the narrative tends to be obsessively focused on their own past, their own psychology, their own ambitions (sexual and professional.) Other characters drift through to one extent or another, but they tend to be there mostly as props, important only insofar as they have something to give to the main character or something to deny him.

As I said, Schrag’s work is very different; she’s obsessed with relationships. There are a lot of characters in her books, but they all have weight and personality. Schrag’s girlfriend, Sally, for example, comes across as both incredibly cruel and entirely justified in her occasional interest and frequently brutal disinterest in Ariel. Sally is often mean, but on the other hand, Schrag gives you enough of her perspective and enough of her actual words that you can see where she’s coming from in her ambivalence about the narrator. With male autobio writing, in other words, you inevitably get a Bildungsroman, where everything relates to the the main characters’ self-actualization. In Schrag, you get romance, where everything relates to relationships between people.

What’s interesting about Likewise is that it seems, in part, like it’s Schrag’s attempt to do what the male creators are doing — to have her own psyche fill up more and more space; to gain control of her painful relationship with Sally by walling herself off in her own pscyhe the way that male autobio creators do as a matter of course. Schrag mentioned in several interviews that her main inspirations for Likewise were James Joyce and Joe Matt — two men, obviously. When I interviewed her and asked her what was attractive about those writers, she said “I guess I related to the obsessive thinking about women that they both had, and maybe related to their work more than I would to a straight woman writer.”

Obsessive thinking like that is often seen as out of control, of course — but I think in a literary context, it can also be a way to turn another person into a figment; it’s a move for control and dominance. You’re turning the other person not into themselves, but into a puppet who performs actions for you over and over again. One of the key literary characteristics of sadism, most theorists seem to agree, is repetition.

Likewise does start out in this obsessive, typically male literary mode. The first part of the book is told in Joycean stream-of-consciousness. The artwork actually represents this, literally, as having a depersonalizing effect on others; many characters around Schrag are drawn featureless, as if she’s so wrapped up in her own head that she can’t see them — or as if they’re part of her dream, and only become clear when she focuses on them.

But while Schrag begins (sort of) in male, she isn’t able to sustain it. In our interview, Schrag described the narrative shift like this:

And then Part 2 starts and you begin with the stream of consciousness, and then it cuts into this tape-recorded version, and it basically goes and then it will cut into a journal written version, and as the stories continue in Part 2, you get stream of consciousness switching with present day styles.

Towards the end of Part 2 the tape recording and handwriting take over the present day reality…and soon the only time you see Ariel in present day reality is when she’s thinking about writing the new book…you get the sense of how much the new book has taken over her mind.

In Part 3 the present day steam of consciousness has totally gone, and you start getting even things that you wouldn’t want to record. Like blank spaces on the tape, or blank pages in the journal…sort of the downside of a story being told only through what’s recorded, you get this warped and biased view

And that continues through Part 3 and then it’s not until the very end, and she’s finally done with it, that the very last page returns to the stream of consciousness reality.

In our discussion, Schrag saw this change as being about art hijacking life: her book taking over the rest of her existence. To me, though, it seems like it can also be read as being about an inability to escape from the outside world, and from her relationships. Stream of consciousness is in her head, but the tape recording and the journal and the writing are outside; they’re objective rather than subjective. Instead of being in control or primary, Ariel goes back to being one voice among others.

The one scene where this seemed most clear to me was in a sequence where Ariel and her boy friend (and sometime boyfriend) Zally go to a strip club. Zally has been to the club before; he got a lap dance and came, as guys do. Ariel is hoping to achieve a similar climax, but it’s not to be. Instead, she ends up being fascinated by the surface of one of the dancer’s faces (literally — the woman has a skin condition), and then by how the women feel about the men (they are not especially enthusiastic about the men, Ariel learns while she’s in the bathroom with them) and finally during the dance itself about what parts go where and what she’s supposed to be doing exactly and on and on and on. The upshot is that Ariel doesn’t get it done in the dance, and has to go beat off companionably with Zally in the bathroom. The whole scene is actually transcribed (I presume verbatim) from the tape-recorded after-analysis which Ariel and Zally recorded on their way home together, and so it comes off as an anecdote; something that is being shared and understood between friends as part of a mutual experience. Zally’s reactions (amused concern that Ariel’s hopes are going to be dashed; icky sexual request to watch Ariel’s lapdance; an general ambivalent investment throughout) are important parts of the story. In fact, in some ways, you could see the whole episode as about Ariel’s relationship with Zally — her competitor, sometimes fuck-buddy, and sometime collaborator — and about how her loyalties and interest are divided between him and the (possibly gay?) stripper who dances for her. This is, in other words, a long, long way from James Joyce’s confessions about his own pursuit of sexworkers in “Portrait of an Artist,” where the prostitutes are little more than scented shadows occupying some guilty corner of the narrator’s skull. For Schrag, getting off isn’t about getting off, but about how she feels about others and how others feel about her.

Schrag is often tormented throughout the book by her inability to shake her butchness, and by the fact that people keep mistaking her for a boy. At the same time, at moments like those in the strip club, she seems to be trying to process experiences like a boy, only to be foiled by a female way of looking at the world. The struggle between the different narrative techniques seems to also be a struggle to find a way to have it both ways — to have the sense of internal privacy and self importance, that male writers often take for granted, while at the same time continuing to respect her relationships with others. Schrag’s struggling with and against autobiography, and as a result Likewise doesn’t read like anything else I can think of, either in that genre or outside it.