Lego System

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Philip Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Je Suis Charleston

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

Last week, halfway through a vacation where I spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying about being mauled by a shark, another white shooter opened fire some 200 miles down the coast. During the manhunt, I watched helicopters thunder up and down the shore searching, not for Dylann Roof, but for a threat so rare as to be almost illusory. In all this, I know, there is a parable for whiteness and its absurd preoccupations in the face of great privilege. Its self-obsessed imagination. My unearned oblivion.

Still, there are things that I know. Having spent the first 18 years of my life in the mountains of Tennessee, and another four in North Carolina, I felt sick, but not quite surprised, when I heard that a white supremacist with a goddamn bowl cut murdered nine African Americans at a historic church in Charleston. Right now the press is doing what it does, trying to play up this white terrorist’s personhood. (Did you know that his poor sister had to cancel her wedding?) The awful truth is that he is like us, just not in the sense such manipulations imply. For years, Roof has been spewing poisonous nightmare views that the people around him didn’t identify as extreme. And why would they? Frankly I’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between sizeable chunks of Roof’s manifesto and certain Facebook posts by my high school acquaintances. His thoughts on, say, George Zimmerman sound a lot like my uncle’s. The difference is that Roof’s rant has the gravitas we are forced to give someone who has murdered nine people. All too often we try to laugh off the words of regular old non-murderous racists, or just live with them, however uneasily.

Now that the Confederate flag has been denounced by the likes of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Walmart, it seems that mainstream society finally recognizes this relic of our shameful past as racist imagery. I’m less sure that people understand that it is much more than just a symbol; it is also a threat. Though I spent more than half my life in the South, I find it difficult to articulate the ways in which its discourse is not just a code, but codes built upon codes, including syrupy insults and thinly veiled warnings. Depending on which side of the law you ascribe to, the Confederate flag carries the implication of violence or a promise to look the other way. Whether it’s draped in the back window of a pickup or waving over a courthouse, its message to black Americans is always the same: if I see you here, there will be trouble.

The rhetoric used by staunch defenders of the Confederate flag will sound familiar to anyone aware of the cultural conversation surrounding satire in comics. In both, you’ll see people rally behind racist imagery under the pretense of honoring history or supporting freedom of speech. Comics figureheads like Art Spiegelman who have no love for white supremacy per se have created and/or defended racist cartoons as though the integrity of art itself depends on it. Not realizing that literally no one self-identifies as racist, they imagine themselves to be that other R word: righteous. What would Dylann Roof make of “Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist,” I wonder? Compare Spiegelman’s condemnation of the “sanctimonious PC police” with the part of Roof’s manifesto that talks about how easily black people are offended. Yeah, I know there are differences. But tell me, what similarities do you see?

The Charlie Hebdo shooting was both an international headline and a story deeply felt on a personal level by many people in the comics community. What happened in Paris was a tragedy, and there’s no shame in being moved by a story that is especially relevant to your life. But those who said “Je Suis Charlie” (or, worse, “Cartoonists’ Lives Matter”) did not speak for Comics. They spoke for white people who understood the massacre to be of universal significance because the killers were militant Muslims and most of the slain were white. While this fits conveniently with our idea of Trouble in a post-September 11th world, the incident was, demographically speaking, a statistical anomaly. Very few victims of terrorists—including the state-sponsored ones that infiltrate U.S. police—are white. You know who is? Right-wing terrorists like Dylann Roof, who are twice as lethal as their Muslim counterparts in America.

Reader, I don’t wish to suggest that you don’t feel the appropriate degree of sadness or outrage or abject depression about what happened in Charleston. None of us has near enough feelings for the nine people who died there, much less the victims of other atrocities that happen around the world on a given day. But if you do not recognize the Charleston massacre as a story that pertains to Charlie Hebdo or to comics on multiple levels, you are egregiously mistaken.

As a white person, I’ll never fully understand, much less convey, what it feels like to casually encounter racist imagery like some of the more infamous Charlie Hebdo covers or the Confederate flag. I can only offer an imperfect analogy. Back in North Carolina, across the street from the house where I was staying, there was a bar with a BITCH PARKING sign out front. I wasn’t particularly alarmed or surprised upon encountering it. Had I not lived outside the South for so long, I doubt I would have even registered it as a thing. First and foremost I recognized it as a stupid joke (though of course a joke, like “celebrating heritage” or satire, offers a certain kind of cover or deniability). In its sheer ridiculousness, this joke made me laugh. On another level, I felt annoyed. On another level still I felt weary. And finally, churning beneath all of those things, I felt a sense of unease. To me BITCH PARKING communicated a warning so obvious it may as well have been in flashing lights: Go home, girl. There is nothing for you here.

It was lunchtime and we weren’t there to drink. We didn’t even sit down. My brother-in-law just wanted to buy an ironic t-shirt. Still, looking around that dark room with a handful of Bubbas and a specials list featuring something called the Wet Pussy, I understood that my instinct in the parking lot had been correct. As my brother-in-law cheerfully chose his shirt, I felt something that wasn’t fear or danger or even anxiety, but its nebulous possibility.

Art Spiegelman’s blown cover for the New Statesman reminds me a lot of BITCH PARKING. The comics clubhouse scene is no longer about who’s allowed in; it’s about who feels welcomed. It’s about subtle signs and signals such as who is being tortured in the posters you hang on the wall. The flag you choose to fly.

Often, I think about the bathos with which champion of free speech and New Statesman cover boy Neil Gaiman imagined his own death at the hands of Muslim terrorists when he attended a literary gala at the Museum of Natural History:

Hanging above us as we eat is a life-size fibreglass blue whale. If terrorist cells behaved like the ones in the movies, I think, they would already have packed the hollow inside of the blue whale with explosives, leading to an exciting third-act battle sequence on top of the blue whale between our hero and the people trying to set off the bomb. And if that whale explodes, I realise, even an oversized flak jacket worn over a dinner jacket could not protect me.

To fantasize about your own grandiose, unlikely death is a luxury of whiteness. Back on the coast of North Carolina, I bobbed along nervously in the Atlantic Ocean every day for a week without seeing a single shark. One thing I saw plenty was the Confederate flag, both on the news and waving proudly in front of the shop that sells $7 towels. In comics I routinely see people hold up similar racist images as unassailable paragons of free speech. The next time you’re tempted to mock and dismiss those who tell you they perceive that phenomenon as an act of hostility, know this: the so-called PC police can’t do violence to comics by simply voicing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. What sort of violence your gleeful disdain can do to them—the humans, not the comics—remains a live question. Whether or not you deign to examine it is, as ever, your choice.

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Follow Kim O’Connor on Twitter.

An Open Letter to Art Spiegelman

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Kim O'Connor

Françoise Mouly, Art Spiegelman, Gerard Biard (CH editor in chief), Jean-Baptiste Thoret (CH film critic) and Salman Rushdie at the PEN awards. (photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images)

Dear Mr. Spiegelman,

I’m addressing this to you, not as an empty rhetorical ploy, but to emphasize the fact that what I’m writing is personal. It always is. I’ve seen a lot of impassioned opinions about Charlie Hebdo offered in the guise of irrefutable pronouncements. I’m tired of reading cultural commentary from writers who act as though the objective truth fell, fully formed, from the sky and into their laps, the function of their words being to simply describe it. Their strange bloodless certainty, the pretense of personal remove, is central to comics commentary and reporting today, and at best it’s a farce.

There is no such thing as objective criticism or journalism; like comics, these forms are always, first and finally, an extension of the self. That’s perfectly natural, but it’s also limiting. What drew me to comics, and what I admire about your work, is its ability to explore and even exploit these limitations, locating truth (or something close to it, anyway) in the very process of acknowledging the obstacles we face as we try to perceive it.

I found myself thinking about subjectivity as I read Laura Miller’s piece about how you rallied comics luminaries to stand in for the six writers who dropped out of the PEN gala in protest of the organization’s plan to honor Charlie Hebdo. Which first of all, let’s face it, was sort of a dick move not unlike crossing a picket line. In one corner of Miller’s story we have you, Alison Bechdel and Neil Gaiman—the trifecta of literary comics—serving as champions of free speech and protectors of a maligned art form; in the other we have hundreds of unnamed writer types hissing like they’re something less than human at the survivor of a mass shooting. It’s a classic story of heroes versus villains. The headline, a quote from Gaiman, frames the faceless hoard’s take as pro-murder: “For fuck’s sake, they drew somebody and they shot them, and you don’t get to do that.” The implication is of course that the PEN protestors think that you should ~totally~ get to do that.

(Of course they don’t think that. Literally no one does.)

I’m not writing in an effort to change your mind about what I obviously regard as a racist publication, or to debate the validity of that PEN award, though it straight up makes me want to barf. I disagree with your opinion, but I also respect its right to exist. I have even tried to make room in my heart for the possibility that there’s some truth in what you say. While I find myself skeptical about how much expertise is required to, say, parse an image of a black person who’s been drawn as a monkey—and the tendency of experts like you to characterize other people’s “inexpert” reactions to images like that as unintelligent—I freely admit that you’re better informed than I on almost any given cultural milieu in play, including comics, satire, and the (supposedly) inscrutable kingdom of France.

Despite those vast stores of knowledge, you’re plainly no expert on race. Frankly, I’m not either, though I’m savvy enough to have recognized how ironic it was when you criticized readers for lacking sophistication even as you rallied a bunch of famous white people behind a slogan you appropriated from an oppressed minority. I don’t even know where to start with your unfortunate riff on “Black lives matter,” a movement that was spawned in protest of the George Zimmerman verdict, and reignited after the death of Michael Brown. Like “All lives matter,” the racist rejoinder to the original slogan, “Cartoonists’ lives matter” ignores one central fact: no one really thinks cartoonists’ lives are worthless except for their murderers, and they are all extremists who have been roundly denounced.

I really wish I could say the same for Eric Garner, or Tamir Rice, or Walter Scott, whose murders have been deemed, variously, as understandable and even warranted by public servants, the judicial system, people in my Facebook feed, and members of my own family. I don’t want to reduce our nation’s disregard for black lives to the deaths of those three people. It’s just that I’ve watched the indisputable evidence of their murders with my own two eyes, yet somehow still find them at the center of a bitter national debate. The “Black lives matter” slogan was borne in response to deep, appalling societal injustice, and my feeling watching you, a white man with uncommon privilege, adapt it in the name of propagating your opinion on the “bravery” of drawing Muhammad as a porn star lies somewhere far, far beyond my ability to articulate it to my satisfaction.

As a slogan, “Cartoonists’ lives matter” draws a false equivalence between one universally criticized attack and what has become a veritable institution of state-sponsored murder in our country. Where you attempt to make a comparison, it’s far more instructive to contrast. The Hebdo massacre was understood instantaneously, implicitly, to be of universal significance, and that’s because the killers represented the most hated enemy of the Western world—militant Islamism—and most of the slain were white. No one has disputed the dead’s status as innocent victims, though that position is routinely invoked as a straw man. They have been mourned all around the world for the better part of 2015.

Back in January, in an article for the New Yorker, Teju Cole asked readers to consider how the victims of Charlie Hebdo became “mournable bodies” in a global landscape where so many other atrocities are barely remarked upon, much less condemned. “We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world,” he wrote, “but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.” As it happens, Cole was one of the six dissenting writers who you and your friends replaced as table hosts at the PEN gala. Were you thinking of him, I wonder, when you told Laura Miller that your “cohorts and brethren in PEN are really good misreaders”? Do you really imagine that Cole, who is an art historian, doesn’t have the “sophistication to grapple with” comics? Or what about Junot Díaz, who was one of the 200-some writers who undersigned Cole’s decision? Like you, Díaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winner. His work has been illustrated by Jamie Hernandez, one of his heroes. Do you think that Junot Díaz doesn’t have the chops to read comics, Mr. Spiegelman? With respect, who do you think you are?

When you framed the Charlie Hebdo controversy as a matter of your vaunted expertise vs. what you call inexpert readers, you weren’t speaking in the abstract. You directly insulted the six writers who started the protest, as well as hundreds of their peers—individuals who wrote their names at the bottom of a letter, just as I’ll sign off at the end of mine. You also indirectly insulted countless other people in comics who object, publicly or privately, to “equal-opportunity offense” that somehow always, always manages to offend the same people no matter how many times old white men try to tell us that we’re just not reading comics right.

How is it that you failed to extend the basic courtesy of assumed literacy to those who struggle with the legacy of Charlie Hebdo? What does it mean for a white cartoonist to appropriate “Black lives matter” and then describe the argument of people who disagree with him—many of whom are people of color—as a failure of reading comprehension? Does your own mastery of the form really preclude the possibility that, say, Cole and Díaz, two of our smartest and most lyrical writers on race, might discern something in those images that you can’t (or won’t?) see? Or hey, what about Jeet Heer, who says that arguments like yours ignore the fact that aesthetics matter as much as intent? Is it just possible that you’re the one who’s not reading these comics correctly?

Look around you, man. Of course cartoonists’ lives matter. I realize that comics still has a whole thing about legitimacy, but Françoise Mouly’s assertion that the PEN protesters are literary snobs simply doesn’t track with the reality of comics culture today. Maus is more or less required reading in high school and college curricula. Neil Gaiman has more than 2 million followers on Twitter. Alison Bechdel is a MacArthur genius with a Broadway musical about her life. Tell me, did you actually hear anyone hissing at the PEN gala? It’s my understanding that Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief received a standing ovation when he accepted that award.

I think of the work of you and Alison Bechdel and am flabbergasted that two people who built their careers on endlessly recursive autobiographies lack enough self-awareness to acknowledge the positions of privilege from which they speak. I don’t know what’s worse about “Cartoonists’ lives matter”—that it’s so masturbatory, that it represents such an egregious misunderstanding of the issues at hand, or that willfully misrepresents the positions of your opposition in lieu of engaging with them. You criticized the protest of the writers you glibly dubbed the “Sanctimonious Six” as “condescending and dismissive” even as you framed their argument as a fundamental failure of literacy. That’s not just hypocritical; it is demonstrably false. You leveraged your authority as the person who put comics on the map as a literary form to publicly smack down artists who are less famous than you simply because they objected to the valorization (not the existence) of Charlie Hebdo. That you chose to badmouth them in your capacity as Captain Comics (protecting a literary gala from evil, no less) is deeply embarrassing to many of us who care about this art form.

Unfortunately, it’s not just you. Your Hebdo comments follow a pattern I see all the time here on the bully beat at the Hooded Utilitarian: Comics calls for nuance when it’s in the service of understanding the transgressions of white men. But when it comes to the other side of the argument, opponents are characterized as unlearned, as uninitiated, as overreacting. Last week at TCJ Dan Nadel bemoaned how comics are still perceived as low culture by the ignorant masses. Increasingly I wonder if it’s the discourse surrounding comics that’s perceived as unsophisticated. It often caters to the sensibilities of white men who are forever foisting their racist sexist takes on comics onto the world under the noble guise of history. They actively alienate readers from other demographics, and routinely mock and celebrate that alienation. They (and you) dismiss people’s deeply felt reactions to comics’ trenchant racism and sexism as empty “political correctness,” stripping protesters of their very humanity, denying their capacity to think and feel in the genuine way that you do.

Your star shines brightly, Mr. Spiegelman, though I know you have a difficult relationship with fame. I often think about how, in a “corrective” book about Françoise Mouly’s many accomplishments, Jeet Heer chose to use your name twice (once more than Mouly’s) in the title. Heer’s shortcomings belong to him, not you, but I want to circle back on the point I began with: it’s impossible to extricate our individual experience from our work and beliefs. The things we find meaningful—what’s important to us, as well as what’s not—emanate from the place of deep personal bias on which we build a life. It’s always personal, an idea that Heer explores ably through the rest of that otherwise excellent book. But acknowledging those connections is a wholly different project than casting everything in their shadow.

The world is large, and each of us exists within it, not the other way around. It’s incumbent upon us to try to overcome our natural tendency to center everything on the self. Real criticism thrives in multiplicity. It can’t live in the certainty of a person who shoots down opposing points of view, whether it’s with bullets or rhetoric. It demands room for doubt.

Comics culture needs to face the uncomfortable truth that its faves are problematic, which is not to say they’re worthless or irredeemable. As the author of this letter, I can tell you it’s not a whole lot of fun. But I also believe that speaking honestly and openly about the flaws in the things we care about is even more important than celebrating an artist, promoting an art form, or defending a cause, however heartfelt our admiration may be.

Murderous terrorists have long been the known enemies of cartoonists everywhere. But the lack of empathy and cultural awareness you have demonstrated is a much more subtle, grave, and pervasive threat to the health of comics today. You’re in a unique position to promote meaningful conversation on a constellation of issues that matter to a lot of smart people. Take a long hard look at yourself, Mr. Spiegelman. You are failing.

Kim O’Connor
______
All HU posts on satire and Charlie Hebdo are here.

A Look at Green Fairy, the Pinnacle of Furry Genre Fiction

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Matt Healey

To begin, an important caveat: I’m not a big reader of furry genre fiction.

I am, though, a furry and a keen reader, so I find myself attracted to furry writers and booksellers, furry books and reviews. When pressed, I say that I don’t read much furry fiction because I don’t think it’s going to be very good.

I recently decided it was time for a rethink. My interest has been piqued over the years by people writing about furry books, by furry writers in general, and by my exposure to a few furry short stories. I found the best of them to be well-constructed and enjoyable, if a bit disposable.

I’m also slightly fascinated by those people who write furry books for a living. Their job feels a bit claustrophobic to me, writing as they are to a small but engaged audience – like a tiny version of the sci-fi readership – a tough demographic.

Successful authors will win a dedicated following, but the bulk will struggle to find a critical mass of fans. If you enjoy writing, how do you decide whether to upload it for all-comers on SoFurry, or to publish it for sale?

I figured the best place to start would be to read the best furry fiction available. I asked around on Twitter and got a strong recommendation for Green Fairy, by Kyell Gold¹. (Disclosure: I’ve met Kyell, and we get along well.)

It’s fair to say that Green Fairy is an ambitious work. It doesn’t tell a straightforward story and it doesn’t include explicit sex scenes, as with many of Gold’s other works. Green Fairy mixes accessible ideas with higher pretensions: in some ways it’s a teenage coming-out story, in others it’s about the value of art itself. It succeeds in its attempt to be a readable, enjoyable book; but it fails in its aspirations to literature.

Roughly, the book follows the story of Sol: a young gay wolf simultaneously trying to manage competing pressures from his internet boyfriend, his father, and school life. He’s a baseball player who has recently lost his starting place in the team, a move possibly precipitated by an embarrassing erection-in-the-shower incident. Sol has to contend with homophobic abuse and bullying in school, and pressure from his father at home.

In many ways, I’m a natural reader for Green Fairy. I’m furry, gay, and know my way around a sports field. Much of Sol’s experiences in Green Fairy are familiar to me, and Gold’s descriptions of school and sport life have a ring of truth.

That’s all good, but Gold runs into trouble with the structure of Green Fairy. Sol is reading a book for a school assignment called Confession, and soon enough the chapters of Green Fairy switch between Sol’s life and sections of Confession itself: a book-within-a-book. This is key to the novel, as aspects of Confession start to intrude on Sol’s day-to-day life.

Confession is introduced as a translation from a 1920s French novel. However it’s not at all convincing. Gold adopts a rather stiff style for the Confession sections, a style that makes me question the skills of his fictional translator. I think the best way to make this example is to compare the opening sentences of Green Fairy and Confession.

Green Fairy: “Sol was only reading a news story about a college student who’d killed himself, but the student had been gay, so when the young wolf’s fur prickled with the feeling of someone watching staring at him, he hid the story behind the picture of a car at some local auto dealer’s website.”

Confession: “Dear père, I know that this is not what you meant when you said you wanted all of Lutèce to speak my name.”

Green Fairy‘s opening sentence is terrific. We learn a lot about Sol – he’s self-conscious, probably gay, possibly considering suicide – and the sentence has a beautiful rhythm as Sol’s attention shifts from himself to his worry about how he is seen from the outside. We know that Sol is trying to hide aspects of himself from the world. (There is also a hint of the literary convention that any book that opens with suicide must close with suicide: Green Fairy doesn’t quite go that far, but suicide is a key plot point towards the story’s conclusion.)

Confession‘s opening sentence has me contemplating, if not my will to go on living, at least the will to go on reading. It’s stilted to the point of being hard to follow. The phrase “not what you meant when you said you wanted” is a discordant succession of clanging syllables. And why oh why would our fictional translator not translate “père” to “father”?

Gold’s intent is pretty clear. He is trying to write Confession in a different style to that of Green Fairy. It’s a good idea, but his attempts to make Confession sound (1) French; and (2) old; are played far too broadly. The remainder of the opening paragraph of Confession manages to drop terms like “scurrilous” and “bourgeoisie”, as well as wheeling out such boilerplate Frenchified cheese as a reference to beheaded monarchy. I’m happy to say, at least, that Confession gets better as it goes.

The book-within-a-book structure is a tough trick to pull off. Both books need to stand alone to be believable, yet they must inter-relate in a way that makes sense. Even the mighty Vladimir Nabokov was unable to completely succeed: his 1962 novel, Pale Fire, has a 999-line poem at its heart, supposedly composed by a peer of Robert Frost. And Nabokov, one of the great novelists, is not a Frost-quality poet. Assertions of the genius of Pale Fire‘s poet and the quality of his 999-line poem (which are integral to the book’s story) just don’t ring true.

Where greats like Nabokov stumble, others faceplant. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach is a 2001 book with a lot of elements in common with Green Fairy. They both have a central gay romance, the plot is driven by school/college hierarchies and the mental health of the main character, and both books are about baseball. The hero of The Art of Fielding owns a supposedly legendary book about the psychology of baseball – also called The Art of Fielding – which he slavishly follows and regularly references. The problem is that The Art of Fielding (the book within the novel) is mind-boggling faux-new-age poppycock, ludicrous if considered as a stand-alone entity, let alone as a work of great wisdom and inspiration.

Green Fairy fails because its execution doesn’t live up to its aspiration. Gold laudably sets himself a tough task, but fails to pull it off. C’est la vie.

Green Fairy is, of course, a furry novel. It is set, more or less, in today’s world but with anthropomorphic animals instead of humans. This is both the novel’s biggest strength and greatest weakness.

In his review of Green Fairy for Flayrah, Fred Patten praises Gold for his “signature worldbuilding”. His mixture of anthropomorphics with the real world is genuinely vibrant, and species differences have a real effect on the lives of the characters. Gold makes scent important to his wolf characters, otters live in and around water, and so forth.

Reading about animal-people is very pleasant, acting as a kind of wish-fulfilment for the furry reader. It helps make the book emotionally affecting and generally more engaging. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, Gold’s furry universe doesn’t hold up.

Gold’s furry characters live in our world. Green Fairy takes place partly in 1920s France – replete with Parisian landmarks like Les Halles and the Moulin Rouge – and partly in present-day America, with mundane schools, sporting scholarship programmes, cars, geopolitics, technology, and so forth.

The facade of this world crumbles when it becomes clear that the furry aspects of Gold’s universe are in fundamental conflict with his real world setting.

It is probably fair to say that this is an unavoidable problem. Writers can create from-scratch universes where only furries exist, or they can create slightly different versions of our world where furries co-exist with humans. But stories where furries exist in today’s world in place of humans, like Green Fairy, run into problems. It is, I suspect, a limitation of the genre.

Gold is smart enough to avoid obvious instances of logical dissonance, stopping short each time he threatens to create a contradiction. Also to his credit, he doesn’t try to resolve potential contradictions by tediously attempting to over-explain things. He is walking a fine line. On one hand, he provides enough information for the story to be grounded in reality; on the other, he holds back detail when logical contradictions loom on the horizon.

Art Spiegelman walks a similarly fine line, and similarly stumbles, in Maus, his Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel. Maus is a true story, following Spiegelman’s father during the Holocaust, with the Jews drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. It’s a simple enough metaphor, but one that fails once characters from other races get involved. Spiegelman’s solution is to draw two pages – two boring, irrelevant pages – showing himself trying to decide how to draw his French wife. Spiegelman tries to make these two pages relevant to Maus by dropping a couple of vaguely racist comments – his wife is a ‘frog’ and he calls himself prejudiced against Jewish women – but this feels less like a comment on the ubiquity of inherent racism, more like an attempt to distract from his admission that his metaphor has failed.

The furries of Green Fairy aren’t used as a blunt metaphor like the mice and cats of Maus, but Gold has the same challenges of retaining the integrity of his universe. Gold, thankfully, doesn’t go all intrusive-author on us like Spiegelman, but the logical problems are still there.

For starters, there are biological problems. The students of Green Fairy‘s Richfield High, heterosexual and homosexual, very obviously regard one another as potential romantic partners. There is no suggestion that there is any problem with mixed-species coupling, and indeed it’s a running gag that Sol’s platonic female friend (Meg) wants to give the appearance that their relationship is a sexual one.

The problem comes about when you look at the parents of each of the students: they are all single-species. Meg the otter has two otter parents, Sol the wolf has wolf parents, and so forth. The operation and physical reality of each household is (in part) defined by the species of the family unit, such as the otters living around water, and the characters tend to refer to other families in this way.

It’s easy to see how Gold is backed into a corner: on one hand he wants a rich, multi-species furry world, and on the other he wants each household to be defined by a single family species. But these two things are incompatible, barring perhaps some unmentioned but recently-repealed species apartheid law.

Similarly, Gold runs into problems when he explores the difference between carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores – one of the sources of conflict that drives Green Fairy‘s plot. Some of our furries are eating meat, and Gold makes a passing reference to non-anthro animals being used for food. This solves one problem but introduces a whole host of others: how can Gold’s animal-person society consider this ethical (or at least unworthy of comment when the ethics of vegetarianism is raised)? Who is farming these animals – are anthro cows raising and slaughtering non-anthro cows? And surely our animal-people would feel some kinship with their non-anthro counterparts, especially the more intelligent species, like wolves?

From Claire C’s comic Harvest

Gold doesn’t answer these questions, and nor should he. It would be boring, and undoubtedly lead to deeper logical problems, short of Green Fairy taking an unexpected twist into some Gulliver’s Travels-esque dystopia. But while his decision to elide this difficulty is correct, the difficulty still exists.

Gold’s characters have mundane problems: a budding romance, or bullying, or a place in a sports team. These are modest and subtle drivers. Gold’s plot relies on conflict caused by such social pressures, for example Sol’s desire to hide his homosexuality, or his efforts to win back his spot on the baseball team. But it’s difficult to care for the characters in thrall to the pressures of Green Fairy‘s universe, because Green Fairy‘s universe doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Interestingly, Gold makes intimations towards the natural challenges of his multi-species and multi-cultural society. Sol’s baseball rival is a young, talented coyote, who is driven to prove himself to the baseball team’s alpha wolf clique. Sol’s failure to keep his spot is especially embarrassing because his rival is considered ‘lesser’ in the eyes of his father, who comes across as a little bigoted (speciesist?).

In conversation with another parent, Sol’s father explains why Sol is playing backup:

“One of those ‘yotes from the trailer park,” Sol’s father said finally. “Tough, scrappy…”

[…]

The words don’t seem to register with the other wolf. “Y’know, once those trailer kids set their mind on somethin’…” He shook his head. “Don’t get between one of them and a steak, know what I’m sayin’?”

This is the language of casual racism, and it’s notable that it’s spoken by the older generation. It’s easy to replace “‘yote” with a racial minority, consider the apparent economic disadvantage of the group, and see that Gold is weaving elements from our own human social experience into his furry world. It is obvious to the reader that Sol’s father and his friend are wrong to mark an entire species/racial group with broad generalizations, in this case roughly “poor” and “recalcitrant”. Sol disagrees without saying so, and the reader empathizes with the conflict between his desires to keep mum and to speak up.

I bring up this example because it illustrates two things. Firstly, it demonstrates Gold’s quality as a writer, using a few efficient lines to get across a complex idea. Secondly, his intimations of racism are edging into dangerous territory. If species differences in Green Fairy are akin to racial differences, Gold appears to be drawing parallels between a single species (coyotes) and an American racial minority.

Other species in Green Fairy are similarly marked. There are a couple of Siberian foxes in the book, both of which are of Russian origin (one speaks in delightfully broken English). Here, again, species seems to relate directly to race.

This is dangerous because it appears that some species stand for single racial minorities, but that the other species collectively stand in for a racial majority – ostensibly white people, displaying as they do the trappings of suburban affluence. The idea that individual diversity occurs within a white population but that other racial groups can be collected as a discrete ‘other’ is wildly racist. Gold, of course, doesn’t say anything of the sort. But, to me at least, this is an unintended problem with the foundation of Green Fairy‘s world.

To be clear – there are no elements of Green Fairy that could be construed as even vaguely racist. This is simply an example of the problems Gold introduces by taking our world, and replacing humans with anthro characters. The drama and plot of Green Fairy are driven by familiar social pressures, and racial tension is a part of that. The problem isn’t with Gold’s treatment of race, it’s with the premise of his universe. Art Spiegelman has exactly the same problem with Maus.

The most obvious problem with Green Fairy, at least the paperback version, has nothing to do with Kyell Gold. It’s the illustrations. There are a dozen or so drawings by Rukis in the book, showing certain key scenes.

Rukis is a fine illustrator. The front cover of Green Fairy in particular is excellent. Less successful are the scenes captured by her art inside the book, mostly of action scenes, from a dance inside the Moulin Rouge through to an attempted rape. These drawings are DOA. Compared with Gold’s engaging and evocative prose, Rukis’s art is lifeless and flat. She would have been better served, perhaps, by providing character portraits of Gold’s main players.

It makes me wonder what on earth illustrations are doing in Green Fairy in the first place. The last time I read a book with pictures, I was 9 years old, and the story was about a kangaroo who went on adventures. Maybe this is a furry genre convention? Do furry books usually include picture?

Despite Green Fairy‘s problems, Gold’s writing skill stands out. The structure of Green Fairy would be challenging for any writer, and on the whole he executes well. Even the Confession sections markedly improve as the book goes on. It makes me wonder if Gold wasn’t learning as he wrote, starting on unfamiliar ground but finding his feet as he progressed through the story. If so, it’s testament to his skills as a writer – he starts formal and stiff, but ends with a bit of rhythm and flourish. I suspect that Gold should have rewritten the opening sections of Confession once he had found his voice, much like a real translator would do.

It’s not just the structure of Green Fairy which is complex, but Gold’s themes. His story is driven by conflicting social pressures, as would be familiar to any high school student, amplified by Sol’s unusual combination of competing hopes and dreams. Gold writes with clarity, and the plot has great energy despite Sol’s introspective nature.

I was particularly impressed by Gold’s development of Sol’s antagonists. Sol feels bullied at the beginning of the book, yet Gold avoids creating cardboard cut-out enemies. The motivations of Sol’s antagonists become apparent as the plot moves forward, and we can sympathize with them even while they engage Sol in emotional, physical, or sexual conflict. We don’t spend any time with these other characters directly, so we never get detailed insight into their thoughts. Instead, Gold humanizes them with context, providing hints that Sol notices but can’t dispassionately process, so that the reader has information that Sol does not. This is skilful writing by any measure.

Gold manages to invoke the emotional instability and general drama of being a teenager, both with Sol and with his fellow students. To be young is to be self-centred, and Gold understands that the characters will treat any event as if it is somehow personal. His single major female character, Meg, is Sol’s age but more emotionally mature, able to more effectively empathize with others but still prone to her own bouts of self-focussed drama. Gold’s older characters are, on the whole, a lot more moderate in their emotional expression.

Gold uses the natural teenage tendency to be self-conscious and self-critical to push his characters around. If anything, he holds back a touch, as if he can’t quite drive his characters too close to the edge – Sol is never really humiliated or embarrassed (although of course Sol doesn’t really see it that way). Yet Gold knows that we all remember what it was like to be in high school, and his emotional manipulation of the reader is deft, especially in the opening chapters. I found it very easy to empathize with Sol.

Even better is Gold’s writing on sport. Sport is a notoriously difficult topic for a writer, particularly action sequences. Sports fiction writing must balance the need for basic explanation, context, and the inevitable sports jargon, all while maintaining continuity of style. Too often sports writing devolves into a dry listing of events, all action and no thought. Many writers choose to avoid action scenes altogether, by narrating the action in hindsight, as remembered rather than as experienced.

Throughout Green Fairy (excluding the Confession sections), Gold retains an urgent tense, and we get to experience events as Sol experiences them. He retains this urgency through the short baseball sections, and it’s clear that Gold has a strong feel for the mechanics and psychology of the sport. He understands that sport is experienced twice: once in reality and again in hindsight. In reality things happen in a fraction of a second, where actions and decisions are unconscious. It’s in hindsight that post hoc reasoning gets applied, and over time the logic of hindsight replaces the instinct of action – the rationalization becomes the reality. And so when Sol gets it wrong on the baseball field, an unlucky bounce transmogrifies into an error that demonstrates Sol’s emotional weakness.

Gold also understands what it means to be an expert on the sporting field. Even in a long game like baseball, a state of ‘flow’ can occur, where actions and decisions happen automatically and time melts away. Sol is an experienced baseballer and manages to achieve this state from time to time, and accordingly Gold has these sections over in a flash. When Sol is struggling, Gold – excruciatingly – takes his time.

This is another obvious point of comparison to Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding, where baseball is also a central focus of the story. Gold’s treatment of baseball in Green Fairy is comfortably more assured than Harbach’s, as is his treatment of social pressures in a school environment, and of hidden homosexuality, and – for that matter – his humour. Gold’s writing stands above Harbach’s… and to put this in context, Harbach received a $650,000 advance for Art Of Fielding, and an HBO series is planned.

Green Fairy‘s main limitation, in my opinion, is Gold’s decision to make it a furry book. The presence of furry characters, in place of humans, causes Gold no end of predictable problems, and this comes at the detriment of the book as a whole. And while, as a furry, I (subjectively) liked reading about Gold’s animal-people and found it easy to engage with them, a non-furry Green Fairy would be objectively better.

Gold is a terrific writer. He is no great stylist, but he is clear, efficient, and subtle in his plotting and character manipulation. His attempt to balance several writing styles in Green Fairy, although not entirely successful, demonstrates his ambition to create something special. Furry readers are lucky to have him, and it’s no surprise that he has a dedicated following.

Green Fairy is good… for a furry book. I have no doubt that my recommendations were fair, and that it stands out as a high point of the genre. But it doesn’t compare favourably to non-furry books, and unfortunately this seems to be due to the furry component itself.

Is the furry genre self-limiting? Goodness knows there is a lot of writing out there in furry, which means a lot of hay and very few needles. And still there may not yet be a great furry book. Any suggestions?
_______
^{1.There was one other popular recommendation: God of Clay, by Ryan Campbell. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to buy a copy without incurring an enormous shipping charge. I’ll buy God of Clay next time I’m at an American convention.}

Matt Healey tweets at @jmhorse.

The Anxiety of Coming Correct

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

In the beginning, R. Crumb created comics. I didn’t know this was the Word until I went to the Comics: Philosophy & Practice conference in 2012. I just sort of assumed that Art Spiegelman had created comics. Now I know that’s just in academia.

That conference was enormously interesting, but two things particularly stood out to me. The first was that Spiegelman, who was billed as the keynote speaker, transformed his speech into a dialogue with a prominent professor of media. “This was going to be a talk by me but I was too daunted by the audience of fifteen or sixteen peers who were billed as being here with me,” he said. “I couldn’t make myself deliver something that’s called a keynote address.” This was clearly a last-minute change; it wasn’t noted in the program.

Perhaps Spiegelman was just being modest, but on another level, he was absolutely correct: he was not the leader in that room. Over the course of that weekend, it wasn’t Spiegelman’s name that I heard praised again and again and again; it was Crumb’s. It was almost as though people took turns speaking to his influence. As thoughtful artists like Joe Sacco and Alison Bechdel paid him eloquent tribute, Crumb shouted stray observations from the audience like someone’s drunken uncle. I idly wondered if he was dying.

The second interesting thing was a disagreement that Crumb had with Françoise Mouly about his blown cover for The New Yorker. Mouly explained why the magazine rejected the art: it felt out of touch. But this is not the critique that Crumb heard; he preferred to cast himself as a provocateur. “I just realized that you have this loyal readership there that is pretty fucking square,” he said. “When you work for The New Yorker…you have to kind of bend whatever lurid qualities your work might have to fit that sort of lite, L-I-T-E [mentality].”

Characteristically, he was a real jerk about it. But what was most fascinating to me in looking at the cover (which Mouly had projected onto a huge screen) was that it was totally dumb. It had the unique distinction of being heavy-handed without actually making much sense—exactly the kind of “political” work you might expect from an artist who built an empire on drawing his dick.

It’s one thing to feel agnostic towards other people’s god; it’s quite another to find him ridiculous. Crumb’s affectations, his attitude towards women, his dim take on race—I don’t intend to spend a single second of this wild and precious life trying to figure out what other people see in that. Does that mean I’ll never understand comics? The answer is, simply, I don’t care, but I worry that’s arrogant. And on another level still, I feel resentful of that worry.

I find that writing, like life, is a delicate balance of feeling worried and giving zero fucks.

I like paradox. It’s the engine that powers everything interesting. When I started reading comics in a critical capacity, I was startled by the early work of Ivan Brunetti, whose illustrations I had seen in The New Yorker and Real Simple for many years. I hated Misery Loves Comedy. It was nothing like his work I knew and loved. But knowing the same man drew all of those things made me feel very hopeful about the world, where all too often people are afraid to embrace multiplicity. Now I scan every issue of Real Simple hopefully for allusions to murder-suicide. This brings me great joy.

There is a certain type of discourse—or is it a pedigree?—that is highly valued in comics crit. Names of the founding fathers (and let’s face it: it’s always the fathers) are whispered with reverence as a sort of password into that clubhouse. There is also a tendency to value historical perspective over any discussion of the present. Creating a false opposition between then and now (or high and low or this and that) is often done in the name of historical preservation, but it’s always a matter of propagating an opinion. There is no such thing as objective criticism; it is always an extension of the self and what you care about. There is an important distinction between saying these are the things that matter and saying these are the things that matter to me.

Still, some take a cold approach. They equate getting good with growing calloused. They forget that sensitivity is a tool, not a flaw. Men who learn to use that tool are generally praised. Sensitive women are crazy or inexperienced. We’re confused. We OVERREACT. Or so we’re told.

When I wrote the Piece that Shall Remain Nameless, I knew I’d be told all of those things. I felt a lot of doubt. I knew it would take fire that was far more intentional than the smoke the piece itself described. I thought that speaking up was the right thing to do. Now I’m not sure. I never am.

(I give zero fucks. I give zero fucks.)

I closely read a very small amount of material, not because it was in itself momentous, or to catch anyone in a word trap, but to explain how I felt about it, and also how I felt about something larger. The feelings were instantaneous when I read the material; the close reading came later. In response, people closely read my writing back to me. They called it fair, but I would argue it was not in the same spirit as the one in which I approached the project. So it goes.

There’s no one path to understanding. We go about it in different ways, if we go about it at all. In examining an issue from different points of view, it’s necessary to be critical of another vantage. But it’s equally necessary to interrogate your own.

R. Crumb created comics, and it seems to me that comics crit was then made in his image. I see his bad attitude and rude behavior all over this town. I see his petulance and his defensive posturing. I see his unwillingness to absorb a critique. And I also see his growing irrelevance—perhaps most keenly every time another fanboy tries to foist his opinion on the world under the noble guise of History.

Real criticism thrives in doubt, not in certainty. In conversations about comics, there is no right and wrong. There is only coming correct. Under the rock of my lousy long essay, it seems to me that a few people tried. Many others came to conquer. The anxiety of it, as ever, is women’s work.

Unethical Empathy: A Case for J.P. Stassen’s Deogratias

Posted on August 13, 2014 by Kate Polak

20 years ago, by the end of July, the genocide in Rwanda had ground slowly to a halt as the Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of all but a small margin of the country. I was only 12 years old, but had followed the news coming out of the tiny east African country with an interest bordering on obsession. The images were appalling: row after row of hastily constructed huts and tents, children not much older than me carrying water down dusty roads for miles, a rail-thin mother nursing her baby among piles of cloth. The piles of cloth resolved into human-shaped forms, but they didn’t move. These stood in stark contrast to the bright floral dresses and poufy hair of Christine Shelley, the Clinton administration’s State Department Spokesman, as she awkwardly avoided the “g-word.” Video crews passed through filthy camps, and on occasion, the news anchor warned viewers of upcoming “graphic footage,” usually a wide keloid scar, sometimes spread across a handsome young man’s cheek. It wasn’t until years later that I realized how ambivalent these images were: reporters had largely been dispatched to refugee camps in bordering Uganda and Zaire, where survivors were forced to live alongside those who had tried to kill them.

My experience of horror and pained sympathy was retrospectively unmoored from my ethical stance. I had no idea for whom I had felt, which felt very ominous. This prompted a more critical eye: “Who is being shown here? Where is their suffering coming from? To what end?” It also provoked suspicion of my emotions: “Who am I feeling for? And what is the point of feeling anyways?”

During my graduate program, I was reminded of the source of these questions during two key events. I was invited by my advisor and mentor Gary Weissman to TA a Literature of the Holocaust class, and rather than giving me the job most TAs are tasked with (grading mounds of papers), he insisted I co-teach the course. It was an honor I didn’t take lightly, and I spent weeks researching, trying to better understand how to frame debates about the representation of the Holocaust in an advanced classroom. The course went through works like Elie Weisel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, as well as Art Spieglman’s Maus. By the time we hit Maus, both Gary and I were frustrated (and occasionally unnerved) by some of the responses from students. As we plowed through midterm papers, we kept coming across a phrase again and again: “walking a mile in their shoes.” I’ll return to that in a moment.

The other key event, not long after TAing for Gary, was when the man who would become my husband handed me J.P. Stassen’s Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, a fictional graphic novel following the title character through his lives in the pre- and post-genocide landscapes. In the era before the genocide, he is depicted as a normal young man: going to school, working, getting drunk, and attempting to woo two sisters. In the era afterward, he resembles the images of the refugees I had seen so many years before: torn, dirty shirt, dull, haunted eyes, slouching towards the hope of a bender. His search for urwagwa, a banana beer, is relentless, and only 26 pages into this 79 page work, Deogratias is rendered bestial, becoming a dog as he creeps on all fours through the landscape back to an open tin-roofed shack not quite the width of a bed. Moving back and forth between the present and the past with the title character’s memories as a sort of frame, readers are introduced to a small cast of characters. Deogratias is in love with two Tutsi sisters, Apollinaria and Benina, who are the daughters of Venetia, a local woman and sometime-prostitute. Apollinaria is the product of Venetia’s affair with Father Prior, a Catholic missionary, who is a mentor to Brother Philip. Brother Philip is new to Rwanda, and earnest in his desire to help. The French Sergeant is a more cynical character, as is Julius, an Interahamwe leader (the Interahamwe were the Hutu youth militias responsible for the bulk of killing during the genocide). More minor characters include Augustine, a man of the Twa ethnic group, and Bosco, a Rwandan Patriotic Front officer who has become a drunk after his work to help stop the genocide. Much of the graphic novel is devoted to “slices of life,” brief moments and short conversations that would be casual in any other context.

The Rwandan Genocide took place over 100 days in 1994, starting in April the day after a plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down. While there was a plan in place in the government to slaughter all Tutsis, this was not a “top-down” genocide. As Mahmoud Mamdani discusses in When Victims Become Killers, the Rwandan Genocide was distinct from the Holocaust in part because a large proportion of the population took part in the killing. Between 600,000 and a million Tutsis were killed by a minimum of 200,000 genocidaires in a country of 11 million. While the differences are significant, it is also worth remarking on the similarities. The Rwandan Genocide was as “efficient” as the Holocaust. Unlike Western media representations of the violence, this was not “Africa as usual”. It was a tragedy that was the combined result of decades of colonial rule, Western reluctance to intervene in an area with few natural resources, racial enmities manipulated through the use of propaganda, French support of the genocidal government, a toothless U.N. Peacekeeping force, and many, many other factors.

Deogratias is not the first graphic novel to explore genocide, and certainly is not the most famous. That honor goes to Spiegelman’s landmark Maus, which explored his father’s experiences during the Holocaust and Spiegelman’s own difficulty with both his father and recounting his story. His visual conceit in this work employed a variety of animals (Jews as mice, Germans as cats, etc.) to highlight the factors of race, ethnicity, and nationality in the genocide. Maus is hyper-self-reflexive, Spiegelman frequently weaving scenes of his arguments with his father in the present day among illustrations of his father’s recollections. It is a powerful work interrogating racism, memory, intergenerational relationships, the effects of historical trauma on a family, and what it means to tell a story. As such, it is very “talky”—Spiegelman litters the page with questions and anecdotes, deftly balancing the textual and visual elements of the graphic form.

Deogratias, in contrast, is an intensely quiet graphic novel. The title character rarely speaks, and while we see the pre-genocide world partially through his memories, he never contextualizes them, or connects them to the silent, dirty man we see in the post-genocide era. The characters who speak in the pre-genocide era have relatively normal lives and normal concerns. The characters who speak in the post-genocide era carefully avoid any reference to the events of April-July 1994. What I find perhaps most important about Deogratias is the extent to which Stassen emphasizes the unreliability of images and the emotional responses they provoke in readers.

The comic opens with Deogratias staring blankly into an open-air café set in a hotel. A smiling white man hails him, inviting him to sit and drink. The man, later identified as a French sergeant, attempts to show Deogratias pictures from his recent tour of the gorilla preserves in Rwanda (among Rwanda’s only “natural resources”). One panel is entirely filled with these vacation photographs, so readers may assume that we are sharing Deogratias’s point-of-view, but the following panel reveals that in fact he is not looking at the photographs (see Figure 1). He is staring intently at the beer he is pouring into the glass, while the French sergeant looks briefly confused.

Figure 1

At first glance, this would appear to be a relatively minor event in a graphic narrative about genocide, but in fact, it lays out the primary thesis: attempts to “see through the eyes” of those who went through the genocide are always partial, and are limited by the relative privilege of the reader.

This recalls what I found in the Literature of the Holocaust course while struggling to explain to students why “walking a mile in their shoes” was perhaps an inappropriate phrase. While we read novels and memoirs, the imaginative closure students experienced while attempting to envision what was being explained in the text prompted them to fantasize “seeing” the Holocaust. While not the worst use of the imagination—after all, we rely on texts to help us better understand the world—it also underscores an often-overlooked issue: to what extent is it ethical to create metaphors between one’s own experiences and situations of extremity?

Maus, because of its form, offered a corrective against the impulse to closely identify with experiences distant from our own positions of relatively safe U.S. citizens. When one looks at a panel, one is simultaneously invited to see through a window into the world and reminded that what they are seeing is mediated. Students were intensely interested in Maus, but were also able to see the characters’ experiences as distinct from their own lives and emotions.

Deogratias takes the ethical self-reflexivity inherent in the graphic narrative form and uses it to emphasize what the reader generally cannot see from their vantage point in the Global North. The tourism photographs of gorillas are the most common image out of Rwanda aside from those of the genocide, which, as I mentioned above, are often not properly images of Rwanda at all.

Stassen narrows this distance when depicting the pre-genocide era by showing scenes that could occur anywhere in the world. For example, Deogratias waits for Apollinaria outside of school, eager to present her with a comic book as a present. The large heart on the cover suggests its topic is romance, but when we look at the panels through Apollinaria’s perspective, we see a lonely woman on a couch, as well as the corner of a panel depicting an upset or disappointed man (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Deogratias asks her “if we could do the same things as in those stories?” at which point, Apollinaria rejects both the gift and the sentiment. The comic, meant to communicate his love for her, reveals the opposite; the page Apollinaria views shows abandonment and frustration. Immediately afterward, Deogratias is approached by Apollinaria’s sister Benina. Deogratias hides his tears, and promptly presents Benina with the same comic book. Unlike Apollinaria, Benina sees a scene of passionate kissing, overlain by the same question Deogratias had posed to her sister, which is more successful in this case (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

As readers, we are prompted to connect with, if not identify with Deogratias. He is the main character, and while his intentions are not always pure, his actions are understandable; he is a teen trying to figure out his way in the world. In addition to the scene’s familiarity—many young men have struggled to woo young women with gifts—it is important to note the ambivalence of the images received by each sister. Neither sees “the whole picture,” wherein the comic depicts both suffering and passion, and only Benina sees the image that Deogratias intends.

In the post-genocide era, however, the reader watches Deogratias as the memories become too strong, and he physically transforms into a dog. The transformation recalls one of the most ominous aspects of post-genocide Rwanda. In Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, he recounts that “The nights were eerily quiet in Rwanda. After the birds fell silent, there were hardly even any animal sounds. I couldn’t understand it. Then I noticed the absence of dogs. What kind of country had no dogs?” (147). The RPF had killed them all because the dogs were eating the corpses.

Deogratias’s transformation is symbolically representative of the trauma undergone by the country. In his continued presence, he is a manifestation also of what is absent in the present day. Over the course of the comic, it becomes clear that not all of the characters we saw in the past have survived to today, but it remains unclear how precisely Deogratias escaped their fates. As a sympathetic Hutu who was intimately connected with a Tutsi family, he would have surely been one of the targets for the Interahamwe. Occasional stray references during the course of the comic suggest he may have been complicit, but at those moments, he retreats into happy memories. It is not until Brother Philip returns and sees Deogratias that the reader understands that Deogratias has been systematically poisoning all of those complicit in the genocide, from the French sergeant to Bosco to Julius.

In addition, Deogratias’s role in the genocide is revealed. In a scene from the genocide itself, the Interhamwe are depicted retreating to the Turquoise Zone. Augustine comes looking for Venetia, Apollinaria, and Benina, and Julius crudely describes the sisters’ rape and murder at the hands of Deogratias and others. The reader is left to wonder why he would be the protagonist.

Herein lies two major aspects of why Deogratias is an essential work. In the first place, it emphasizes how point-of-view in graphic narratives can provide important insights for what it is to “empathize” with images. As readers, we exist in a privileged space in relation to these characters: a space of safety wherein we can choose not to look. Furthermore, what we are shown when we choose to look is suspect as well, because what we see may be only partial. We may misinterpret it. Both the provisional nature of images and the chance of misinterpretation suggest that images can lead us to dangerous conclusions. In the case of the Rwandan Genocide, we conflated perpetrators with victims. We misrecognized the violence as something “naturally African,” something that happens in those places.

The second aspect Deogratias expertly negotiates is the extent to which the reader is allotted access to victim experience, and what victim experiences can be emotionally legible. By invoking empathetic identification with a perpetrator, to some extent Stassen is suggesting a broader complicity in the genocide than simply those hundreds of thousands that did the killing. At the end of the graphic novel, we see through Deogratias’s eyes as the bodies of Benina and Apollinaria are eaten by dogs (see Figure 4). In this moment, we are both visually identified with the culprit and are shown an image from the genocide itself—one considerably more extreme than we saw during those months in 1994.

Figure 4

When readers in the Global North seek to “walk a mile in someone’s shoes,” it is perhaps an honest desire to understand experiences of extremity, but we rarely want to recognize where our paths lay in relation to the ones down which we vicariously traipse. Deogratias is a powerful precisely because it exposes us not to the subjective experiences of the victims, but to that of the perpetrator. I am not asserting that victims’ stories are unimportant. I am asserting that Deogratias reminds us that the object of our empathy may not be deserving of it, and that, perhaps more importantly, from our vantage point in relation to the Rwandan Genocide, we were considerably closer to the bystanders who did nothing than to the victims who suffered.

Maus and Marketing

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

This is probably my least favorite page in Maus.

This page doesn’t have the design problems that I taked about over here, and, which Mahendra Singh elaborated on.

The second page is cramped and confused; the first is not a masterpiece of design or anything, but the simple four panel grid at the top is effective; the flies the visual tip off to the gruesome reveal of the corpses around the drawing board.

What’s interesting, though, is that, while one is sub-competent and the other is effective, both use the same basic formula. You also see it here:

In each, the page is set up as a reveal. The top visuals keep your eyes focused on neutral images, and then the bottom opens up into the horrible truth. That horrible truth is always the same truth; namely the Holocaust, symbolized with a crude obviousness either by the (poorly drawn) Nazi flag, or the Auschwitz gate, or (most viscerally) by a huge pile of dead bodies. the importance of the Holocaust is emphasized each time both by its position as revelation, and by its scale. In his page design, Spiegelman tells us, over and over, that the Holocaust is huge and that it leaps out at you.

That is not, I would argue, an especially insightful take on the Holocaust; it turns it into a pulp adrenaline rush. Those pages each seem like they’d work as well, or actually better, if you substituted Dr. Doom for the Holocaust in each case. IF you’re going to set up a supervillain behind the curtain melodrama, best to be talking about an actual supervillain. Hollywood effects work best with Hollywood content; trying to add drama to an actual genocide comes across as cheap and presumptuous.

Interestingly, Spiegelman himself is somewhat aware of this, and on the page I’ve shown here, and in the following page, he tries to address it.

Spiegelman here is discussing, and decrying, the Hollywoodization of his book. These pages are from the second part of Maus, after the first part had gone the pre-Internet version of viral. The “reveal” of the final panel is both of the corpses and of the book’s success — the foreign language editions, the TV and movie offers. You could see the bodies as symbols of Spiegelman’s innocent alt-comix purity — a kind of spiritual death, underlined by the reference to his mother’s suicide. The off-panel declaration that “We’re ready to shoot!” links the media explicitly to the Nazi murderers; Spiegelman, as tortured artist besieged by popularizers and reporters, is positioned as a tormented victim of the gas chambers.

Defenders of Maus will no doubt argue that these pages are ironized. For example, Eric Berlatsky (that’s my brother!) writes:

Spiegelman is sure to implicate himself when he depicts Artie at the outset of chapter two of Maus II. Sitting at his drawing table, in front of television interviewers, Artie discusses the commercial success of the first volume of his book while sitting atop a pile of anthropomorphic mouse corpses. He is depicted not as a mouse, but as a man wearing a mouse mask, performing Jewishness for commercial gain. The simultaneously humorous and threatening depiction of the American advertiser offering a license deal for Artie vests (“Maus. You’ve read the book now buy the vest!” [42]) indicates how Artie (and Spiegelman himself) uses the past not merely to recall it in the present, but for his own profit and on the backs of the Jews his book is purportedly “remembering.” Artie displays a questionable connection to the past in order to participate in the circulation of power and profit.

Eric, then, suggests that Spiegelman is intentionally undermining himself; that he’s implicating himself in the marketing of the book and the performance of Jewishness.

I’d agree that the page raises the questions that Eric discusses. But is the effect really to undermine Spiegelman? The sympathy in that second page remains resolutely with Artie, who is being “shot.” He is the sensitive artist/victim (reduced to actually infantilized crying at the end) while callous reporters and interlocutors try to make a buck or score stupid points off the corpses stacked around his desk. The shallowness and duplicity of the media is emphasized by Spiegelman’s use of masks here; because they are drawn in profile, where we can see the mask-strings, the reporters comes across as macabre and deceptive.

Spiegelman is drawn in profile on the first layout, too. You’re in his head though, and he’s alone; it doesn’t feel like he’s concealing something, but like he’s trapped; the mouse mask victimizes him, and connects him to the dead victims (who aren’t wearing masks.) And then from that bottom reveal and through the next page, Artie is drawn mostly looking out at the reader; you can’t really see the mask. It’s as if the dead bodies have made him a “real” Mouse. In addition, the presence of the reporters ends up being validating; the contrast between their clear masks and his “natural” features shows clearly who has the right to speak — they’re crass desire to commercialize the corpses around his desk positions Artie as feeling caretaker; the only one who truly understands the horror. Thus, the dialogue is mostly the reporters asking aggressive questions and Artie as genius artist undermining them with wit and humble brag, followed by sensitive breakdown. The low point is probably when Artie blithely suggests he would draw Israelis as porcupines — a smirking one-liner that both dismisses the very real problem that Israel poses for Spiegelman’s Jews-as-mice-as-victims metaphor and glibly ties into ugly Zionist narratives positioning Israeli aggression as righteous defense.

The real failure of these pages, though, is Spiegelman’s utter refusal to grapple with his own responsibility for the commodification he’s supposedly decrying. IF you really don’t want your Holocaust story to be easily consumable, there are ways of doing that, from Celan’s impenetrable poems silence to Philip K. Dick’s oblique, quiet puzzle-box The Man in the High Castle. The critical and commercial success of Maus is not an accident; it’s the result of the deliberately unchallenging way in which Spiegelman presented the material. And that makes his wailing about the burden of success (which he, again, explicitly compares to the horrors of Auschwitz) insupportably presumptuous. The page itself, with its build-up to the big gothic reveal, uses pulp tropes to dramatize the Holocaust. The quite clichéd juxtaposition of feeling artist and unfeeing reporters/media is also an easy cultural narrative. Even the revelation of Spiegelman as man, rather than as mouse, doesn’t so much undermine the iconography (we still get the shock of anthropomorphic corpses) as it shows us the hand behind the image. Tortured genius is hardly a new marketing meme.

In short, Maus, in numerous ways, is an effort of deliberate middle-brow popularization. And part of that popularization is the elevation of Spiegelman himself; the genius interpreter, speaking from his pain as corpses overwhelm his drawing board. The bitter irony of Maus’ success is that the book’s defenders end up in the position of Spiegelman’s masked Nazi-like philistines,scrabbling joyfully amidst the corpses. And from the pile, finally, they lift Artie himself, circled by flies, the genius who realized that if comics marketed genocide, genocide in return would market comics.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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