Tag Archives: Caroline Small

Tween Horror

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I had an article on the Atlantic a couple of days ago in which I talked about the Hunger Games and Twilight, comparing Bella and Katniss. I argue that Bella is in many ways stereotypically feminine (passive, focused on romance and motherhood) while Katniss is in many ways stereotypically masculine (competent, deadly, not focused on romance).

People have not been pleased with me. Specifically, Alyssa Rosenberg and Amber Taylor take me to task. Alyssa started out by calling me condescending and went on to say:

First, there’s something really profoundly weird and limited about this definition of femininity — and condescending in the piece’s sense that a totalizing devotion to motherhood, to relationships, to sex, to girliness is the only, or most worthy, definition of femininity. The second-wave feminists who produced Our Bodies, Ourselves may not have done the research into a groundbreaking medical text that changed the relationship between women and the medical establishment while wearing pretty dresses*, but that doesn’t mean that their work wasn’t deeply attuned to the feminine. Creating space for women’s voices in hip-hop, and suggesting that women have something specific to offer the form, may not be explicitly attuned to the state of romantic and sexual relationships, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an exploration and assertion of the feminine. Choosing to have a baby even if it means you have to be on bed rest or endanger your life might mean you’re devoted to motherhood, but it doesn’t actually make you more of a woman than casting off your cloak to duel the holy hell out of Bellatrix Lestrange or climbing into an exo-suit and doing battle for a little girl’s life — and by extension, the continued existence of the human race.

As is usually the case, Caroline Small is more eloquent than I am, so I’ll let her respond. This is a comment she left on the Atlantic site before Alyssa’s post went up, but I think it resonates.

The comments to this article are really pretty interesting. But pretty disheartening, really, too. A lot of popular feminism, which seems to be where some of the commenters are coming from, isn’t very attentive to the history of cultural gendering, where certain traits were indeed gendered “female” and certain “male”, and where the male traits were generally considered better and more worthwhile. Those preferences haven’t really gone away — the sets of traits and behaviors are still valued differently. They’re just more available to individual people of both genders now.

I’ve been seeing these “I’m glad I grew up with Buffy and not Bella” things too, so it’s not just Katniss. I sympathize; Bella doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. But it doesn’t take much insight to recognize that she aligns more closely with “traditional femininity” than Buffy and Katniss do.

Fortunately, there are lots of women today whose self-perception aligns with the masculine values, to the point that those women would never describe those traits as “masculine”. I think these comments reflect that. But being able to see them as non-gendered, or differently gendered, is something we have the luxury of doing because we were fortunate enough to have come up after feminism fought those hard battles, in an era where other people and society overall enforce those gendered norms on our individual bodies much, much less.

A lot of people seem to think that the point of feminism is making “masculine” behavior acceptable for women — or making no behavior unacceptable for women, that is, separating the behavior from the bodies of the people who perform the behavior and not judging women who prefer those historically masculine traits. And I agree that is one goal of feminism.

But feminism used to also be about recognizing the value and beauty of the way women historically did things, of women’s ways of knowing, of women’s unique experiences — of “femininity” as a counterweight to the excesses of “masculine” strength and authority and aggression. It used to be about valuing “femininity” as a place from which we could criticize and challenge the bad things in our world. A lot of the distaste for Bella is genuine distaste for the historically “feminine” categories and behaviors and values and aesthetics, but it’s generally expressed without even the slightest recognition of how problematic and limiting — and historically patriarchal — that attitude is.

So I’m hesitant that it’s a good thing to derogate traditional femininity, either in favor of traditional masculinity or even in favor of an individual woman’s right to behave however she pleases. A feminism that rejects the very notion that culture is gendered (in ways that have nothing to do with biology) is a feminism that’s amputated its best critique of power. It’s essentially co-opted by historically masculine cultural biases and preferences — including the ones for violence and strength. That’s tragic, if that’s where we are.

Part of the appeal of characters like Katniss is that they challenge conventional gender without completely eradicating it. Part of the appeal of characters like Bella is that they subvert conventional gender without really challenging it at all. I don’t much like either of them at a personal “do I want to hang out with these people” level — I’m with the person who prefers Hermione, although HP is almost as badly written as Twilight. But it strikes me that not being able — or willing — to think the difference is a problem.

Girl power is great — except when it moves beyond allowing people with female bodies to behave any way they like and becomes a new set of restrictive, normative, angry, prejudiced norms that bully people with female bodies into behaving a certain way. The widespread and almost-always knee-jerk “feminist” contempt for Bella, both in itself and in comparison with “tough” female characters like Katniss and Buffy, is a tremendous intellectual and social failure in that respect.

So I think it’s worth asking the defenders of Katniss — is there actually a feminist critique of the power structure that gets Katniss into the book’s defining life or death challenge, the kind of systematic feminist critique you get from, say, Joanna Russ or Erica Jong? I can be talked out of this position, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is. The same question could be asked of Buffy, and of any other girl power heroine. Twilight may actually have the edge on that one — there is a definite critique of the Volturi from Bella’s perspective that aligns nicely, yes, with Christian ideals, but also with traditionally feminine ones. (Although Bella is certainly no Alyx.)

Ignoring the seductiveness of those “masculine” characteristics, pretending their relationship to authority and strength and power and violence is transformed just because a woman engages in them — — that’s not feminist at all. And neither is perpetuating biases and prejudices against the historically gendered-feminine traits. A feminism that can’t make room for Bella is a feminism that’s going to have a lot of trouble getting purchase with women who like Bella, and that seems like a tremendous mistake to me.

To me it seems like Caroline has Alyssa pretty much dead to rights. Alyssa is basically insisting that the feminine be defined as, “anything that women do.” And that has been one goal of feminism. But another goal has been to champion those things traditionally associated with women. And you can’t champion those things if you feel it’s condescending to even suggest that they exist.

The difficulty with championing them if you refuse to admit they exist is perhaps best epitomized by another commenter on the Atlantic. This is Genevieve du Lac. Her comment has garnered 16 likes, so I don’t think she’s just speaking for herself here.

I’m really disgusted with these definitions of femininity and feminism. Why can’t a woman be competent and feminine at the same time? Femininity is not weak. And Bella is just retarded. The two neurons she’s got floating around in her cerebellum are drunk off too much estrogen… like most 16 year olds. So she’s got some feminine qualities – like following her feelings, etc. That does not make her the epitome of femininity.

I’d like to think a woman can be feminine and still be competent. I can wear my makeup and heels and take care of my hair just as well as I sky dive, shoot an arrow, shoot a pistol, finish my MBA, and have a career. Sheesh.

Like Alyssa, Genevieve wants the feminine to mean everything women do. But to get there, she has to call Bella “retarded” and sneer at her “estrogen.” Which, to me, seems like a problem.

Alyssa doesn’t lambast Bella in such offensive terms, of course, which I appreciate. But she is coming from at least a vaguely similar line of country.

And while those values are worth examining further, Twilight‘s also eminently critiqueable on narrative grounds, something Noah gives very little credence. Complexity is the stuff of genuinely compelling decision-making, as well as compelling storytelling. What’s troubling about Twilight is less the idea that Bella picks Edward and more the inevitability of their eventual union. Once Edward walks into Bella’s science class, she never really considers anything else, never gets presented with any other truly compelling options, she treats the humans in her life who are graduating and going off to their own adventures with dismissiveness and disinterest. Tough choices are fascinating. Defending the world’s kindest fate is rather dull.

And just as I’m bored by Bella’s certainty and dismissive attitudes towards people who set other priorities and take other paths, I don’t appreciate the idea that I don’t live up to Noah Berlatsky’s very particular standards of femininity, I’m doing it wrong. There may be effective arguments for a Christian focus on love rather than strength. But a strident and myopic lecture to women with a variety of priorities isn’t likely to be one of them.

Alyssa is arguing for narrative complexity — complexity involving action, politics, and suspense. She goes on to argue that the Hunger Games is interesting in part because it’s about how politics destroys families; how the public trumps the private and why that’s evil.

But…that’s not unique to the Hunger Games. It’s just how adventure stories work. You’re fighting for home and family; that’s the motivation, but it’s not the story. That’s why Amber Taylor is misleading when she says that Katniss’ actions are all about her family. Diagetically they are…but that isn’t what the books focus on. We hardly know Katniss’ sister, or her relationship to her; Pru really just exists as a kind of pure idol of goodness and innocence, a reason to keep fighting, like any number of pure-women-left-at-home in any number of adventure books. What Alyssa wants, and what adventure narratives want, isn’t the exploration of love and relationships…so they push those over to the side. And instead, you get violence and things blowing up.

I don’t have any problem with things blowing up in my entertainment. I don’t know that I seek that kind of thing out quite as much as my wife does, but I’m perfectly happy to go along for the ride. Enjoyable as those things-blowing-up are, though, I like other kinds of stories too. Such as, occasionally, romance. Which is what Twilight is.

As in most romances, narrative complexity, in terms of events and suspense, is not the point. You know Bella is going to get her guy, just like you know that Jane Austen’s heroines are going to end up happily married. That’s how romance works. People — often people known as “women” — read those books not because they’re idiots who don’t like complexity, but because they are interested in a different kind of complexity. Specifically, they’re interested in the ins and outs of love; not just whether people love each other, but how they do so; not who will live and who will die, but what will they say and how will they say it and how will their relationship develop?

For instance, there’s that scene in the Twilight series where Edward’s family is voting on whether to turn Bella into a vampire. Edward’s father votes yes, and his reason is that Edward has vowed to kill himself when Bella dies. For Edward’s father, his love for his son therefore means that Bella has to also live forever.

As a father, as a husband, as someone who has been thinking a lot recently about in-laws and what they mean for marriage and for love — I found, and find that scene really moving. And that’s where the suspense and surprise in Twilight comes from; from the explanation and exploration of love and intimacy, not just between Bella and Edward, but between Bella and Jacob, and Jacob and Edward, and Edward’s family — the entire cast of characters, in other words. It’s different than watching the nifty new way Katniss kills somebody, I’ll grant you. But it’s not worse. For me, anyway, I find it more compelling. Or, as Laura Blackwood says in a lovely recent essay, “The Twilight series challenges what I would call the “Buffy Summers Maxim”: that teen heroines be physically empowered, oftentimes at the expense of emotional clarity.”

None of which means that Katniss, or Alyssa, is “doing it wrong.” Even if the Hunger Games is (like Twilight) dreadfully written, I still like Katniss. I like watching her figure out how to kill people; I like her tomboyish competence; I like her butchness, I like her delight in dressing up, even if the series won’t really allow her to own it. I like the way she finds true love and family at the end. She’s not my favorite heroine in the world, and her whining (like Bella’s) gets pretty tedious, but overall, I enjoyed spending time with her. That’s why I went out of my way to say at the end of my essay at the Atlantic that Katniss and Bella aren’t opposed. As another writer notes here, it’s not an either/or choice. Lots of girls admire both characters. I think it’s possible to imagine that Twilight’s heroine and the Hunger Games’ heroine would find something in each other to love and admire as well.

Amber Taylor disagrees with me there, though:

The idea that there would be a fight is absurd, but the reason for peace is not that Bella and Katniss “might understand each other’s desires and each other’s strength” and walk away in mutual respect. Katniss wouldn’t fight Bella because Bella is not an autocratic totalitarian dictator. Bella threatens exactly nothing that Katniss values, and thus Katniss, a user of violence who is not inherently violent, would probably shrug. Katniss’s political consciousness and promotion of self-rule does not threaten Bella’s tiny microverse of loved ones and would likewise be a non-issue to Bella.

For Taylor, Katniss wouldn’t respect Bella. She’d just ignore her, because Bella is no threat. But I have to ask…if Bella “threatens exactly nothing” that Katniss or Taylor or Alyssa values, why then are so many writers so eager to attack her? If she’s not a danger, why call her a “retard” or deride her as dull or passive or sneer at her “tiny microverse of loved ones” — that thing that some of us of insufficient political consciousness refer to as our “family”? What, in other words, is so scary about Bella and the girls who love her? And could it, maybe, have something to do with our culture’s ambivalence about femininity?

I’ll let Sarah Blackwood have the last word.

Bella holds up a cracked mirror and shows us some things we don’t want to see. But she also reminds us that the imagination resists checklists of appropriate behavior. Teen girls resist checklists. The really interesting conversations start to happen when we stop circling the wagons against “bad examples” and “passivity” and start exploring not only what we want our heroines to be like, but why.

Caroline Small on Comics and Writing (again!)

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Caro keeps writing these massive comments that I hate to see buried in the threads. So I thought I’d highlight this one too. (I’d urge people to click over to the thread also, though. James Romberger, Robert Stanley Martin, Jeet Heer, and others also have many interesting thoughts.)
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Gracious! I couldn’t participate yesterday or Friday and it’s going to take me awhile to really catch up, but I think I need to jump into the James/Robert kerfuffle here because I think James’ real target is probably me. So I’ll try to clarify.

For me it is a question not of giving precedence in the creative process to one person or another, or even to one skillset or another, but just of teasing out all the different “crafts” that go into making a really extraordinary comic. The importance of visual craft is certainly indisputable. I mean no dismissal of it. But I think the craft of manipulating narrative is also very important, and — depending on the conception of the work — the craft of manipulating prose may also be important.

So the question for me isn’t which is more important, because I think that there is no right answer to that — creators can make choices about whether to try and balance them or let one be dominant on a case-by-case basis. That’s part of the craft of creating any work, choosing which elements to emphasize at which point.

But I also do think it is the case that, de facto, right now, advanced visual craft is consistently and significantly much more important to people in art comics — both creators and fans — than advanced narrative craft, even though some creators dismiss both. At the level of skill, James, as you rightly point out here and many other places, it is extremely difficult to find someone who is really gifted at both visual creation and narrative manipulation. The conditions for getting highly skilled at visual craft are more accessible to cartoonists than the conditions for getting highly skilled at narrative craft.

We’ve discussed this before: there are so many inputs to that — education, culture, aesthetic preference, history of the art forms — it’s just really rare that people are first-rate at both. Although I can make arguments for people here and there, I really can’t come up with anybody working right now other than Eddie Campbell who I think sails easily over my bar, except possibly Dan Clowes, who still isn’t quite in Campbell’s league narratively.

Given that difficulty of finding people who are good at both, and given the pressures of a commercial work environment, I think it’s logical that there aren’t many (any?) mainstream collaborations that have the seamlessness, the balance between the different craft inputs, of a tremendous literary/art comic like “Fate of the Artist.” I do understand what Gary and Brunetti are getting at with the notion that a single creator can integrate the disparate crafts in a way that’s very difficult for collaborators. A really seamless artistic collaboration probably requires a meaningful level of intimacy and honesty that seems likely hard to get in a really commercial environment.

I do understand the struggle here over who can and should get credit — without that intimacy and honesty, the more aggressive personality is probably going to be in the lead. But I think credit is a red herring when talking about issues of approach, because who gets credit would depend on how the approach played out in the specific work. Credit is specific; approach is general. I don’t think any particular imbalance is an inherent property of collaboration — look at John and Sondra of Metaphrog. I don’t have the sense that one of them is more “in charge” than the other. I think they are true collaborators. But that’s not going to be the case with all collaborators. They, like a lot of bands, get around the issue by giving themselves a collective name and emphasizing the group work.

I think it’s essential, therefore, that we bracket questions of credit and the relative importance of individual contributors when we think about the value and risks of collaboration in general. I think we need to look at the actual effects of the Gary/Brunetti approach in practice, not just the romance of it as an ideal goal: what so often happens in single-creator comics is that the elements of “architecture” typically associated with writing, the manipulation of narrative and the rudiments of fiction that Barth calls “craft”, get short shrift — often relative even to film and mainstream fiction, but especially relative to the types of narrative manipulation you see in the most ambitious prose writing.

This is partly because, I think, many cartoonists simply aren’t aware of how craft-intensive the manipulation of narrative is, or they think, like Dan says for Lynda Barry, that narrative is and should be something we do “naturally.”

Up to a point, the notion that human beings are storytelling creatures is true, with some caveats to what “natural” means, but narrative-minded Western humans have been stylizing that “natural” ability for at least a few hundred years now, so it’s a pretty aggressive choice to reject everything they’ve done out of hand. Not that you were defending that stance, James, but to privilege “naif” writing is to be extremely aggressively anti-writing, at least in the sense of what “writing” means to most people who spend a lot of time reading prose fiction.

I think Barry’s anti-Craft stance is much, much, much more harshly against writing than Robert’s is against visual art. I find it really hard not to get very personally offended at it, and the only reason I can avoid it is because it seems to have a psychological source rather than a political one. She feels excluded by formal writing, and so her response is to construct a pedagogy that excludes formal writing right back. That’s not personal against me. But I just don’t agree that either group needs to exclude the other, and I think she’s wrong to approach it that way.

This quote is a good place to expand on that point:

ask her about how she wrote CRUDDY and she’ll tell you a tale of years of woe stemming from reading book after book on story structure and novel-writing, which ended only when she threw it all away and painted the novel in ten months with a brush.

I’d be curious to hear Dan’s response to Noah’s form/content point, but my problem with this ties back into the Dickey book and the tangent with Charles about reading speed – you don’t develop intuition about story structure and novel-writing by reading how-to books. You develop intuition about story structure and novel writing by reading thousands of novels. How-to books just help make you more conscious of things you already know about and have experienced through tens of thousands of hours of reading prose books. Those how-to books resonate and make sense not because they show you something new, but because they articulate intuitions you already have as a reader. If you don’t have those intuitions already developed through that relationship with reading, those books won’t make sense. They won’t tie back into anything “natural” and they’ll feel horrifically artificial, like they are talking to someone completely different from you.

And if you don’t have that intuition, it’s going to be very hard to manipulate narratives and write in ways that speak intimately and in compelling ways to the people who have read thousands of novels. Those people SHOULD BE an audience for “literary” comics. But we often are not, because there is such widespread contempt for the writing we love among the comics community. It is a fierce exclusion, and one that feels very deeply personal. And it is a completely unnecessary exclusion — and I think often a completely UNINTENTIONAL exclusion, born of psychology and lack of experience and interest rather than actual dislike.

So although I want to qualify again that as a way of getting at inner process, Barry’s pedagogy sounds extraordinary, what I find so terribly off-putting about it, at least as presented here, is her seeming inability to see past the limitations of her own, “naif” or “brut” discourse to recognize how her pedagogy and its goals could work with rather than against more craft-intensive approaches to writing and more stylized approaches to narrative, how it could be welcoming to prose readers rather than exclusive of them.

There is no reason why comics cannot have both a brut, naif tradition and a full-range of more stylized traditions in narrative — the exact same way it draws from both naif and stylized traditions from visual art. There are brut visual traditions as well as artists who are as skilled as the best classical illustrators and painters, and comics welcomes them all.

But for writers, if you are interested in more stylized narratives, or in more academic ways of talking about and thinking about narrative, you are consistently marginalized — forced to defend your perspective against charges that it’s “anti-visual” or anti-artist, and, more aggressively, told you are insensitive to the history of comics or just plain uninformed. That type of assertion, like Barry’s “anti-Craft” language, are not “approaches” to making art when they are stated so baldly and with the intent to derrogate or exclude other approaches. At that point, they are just ways of policing the discourse community. And a strictly policed discourse community is not a fecund environment for great art — ask any anti-academic Modernist.

What I’d like to see is a more engaged recognition from within comics of the extent to which these ways of thinking about comics are schools or whatever that can co-exist and even overlap and inform each other. The “anti-Craft” approach Barry and others take is a school of cartooning and should be treated as such (someone mentioned James Kochalka’s term “cute brut” to me.) There is an “art school cartooning” that allows for naif narrative but requires more ambitious visual craft. I’m sure there are several more approaches that already exist within comics praxis, and there are definitely a number of approaches that hypothetically are possible but really do not exist within comics praxis.

If comics praxis is to expand to include the widest possible range of discourse communities in its scope — something which absolutely MUST HAPPEN before it can truly and accurately be considered a medium (rather than a genre) in praxis rather than in potential — comics practitioners, including critics, have to be able to talk about competing approaches as competing approaches, without bullying each other over the various ways that one approach excludes elements of the others. That’s the point of approaches — they select certain aspects to privilege and push aside others. But they do not do so universally — more comics like Eddie Campbell’s won’t mean there are fewer comics like Lynda Barry’s or Ariel Schrag’s or Seth’s. It will just mean the discourse communities who can find affinities with comics and make investments in comics will be bigger and more diverse, and that’s better for every cartoonist, no matter what his or her approach.

Caroline Small on Comics, Publics, and Reading

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Caroline Small had several lengthy and thoughtful comments on this post by Nate Atkinson. I thought I’d highlight them so that more folks can see them. I’m going to pick a couple, so it’ll be a little disjointed, but I think the points overall are clear (and you can always jump back to the thread to see the comments you’ve missed by Caro and others.)
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First this one.

I agree with Noah when he says this “it just seems like comics has gone the consolidation/subculture route for so long (as Nate admits) that further progress along that road threatens to become sclerotic.”

I think the problem is exactly that: the public (I like the lit theory word “discourse community”) is SO well defined and SO specific that it actually determines not only the conversation about the art but the art itself, rather than the other way around. The comics-reading public is a thing independent from the comics it engages with, that most comics self-consciously and intentionally appeal to, rather than an epiphenomenon of neutral people’s discussion about those comics. Perhaps that epiphenomenon was what the OLD TCJ did, creating that community. But that community’s been stable, with a clear discourse and assumptions, for a pretty long time.

Noah also accurately states my position on the accomplishments of contemporary film. I think at least some of the reasons for that, though, have to do with the phenomenon Nate describes and how that worked in the early days of cinema. I think the emergence of a discourse community about film was much less about subcultural identity and much more about legitimating film in a multi-media, multi-form artistic context. Cocteau is the archetype of this, his friendships with Picasso and Gide and Proust and Diaghilev and Radiguet (et al., et al., et al.) created a sense of what art was and was for that informed his films, and his films informed our sense of what film is. As such (and he’s only one example), films’ original genetic diversity is much more diverse than comics. So even when film gets more self-referential in the mid-century, it’s referencing something more inherently diverse.

And you can argue that comics draws heavily from fine visual art, which in some instances is true, but the thing about film is that it was all arts, including writing, including music. (Cocteau wrote for Stravinsky…) Even today’s screenwriting takes writing and literature seriously in a way that comics does not, although it’s certainly never been as important for film as for theater, where dramatists and directors are still pretty separate functions. Still, I’ve never heard film people or theater people make the kinds of claims you hear all the time in comics, that the expectation of competent, nuanced writing as a baseline expectation for any professional work makes someone “anti-visual.” Maybe it’s because even though there are filmmakers and dramatists who only make films and plays, there are greats in those fields who considered themselves primarily writers: e.g., Beckett produced both drama and fiction, Cocteau wrote novels and poems. Auster writes screenplays and novels. And in all cases their literary work is exceptional and standard-setting. It seems like the only great in comics I’ve ever heard say anything really valuing writing is Saul Steinberg, and you never hear modern day critics acknowledge Steinberg’s own preferences in that area – his visual acumen is always what gets praised.

So I think it’s not just that comics is less genetically diverse, but that the discourse community likes it that way. Warren Craghead and Austin English, for example, don’t get all that much attention from the TCJ-defined community (although there was a recent interview!), so the “public” isn’t getting defined in ways that include their perspectives in our sense of what comics are.

Which is to say that I agree with Nate that comics have been about the formation of a public first and an art form second, if at all. But this is why I like the term “discourse community” so much — I think that it’s never a seamless, painless transition from the kind of discourse that supports a subculture to the kind of discourse necessary to support an artform. TCJ is in a unique position to encourage and support that transition, but they don’t appear to really deeply want to. Being at the top of the heap in the subculture is a hard position to do it from — it’s asking a big fish in a little pond to swim into the waters where they’ll be a small fish again. I get why they don’t risk their position and their influence within the existing industry for that goal. But comics has so much extraordinary potential as an art form, it makes me sad that the most influential critical voice in comics doesn’t see it as a primary part of their mission.

And this one.

Here’s the Lynda Barry article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/cartoonist-lynda-barry-will-make-you-believe-in-yourself.html

Compare it to this passage from Don Greiner’s wonderful book on the pedagogy of James Dickey:

The prevailing tone of these classes is joy — joy in the art, in the language, in the writers themselves…Dickey is especially memorable on Yeats, Pound, Thomas, Houseman, Hopkins, Frost, Robinson, de la Mare, and Bridges…[The lectures] are in every way a testimony to a man engaged with the rigors of poetry. Yet they are also a testimony to a man committed to readers, committed, as it were, to passing it on.

Or, consider this essay by John Barth (in a rather spotty OCR from the original 1985 article: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/21/specials/barth-writing.html

[Writing] gets learned. Can It Be Studied? Boyoboy, can it ever. Since long before the invention of universities, not to mention university programs in creative writing, authors have acquired their authority in four main ways – first, by paying a certain sort of attention to the experience of life as well as merely undergoing it; second, by paying a certain sort of attention to the works of their great and less great predecessors in the medium of written language, as well as merely reading them; third, by practicing that medium themselves, usually a lot (Charles Newman, the writer and critic, declares that the first prerequisite for aspiring writers is sufficient motor control to keep their pens moving left to right, line after line, hour after hour, day after day, and I would add year after year, decade after decade); and fourth, by offering their apprentice work for discussion and criticism by one or several of their impassioned peers, or by some more experienced hand, or by both.

Those four obvious, all but universal ways of learning how to write correspond roughly to what I take to be the proper objects of study for all serious writers -their material (”human life,” says Aristotle, ”its happiness and its misery”), their medium (the language in general, the written language in particular), their craft (the rudiments of, say, fiction, together with conventional and unconventional techniques of their deployment), and their art (the inspired and masterful application of their craft and medium to their material). Not only does the first of these – the material – not imply a creative writing course; it is beyond the proper province of one, though the study of great literature is one excellent handle on ”human life, its happiness and its misery.” And real mastery of the fourth – the art, as distinct from the craft – is more the hope than the curricular goal of a sound writing program; it comes from mastery of the other three plus a dash of genius.

Barry’s course — which sounds wonderful in many ways — seems to correspond to the first item: the material. The article even says “Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft.”

But if you look at Barth’s breakdown, the craft is what makes stories into writing. Craft includes “the rudiments of fiction.” And a good solid understanding of the rudiments of fiction is what seems to be missing from an awful lot of beautifully drawn comics I’ve seen (not to mention an even greater number of pedestrianly drawn comics I’ve seen.)

Screenwriters study the writer’s craft; screenplays are fiction. But art comics writers tend not to — and they’re especially dismissive of that last one, submitting apprentice work for critique. I heard someone on a panel at SPX say that one of the problems with working with a big press is that the editors tried to edit the comic but you can’t edit a comic the way you edit a book, telling the cartoonist that the joke fails here or whatever. That attitude isn’t a property of comics — it’s a property of an immature writer, because EVERY writer can learn from readers.

I guess all this rambling is to set up two questions – isn’t there something comparable to the “workshop” in studio art, where your peers critique the ideas and execution of your work? It seems like there would be, so I can’t imagine that person was getting that notion from visual art, but maybe I’m wrong.

And, if anybody reading this studied comics in a formal curriculum somewhere, what did your program teach you about writing? Was your experience more like what Barry goes for in her course, or what Dickey describes in his?

And I’ll finish with this one.

Jeet, the comment about Barry not being interested in craft was on the first page of the NYT article on her class; it’s not an assertion I’m making about her work.

Perhaps the NYT writer misunderstood her, but I think it should be pretty easy to see how the description of the techniques and approach she uses appear significantly different from the kind of teaching one got from Professor Dickey (whose workshop _I_ took, as well as Dr Greiner’s — Greiner was the one, Noah, who made me read “The Sound and the Fury,” darn him!).

My criticism of teaching the psychology of creativity is this — that psychology, more than any other kind, isn’t the same for everybody. And an awful lot of literary creativity has tended to emerge out of the mindset of an advanced critical reader, not some playful wellspring of creative openness. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of “readerly” creativity. You see that in Dickey; you see it in Barth.

I don’t, however, see that in Barry’s pedagogy, which is why I said her teaching was about something different. And so I think you’re missing the point of the comment, which is not whether she is a good teacher, but whether there is a difference in discourse community there, and whether it can and should be bridged. Are you suggesting that Barry’s pedagogy is, in fact, within the discourse community of traditional creative writing? From the quotes in the article, it seems like Barry herself is resistant to that.

I don’t DISAGREE with Barry’s pedagogy, and certainly not for her goals, which it seems to fit well. I do think Barry’s pedagogy isn’t a substitute for Dickey’s pedagogy, and that a great writer probably needs some of both kinds.

Do you think Barry’s is a substitute, or do you think there’s value in both? Because the only thing that I DO disagree with is what sounds like her contempt for the more traditional pedagogy that writers like Dickey practiced. It works just like her comment on Franzen.

One of the wonderful things about Mr Dickey was that he could take a student from the backwater of South Carolina who’d never read anything but the Bible and the newspaper and make him understand why TS Eliot was poetry. And he didn’t do it through “inspiring their creativity;” he did it, as the excerpt I quoted says, through sharing his love of reading and through the idea that reading is a source of inspiration for creativity. Sometimes he turned those people into teachers and writers themselves — but he always turned them into readers.

Disrespecting that isn’t cool at all. Pedagogy doesn’t have to be “about” psychology to be effective psychologically.

Reality, bah. Give me soaps!

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Imagine my joy that a thread containing a great many generalizations about romance and soap opera offers analysis of only two categories of texts: literary fiction by men (mostly Proust and Updike) and Marvel comics (albeit ones that are, loosely, “open to female perspectives.”)

Sigh.

I think this happened because people, in trying not to denigrate soaps and romances, were focusing on the elements they have in common with things that really aren’t romance or soaps. But in the process, it feels a little like the actual things that makes those genres feel the way they do, the things that make them emotionally appealing, are lost. Romantic situations do not a soap opera make — if I really want Robert Scorpio, Mr. Darcy will just not be good enough! Certainly romantic (i.e., dating, marriage, non-casual sex) and domestic situations are commonplace in the romance genre and the soap opera genre. But just having romantic or domestic situations at the center of a narrative, to me, is not enough to place it in those genres, and certainly not to actively gender the work female in the way those genres generally are.

That’s because what makes romance and soap opera “feminine” isn’t simply that they’re about romantic situations, or even that they’re about domestic situations in the broader sense. What makes them “feminine” is that they’re preoccupied with emotional motivations, more than just emotional experiences, and in that respect they mimic typical and stereotypical intrafemale conversation, including but not limited to gossip. (It’s circular, of course, because familiarity with these genres has shaped and colored and affected and even defined intra-female conversation, but nobody is claiming gender is not a social construct…)

In American soap operas, especially since the 1960s, a character’s motivations are generally multifaceted and involve a lot of duplicity, suspiciousness, victimization, competition, manipulation, machination, and whatever emotional anything can be thrown in to make human interaction complex, confusing, and melodramatic. (I don’t have the sense telenovelas are much different.) But the narratives are structured not to make the viewer care, but to give the viewer room to analyze and sort out those complex and dramatic motivations — what makes this character feel and act this way, why is she plotting, are there secrets in her past, is he telling the truth? The long duration of the narrative isn’t about building emotional relationships with characters — that’s an epiphenomenon of the intimate view of their lives. It’s about revealing those motivations slowly so that there’s more time to analyze and speculate about them, more time to gossip with yourself and other fans of the show about the characters. I think you could make a good case that the reason soap operas are vastly less popular now than they used to be is that women, even women who stay home with kids, are far less homosocial, so they have less opportunity for (or interest in) the types of conversations that used to circulate around soap opera plots. Soap opera is a deeply _social_ genre.

Romance is just a capsule from that, a solved problem. It’s not interactive — it’s fantasy with an idealized happy ending — but it’s still about motivation. Sometimes the framework focuses on sexual attraction and other times on social attraction (or social obstacles to attraction), but the emotional kernel of a typical formula romance novel is a shift in the man’s motivation from self-serving to heroine-serving, or in both main characters’ motivation from individual-serving to cohesive couple unit-serving. There it’s the repetitive pleasure of a single, longed-for, idealized motivation, rather than the sustained drawing out that you get in soap opera, but motivation is still the emotional heart of the genre.

The point of BOTH genres is peeling the onion of those motivations and establishing not social familiarity with or even affection for the character, but the kind of psychological intimacy that gives you a reliable gauge about why a person behaves a certain way. That is not a side effect; it is not a tool for effective characterization — that psychological intimacy is an end in itself.

I don’t really buy that Jaime Hernandez has been trying to write “female genre fiction” all these years, although it definitely seems to be genre of some kind. But when it’s described like this, from Dan’s review:

“In taking us through lives, deaths, and near-fatalities, ”TLB” and “Return For Me” encapsulates Maggie’s emotional history as it moves from resignation (Maggie fails to purchase a garage, i.e. fails to fulfill her dreams) to memories of loss, to sudden violence (a theme in this story) to love and contentment.”

I really don’t expect genre at all. Maybe a kind of pulp realism…or perhaps it is closer, in its deep structure, to this “romance” you all see in Marvel comics, which is maybe a different and less-well-codified subgenre of romance.

Jaime’s work, though, to me in my limited experience and from Dan’s description, seems much more concerned with capturing emotional experience — getting the emotional experience of the character down on the page in a powerful and compelling and convincing enough way that it invokes a connection to that emotional experience, and a sympathy and affection for the character, in a reader. It’s not that the characters don’t have motivations, of course they do — but their motivations are presented pretty straighforwardly, in the service of making the character make sense and seem real. The humanity of the character is the point. Believing in the characters is the reward.

I don’t knock that kind of emotional theater, but just to be clear — that ain’t romance or soap opera. It doesn’t satisfy anything comparable to the things that urge me to go consume some conventionally gendered-female genre material (or the similar “literary romances.”) I go to female genre material either for a safe and predictable space to indulge thinking about the social complexity of emotional motivation (without the real-world drama that ensues when you overscrutinize your real-life friends’ motivations) or for idealized fantasy of a minimal-drama, happy-ending world. One reason I am, generally speaking, not in the least bit interested in more realist work, including Jaime’s but also, say Theodore Dreiser’s, is that I do not need a book, comic or otherwise, to provide me emotional experiences or to present to me what is real in the world. All I need to do is call my girlfriends for a nice, long chat — the ones with babies in intensive care, brain-damaged adult children, elderly dependents, cancer-ridden siblings, failing or complicated marriages, miscarriages, unfulfilling jobs, no jobs, frustrated ambitions, low self-esteem, high cholesterol, and houses they can’t afford. They — and their low-drama compatriates with good jobs, great legs, smiling children, couture-filled closets, beautiful spouses, stellar wine cellars and glossy educations — are much more real than anything Jaime, or any other realist writer has to offer on the truth-in-narrative front.

So when Dan gushes that “They’re real,” the only response I really have is “why, then, wouldn’t my time (and yours) be better spent caring for the actual people in our actual lives who have similar or worse problems?”

Now, I can absolutely respect a realist-to-melodramatic book that offers rare, meaningful wisdom on WHY those experiences happened to people — and by “rare and meaningful” I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences that a bright, socially adept, adult female wouldn’t have already gained from the routine business of conducting her social and familial life. I respect Dreiser for that reason (even though I have no interest in ever reading Sister Carrie again if I live to be 1000.) I need something extra-real to make a book worth the distraction from my actual real life.

Which isn’t to say that Jaime’s work does not do those things, doesn’t have anything extra-real. It’s just that the extra-real stuff is what I’d have liked the TCJ reviews, and discussions of this kind of art in general, to pinpoint and grapple with. Emotional verisimilitude and compelling characters and being real are just the bare minimum I expect of competent fiction. It’s not what gets you praised; it’s what gets you published. So given that, Mr Critic, what makes the experiences of these “real” characters so unique in the world or so idiosyncratic a representation of the social tapestry that it’s worth my time having fictional experiences with them when I could be having real ones with my family and friends (or having fictional ones that offer something really artistically challenging or intellectually ambitious, independent of all the emotional schtuff)?

That’s a question that, for my taste, isn’t answered — by critics or by fiction itself — nearly often enough.
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Update by Noah: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

Caroline Small on Habibi, Said, and Heart of Darkness

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Caro posted this in comments earlier today. I hope she’ll forgive me for turning it into a post.
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The classic examples I think of when I think about “good” exoticism are things like World’s Fair pavilions and ’60s musical exotica — all trafficking in stereotypes and generalizations and even caricatures, but also, importantly, drawing on indigenous voices and crafting exotic representations that are, overall, positive, rather than dehumanizing ones. They can create interest in the outside world that’s a valuable counter to jingoistic tendencies.

So without intending any criticism of Nadim’s use of Said’s argument, I think that digging a little deeper into Said might be worthwhile, as it seems like we’re moving toward entrenched positions that really are more axiomatic than anything Said himself said. I take Eric’s point (and I don’t know for sure whether Franklin has read Orientalism or not) but it seems like he might find it more palatable than most French theory — Orientalism is from 1978, and it’s much closer to a traditional textual and historical treatise than the canonical works of poststructuralism or psychoanalytic feminism (and Said’s later work.) There’s a copy of the book online, and even skimming the introduction is valuable.

It’s also interesting to note that by the 1990s, in books like Culture and Imperialism (which were much more overtly theoretical than the earlier work from the late ’70s), Said was putting forth defenses of books like Heart of Darkness specifically on the grounds that Conrad was self-aware, that is, even though he couldn’t really think outside of the discourse of Orientalism, he perceived the places where it was insufficient, and that perception comes across in his writing. Said says:

What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self-conscious about what he did. Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow’s adventures: it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad’s way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890S the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business. […] Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow’s narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.

[…] Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else’s experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aestherica1ly but also mentally unassailable.

Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow’s tale in a narrative moment that he allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history, was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history, one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie. As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty.

I think the important next question, therefore, is not whether Thompson’s Habibi traffics in orientalist stereotypes, since Thompson has acknowledged that and Nadim does a good job of highlighting them, but whether it does anything interesting structurally with those stereotypes, whether and how it deepens our understanding of them. His right to use them is rather besides the point, IMO. Of course he can use anything he wants, but is what he does with them smart?

I haven’t seen any arguments that he does anything particularly smart with these tropes, in the sense of the type of insight that Said identifies in Conrad. It seems to me, on the surface, that a “cowboys and indians” perspective isn’t all that likely to get to those types of profound dissections of the sociodynamics of Western prejudice. But that doesn’t mean he won’t surprise me! An argument that he accomplishes something that smart is what I’d like to see, from Thompson and people who appreciate the book, and it’s what I’ll be looking for when I read it.

Franklin Einspruch on The Limitations of Theory

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We’ve been having a spirited debate about the place of theory in comics in response to Caro’s recent post on the subject. In particular, Franklin Einspruch vigorously contested Caro’s position. It seemed a shame to leave his responses buried in comments, so I thought I’d pull a couple out and highlight them here.

Here’s Franklin’s first comment.

There’s only one way to verify Caro’s assertion, stated a few different ways, that lowercase-t theory or uppercase-T Theory have something important to offer comics. That is to create said comics and see how they turn out. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that such-and-such might to be possible in comics, but there’s a huge problem with suggesting that “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” would come into existence if only the creators employed particular philosophical or literary models. Art just doesn’t work that way. Attempting to make it that work that way gives you mannerism. I call it the Shopping List Problem. One can see certain characteristics in a successful innovation of style, inspiring other creators to copy the characteristics. But quality in art is not a shopping list of characteristics, checked off and accounted for in the new work. It’s an integrated whole that generates forward from the intuited feelings of individual creators. The head serves the heart. The other way around is poisonous.

At least as far as visual art is concerned, Theory has totally failed to account for that aspect of art-making. In fact it has put concerted effort into demolishing the very notion of universal value, and replace it with these checklists. I recently learned that a friend of mine, a beautiful realist painter, is having a show of new work in which she has more or less discarded painting. The gallery is thrilled that the exhibition “will be strikingly conceptual in its trajectory” and that she has been “gradually moving in a more conceptual direction.” A conceptual program, of course, is the major item on the checklist of contemporaneity as subscribed to by a certain species of art-worlder. People used to take it as a sign of progress when figurative artists went abstract. Now people expect them to go conceptual. This is mannerism at its worst. I nearly cried.

With all due respect to Caro, I suspect that her idea of “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” is in fact comics that better emulate the characteristics she finds attractive in a particular strain of literature. Someone who finds those characteristics exciting, and I mean genuinely enthused, butterflies-in-the-tummy excited about them, ought to have a go at it. The rest of us ought to be left alone to pursue our ambitions and literary inclinations as we see fit to do so. Something entirely new might arise, not dreamed of in her philosophies. I hope she doesn’t subscribe to the arrogant presumptions of historical inevitability, finality, and perfection that makes the culture of capital-T Theory the moral and intellectual sinkhole that it is.

One more observation: A picture is only worth a thousand words when you’re dealing with description. When it comes to dense, complicated fiction, words become noticiably more efficient. It distresses me that comics critics calling for Booker-sized ambitions seem not to notice this.

And after a bit more back and forth, Franklin added:

I have run into these notions before, namely that any kind of intellectual work done on behalf of art is theory, and that only theory stands in the way of sentimental or formal disasters. Both of them are mistaken.

Recasting traditional poetics and narrative as just another theory, even if you have to scare-quote “theory” to assert it, is certainly flattering to the culture of theory. Thus theory can be said to exist everywhere and at all times. I’ve even seen references to “Greenbergian Theory” as if non- or even anti-theoretical approaches to art merely constituted another theory. (For the uninitiated, the reference is to Clement Greenberg.) “Non-ideology, or non-theory, is an ideological and theoretical position, even if unacknowledged,” as Noah puts it. I’m sorry to be rude, but this is the sound of academic culture pleasuring itself. A finally fed-up Robert Storr wrote this in late 2009:

Speaking with a po-mo savvy young artist this week, I felt compelled to ask him what, given his approach to critical theory, was his attitude toward praxis? A puzzled look crept over his face, and, with a candour as admirable as it is rare among those who keep their verbal game up, he replied, ‘What’s that?’

The fact of the matter is that certain structures look good, sound good, or read well for some reason and seem ripe for reuse in an original way. Thus art progresses forward, by execution, not theory. When Caro claims that “You can’t feel your way around a 600-page novel unless you want that 600-page novel to be a rambling, solipsistic disaster,” I have to ask her how many 600-page novels she’s written, because that doesn’t sound right to me at all. I’m going to guess from the longer nonfiction I’ve written that really do have to feel your way around it, and you have to feel your way around it so thoroughly, self-critically, and intensely that the ramblings, solipsisms, and all the other weaknesses expose themselves as such. Then you root them out. Theory doesn’t save you from this work. As far as I know nothing does.

Are there broad biases against “literary thinking” in comicdom? I’m just as inclined to think that the Booker-style graphic novel envisioned by Caro would have to be the size of a children’s encyclopedia in order to achieve the same scope of ambition, because for certain narrative problems a picture is worth about six words instead of a thousand. Can one really just use more words? In my experience the words and the images have to sync at a certain rate or you’re not making comics anymore. We like making comics.

There’s something more than a little silly about critics, having trained on a certain specialty of literature, calling upon comics creators to acquire the same training so they can make equivalent comics. This is getting the cart so far in front of the horse that they’re not even attached anymore. Look, Caro, you’re a writer, you understand the literary angle that you’re looking for better than anyone, so do what I did when I wanted to see comics done a certain way and make the damn things yourself. As it is you might as well be standing on the sidelines of a football game yelling at the players to start playing hockey.

Jane Freilicher, Dark Afternoon. Franklin mentioned Freilicher in the course of the discussion.