Tag Archives: Daniel Clowes

What Does That Even Mean?

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A while back Isaac Cates posted an analysis of a panel from Ghost World over at The Panelists. Since the Panelists is sadly going to fold shortly, Isaac re-posted it at his own place.. Anyway, Isaac also posted comments from the post, including some of mine. But not all of them…so I thought I’d collect them here. And what the hey, I’ve reproduced some comments from others on the thread too so this seems a bit more coherent.
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So to start, here’s Isaac’s (abbreviated) take on the a panel from Ghost World.

At the beginning of the chapter, Clowes reveals Enid to be deeply clueless about the outside world in a way that rewrites a lot of her seeming savvy in the previous chapters. Up to this point, Enid has been cool, positioning herself against the stupid, the pretentious, and the lame: “I just hate all these obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers!” (Is that Enid talking, or Lloyd Llewellyn?) But then the change-up:

Enid’s fun to hang out with, but how seriously can we take a high-school graduate who doesn’t know what the G.O.P. is, or what it would mean for a lobbyist to be in bed with them? Don’t we have to think of her as uninformed, immature, and a little lame? This is the panel that gets us ready to think badly of Enid’s prank on “Bearded Windbreaker.” It’s also the moment, at least in my reading experience, when we start looking at these girls from the outside, as characters, instead of seeing the semi-grotesque world through their eyes. In other words, this is the panel in which Clowes moves away from Lloyd Llewellyn and Like a Velvet Glove territory and starts to make David Boring and Ice Haven possible.

I replied to Isaac and to other folks on the thread:

I read it that Enid knows what the headline means too. And in that reading, of course, it’s Isaac, not Enid, who’s insufficiently hip and a little clueless, yes? (Though, of course, in Isaac’s reading, it’s me who is unhip/clueless.)

I think trapping/implicating the reader in these questions of knowing/not knowing, hipness/not hipness, and the subsequent arguments about who is more moral and who is more superior is an important part of what Ghost World is about. In general, I find those questions tedious and irritating, which is one of the (many) reasons I don’t care for this book.

Jeet then quotes Charles Hatfield’s comment.

Noah: you’re not engaging with what Charles actually wrote above. As he says, “Seriously, the moral arguments in Ghost World are not reducible to who’s hip and who’s not. There are questions of empathy and responsibility there that exceed, I bet, even what Clowes expected from the work when he was midstream.” That’s a serious reading of Ghost World which you have to grapple with. you can’t just repeat your earlier point about the book just being about “who is and is not a sufficiently or overly knowledgeable hipster.” To simply repeat your earlier point when it’s been challenged in a serious and convincing way is to write criticism that is, to borrow a phrase, “tedious and irritating.”

Me:

I’m not writing criticism! I’m engaging jovially in a comments thread.

I don’t want to derail the thread with a grudge match. You want to engage in a knock-down drag out, come over to HU and talk about Human Diastrophism. We’re waiting for you!

Oh, all right. Sigh.

I don’t find the questions of empathy and moral responsibility Charles is talking about either engaging or enlightening. As I’ve written about the book elsewhere, what I mostly get from it is an older male creator acting out his attraction/repulsion for younger girls. I think that fits this panel quite well. The girls are looking off panel at the reader/author, whose paper it is. The paper is about the Grand Old Party (coded old and surely male) performing metaphorically sexual acts. Clowes has Enid ironically refusing to understand the headline — a sexual disavowal, which actually means she understands quite well this headline about perverse sex with grand old men. The knowledge/not knowledge binary is a tease and a provocation; the moral experience Isaac articulates in which we are able to feel superior (and/or possibly inferior) to Enid is part of the (sexualized) satisfaction we (the grand old party) get in pretending that Enid knows and does not know us.

Happy?

Damn it; hard to disengage when I get started. I wear that “tedious and irritating” badge proudly….

So just a couple more notes. First, I don’t think this is something Clowes is unaware of. He picks his details carefully; the Grand Old Party is really not just a random choice.

Second — in this reading, Clowes emphatically gets the laugh on Enid. Enid is saying she doesn’t understand the headline in order to show she understands it; she gets the stupid metaphor. But the trick is, that stupid metaphor isn’t just a random paper lying around; it’s a snide sexual remark implicating Enid which has been placed there by Clowes. Enid gets the diagetic point, but not the extra-diagetic point. She’s attempting to assert her control and wisdom, but Clowes shows us she’s just his cipher. In this way Isaac gets the details wrong but the essence right; this is a panel which sneers at Enid for her lack of sophistication. I don’t find that particularly morally insightful or uplifting though.

All right, I’m really done. Sorry about that.

Jeet responds.

@Noah. “what I mostly get from it is an older male creator acting out his attraction/repulsion for younger girls”: this is a pretty good example of “the intentional fallacy” in action. I don’t think its very fruitful to judge works of art by what the author’s presumed motives are. In fact, I don’t even think it’s possible for anyone (even Clowes) to know what the motives of his art art, or what the motives of any art are.

The issue of “moral questioning” that Charles raised have to do with the friendship between Enid and Becky, and also how the two girls treat other people. This is something that can be discussed by looking at what Clowes wrote and drew. It doesn’t really contribute to the conversation to speculate about Clowes motives, unless by chance you are a telepath. If you are a telepath, then tell us and continue to enlighten us about the secret, ulterior motive of artists. On the other hand, if you are a telepath, you could use your power in more frutiful ways, perhaps by uncovering government and corporate corruption.

Isaac adds:

Jeet:

I’m not really interested in whether Clowes personally thinks Enid is hawt, but I find that I am interested in at least one aspect of an author’s perceivable psychology (intentional or not): as his interests and ideas shift, the themes of the works shift. If I find myself responding more to the ideas in David Boring than in Like a Velvet Glove, and I know they’re written by the same person, I want to see when those new ideas started to develop.

Noah seems to be caricaturing those ideas as merely an older (not yet middle aged) cartoonist pining for teenage indie tail and then rejecting the notion of jailbait.

For me, or at least in my reading of Ghost World, it’s about more than (or less than?) simple attraction to scornful ugly-cute teenage girls: instead, it’s about Clowes as a writer moving out of a period of personal grotesquerie and universal satire (as in “I Hate You Deeply”) and into a period of social observation, where he becomes interested in writing characters.

There might be a grain of truth in Noah’s lampooning—remember the way that Clowes has Enid show up admiringly at a zine-store signing in “Punk Day,” then draws himself looking like a seedy dork—but I think the real crux of the matter is artistic development beyond teenage scorn and hipster one-upmanship. This is a lot closer to Charles’s notion of ethical stakes than Noah is allowing. And I think Clowes makes that turn in “Hubba Hubba.”

Jeet:

@Isaac. I find your reading of Ghost World as a liminal work in Clowes’ oeuvre to be compelling and persuasive. But seeing Ghost World as being thematically focused on Clowes’ own evolution as an artist is a bit different than the type of argument Noah is making, which is that we can divine Clowes’ motives for doing the type of art he does. Your reading of Clowes is based on looking at the trajectory of his career, on looking at the comics itself. I think Noah’s approach is based on some sort of pretense to telepathic powers.

Isaac:

Well, you could call that a pretense to telepathic powers, or you could call it Freudian criticism…

As I said, though, I don’t think that “Did the cartoonist want to jump these fictional characters?” is the most interesting question we could be asking about a text.

Me:

I like that your accusations of intentional fallacy are built on intentional fallacy. You presume I started from an idea of what Clowes was doing and read back into the comic. In fact it’s signals in the comic that led to my reading. “Clowes” figures in the text as an author function. He does it very insistently — he’s even in the book, as Isaac says. He’s in that panel; it’s his paper (and the reader’s too, quite possibly). I don’t know what Clowes had in his head, of course, but I know how he figures himself in the text and I can do a reading based on that.

You seem to think that you’re performing some sort of advanced literary technique by refusing to think about the self-reflexivity of the text. That’s characteristic; you tend to be fairly uncomfortable with readings that aren’t straightforward. But Clowes is very much a pomo writer; he’s playing games with the intentionality you want to put off limits.

I don’t think Clowes wanted to jump the characters necessarily, or only, by the by. It’s about inhabiting them too. Sadism is not just lust; it’s control.

There are lots of older men in Ghost World, incidentally. Clowes himself shows up, but there are various other figures wandering around the edges. And of course Enid’s name is Clowes’ name. Seeing her as and Becky as doppelgangers (doppelmeyers?) is hardly a counter-intuitive reading.

But you haven’t done a reading yourself, Jeet, serious or otherwise. If you want to take on the panel and respond to my criticism (other than with ad hominem petulance) it seems like you’d need to try to deal with the following: the reason that that title was chosen on the newspaper; the reason the panel is framed so as to suggest that the paper is the reader’s (or Clowes’); the role of knowledge in the panel, and how it accounts for both Isaac’s reading (Enid doesn’t know) and the other readings here (Enid does know) — and ideally also you should account for the hints throughout that Enid and Becky are Clowes.

I presume you’ll just indulge in more indignation and then punt, but I’ll live in hope.

Isaac, in terms of what’s more interesting in the text, morality or jumping bones. Do you really see Clowes’ moral vision as especially serious or insightful compared to folks who actually care about that stuff — George Eliot, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, even Dickens? It all just seems pretty thin gruel by those standards to me — the characterization is thin, the “morals” such as they are boil down to “don’t be a prick” — I just don’t see it as an especially powerful or interesting moral vision. Do we really need someone to tell us that it’s cruel to prank call people? I mean, this isn’t Lydgate being tempted here. The moral questions aren’t what’s interesting; what’s interesting is watching Enid be taught A Lesson.

To me, that’s because the energy of the book is not invested in morality as morality; rather it’s invested in morality as a lever of desire and power, about the experience of condemnation and wanting to be condemned. That’s why you’re reading of this panel isn’t really about morality. It’s about knowledge, and it’s about contempt. And about Clowes, of course.

Isaac:

I don’t think I’m trying to compare Clowes to Tolstoy here. I’m comparing “early Clowes” to “later Clowes”—and noticing a difference that has to do with the position (moral, ethical, social, whatever) of the satirist or the satirical impulse.

Early in Ghost World, as in the Lloyd Llewellyn shorts, the satirist is impervious; beginning in “Hubba Hubba,” making fun of people starts to seem like a sign of personal insecurity and even a certain sort of naïveté. I think that’s an interesting development.

Me:

Well, fair enough. I think comparing to Tolstory (or the Wire, or whatever) is kind of interesting, but no reason why you should have to, of course.

Rob Clough:

To tie Isaac’s claims back into what I said, Ghost World represents the turning point between unfettered, unimpeachable satirist and a more self-aware artist and person understanding what their constant sneering represents. I agree 100% that Enid is a Clowes stand-in, but the issue is not even controlling a young girl, but rather exploring and expressing the understanding of how much self-loathing she (and he) possess at that point in time. Clowes drawing himself in as a grotesque, pathetic toad isn’t just a good gag, I would argue, but an expression of his own self-loathing.

Enid being taught a lesson regarding pranks isn’t a simple control/corrective of a young female, it’s Clowes castigating himself for indulging in the pleasures of simple cruelty as a way of coping with alienation.

Lastly, while I agree with Isaac that Clowes’ character work became much sharper starting with Ghost World, I would argue that nearly every one of his characters represented some autobiographical aspect of his life, personality and/or desires. Even with all of the pomo deflections, Clowes’ work is deeply personal.

Jeet:

I think Clough pretty much hits the nail on the head in sharpening the point Isaac originally made that Enid is a way for Clowes to reexamine his earlier artistic practices. I’d go further and note that their is a contradiction between saying that Enid is Clowes’ alter-ego and saying that he’s using her as a punching bag to work out his revulsion/attraction to young women. Yet the same critic can hold these two positions simultaneously.

Me:

Hey Jeet. Not a contradiction.

Sadism is about control. As such, it’s often about fantasies of actually inhabiting or being the other person. So imagining someone as your alter ego can be a way to inhabit them and destroy them. Basic rape fantasy. And sure, it seems logically contradictory if you’re writing an algorithm…but human beings and their fictions aren’t algorithms (unless you have more faith in the Turing Test than I do, I guess.)

Anyway — truce, maybe? I really don’t need to be mad at anybody for liking Ghost World. I don’t agree, and I in general don’t see art the way you do, but it’s not a big deal. It’s fun to talk about the differences, and I appreciate you getting me to figure out my reading of that panel more explicitly.

Rob, you’re point that Clough’s moralism is directed at himself is interesting, and I think it’s certainly part of what’s going on. But why externalize that self as a young girl? Self-loathing and misogyny aren’t mutually exclusive, surely. You can hate yourself for loving and love yourself for hating all at once. And the gross, pathetic toad who is controlling/watching/inhabiting the attractive young thing is a ubiquitous fantasy in itself. Self-loathing can be a pleasure too.

And I’ll conclude with a comment by Caro:

I think I’m hesitant in general about the “shift through time” linearity of your argument, Isaac. Ouevre questions aside, I didn’t find Ghost World to have nearly as linear a narrative trajectory as the shift you’re describing suggests — I read it in the Eightballs (long after their original publication) and it was very nested and recursive to me, with each episode covering very similar ground save very subtle, significant, changes as Enid matured. There were constant metaphorical returns as well — really a structural tour de force. (I was apathetic about it, actually, until I got deeply invested in disagreeing with Noah’s reading from our roundtable last year.)

I still disagree with Noah, but also with Jeet — there’s nothing contradictory about representing a character from both inside and outside. Although I don’t see the same objectification here that Noah does, I think the objectification that is there is of a piece with the identity crisis at the heart of the narrative — the blurring/confusion of self and other — “desire is the desire of the Other” — it is Freud playing the piano there on the back cover of Issue #17…

Thanks to Isaac again for starting this conversation. Revisiting reminds me why I’m really sorry that the Panelists is shuttering.

Toth, Internalized

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by James Romberger

Since I am precisely the type of brutally obsessive yet overly sensitive observer that qualifies me to write for The Hooded Utilitarian, I am unable to ignore a few references I have seen online to my “fannish adoration” of the work of genius cartoonist Alex Toth. Answering them also gives me the opportunity to address some critical shortfalls that I have seen in the literature about Toth.

I do feel that Toth’s work is head and shoulders above that of most artists who have worked in the medium thus far. I and many other artists find Toth to be a great teacher. It is instructive to figure out how and why his odd approach works so well. Artists may not see his art in the same way as someone who is not an artist, but there are also many, many non-artists who appreciate the depth of Toth’s skills—and some who do not.

A critique that is often leveled at Toth should be dispensed with. Unfortunately, in order to appreciate his work, one must overlook the quality of the writing in most of the stories he drew. That can be said for every four-color comic book artist that worked with writers. But some seem to blame the artist for this. Even though Toth had higher artistic standards than his contemporaries, he was not any more responsible than they were for the texts they worked with. If not for bad scripts, there would be no Toth comic book art and in fact, there would be no comics at all.

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Review: Dan Clowes’ Wilson

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Synopsis with significant spoilers. “Wilson is a big-hearted slob, a lonesome bachelor, a devoted father and husband, an idiot, a sociopath, a delusional blowhard, a delicate flower.” His misanthropic existence is filled with misdirected rage and a search for meaning and connection. His closest companion is his pet dog, Pepper, but his father’s death prompts him to leave her in a quest to find his ex-wife, Pippi, and his daughter, Claire. He finds them both with the aid of a private investigator but this fleeting happiness ends when he is imprisoned for kidnapping his daughter. When he is finally released after a period of 6 years, he discovers that his dog has died. His ex-wife is already dead by her own hand. His one time dog-sitter, Shelley, becomes his only consistent companion. Wilson is briefly reunited with his daughter and discovers that he has a grandson. The connection is short-lived and she will only communicate with him through the distance afforded by an internet connection. The closing page shows him at an uncertain rest while contemplating the fall of raindrops on his window.

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Ghost World: Hateable Girls, Part Eleventy-Billion

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‘Show, don’t tell’ the saying goes, and that’s what Clowes does here.  Ghost World, as those who’ve been reading along are aware, is the story of two teenaged girls fresh from highschool named Enid and Rebecca.  Ghost World chronicles some episodic interludes in their relationship and Enid’s life.

With its purposefully ugly art, limited color schemes, Satanists, cafe settings, music references, and f-bombs, this comic is painfully edgy.  The whole thing might as well scream: I’m new!  Different!  Hip!

And maybe the art is, maybe the setting is, but honestly I don’t really care.  The story is pathetically old school.

Clowes depicts the two girls, Enid and Rebecca, as being shallow shallow shallow.  They lead boring, directionless lives.  They like to make prank calls.  They pick on each other.  Enid, in particular, is full of loathing towards others.  When Rebecca challenges her to name one guy she finds attractive and would sleep with she says, wait for it!

David Clowes.

No, really, she does.  Self-insert Mary Sue-ism!  Ewww.

It’s one thing to show a set of characters as essentially problematic and unlikeable, but if you’re going to do it, and you’re not one of the group you’re deriding, then you’d better show them accurately and not rig the game in your own favor.

Which is why Ghost World so annoys me.  Clowes’s teenaged girls don’t behave like teenaged girls.  Here we have Enid telling Rebecca a story about meeting an old asshole, Ellis, and his kiddie raper friend.  Ellis ‘humorously’ suggests that the kiddie-raper check her out, since she’s only 18.

Rebecca’s response is shown below:

TakeMe

First of all, take a look at that body language.  As someone who wears a skirt from time to time, let me tell you that girls rarely spread their legs like that while wearing a skirt.  For one thing, it’s flat out uncomfortable.  For another, we get nagged about spreading our legs or showing off our panties or what-have-you.  Even in pants, spreading the legs is something that is usually done when one feels very comfortable and safe.  It’s not something that a girl does when she’s just heard some bozo suggest a child-molester hit on her best friend.

This panel is not an accident.  Look, I don’t like Ghost World, but Clowes has some drawing chops and he portrays body language effectively enough when he wants to. So what’s going on here?

A teenaged girl is not going to open her legs wide in a ‘take me big boy’ response, so why is she drawn this way?  I can only assume that Clowes thinks a girl would have that response or because he wants to titillate the reader with Rebecca’s spread legs.  Either option is unpleasant.

Then there’s the “lesbo” masturbation scene.

I’ve noticed that one of the ways Clowes mocks Enid is by having her mock people for something and then later having Enid do that mockable thing herself.  Enid makes fun of a guy who she used to have something of a teen-romance with in high school.  She says that he probably called her and jacked off while she talked.  Mock mock mock ew say Enid and Rebecca.  Then Enid visits an adult bookstore and picks up a fetish Batwoman hat and calls to tell Rebecca about the adventure.  While on the phone with Rebecca, Enid takes off all her clothes and gropes herself while looking in the mirror (but doesn’t tell Rebecca).  Mock mock mock.

It’s this weird circle jerk, but it doesn’t ring true.  It comes off to me as something Clowes wants to think teenaged girls do, much in the same way that the high school boys I knew hoped the girls in the gym showers got up to steamy hanky panky.  Never mind that in reality gym showers were places of horror, shame, body-fat hatred, silent prayers that you weren’t having your period (and if you were, that no one would find out–good luck with that) and tears. To the guys it was all a happy fantasy of hot girl on girl action.

Why is Clowes doing this?  I say it’s to do two things at once: make fun of Enid for being a jerk and to fantasize about her and Rebecca in a sexual way.

Here’s a thought experiment.  Take out the reference to Sassy and replace it with Lucky.  Remove the punk green hair and replace it with a blonde ponytail.  Switch the swearwords from fucking cunts to snooty bitches.  Remove Bob Skeeter the astrologist and replace him with Ned the computer nerd.  Pretty soon, if you took away the hipster faux-literary trappings and replaced them with mainstream teen story trappings, you’d have a boring and cliched tale of a couple of teenage girls who everyone loves to hate (and wants to date).

But maybe it’s not as OK as it used to be to hate girls just because they’re blond and pretty and not fucking you.  So, instead of going that route, make the girls “real” by changing their outfits and the bit characters and the scenery.  Then it’s not a cliched misogynistic screed, it becomes a “true” tale of how girls “really are”.

But it isn’t quite a tale of a guy who can’t get some, is it?  No, because Clowes draws the main character wanting him.  How much more proof could there be that this is a story about girls who are wanted/hated and the line between those two things?

There’s a fine literary tradition all about how women are shallow creatures and female friendships are suspicious and smothering.  But if you’re a old dude perving on the sweet young things when you’re arguing it, it looks a teensy bit suspicious, is what I’m sayin’.

So let’s take a look at the so-called emotional growth and story progression of their relationship.  What do they say and what do they do? Enid is thinking of going to college (to become someone new) and Rebecca decides to travel with her.  What do they say about this?  That it’s unhealthy.

Let’s take a look at that.  It’s unhealthy for a friend to accompany a friend on a quest to become someone new.

Do you think that’s true?  Because I sure as hell don’t.  I’ve gone on several quests to make myself better, move someplace new (emotionally or physically), and been enriched and enlivened by the people who are by my side, traveling those paths with me.  But Clowes, speaking through his characters, labels this as kind of creepy.

So what, exactly, does Clowes display as  Enid’s growth?  What is her progression?

If we take a look at the final pages, we see Enid in a new outfit.  We’ve learned in this comic that changing outfits means changing who you are (at least for Enid), so let’s take a look at what’s she changed into.  She’s well-groomed, with smooth hair done like Jackie Kennedy, and she’s wearing a neat, fifties housewife ensemble and carrying a hatbox shaped purse.  Examine that for a moment.

Does this hark back to a desire on Enid’s part?  Not as mentioned/drawn in the text, so we’re left interpreting the image in the way our society means it.  Nothing says housewife quite the way a fifties outfit does.  Is there anything (besides June Cleaver) that fifties suits and haircuts bring to mind, visually speaking?

Not that I know of.

What is this journey, anyway?  It’s a journey of Enid’s current life, and it ends when Enid steps on a bus.  What does that symbolize, within the context of story that Clowes has built?  Erasure of self.  Clowes likes to talk about it as creating someone new, but again and again he denies that Enid wants to be anyone specific.  At the end, presumably after her emotional change (indicated by the dress, the diner voyeur scene and the bus) he gives her no identity except that of a very stereotypical fifties housewife.

That’s the “growth” that he lays out.

Ponder that for a moment and ask yourself whether it is, in any substantial way, a positive view of Enid.  A positive view of girls, period.  Whether it is anything besides the author saying, “Girls like Enid eventually cease to exist“.  Not only does the author change them (into something trite), the girl herself wants to be anyone but herself.  Herself is so awful she cannot be.

That’s a pretty hateful message when you get right down to it, and I cannot look at that as growth, as anything besides old fashioned misogyny and a desire to turn Enid into, bluntly, a wife.  A person who exists not for herself, but who exists in relation to a man.*

But maybe I’m wrong.  It’s been known to happen, and a single outfit is a small thing to base an entire textual interpretation on, right?

Right.  Let’s look at the diner scene, which is the last line in the book, and the closure of Enid’s relationship with Rebecca.  What does Enid say?

She says, “You’ve turned into a beautiful young woman.”

A beautiful young woman.

Look at those words.  Consider the perspective of them.

Who is saying this?  What is the relation of the woman in those words?  To what aspect of the person are these words referring?

Enid (or Clowes through the character of Enid) considers this the mark of passage for Rebecca, the outside view, the praise.  But what kind of praise is it?

It’s the praise of someone outside the woman, wanting her sexually, and has nothing at all to do with the woman’s internal desires, personal happiness, emotional growth, interests, community, relationships, or personhood.  No, to say ‘She’s a beautiful young woman’ is to say she’s sexually desirable by an outsider.

And you know, as a bland statement of fact, it’s not so bad.  But as a statement of a woman’s journey through a friendship and her creation of a new ideal self?  That’s really fucking shallow, objectifying, and creepy.

This is not a tale of powerful female friendships post highschool.  Nor is it a tale of emotional growth.  It’s the same, tired story of how girls are shallow and their friendships are incestuous and unhealthy and most importantly how they need to become not-themselves.  Gee, that’s deep.  I’ve never heard teen girls and what they care about called shallow before!  How original!

* Yes, I’m well aware that plenty of women are happily married.  That’s not what I’m talking about, so let’s not go there.  What I’m talking about is defining a woman only as her role in regards to men.

Note number two: I was an odd clothes wearing weirdo who read strange magazines, once upon a time, so I’m well familiar voices and inner worries of this group.  Just so you know.

Enid Shylock (Ghost World Roundtable)

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Shaenon Gaerrity weighs in on our Ghost World Roundtable. I’ll quote a couple of chunks.

Noah Berlatsky compares Ghost World unfavorably to Ariel Schrag’s coming-of-age trilogy, pointing out how well Schrag captures the intensity of adolescence: “Ariel’s difficulty wasn’t that her world was fading out, but that it was too sharply coming into focus, and there was too much of it. It’s the intensity of her emotions — her crushes, her attachments to friends, and, indeed, her attachment to her art — that makes her life a misery. Sometimes. And, then, at other times, that same intensity becomes a source of strength and beauty and excitement.” That’s an astute assessment of Schrag’s work, but I don’t know if it’s accurate as a sweeping assessment of adolescence. Yes, the intensity can result in the richness of experience Berlatsky sees in Schrag’s comics. But it can also inspire a bleak, apocalyptic, end-of-the-road feeling, which is why teenagers are so attracted to death and morbidity. Teach any writing class for teens, and you’ll have to wade through interminable whines about being numb and hopeless and “unable to feel anything anymore”–and, worse, you’ll probably recognize your own teenage writing in it. Adults feel more, or more easily, than teenagers do. Teenage writers like Schrag, who are able to dive into their lives and confront their emotions fearlessly, are rare and uniquely fascinating….

The one area where Ghost World does fall short, one that several folks on the roundtable have already noted, is Clowes’s failure to imagine any sexuality for Enid. Berlatsky writes that Enid is implausible as a teenage girl because “she’s uninterested in discussing her crushes,” which unfortunately comes off as a bit insulting to teenage girls: gee, if she’s not talking about love, how can you even tell she’s a girl? In fact Enid and Rebecca do talk about boys often, but Enid’s contributions to the discussion are, as Rebecca points out, either negative or disinterested. There are only the briefest hints of what Enid might find attractive: she describes her hipster ideal to Rebecca, then imagines Dan Clowes as the embodiment of that fantasy, only to be brutally disappointed by the reality. Meanwhile, she actively discourages Rebecca’s real-life romantic interests. It’s okay for a teenage girl to be timid about sex and hide it behind bravado and fantasy, but there should be some indication that she at least looks at guys.

It’s interesting that Shaenon accuses me of stereotyping teen girls…but in order to do that she kind of has to arrive at the point where she thinks Ariel Schraeg is somehow a less representative portrayal of teen girls than Enid Coleslaw.

Moreover, I think Shaenon’s point about Enid’s sexuality, or lack thereof, is astute…but I think it’s a more crippling problem for the book than she acknowledges. Specifically, I think Enid’s lack of sexuality is precisely why her whole existential dilemma rings so false. At least for myself as an adolescent, I remember quite vividly that my sense of alienation and despair were very much tied up in sexual and romantic impulses that I wasn’t prepared or able to deal with. I don’t think that’s atypical, and it’s why Enid’s alienation — which is tied up more in nostalgia for her past than in desire— seems so entirely wrong. Nostalgia is the fetish of the middle-aged, not the young.

I also wonder about this. “Adults feel more, or more easily, than teenagers do.”

I just don’t think that’s true. Teenagers may have more difficulty parsing social codes and sublimating their emotions in socially acceptable ways. But they certainly don’t feel less, nor do I agree that they feel less easily. I think it’s insulting to suggest they do, honestly. You know, “hath not a teenager eyes? Organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Teenagers aren’t all that much different than, you know, people. In that vein, I think kinukitty’s point is worth repeating

“I don’t recognize them as high school girls, but that is probably secondary to the fact that I don’t even recognize them as human.”

Ghost World Roundtable: The Comics Outside the Story & Other Things

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[Editorial Update: This is a post in a roundtable on Ghost World. The first, by kinukitty is here. The second by Charles Reece can be found here. Richard’s contribution can be found here and Noah’s take here.]

I bought a hardcover collection of Ghost World sometime in 1997 because I enjoyed Dan Clowes’ story in serialization when I first read it in the pages of Eightball.  “Always nice to have a hardy, well-packaged edition for future reference,” I thought to myself. I don’t think I’ve cracked open the pages of the hardcover more than a couple of times in the intervening years.

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Somebody Else’s Ghost (Ghost World Roundtable)

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I was interested in setting up a Ghost World roundtable because it’s a book I’ve had mixed feelings about. Well, that’s not exactly right. I’ve always pretty much hated it, actually. But I’ve had some trouble figuring out why I hated it. Which is unusual for me; as a rule my bile flows fairly glibly. I mean, yes, there are some loathsome aesthetic choices — the heinous blue-green spot color being the most obvious. Beyond that, though, I’ve never been able to quite wrap my head around what about the book so thoroughly irritates me.

In this regard,Kinukitty’s post Charles’ essay and Richard’s post have been helpful. Though kinukitty disliked the book, Charles liked it, and Richard had mixed feelings, their reactions actually have a good bit of overlap. For all of them, the book and its characters are defined in large part by absence. Kinukitty says of the characters “I don’t recognize them as high school girls, but that is probably secondary to the fact that I don’t even recognize them as human. They are not so much characters as collections of anecdotes that are intended to be cool and ironic… I think Ghost World is unpleasant in a way that winds up being pointless because there’s no there there.” Richard notes that Enid eventually heads towards adulthood, but that she displays “a maturity without content, which invites that the reader fill in the blanks with their own experiences.” Charles comes at a somehwat similar point from a different angle, arguing that for Enid, “Mass culture has even detached us from our detachment.” In other words, the book’s pointlessnes and Enid’s lack of a center is, for Charles, thematized; it’s an example of our modern, or postmodern dilemma. Ghost World is a world where there is no meaning; where you can’t even recognize others as human, where we’re all just collections of anecdotes, alienated from our own stories.

I think Charles has also made a very astute point — though not quite the one he intends — in linking Ghost World to the work of John Barth. Clowes is often discussed in terms of filmmakers like David Lynch, I think, but he’s always struck me as being more allied with contemporary fiction — not least because of his flatness. Lynch, for all his auteurishness, has a lot of pulp at his heart; he likes the flamboyance of horror or heist films or psychological thrillers. He may make films about emptiness and the break-up of identity, but the films themselves are filled with pyrotechnics and a weird kind of life. They’re not a blue-green blank.

Literary fiction, on the other hand, often is. “Middle-aged academic types” as Charles quips, abound; it’s a genre of mid-life crisis. And indeed, Barth’s The End of the Road, from Charles description, sounds very much like…well, here’s what Charles says about it:

Horner is a middle-aged academic type who’s managed to think himself into a hole, not seeing any potential action as better grounded than another – sort of an infinite regress of self. Thus, he’s sitting in a bus station in a state of existential paralysis, not able to even come up with a good reason to get on a bus and leave his former (non-) life behind.

That’s tricked out with intellectual filigree, but basically it’s a mid-life crisis, right? Garden variety despair at getting halfway through your existence and realizing you haven’t done all that stuff you wanted to do when you were a kid; you’re not on top of the world, you’re just some bourgeois scmuck like every other bourgeois schmuck, so you sit there, unable to go forward, unable to go back. Okay, now, hurry up and write a novel explaining that it’s not just you who’s lame — it’s a universal, existential condition!

So hold that thought, and let’s consider Enid for a moment. Enid is in almost every respect an extremely odd teenaged girl (as kinukitty points out). She seems acidly alienated from pop culture and music. She’s uninterested in discussing her crushes, or, indeed, discussing enthusiasms of any sort. She has an extremely guy-like instrumental approach to sex, based largely on scoring points and talking to her friends afterwards. And she turns for solace, not to booze, or drugs, or sex, or crushes, or pop songs, or movies, but rather to totems of her childhood; random theme parks she visited as a kid, random toys; half-remembered kids songs. Enid is desperately nostalgic for her youth — which is more than a little weird when you’re only, what? 17?

Oh, yeah, and she has a fascination with creepy borderline psychos. Who are older. And male.

Not that it’s impossible that a teenaged girl would act this way, of course — people are different after all — and certainly lots of young girls are fascinated with creepy older guys. But…well, for example, Ariel Schrag is more or less in Enid’s bourgeois demographic. And her adolescence, based on her autobiographical comics, was certainly filled with anguish of various sorts — her parents divorced, she went through a painful process of questioning her sexual identity and she had a number of extremely traumatic relationships.

But…Ariel didn’t live in a ghost world. She had lots of serious problems, but they were problems that you have when you’re young — which is to say they were problems caused by not being able to understand, or process, or sort out a cascade of emotions and desires. Ariel’s difficulty wasn’t that her world was fading out, but that it was too sharply coming into focus, and there was too much of it. It’s the intensity of her emotions — her crushes, her attachments to friends, and, indeed, her attachment to her art — that makes her life a misery. Sometimes. And, then, at other times, that same intensity becomes a source of strength and beauty and excitement.

Now, that second bit doesn’t have to happen necessarily, and doesn’t for a lot of adolescents. Youth can be great (which is why people romanticize it at times) but it can also really suck, and the sucking can easily outweigh the good stuff, and does for lots of people. But the point I think is, when adolescence is miserable (as it absolutely can be) it tends to be miserable the way adolescence is miserable, and not miserable like middle-age.

Ariel Schrag wrote her autobiography when she was an adolescent, and that’s how it reads. Dan Clowes wrote Ghost World in his mid-thirties…and that is so, so, so how it reads. Enid, it seems to me, makes most sense not as an accurate portrayal of a teen girl, but rather as an accurate portrayal of a thirtysomething man enjoying himself by pretending to be a teen girl.

And, indeed, as that, Ghost World is undeniably kind of brilliant. Most of the intellectual content of the book is little more than the clichéd crankery of the past it hipster, bitter that he’s no longer up on all the latest bands, pining for his youth while simultaneously loathing and desiring the young. Put those sentiments in the brain of a college professor and you’ve got just another novel by John Updike…or, perhaps, John Barth. But hand the sentiments off to young girls — that’s kind of genius. Have the girls sneer at Sonic Youth for you; have the girls moon after the detritus of their youth; have them say of each other, with just a touch of condescension, “You’ve grown into a very beautiful young woman.”

Perhaps the most emblematic moment in the book, in this respect, is when Enid meets (a thinly disguised) Clowes himself. This is, to the best of my recollection, the only time in the narrative that Enid expresses an unironic connection to, or enthusiasm for, any piece of contemporary pop culture. Yet, when she sees the “real” Clowes, she is disappointed because nobody else has come to see him and he is “like this old perv.”

Clearly this is supposed to read as self-effacement on Clowes’ part. But I wonder. Enid’s initial fascination (which is in part sexual) is certainly a fairly familiar creator fantasy (“she loves me for my art!”) But even more than the enthusiasm, it seems to me that the disappointment is a kind of sublimated self-aggrandizement. After all, Enid’s let-down is only really possible because her interest in Clowes, like all of her interests, is without content. We never learn what she likes about faux-Clowes, or what it is in his books that inspires her. Who is Enid? She’s no one, a ghost without purchase on her world or her culture. And why is she no one? Whose ghost is she?

enid and clowes

Surely it’s significant that, as this sequence suggests, while Clowes can imagine Enid, Enid can’t imagine Clowes. Indeed, the page reminds us subtly that it is Clowes calling Enid into being; we see her from his perspective first, and only then can she see him. Enid’s self isn’t there not because that’s the way it is for all of us in this sad state of late postmodernity, but simply because her self isn’t hers. She’s somebody else’s mid-life crisis, there to buttress another’s existential vacuum with the weight of her own nonentity.
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Update: Suat’s contribution to the roundtable is now up.