We Hooded Utilitarians agreed to do a roundtable on Ghost World weeks ago. Months, maybe. As if I’d keep track of something like that. The point is that I now have to write something, and I don’t want to.
I don’t like Ghost World, but that isn’t the reason I don’t want to write about it – as everyone knows, few things are more enjoyable than climbing up on the old soap box and bursting forth with a bell-like chorus of disgust or, ideally, righteous indignation. Or, to put a finer point on it, I like to vent. I like to read the venting of others, so long as a certain level of intellectual rigor is maintained. I am comfortable with the negative.
The problem is not that I dislike Ghost World, but that Ghost World makes my stomach hurt. It gives me an icky, slimy feeling. I find it annoying, repulsive, and kind of boring, in more or less that order. It is also ugly, really grindingly ugly.
But not accidentally ugly. This is an important note, albeit a side note, for me. Ghost World intends to be ugly and repulsive. It aims high, and it succeeds. So we will pause to acknowledge this. It is also supposed to be hip and funny and, you know, real, man, and in those areas, I think it fails miserably. Well, I guess it is hip, actually. If hipsters say it’s hip, that makes it hip, by definition. Who am I to argue? I’m willing to give the world at large that point.
What Ghost World is not, however, is funny or real, in the sense of creating characters that seem like fully fleshed human beings. You know, as in real. The supposed humor of this book escapes me completely. I am not a dour and humorless person, by the way. (Just the other day I watched the first six episodes of “Big Bang Theory” and I laughed and laughed. Johnny Galecki! So geekalicious!) Nor am I a Puritan or someone who is too old and uptight to get it. I write porn, for Christ’s sake (well, not for Christ’s sake, obviously) (or not, I guess, but no, it really isn’t), and I was more or less the target audience for Ghost World when it was created. I felt the same way about it then. I pulled it off the shelf in 1997-ish – I have always been willing to consume that which is marketed to me – and I read the first couple of stories, flipped through the rest, skimming dispiritedly, and put the book the hell down, wanting nothing else to do with it.
And that’s pretty much exactly what happened when I tried to read Ghost World again last week. (Hey, I do research. I may not have a real name, but I do have standards.) The main issue, or me, is that I do not recognize the main 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. Makes the whole thing fall kind of flat. Here’s the thing. I understand that I might not be quite the right sort of person for this book – I might not have exactly the right background to really feel the characters. Except that a) I should be, and b) it shouldn’t matter. I was a disaffected, oddly dressed and coiffed, shockingly acerbic teenage girl through much of the eighties. I was “edgy.” (God, I hate that word.) So, there’s that. But, whatever. I don’t think it matters. I have managed to appreciate stories about assassins and pirates and brooding nineteenth-century English nobles trundling bleakly across the moors, and I have very little practical experience with any of that. If the characters are well-written, I can work with it. They don’t even have to be human. Dog POV? Panther? Bring it on. Enid? Not so much.
In fact, my major reaction to Enid is WTF? I mean, some of the details ring a bell. We’ve all slept with gross losers for reasons that were, and remain, fairly obscure to everyone. And who doesn’t enjoy Satanist-spotting? A while back, I was partaking of a high-fat Indian buffet with a friend, and we noticed the people at the next table were doing an interview for a music magazine. The reporter said – quietly, gently – “It must be hard for you sometimes.” And the metal guy, who was eating samosas double-fisted, as if the reporter was perhaps buying lunch, said, “Yeah, man. It’s hard to be a Satanist at Christmas.” Golden, right? See, I have random things in common with Enid, but she never gels as an actual character for me. Dan Clowes might or might not be pleased to know that Enid and Rebecca remind me a little of the tertiary disaffected youth characters in Lost Souls (who probably have names but are only there for atmosphere so no way in hell am I looking it up). I’m referring to Poppy Z. Brite’s vampire book. I know what that means to me, but I’ll let you make of it what you will.
Here is when I should tie everything together and, ideally, make a point of some kind. Cicero’s rules for rhetoric demand it, and you, having followed me this far, deserve it. Sorry about that. I’ve shot my wad. I think Ghost World is unpleasant in a way that winds up being pointless because there’s no there there (since I’m referencing the classics). I don’t mind rolling in the gutter, but I want to get something out of it. Understanding. Comfort. Titillation. Something. I get none of that from Ghost World. All I get is irony, and straight irony, not even chased with Diet Coke, just kind of makes me feel dirty (not in a good way) and irritated. I do look forward to reading the posts about why people like Ghost World. And, even more, I look forward to not thinking about Ghost World again for another twelve years.
Update by Noah: The entire Ghost World Roundtable is here.
Are you writing about the comic book or the movie?
1. The comic is one long story, not a collection of shorts.
2. Enid doesn’t sleep with a loser in the comic book.
I don’t understand why this was written. None of it really made sense.
The comic comes across as very episodic to me, actually. Seeing it as a collection of anecdotes seemed pretty apt.
Enid does sleep with a guy who seems like a loser in the comic (you don’t learn much about him.) It’s a different loser from the movie though (I presume; I haven’t seen the movie. And neither has kinukitty, I”m pretty sure.)
I’ve mostly been indifferent to Ghost World, which is strange, since I love just about everything else Clowes has done, and this is presumably his most popular work. Ghost world – I just never could get what was supposed to be so great about it. Even the movie just seemed kind of random and disjointed, and smacked of having the intimation of meaning without really meaning anything.
Are you talking about the hippie guy Enid loses her virginity to?
Fair enough about the collection of anecdotes.
Apologies for excess snark.
Still though, It seems like if the author has no real idea why she doesn’t like GW, a post about it is out of order.
Yes, I think the hippie guy was the person in question.
She gives several reasons she didn’t like it, many of which I found useful in thinking about my own reaction to it. I also thought it was quite funny, which seems like reason enough to post. If it didn’t work for you, that’s fair enough; lots more on the topic to come….
I quite like this post; “porn for Jesus” had me laughing, and I’m looking forward to the “Making of Americans” roundtable.
It’s a good record of being disconnected from a work you feel like you should be connected to for the half-dozen reasons stated, and a nice counterpoint to the prevailing line at the time that Clowes wrote women brilliantly. I haven’t reread GW with all this in mind– I haven’t read it in 6 or 7 years– but I’m looking forward to rereading it through this lens.
The reviewer (Gluey Tart?) sounds like Enid to me. Coincidentally, I just reread Ghost World after a number of years, and I really admire it. I don’t find it humorous (and I don’t think it was meant to be), but true to life & beautifully plotted & drawn. To me it’s about the awkward burden of being “hip”, that I went through in my teens, and that thins as one matures, relationships change, one leaves home, etc. Enid & Rebecca (and Enid’s dad & stepmother) feel very real to me. The scene where they are crying after their fight is just devastating.
I agree with the reviewer that the art is deliberately off-putting, though I wouldn’t call it ugly. Like most all of Clowes’ work, I think it evokes the sterility of the suburbs.
I really liked the movie too, but it’s so different from the comic it might as well have a different name.
I’d always thought that GW was intended as a satire/indictment of hipsterism – which may just show how difficult it can be to read authorial intent. Maybe it’s the original context in which I read it, which was serialized and following directly on the heels of ‘Velvet Glove,’ which may be the most ironically detached comic of all time.
True that it was very episodic. I remember being fairly surprised that it was supposed to be a continuing narrative, in the end. Turns out the film is more successful in that regard, because it’s well cast and has a stronger through-line, without losing much of the comic’s point.
Since HU is now being hosted by TCJ.com, it might be useful to note that the most detailed contemporaneous review of “Ghost World” was in TCJ #186 and was written by Christopher Brayshaw. Much of that review concerns Clowes’ storytelling skills but he starts and ends off by addressing Clowes’ take on kitsch. I would ask Brayshaw for permission to scan in the pages for those who don’t own the issue but he’s nowhere to be found on the web (I think).
I remember finding “Ghost World” to be a disappointment, after being repeatedly told that it was just the kind of thing that someone like me would like, and then suffering through about 10 years of being asked over and over again why “someone like me” didn’t like it. I don’t feel nearly strongly enough about it to argue with anyone who loves it, just mildly confused why I didn’t get out of it what so many others apparently did.
In other words, it’s a relief to hear from someone else who supposedly “should” have liked GW, but didn’t.
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Charlie Hancock says:
The reviewer (Gluey Tart?) sounds like Enid to me.
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Really. what could be a more utterly Enid-ish line than “I was ‘edgy.’ (God, I hate that word.)”?
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Ng Suat Tong says:
Since HU is now being hosted by TCJ.com…
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(??? Notices the dates on the posts) Shucks! Here I was looking forward to the Ghost World Roundtable.
Are there other HU threads for that roundtable accessible, Noah?
There’s a link in the post! But if you can’t find it…the whole roundtable is here.
“I am not a dour and humorless person, by the way. (Just the other day I watched the first six episodes of “Big Bang Theory” and I laughed and laughed. Johnny Galecki! So geekalicious!)”
was this sarcasm? or was this article written by somebody that actually enjoys the shlockfest that is Big Bang Theory?
Ghost world is a wonderful story of trying to find your identity as a teenage girl (grrl) in a world that generally represented teenage girls as boy obsessed idiots Ghost World was very very important, Ghost world the movie still retains some of what makes the book great I reckon it is a movie more about a Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar type misfit trying to find romance with the help of a Enid which is sad since it shifts the focus from unrepresented accurate depictions of apathetic teen girls to overrepresented nerdy slightly creepy men (like those lovable goof-balls in The Big Bang theory hyuk hyuk).
I can understand why people wouldn’t like or could criticise either the book or the film, but not for any of the reasons that Gluey Tart mentions.
Lots of folks enjoy the big bang theory; it’s the most popular show on television I think. (I find it somewhat funny.)
I think Ghost World is supposed to be (partly) discomfiting and it’s not trying to serve its characters’ foibles up as adorable delicacies like the geeks in Big Bang Theory. Every cultural point of reference in this—blog post? article? essay?—…sitcoms, brooding Englishmen on the moors, pirates, animal characters, teenage vampire novels—refers to an easy, compulsively consumable snack genre. You know the form, you know the rules, the only mystery is the way it’s going to reach its goal and hit the tropes along the way. A book like Ghost World, however, will make you feel weird, leave you uncertain who to root for or what you’re supposed to get out of it… it writes its own rules. It challenges you. It’s nice, I guess, that every perspective gets a hearing on the internet, and this one is definitely out there.
I’m pretty skeptical of the claim that lit fic (which is what Ghost World is, more or less) is not a consumable. You can purchase it, right? And it provides exactly what you’re supposed to consume lit fic for; uncertainty, ambiguity, all the markers that let you know you’re a serious consumer seriously consuming the lives of oh-so-ambiguous young women in all their fascinating, uncertain ambiguity.
Not that you shouldn’t be allowed your genre pleasures. From over here, outside the fandom, though, they just don’t necessarily look uncategorizable.
I still don’t get your definition of “literary fiction,” Noah! Earlier, you defined it as self-consciously serious work by writers with university teaching positions, but Clowes obviously isn’t an academic. Also, I don’t think your dislike of academics’ fiction fits so well with some of your comments on the Crumb piece, where you seemed to sneer at the idea that comics are a lowbrow force in opposition to the academy. If college professors suck at creativity, maybe Crumb is right to be skeptical of academic conferences and heckle them like somebody’s drunken uncle.
And are you saying that all art is genre art–even if it consciously attempts not to adhere to genre conventions, that attempt is itself a genre convention? I guess all stories belong to the narrative genre, but I think there’s a big difference between “I’m going to tell a serious story about two teenage girls” and “I’m going to tell a story about someone with fantastic powers and a secret identity who dresses up in a costume and fights criminals.” The first idea could occur to just about any human being who has ever lived, but the second is totally dependent on Siegel and Schuster’s very peculiar idea from 85 years ago and the endless material that expanded on it.
Hey Jack. I think genres are always defined contrdictorily and vaguely, which doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I wrote about lit fic as a genre here.
I think academic work and anti-academic work actually have a lot in common. Status anxiety isn’t all that different, whichever end it’s coming from.