Tag Archives: Ghost World Roundtable

Ghost World, A Slight Return

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I have more to say about Ghost World? I’m surprised, too. It’s all the discussion about whether Enid seems like a real teenage girl or not, and what that means.

You know, people have compared me to Enid since this damned book came out. (McBangle mentioned a similar dilemma in a comment on my original Ghost World post.) I don’t know how many people have started talking to me about it, assuming I must love it, or asked me if they should read it, assuming I must love it, or shared their love of it, assuming I must love it. Everyone is surprised to find out that I don’t love it. I will admit that, as a result, I have a bit of a thing about Ghost World. It makes me touchy. Not touchy as in feely, but touchy as in “Fuck you, you people who think I’m Enid.”

My reaction is a kind of horror, wondering what the hell it is about me that makes people come to this conclusion. Without delving too deeply into the psychology of Kinukitty (because nobody wants that, least of all Kinukitty), I will say that people tend to prefer not being translated into shorthand. I prefer that others at least keep up the social convention of pretending that I am an individual and not the edgy, sarcastic girl dork, perfectly symbolized by Enid and therefore requiring no additional analysis. Yes, yes, this is a bit of an overreaction AND a bit of an oversimplification, yadda yadda. The thing about stereotyping isn’t that it doesn’t tell any truth, though, but that the truth it leaves out is likely to be the really important bit. To the stereotype-ee, at the very least.

I think this speaks to the integrity of the character and thus the storytelling. Others may disagree (and do, in fact), but for me, the point of fiction is to do the opposite of fixing a stereotype. I think the point of fiction is to unveil subtleties and nuances and allow the reader to understand something about a character or situation. It really bothers me when the peaks and crannies go unexplored, as it were. (And, given the sexual aspect of the recent discussion, eewwwww – sorry.) I was about to tie that into how unpleasant it is in real life, too, but the peaks and crannies thing has killed my will to go there.

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.

Ghost World: Pander to Me (Ghost World Roundtable)

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Editorial Update: This is the third post in a roundtable on Ghost World. The first two can be found here and here.

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I read “Ghost World” for the first time last week, and my initial reaction was fairly positive, though it was hard for me to explain why. As I thought more about it, I realized that my appreciation for the comic had little to do with the art. Nor did I care much for the episodic stories, which ranged from mildly amusing to kinda dull. The most appealing aspect of “Ghost World” was the main characters, Enid and Rebecca. And much of their appeal is due to how effectively Daniel Clowes panders to a specific demographic that I belong to: geeks.

It’s easy to see why geeky comic readers love this book. Enid and Rebecca are both social outcasts. They’re alienated, unmotivated, but seem cleverer than everyone else. They’re constantly looking for ways to relieve their boredom (which is difficult when living in an ugly suburban sprawl). Enid, in particular, has mastered the ironic appreciation of pop culture detritus. I can see Enid and Rebecca as the type of kids who would go to a comic convention just to make fun of the fat guys dressed like Green Lantern. And like all teenagers, they’re obsessed with sex but uncomfortable with the idea of adulthood.

If I had read “Ghost World” when I was 18 it would have probably been my favorite comic of all time. I was a typical Gen X’er nerd, an insufferable combination of self-pity and intellectual arrogance. Maybe Daniel Clowes went through a similar phase, because that also sounds like a good description of  Enid. And that’s why I found it odd when Kinukitty argued that Enid was unrelatable, because my inner geek had no trouble relating to her. Admittedly, there’s an underlying narcissism in Enid’s appeal, and that can be very off-putting to some readers. My appreciation for the character of Enid is connected with a nostalgia for my late teens. Clowes makes this easy for me, because Enid is not some unique gem of a character, and there isn’t much that gets in the way of my identification with her. She’s an archetype of geeky disaffection, a bundle of adolescent hangups and amusing idiosyncrasies.

Much of the comic is devoted to exploring the ennui of middle class geeks, and the story is constantly on the verge of succumbing to a navel-gazing sigh. Clowes is a better writer than that, however, which is why “Ghost World” ends the way it does. But even the ending, where Enid gets on the bus to Anywhere but Here, feels calculated to deliver maximum satisfaction to grown-up geeks. In Enid, geeks find an avatar who breaks free of her post-adolescent stasis and embraces maturity. But it’s a maturity without content, which invites that the reader fill in the blanks with their own experiences. In short, “Ghost World” gives comic readers the best of both worlds: a wistful look back on their awkward teen years followed by the endorsement of their adulthood.

My opinion of “Ghost World” is mixed. The jaded, grown-up part of me can recognize that, beneath all the hype, “Ghost World” is nothing more and nothing less than well-crafted pandering to the core demographic of indie comics.  On the other hand, my inner geek is easy to please.

GIVING UP THE GHOST: Ghost World Roundtable

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Editorial Update: This is the second post in a roundtable on Ghost World. The first, by kinukitty is here.
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Reading Ghost World again got me to thinking about John Barth’s nihilist novel, The End of the Road. The latter begins at a bus station; the former ends at a bus stop. And much like Barth’s protagonist Jacob Horner, Enid spends the duration of the story searching for an identity, but only succeeds in finding what she’s not. 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. The abiding gloom that pervades all of Ghost World’s vignettes, undercutting Enid’s hipper-than-thou detachment from those around her, is a sense that she’s headed to the same destination as Horner: nowhere.

ghost-world01

I figure there must be some consilience here, since kinukitty’s main reason for not liking Clowes’ book – that it’s neither real nor funny – reminds me of Barth’s prefatory defense of his story:

Jacob Horner […] embodies my conviction that one may reach such a degree of self-estrangement as to feel no coherent antecedent for the first-person-singular pronoun. […] If the reader regards [this] egregious [condition] (as embodied by the [narrator]) as merely psychopathological – that is, as symptomatic rather than emblematic – the [novel] make[s] no moral-dramatic sense. [p. viii]

Now, I realize that if one has to defend something as funny, it’s never going to make it so to those not laughing. This is particularly true of existentialist humor, since it’s kind of the obverse of prat falls, namely only funny when it happens to me. So I’m going to stick to the reality of Enid’s predicament. The End of the Road is a bit abstract, where Horner goes through a series of fanciful psychotherapeutic treatments in search of a cure (the search is, of course, at the insistence of a psychiatrist). The most relevant of these is mythotherapy, which involves acting in a chosen character role with the purpose of having it stick through habituation – an irrational solution to a rational psychosis. Clowes treats the identity formation of teenagers in much the same way, but with a recognizant teen who, like Horner, can’t ignore the ontological arbitrariness undergirding the whole process. Just because teens regularly slip into an adult role without much of a hitch doesn’t mean that there’s not a good deal of truth in her depicted inertia.

To be sure, this is a bourgeois dilemma, requiring enough leisure time to reflect on the construction of one’s identity. The working class has to learn their roles quickly if they want to endure. A day laborer in Horner’s place would simply starve. Class division is explicitly drawn out in Enid’s moribund friendship with Becky. Becky just assumes she’ll have to work after high school, whereas Enid’s dad is pressuring her into college. Enid’s intellectual background is alluded to when discussing her dad’s political interests, which she equates to sports. As she explains, since her family would be the “first ones they’d have shot” during a revolution, there’s little point to true political commitment. A choice between academia or the workforce isn’t any more significant. Becky relates to Enid’s views in much the same way that someone who desires the privileges money affords will act towards those who have always taken their wealth for granted. Becky may affect her friend’s class-based despondency, but she begins to be “cured” upon going to work. Meanwhile, Enid continues her search for an authentic self in the same manner that she began the book, analyzing pop culture:

ghost-world02

Just like the rest of us, Enid was born into the media-saturated “Society of the Spectacle,” which makes it damn hard to distinguish the real from its image (“spectacle”). There are plenty who’ve given up the fight, claiming that the shadows on Plato’s cave are reality. It’s this crisis that leads to ironic detachment. Consider what R. Fiore calls the Warhol and Anti-Warhol Effects, which Slavoj Žižek suggests in The Fragile Absolute are two sides of the same coin. As sublime imagery became increasingly commodified (think a well-made BMW ad), modern artists increasingly focused on holding the place of Art intact (renewing or creating the “there there,” to borrow a reference from kinukitty). This was done, as a way of separating itself from the beatification of crass commercialism, by filling the spot with crud – a toilet, coke cans and the like. It has the (“Warhol”) effect of focusing the attention on the constraints, or construct, of Art, rather than the depicted object. Capital is quick to adapt, of course, so this shock tactic is of diminishing returns. If I’m correctly following Žižek’s Lacanese, this wide-scale commercial co-optation of not just the aesthetic Sublime, but pretty much anything that once gave off a sense of “authenticity,” has resulted in our no longer being able to identify ourselves in relation to these (formerly) Master Signifiers. Instead, the Self has become fractured, its consistency

[…] sustained by relationship to the pure remainder/trash/excess, to some ‘undignifed’, inherently comic, little bit of the Real; such an identification with the leftover, of course, introduces the mocking-comic mode of existence, the parodic process of the constant subversion of all firm symbolic identifications. [p. 39]

Enid Coleslaw, in other words. Her problem is that she can’t give up the Cartesian ghost; she’s looking for the old-fashioned Cogito, while living in a postmodern world. She tries to define herself by attempting paradoxically to establish defining connections through an ironic detachment from pop culture detritus, as if she can divine an auratic dimension to an anachronism like the Hubba Hubba Diner with its long-haired waiter, Weird Al. Or consider how she “authentically” dresses as a parody of 70s punk. These things can only sustain an identity if a person already believes (or acts if she believes) in their significance, which is exactly what Enid can’t do. All signifiers carry equal weight, which I suggest is hardly a flaw in her reasoning. Hell, it’s not even possible to call her condition “nihilism” without conjuring thoughts of Mike Myers on SNL, or those three phony Germans antagonizing The Dude with a ferret. Mass culture has even detached us from our detachment. Thus, Enid’s one true act (to borrow from the Lacanians again) is to get on the bus, cutting all her symbolic ties – a symbolic suicide. I’m inclined to see all of this as a good deal more than superficial tragedy. But, then again, one might point out that I have the time to blog about a comic book.