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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.

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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:

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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.

Gluey Tart: Ghost World Roundtable

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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.