Tag Archives: Noah

Can a Romance Novel Be Ambiguous?

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2385082Multi-layered, ambiguous, nuanced, complex. That’s generally the sort of thing literary critics say when they are praising some important work of literary fiction for its importance, seriousness, and literariness. Great novels, or works of art, are supposed to have meanings within meanings, perspectives within perspectives. To be great is to be multiple. Pulp or genre novels, on the other hand, are often seen as being singularly utilitarian. A horror novel scares you; a spy novel gets the blood pumping, porn does what porn does.

In an interview with me last week, romance novelist Kathleen Gilles Seidel suggested that romance, too, was more singular than multiple, at least in some respects. As a writer, she says,

my relationship with my reader is a romance writer’s. I am not out to challenge her (or him), threaten her, or even change her. I am very controlling of her (or his) experience. The characters may be complex, and the judgment about them may be nuanced, but ultimately there is almost no ambiguity in the judgments. A reader is going to end up drawing the same conclusions that I have.

So for Seidel, romance novels are restrictive and, at least in some ways, unambiguous. Is this true?

There are buckets and boatloads of romance novels, and it’s hard to make any statement about them in general that would be true of every one. But it does seem to be true of one novel — Seidel’s own 1991 book More Than You Dreamed.

More Than You Dreamed is about an (extremely) wealthy director’s daughter, Jill Casler, and a basketball coach, Doug Ringling, who is the nephew of the famous actor Bix Ringling. Bix and Jill’s father, Cass, were both involved in the making of a 1948 blockbuster, Weary Hearts, a historical drama focusing on one Confederate family’s struggles during the Civil War. The making of the film is shrouded in confusion, and Jill and Doug work together to uncover the production mysteries. While falling in love. As you’d expect.

To repeat, that outcome is expected. You’re introduced to Doug and Jill on the first page, and you know what’s going to happen. That singular, predictable reading is mirrored, emphatically, in the film within the book. Just as the reader reads “Doug” and “Jill” and says, “aha!”, so Doug and Jill read various versions of the script for Weary Hearts — and those readings are always singular, immediate, crystal clear. When Doug and Jill find Bix’s original script, they both know it’s a masterpiece — and everyone else who sees it thinks exactly the same thing. When Doug and Jill see an early print of the film, they both agree it’s a failure, and for the exact same reasons. Art, in More Than You Dreamed, is unitary. It speaks to everyone with the same voice.

Or does it? Is Doug and Jill’s reading of Weary Hearts the only reading? Again, Weary Hearts seems based, at least in very broad strokes, on Gone With the Wind — another sweeping Confederate historical. Gone With the Wind, like Weary Hearts, was, and is, widely beloved. But it’s also extremely contentious. GWTW was a racist film; as a result, its tragically defeated white heroes can also be seen as awful, white supremacist villains. Instead of a romantic triumph, the film could be seen (and frequently is seen) as an ugly apology for evil.

And what about Weary Hearts? The film, as described, seems to be much less focused on race than GWTW — the characters are not landholders, but small farmers, and only one black character appears. But still, if you take seriously the idea that the Confederacy was a racist endeavor, the view of Weary Hearts has to shift. Is Pompeii, the one black slave in the film, really content to travel with the Confederate hero Charles as he wanders about fighting Yankees? Is that original print really flawed because of poor acting? Or does the early version lack power because it fails to confront the moral evil of the Confederacy?

There are clues in the book that perhaps support this alternate reading of the film. Doug, who looks almost exactly like the star of Weary Hearts, participates in a Civil War reenactment, during which he makes a passing joke about the South’s racist and sexist past. Later, and more uncomfortably, while he waits for a black basketball star friend, he quips, “I kind of like this, meeting him in a Confederate uniform. He can call me Massa, it will be good for him.” Jill replies that Doug should probably be the one calling Lynx master, since Lynx “could buy and sell you.” On the surface, it’s supposed to be a moment of fun banter. But it’s also an uneasy reminder of what the American South (and not just the South) was about. And though, again, it seems to be directly denying the continuing relevance of that history (Lynx has the power now) it could also be seen as a nervous suggestion that the past isn’t quite yet gone.

In researching Weary Hearts, Jill and Doug both want to prove that their relatives — Jill’s dad, Doug’s uncle — were good, thoughtful, brilliant, talented people. They succeed in doing so; that’s the message, and part of the happy ending, of the novel. But there’s ambiguity there too. Is it good, and thoughtful, and brilliant, to present a romantic Confederacy sans racism? The title line, near the end of the book (“…once you start to look, you may find more than you ever dreamed”) could be about the wonder of finding love. But it could also be an ironic comment on how dreams (filmic or otherwise) can ensure that you don’t look for, and don’t find, certain things.

Probably this isn’t the reading Seidel intended. But again, there’s some textual support. Jill, we learn in the novel, is an incredibly controlled person, terribly afraid that the people around her will become angry. “Jill’s goal in life was to get people to stop being angry. That’s what she did, calm everyone down so that things would get done”. Doug, for his part, lost his job at a Division I school; he is adrift throughout the book in part because he hasn’t let himself feel rage at the people who maneuvered him out of his position.

The book, then, is not only about the secrets of the past, but about repression in the present. And the two are linked. At the end of the book, Doug realizes that his uncle Charles, who played Booth the Confederate soldier in the movie, was a lousy actor. But he determines to keep that a secret: “He’s weak, he’s a coward, and he’s a quitter but he’s family.” Jill and Doug have connections, wealth, knowledge, and power; they can protect their own. In the name of family, history is altered, and myths promulgated. Does that refer just to Charles? Or does it implicate the film he was in, and it’s neo-Confederate romanticism as well? Jill and Doug’s happy ending also becomes a conspiracy about a happy past. Bliss in the present erases ancestral moral failings — which can be an exhilarating message, but which can also have less sunny connotations.

Seidel’s control, then, can itself be read as ambiguous. The characters in the novel find new scripts and scenes and perspectives on a classic story, and they refuse them — they push them away. The shelving of multiple meanings, though, can itself have more than one meaning. To reject ambiguity is itself ambiguous; to push aside a meaning is (multiply) meaningful. More Than You Dreamed settles on one romantic dream, but it also says, ambiguously, that there are more.
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For those interested in the question of romance and directed reading, Liz McCausland hosted a lengthy discussion on the issue which is worth checking out.

The Iraq War as Blogging Psychodrama

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This first appeared at Splice Today.
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I Was Wrong: A Real Time Chronicle of the Iraq War, 2001-2008, Andrew Sullivan’s recently released ebook, is a compilation of his blogging on the Iraq war. As such, it begins with a post on September 11, 2001, a few hours after the attack on the World Trade Center. “When our shock recedes,” he writes in that first entry,

“our rage must be steady and resolute and unforgiving. The response must be disproportionate to the crime and must hold those states and governments that have tolerated this evil accountable. This is the single most devastating act of war since Nagasaki. It is the first time that an enemy force has invaded the precincts of the American capital since the early nineteenth century. It is more dangerous than Pearl Harbor. And it is a reminder that the forces of resentment and evil can no longer be appeased. They must be destroyed – systematically, durably, irrevocably. Perhaps now we will summon the will to do it. “

Sullivan’s initial reaction, is, then, a narrative — and a familiar one. It is a story of evil revenged, good triumphant, and violence unleashed. World War II is summoned up, through references to Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and appeasement. The accuracy of these past allusions (Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurds in 1988 caused more deaths than September 11, to name just one post-Nagasaki example) is less important than the future they point to. That future is just war, and a new greatest generation, of which Sullivan (through that collective “we”) will be a part

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. I Was Wrong is the story of a story gone awry; it’s about how Sullivan thought he was in a book about good defeating evil, and instead discovers himself in a different tale altogether. The arc of that tale is traced clearly enough in the chapter subheads of the ebook: “Trauma”, “Doubt” and “Regret.” Shocked by 9/11, Sullivan hoped for, demanded, and was finally thrilled by the reality of war. As the Iraq quagmire deepened, and the extent of Bush’s “feckless” mendacity became clear, he began to re-examine his support. And finally, with the revelations of Abu Ghraib, he realized that the war should never have been waged, and that he had been complicit in an atrocity. “Those of us who supported this war cannot wash our hands of the blood of tens of thousands of innocents it has now claimed,” he wrote in October 2006. And he adds, in an epilogue, “Although my intentions were good, I feel ashamed of some of the sentences in this book.”

Sullivan’s recognition of his errors, and his willingness to admit them, are both extremely admirable. Yet, there are unsettling ways in which the story he thought he was telling in the beginning and the story he ends up telling fit together almost too well. In his second post on the day of 9/11, for example, Sullivan writes:

It feels – finally – as if a new era has begun. The strange interlude of 1989 – 2001, with its decadent post-Cold War extravaganzas from Lewinsky to Condit to the e-boom, is now suddenly washed away…. The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society.

In this story of 9/11, the fall of the towers becomes an awakening; a traumatic shock that erases the past and leads to moral and spiritual renewal. Though the specifics are somewhat altered, isn’t that also the story of I Was Wrong, with its path from benightedness to revelation to knowledge, awakening, and renewal? Sullivan here, waxing lyrical about America and freedom and democracy, doesn’t sound so very different from Sullivan at the end of the book endorsing Obama and “a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.” We always seem to be regenerating in one way or another, always involved in a never-ending American apotheosis of purification and renewal.

This is, perhaps, just another way of saying that Andrew Sullivan is still Andrew Sullivan; he may have reversed his opinions, but he’s still the same excitable, starry-eyed blogger in 2008 that he was in 2001. From this perspective, the most important part of the title I Was Wrong is not the “Wrong”, but the “I”. In his afterword, Sullivan says that “a blogger writing daily…has nowhere to hide,” by which he means that he can conceal nothing. But it also seems to suggest that he, himself, conceals everything — that he’s so close to the camera that you can’t see past him. Thus, September 11 becomes his revenge fantasy. Thus, I Was Wrong turns the Iraq war and its aftermath into the confessional, spiritual journey of one, Andrew Sullivan.

Blogging as a form explains a good deal of this self-absorption. You read Andrew Sullivan for news to get not just Andrew Sullivan’s take, or opinion, about the news, as you might find in an op-ed. Rather, you read Sullivan’s blog, or Sullivan’s book, to get Andrew Sullivan’s story of the news — an ongoing narrative about the world, filtered through his particular perspective. The fact that the Iraq War ends up being about Andrew Sullivan isn’t because Andrew Sullivan is a navel-gazing narcissist; it’s simply a genre default. In superhero comics, the superhero wins; in romance novels, the girl gets the guy; in blogging, the blogger is front and center. If you don’t like the trope, you read something else.

Whether you like them or don’t, though, tropes have meaning. In this case the narrative impulse to turn piles of dead bodies into a story by, and/or about, this one guy watching seems like it has more than a passing relationship to American policy. The invasion of Iraq, as Sullivan’s book painfully shows, was about a desire for revenge and for American renewal and goodness — it was about us, first and last, in other words, rather than about the WMDs that weren’t there, or about human rights which Abu Ghraib showed we didn’t much care about in the first place.   Sullivan can change the story about himself from revenge to regret, but he can’t stop making it about himself. One way or another, for us the meaning of Iraq is not Iraq, but us. The real moral error in I Was Wrong is not believing Bush or miscalculating the costs of war, but treating a country full of people as characters in one’s own psychodrama. That’s called imperialism. As this book shows, even for someone as honest and thoughtful as Andrew Sullivan, it’s a hard vice to break.
 

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Utilitarian Review 1/30/15

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Erin Polgreen wonders whether journalism comics can be funny.

Chris Gavaler on superheroes, billionaires, and his mother.

Me on blasphemy and Charlie Hebdo (and the most offensive cartoon you’ve never seen.)

Ng Suat Tong with a list of the Best Comics Criticism of 2014.

Em Liu examines Hollywood’s problem with the Asian male.

The spike from Jacob Canfield’s post has largely passed; we’re back to wending our quiet and mostly anonymous way through the internet. Sort of a relief.

Shonté Daniels with a short review of the stealth video game The Marvelous Miss Take.

Chris Gavaler argues that we are in the age of popularism (move over post-modernism.)

And finally I urged everyone tell Jonathan Chait to shut up.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic

— I interviewed Johnetta Elzie about women in the Ferguson marches.

—I reviewed Point of Honor, which tries to create a post-racial Confederacy.

At Ravishly

— I wrote about the gendered genre confusion of David Rees’ Aphex Twin/Taylor swift mashups.

—I interviewed Kathleen Gilles Seidel, one of my favorite romance novelists.

—I talked about Ms. Marvel fighting Islamophobia in San Francisco

—I explained why being lazy is good for your marriage.

At Splice Today

—I explained why liberals shouldnt’ want Palin to run.

—I advised Freddie deBoer to be a uniter if uniting is what he’s into.

At the Reader I talked briefly about Kaki King, guitar god.
 
Other Links

Katherine Cross on Jonathan Chait and toxic activism.

This Sady Doyle Chait takedown is maybe my favorite.

And I still really like this Angus Johnston piece about defusing conflict on the left (and in general.) I like the updates as well.

The CTA and Reverse Racism

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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My wife is white, and she was taking the train to the Southside where we live. The train was crowded, almost entirely with African-Americans. One black man saw her sitting, and harassed her for the entire 20-minute train ride. How dare you be here when you know that this is a black train going to the black Southside, he told her. “Here’s this white women taking a seat. Are there any black women who need a seat? Or any black men. Or anybody?” He talked at length about how white people disrespect black people. He kept repeating, “You think you don’t have anything to do with it, but you have to pay.” It was that “you have to pay” that my wife found especially worrisome. Other people on the train punctuated his dialogue with laughter or shouts of encouragement.

She got home safely and was none the worse for wear. And nothing like this has ever happened to her before; she doesn’t feel unsafe taking the train as a rule, and not infrequently chats pleasantly with fellow riders. Still this incident was obviously very uncomfortable, and more than a little frightening. It also shows, I think, that the liberal default claim that “there is no reverse racism” is not entirely accurate. My wife was harassed, threatened, and told that she should not be allowed to use public facilities because of the color of her skin. It’s hard to imagine how you could define racism in such a way that her experience wouldn’t qualify. Certainly, if the reverse had happened—if on a train full of white people going to the Northside, a black person had been singled out and harassed on the basis of her race while other white onlookers cheered—it would be considered racism, and rightfully so.

There are a couple of possible takeaways here. First is the obvious point that black people, like white people, can be hateful if given the chance. That hatefulness can take a number of forms, but one is racial prejudice.

Racial prejudice doesn’t exist in a vacuum though. And in this case, the context, or the possibility, of black prejudice against white people is predicated on the context of white prejudice against black people. What happened to her only makes sense because of black history.

I don’t mean that the history of white oppression is an excuse for what happened to my wife. There isn’t any excuse for it, and treating people as if the sin of their skin color trumps who they are as individuals is simply a restatement of racism, not a mitigation of it. Rather, what I’m saying is that the black-on-white racism directed against my wife was made possible by the structural white-on-black racism that has shaped Chicago.

My wife’s assailant said that the train to the Southside was a black train. But it wasn’t African-Americans who decided that the Southside would be black. It wasn’t African-Americans who decided that Chicago should be the most segregated city in the country. For that matter, it wasn’t African-Americans who decided that people in the US should be categorized first and foremost on the basis of race in order to morally justify and practically facilitate slavery. My wife was visible as a white person going to a majority-black section of the city because her country and her city had made a systematic, centuries-long effort to mark and segregate black people. Without that history of racism, the reverse-racism my wife experienced would be impossible.

In a recent piece at Counterpunch, Tanya Golash-Boza argues that racism harms not just black people, but white people as well. She points out, for example, that when qualified people of color are passed over for advancement, less qualified white people get the jobs, so that “mediocre white people are teaching our children, leading community businesses, and fixing our telephones.” She adds that the structural concentration of wealth in the U.S. goes, not to all white people, but to a select few, so that racism is part of a system in which most black and white people “are fighting over the crumbs.”

My wife’s experience could be seen as another, even more direct way in which structural racism against black people can, in particular circumstances, result in harm to white people. The creation of racial difference and of segregation results in categorization on the basis of race.

Golash-Boza concludes: “Once we see the harm that racism causes all people in our society, it will be easier to form multi-racial coalitions to eliminate racism.” I’d like that to be true. But I think that when pointing out the harm that racism does whites, it’s important to realize that those harms are accidental—a kind of gratuitous fall-out of the hate and misery intentionally targeted at black people.

My wife’s story is the story of Chicago’s Southside, which is the story of America, which is in a lot of very important ways the story of racism. Doing a cost-benefit analysis on how and whether racism hurts white people can elide the uncomfortable fact that racism is entwined with the very existence of “white people” as a category, and for that matter with American (and certainly with Chicago) identity and history. Wanting to get rid of racism, then, isn’t so much about cost-benefit analysis. Rather it’s about no longer wanting hatred to be what we live with, day in and day out, what we see in the faces around us, and what we come home to every night.

Everyone Tell Jonathan Chait to Shut Up

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Last summer, I wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which I argued that Orange Is the New Black (OITNB)fails to effectively critique prison as an institution because prison as an institution in the United States is directed mostly at men, and OITNB presents prison as bad because it victimizes women. The piece went semi-viral as a hate read, and was widely denounced. Jezebel wrote an article with the very Jezebel title “Writer Doesn’t Understand Why Show About Women’s Prison Has So Few Men.” Music critic Brandon Soderberg called me as a “clueless cracker pedant” on Twitter. Folks I liked and respected told me in no uncertain terms that what I had written was unfeminist and generally awful. There was a massive comment thread with people lining up to tell me I was stupid and should shut up. The left, the damn left, in all its insular self-righteousness, would not tolerate brave dissent such as mine.

Or at least, that’s the conclusion I would come to if I were Jonathan Chait. Chait has written a long article for New York magazine in which he bemoaned the return of political correctness and the toxic culture of the left. Chait points to Hanna Rosin, who wrote a book about the current plight of men, and was ridiculed with a hashtag; he also singles out an invitation-only Facebook group where people argueloudly with each other. My experience could be another data point for him, yet one more example of how “swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant” terrifying the heterodox leftist or liberal into silence.

There’s a couple of problems with Chait’s thesis, though. First of all, there’s just nothing in his article or in his examples that makes a case that discourse on the broadly defined left is somehow nastier than discourse on the right, or in the center, or out in directionless space. The first controversial piece I wrote for the web was for The Comics Journal. I reviewed Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and my piece was headlined “In the Shadow of No Talent.” TCJ readers lost their shit and at least one person wished for the death of me and my family. It was exactly the sort of intemperate lashing out at dissent that Chait denigrates — but it didn’t have anything to do with political correctness or a culture of Marxist intolerance. It had to do with comics fans not wanting to hear me tell them that the thing they liked wasn’t any good.

Since then I’ve been told that I am stupid and that I should shut up by lots of Men’s Rights Activists, some feminists, some romance fans, many comics readers, fans of Breaking Bad, fans of The Hobbit, some leftists, and many right-wingers. I’ve even been abused by a fair number of supposedly free-speech-loving liberals and libertarians, who, when it comes to online behavior, aren’t any more tolerant of dissent than anyone else as far as I can tell. In a recent discussion of Charlie Hebdo, one First Amendment lover told me that if I didn’t like America, I could leave it — because free speech means exiling folks who say things you don’t like. Maybe, as Gawker’s Alex Pareene says, the liberal Chait is especially thin-skinned when it comes to criticism from his left. But one thing’s for sure: In terms of yelling at each other online, there are no red states and no blue states. There are only states of intemperate ire, and lots of them.

Chait is right, I think, that social media has changed the way social pressures work when it comes to speech. It used to be that conversations in the public sphere were limited and controlled by institutions. What you could say was controlled by what magazines (like, say, The New Republic, where Chait used to work) would print. That’s still true to some degree. But it’s also true that social media has made it possible for people who didn’t have a platform to speak loudly, astutely, randomly, continuously, profanely, violently—and often right there, just under an author’s prose, in the comments section. The roar can be deafening, and sometimes frightening.

I use the word frightening advisedly. Chait in his piece does that odd thing free-speech advocates sometimes do, and downplays the importance, or dangerousness of talking and expressing opinions. ” Mere expression of opposing ideas, in the form of a poster, is presented as a threatening act,” Chait sneers, denigrating an academic who found a pro-life sign on a college campus offensive. But speech is threatening, often, and aggressive. You could argue that a professor physically grabbing a sign from a student is an escalation, and I’d agree with you. But it’s not an escalation from zero

Chait is telling people on the left that they’re totalitarians; I’m telling him that he’s a fool. The intent, in both cases, is to cause a reaction, to disturb, to mock, to change the world, in some small way. If speech were utterly inconsequential, if it had no power, there wouldn’t be any point in defending it. The argument for free speech, surely, has to be built on the notion that speech does in fact have power. It’s because speech is worth listening to that you defend it, not because it isn’t.

And the cacophony of the internet is, contra Chait, often worth listening to. It’s given a voice to many folks who didn’t have one before. Chait takes a swipe at the 1990s’ anti-sex work policies of Catherine McKinnon, but he doesn’t mention that the social media he sneers at has been a huge boon to sex workers themselves, who can finally create their own platforms after decades of being silenced by both the right and the left.

Similarly, black women and other women of color have a major presence online, and are able to talk back to folks like Chait (or like me) in a way that wasn’t possible even twenty years ago. Chait doesn’t always like what these people tell him — he seems particularly disturbed by Brittney Cooper’s argument that reason is not always a useful tool against racism. But that’s how free speech works; people will sometimes say things you don’t like.

There are downsides to all this roiling speech, too. Chait seems to think the most serious problem is that white men and white women are sometimes told that their whiteness disqualifies them from speaking. “Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing,” Chait moans.

And sure, as a white person, I find it unpleasant when my brilliant, beautiful ideas are dismissed because I’m white or male. But that problem pales (as it were) next to receiving actual death threats, being doxxed, or having SWAT teams sicced on your house — none of which Chait mentions, because none of those things are regular occurrences on the left. But other communities haven’t been so lucky. Being white on the internet may be a hard, sad, road, but it’s nothing compared to being a feminist video game developer. For that matter, being white on the Internet is not generally anything compared to being black on the Internet. As Ferguson activist Deray Mckesson told me, “the death threats aren’t fun. They put my address out there, that’s not fun. I get called a nigger more than I’ve ever been called that in my entire life. I’ve blocked over 9,000 people, so I don’t personally see it as much anymore, but my friends do.”

The Internet makes it possible for more people to speak more effectively than ever before in history. That also means it allows more people to issue death threats, shout obscenities, and harass others than ever before. Free speech, and for that matter democracy, has always been a balancing act between the polis and the mob — between unleashing speech to empower people, and trying to figure out how to prevent the power of speech being used to oppress, to terrorize, and even (through that call to the SWAT team, for example) to kill.

The Internet, and social media, have exacerbated these tensions; they increase the potential of speech, for good and ill. Those are problems we have to wrestle with. Jonathan Chait isn’t up to the task, in part because his obsession with the left leads him to focus on ideologies rather than methods; on who he wants to shut up, rather than on figuring out which kinds of speech, whatever the content, should be allowed, which shouldn’t, and how to deal with the difference. Fortunately, the Internet is full of talking people who, civilly and less so, can tell him where he’s wrong, and that he should shut up.

Blasphemy and Charlie Hebdo

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The complete roundtable on Satire and Charlie Hebdo is here.
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The terror assault which killed twelve people, including many prominent cartoonists, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo occurred two weeks ago now. It has been largely replaced in the news, at least in the Anglophone press, by other atrocities and other controversies. The news cycle is brief and vicious, and old blood, no matter its quantity, soon gives way to new.

Still, the response to the tragedy has at least some lasting lessons for the comics community in general, and for comics scholars in particular. I’d point particularly to a piece by Mark McKinney, a professor at Miami University and co-editor of European Comics Art.

McKinney, in a clearly heartfelt piece, denounced those who responded to the cartoons without sufficient context or understanding. “[W]hen many analysts see the cartoons, they simply lack the artistic, cultural and linguistic frameworks for interpreting them,”he says. He then goes on to argue that the magazine was anti-racist, and to point out that it is a determinedly French, and “even Parisian” magazine. He discusses, in laudatory terms, its commitment to scandalous and offensive imagery. And then, after several paragraphs of general background, he presents his rich, contextualized conclusion.

Through their cartoons, comics and news articles, the journalists of Charlie Hebdo courageously carved out and defended a space for dissent from religious extremism and censorship. Their joyful mockery of religious dogmatism is viewed as insensitive at best, and even blasphemy, by some clerics and their followers, and, as we now know, by terrorist murderers.

The nuanced, scholarly conclusion is, in other words, exactly the same as the broad, knee-jerk, uninformed conclusion reached by large portions of Anglophone social media. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were free speech martyrs fighting against religious extremism. The only people who disagreed with their cartooning or editorial policies, were, in McKinney’s informed assessment, either “clerics” or their (blind? stupid?) followers, and terrorists.

“Scholarship on comics and cartoons can help us understand the meanings of Charlie Hebdo in important, vital ways that simply skimming over a few cover images from the magazine will never do. To the dead and the wounded, to the grieving survivors of those massacred, we owe at least this: a genuine attempt to understand what the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo did, and why,” McKinney declares in satisfaction. Fair enough; who can disagree with that? But his article is not such a genuine attempt. It analyzes no images. It discusses nothing in depth. Instead, it invokes the name of scholarship not in order to create more understanding, nor to perform a more subtle reading, but merely to lend the imprimatur of the academy to one side of a debate. There is no effort in McKinney’s piece to engage with French or Francophone critics of Charlie Hebdo, nor any effort to discuss the reasons why many French Muslims felt that the magazine targeted them. There is no recognition that there might be, not one context, but multiple contexts. There is no effort to think about the history of caricature and the history of racism, or to think about how intent and reception may diverge. McKinney’s piece is not scholarship. It is polemic.

I don’t have anything against polemic per se. It’s a venerable genre, and, like any aesthetic endeavor, can be done well or poorly. I find it troubling, though, that McKinney attempts to cloak his polemic in the mantle of academic rigor, and portrays those who disagrees with him as either ignorant or ill-intentioned. Poorly defended, entirely banal opinions are presented by McKinney as interesting and true simply because a comics scholar happened to put them forward.

Since McKinney urges context, I should say that the context of his own remarks is clear enough. At least since Frederic Wertham pointed out that comics were often racist, sexist, violent, and kind of crappy, the comics community has been exceedingly sensitive to any criticism that calls into question the moral or social content of cartooning. On top of that, comics have long been seen as childish, largely aesthetically worthless pulp crap; comics scholars have waged a long, difficult campaign to get them recognized as complex artistic expression, worthy of study. McKinney, then, is not really trying to add nuance to the Charlie Hebdo discussions, which is why he adds none. He is instead repeating (under the validating mantle of scholarship) the same arguments that comics has used for decades to defend itself against hostile critics. To wit, comics are complicated and moral, and if you disagree, you’re a Puritan thug and a fool.

The murderers of Charlie Hebdo prove that Puritan thugs (broadly defined) do in fact exist. However, this does not mean (contra McKinney and his supporters, educated and otherwise) that all those speaking out against Puritan thugs are beyond reproach. Nor does it place a seal forever upon the righteousness of comics creators or comics scholars. Is comics scholarship an academic field devoted to the understanding and discussion of comics, bringing a wide range of knowledge and approaches to a complicated, sometimes beautiful, sometimes flawed, sometimes undervalued, and perhaps sometimes overvalued medium? Or is comics scholarship to be devoted to boosterism, advocacy, and sacralization? If Charlie Hebdo’s accomplishment was to fight against all priesthoods, then surely it does them little honor to try to set up a priesthood in their name, handing down stern pronouncements about how their work must be read and understood. You can’t venerate blasphemy by venerating blasphemy. And comics scholarship, whatever its accomplishments and advantages, does itself no favors when it attempts to set itself up as an unquestionable authority in the name of free speech.
 

CH snow

Utilitarian Review 1/24/15

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Wonder Woman News

This Wednesday, at 6:00PM, I am going to be signing books at the lovely First Aid Comics, 1617 East 55th Street, Chicago, IL 60615. If you are in Chicago, come on by and chat about space kangaroos!

Lauren Davis did a really fun interview with me; we talked about Steve and castration and Etta Candy and love leaders, which haven’t come up in other interviews so much.
 
Other News

Jacob Canfield talks about the depressing and overwhelming response to his viral internet piece on Charlie Hebdo which ran on HU.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Subdee on Britpop and Phonogram.

Josselin Moneyron looked at a year of Charlie Hebdo covers (most of them aren’t about Islam.)

Folks asked me questions about Wonder Woman, and I answered.

I interviewed Andrew Hoberek about Watchmen and neoliberalism.

Sarah Shoker on whether science fiction will lead us to a better future.

Naphtali Rivkin on Junot Diaz, Isabel Allende, and superbildungsromans.

Kim O’Connor brings you fables from your comics industry.

Michael Carson on American Sniper as authenticity kitsch.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic:

— I wrote about Bart Beaty’s new Archie book and the advantages of no continuity.

—I explained that the point of The Man in the High Castle is that the Nazi dystopia isn’t that dystopic.

At Ravishly:

— I talked about why Beyonce and Wonder Woman are alike (they will save the world through sex.

—I argued that Lucy in the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe can be seen as a feminist character.

At Pacific Standard I reviewed Edward Struzik’s Future Arctic, about practical responses to climate change.

At Splice Today I wrote about

— why you can write about a trailer without seeing the movie.

— how my cat does not want to be cozy.

At the Chicago Reader I did short reviews of

— a nifty Posada tribute show

—woozy loungey hipsters Woo Park.

 
Other Links

Forrest Wickman on how women don’t get credit for their music.

Anthony Failola on the French Muslim community and Charlie Hebdo.
 

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