Tag Archives: Potential

Ariel Schrag, Subject and Object

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ARIEL SCHRAG, SUBJECT & OBJECT

“I don’t wanna write something that like, other people would read, flipping through, I’d wanna write something important, you know?”

“Not really.”

When I read any fictional work, as much as I try not to, I’m always reading it as disguised autobiography. Most manga, as much as I like it, is mainstream genre fiction: written to satisfy a perceived market, rigidly editorially controlled, and produced in discrete chapters and story arcs. Artists are not encouraged to get personal; only a few Hideo Azumas and Yoshihiro Tatsumis, and possibly artists like Hiroyuki Takei whose interests show through in their mainstream work, share their lives with the reader on anything but the most trivial subjects (“I got a cyst on my finger from drawing too much…I love model kits!…Did you see the new Harry Potter?”). Looking for the artist behind the work usually leads either to opaque psychoanalysis (the uniformly corrupt portrayal of sexuality and adulthood in the work of Kazuo Umezu, the androgynous bisexuality of The Rose of Versailles) or the torture-gameshow appeal of watching artists crack and strain under the pressure of their deadlines, producing noble failures which spin off track in interesting ways (the endings of Ashita no Joe, the crassly-marketed-yet-personal anime Neon Genesis Evangelion). Contrarily, American comics culture, even the commercial side, tends towards the idea of “comic artist as rock star.”

So, while I admire formal skill in storytelling, I also have a weak point for art as voyeurism. This cult of personality was part of what drew me to autobiographical comics in the 1990s, a world about as different from manga as possible, although it shared a taste for nice black and white linework. I am the worst type of autobio comics reader. The feeling of a personal connection with the artist, however imaginary, was what got me reading artists like Howard Cruse (furtively, secretly), Gabrielle Bell, Juliet Doucet and Ariel Schrag. I want to feel that I am watching artists go insane for their work, martyrs like Joe Matt, whose works have a sort of “there but for the grace of God go I” quality, and Dave Sim. My shamelessly prurient tastes in “autobio” could be gleaned by the fact that I didn’t read much Harvey Pekar (middle-aged guy, mundane daily issues, who cares) or pre-Fun Home Alison Bechdel (too adult, too secure in its sexuality). Rather, I would have been a perfect target for Benjamin Godfrey’s forgotten 1990s minicomic Girltrap, a spiritual precursor to the fake video blog “lonelygirl15,” which Godfrey wrote under the pen name “Betty Godsmear” as a parody of the whole girl-who-exposes-her-life-to-mostly-male-readers phenomenon (“In this issue: Panties! Stoned! Handcuffs!…Sorry, gang! Less sex in this issue than in the past! But look for my sex tips issue, coming soon!”). Apart from the fact that the other person’s life was presented as “real”, was this fetishistic fascination with another person’s life really so different from Japanese moe manga, those creepy-sweet stories about the cutesy lives of teenage girls, stories consumed by male readers by the ton? So my first reaction to Ariel Schrag’s Definition and Potential was voyeuristic (“She’s so awesome! So insightful! So angsty!”) and only secondarily to appreciate the formal and artistic qualities of her work.

Ten years later, reading different analyses of Schrag’s graphic novels, I’m wary of the trap of thinking of them as “just lala girl story” (to quote Schrag), of basically admiring Definition and her other early works as a kind of teenage art naive, the work of comics’ child star. It’s the same reaction made by many people within Likewise itself, who are disappointed by the clinical nature of Potential (an appropriate feel to a work which draws its metaphors from laboratory science) compared to the exuberance of Definition. To dismiss Likewise for not being Definition is to dismiss Schrag for growing up. Admittedly, my own initial reaction to Likewise was disappointment too. Partially, this was from reading the beginning of the story in the floppy comics form, for which it simply wasn’t suited. But part of it was from the wordy, challenging narrative (my reading muscles made flabby by manga), and the growing distance of the author, the lack of the eagerness which dominated her earlier works. It’s an eagerness which Schrag herself parodies, when she imagines flinging herself under the wheels of a car, a regressive act drawn in Definition‘s chirpy, regressive style. In Likewise Schrag’s art is better (less stiff than Potential) and her dialogue more finely heard than ever, but the emotions which ran wildly throughout the earlier works are now subtler and increasingly mitigated by self-analysis. The dewy-eyed Ariel Schrag who in earlier books had sometimes seemed carried along by the tides, who suffered through unrequited crushes and objectification (whether within the story, or from readers and fans like me) begins Likewise very much as a subject, by breaking up with her girlfriend. Throughout the book Schrag continues to be the primary actor, the experimenter, taking matters (and dildos) into her own hands. And most of all, pens; she self-documents with many tools and layers of narrative, her tape recorder, her notebook, her art. Like Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of the Artist, or Joe Matt’s comics, it becomes the story of the telling of a story, but it generally stays unpretentious, and for every panel at the drawing desk there are ten others outside it.

Reading Likewise as it’s now printed, as a single 350+ page graphic novel, takes care of my problems with the pacing. The story moves at first slowly and then with accelerating speed, changing and disintegrating (and sometimes reforming) as it goes, like Schrag’s uncertain family situation, like her feelings on homosexuality, like her love for her ex-girlfriend Sally. In the spirit of a senior year in high school, Likewise gives a sense of waiting, of frustration, but also of purpose, of climbing page by page to the top of a mountain of pages (and experiences) to “the point of no return.” The first two-thirds of the book, the most linear part, is an excruciating portrayal of a post-breakup, a breakup so intense it causes Schrag to question not only her own sexuality but her gender and the entire biological purpose and existence of homosexuality. None of these “arcs” have tidy endings; just when we think Sally is out of Schrag’s mind, she reappears in some other form. The story contains, not emotional climaxes, but emotional fades and dissolves. A relationship only “ends” when every possible combination of the players has been tried and retried. There are no one-liners or unquestioned pearls of wisdom, the kind Schrag’s mom tries to throw out (this is documentary realism all right, having your parents suggest things you should put in your comics). The discussions of “It” (who has “It” and who doesn’t) feel like high-school cliquishness disguised as philosophy, but Schrag faithfully documents this stage in her life along with the rest.

If I could only use one word to describe Likewise, it would be “deliberate”; deliberate choices of what to put in and leave out, subtle effects of insertion (pun intended) and repetition, making a story out of the information overload of life. Having never read Ulysses, I can’t offer an analysis of Schrag’s James Joyce influence, but that’s fine, since Likewise obviously contains more personal and textual references than any one person can get apart from Schrag herself. I think this is the natural outcome of epic, solo comics produced without editorial interference; the tremendous time spent alone, thinking and drawing, makes one want to put everything into the work, and why not? Some reviewers have commented that the increasing (if always selective) sketchiness of the art in the last 1/3rd shows that Schrag was growing tired of the story, as she finished inking her high school epic into (presumably) her mid-20s. But this suggestion isn’t incompatible with a conscious choice: as Schrag cuts her emotional ties to Sally and to high school, as she lets go, the art breaks apart, fading into the past, focusing only when it needs to. The book’s vocabulary of formal and stylistic tricks is huge and sometimes hard to analyze, but it succeeds in that you never have to stop to analyze it; the length and scope of the work gives each technique its time and place. Both visually and textually, it’s dense and deliberate and emotionally affecting, and it establishes Schrag firmly as more than a character in her own story, but as a comics creator of tremendous ambition and skill. And her minicomics are good too.

Update by Noah: The whole Likewise Roundtable is here.

Battle At the Likewise Roundtable!

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I disagree with so much in Suat’s recent post it’s difficult to know where to begin. But perhaps I’ll start here.

The plot [of Potential in summary is simple: Ariel goes to high school, “discovers” that she is a lesbian, meets other girls and has occasional sex and alcohol.”

Um…no, i’ts not. The plot of Potential does begin with Ariel discovering she’s a lesbian. But it focuses on her developing, and increasingly disastrous, relationship with one particular girl, Sally. That development is not “simple” either — Sally and Ariel’s characters and interactions are both complex and nuanced. As an example (and to help Suat with a scene that seems to have left him non-plussed) — Ariel’s decision to have sex with a boy before she turns 16 is clearly linked to her general obsession with ritual rights-of-passage. That obsession (which isn’t spelled out — you have to be reading carefully enough to actually follow what the characters are doing) becomes a major bone of contention with Sally, and is tied, too, into Ariel’s general possessiveness and control issues.

I could go on; those themes are also linked, for example, to Ariel’s increasingly fraught interactions with her parents. But the point is: the relationship between Sally and Ariel is absolutely central to both Potential and Likewise. Yet, in his 2000 plus word review, Suat mentions Sally exactly once (when he, again somewhat bemusedly, discusses a scene where Ariel imagines her girlfriend turning into an alien.)

Suat’s a very intelligent and perceptive critic. So how exactly did he go about missing the main narrative and thematic feature of not one, but two books? Well, I think he did it this way:

I found little here which was emotionally moving or disturbing… I literally had difficulty concentrating on the comic from panel to panel.

Suat missed the plots of Potential and Likewise because he found the books so boring he couldn’t pay attention to them.

I don’t actually have a problem with that. Different people are interested in different things. Some people don’t like metal. Some people don’t like horror films. Some people don’t want to read yaoi. And some people don’t want to read journals (which Suat refers to disparagingly throughout his essay), or read about the trials of queer youth, or look at visual art which isn’t polished or accomplished in a particular way. That’s the way it goes.

Ideally, a critic would realize when his or her disinterest in generic and formal elements is so overwhelming as to be essentially insurmountable. Suat doesn’t do that here, unfortunately — instead he doubles down.

Noah would say in Schrag’s defense that this betrays a lack of interest on my (or other like- minded reader’s) part in the life and thoughts of teenage girls. I would suggest rather that it betrays a lack of interest in the life of just any teenage girl. In the same way that not all autobiographies are worth reading, not every teenage journal is worthy of our attention or approbation.

The point I think is that Suat is only interested in teenaged girls if they make art “worthy of our attention.” But…what if, just as a possibility, the disinterest in the everyday life of teenaged girls actually prevents you from noticing art that might be worthy of your attention if it were about something that you found more absorbing?

As an example of how such a blind spot might work…here’s Suat giving my review of Potential what for:

Where Berlatsky sees sublime confusion, I see only a poorly edited journal. I much prefer the artist who prunes and refines a piece to one who rattles on however authentically. Quite simply put, these are comics which contain little in the way of beauty of form or language.

So, reading that little bit, you’d think that I admired Schrag’s work for its “sublime confusion,” and authenticity — because she was punk rock, and just let her feelings flow.

But here’s my actual last paragraph from that review:

Schrag herself never comes out and says any of this; indeed, her touch with the material is so deft that it’s easy to feel that she’s not shaping it at all. She could have written with a heavier hand, spelling out every moral ambiguity and explicating each psychological nuance. Instead, Potential is messy and confusing, filled with shifting perspectives, odd random details, and sudden moments of despair and love. If it were easier to classify, it would have a larger audience, but it wouldn’t be nearly as great.

I do talk about the book’s messiness, but I explicitly say that this messiness is a result, not of authentic spewing, but of her deft touch. I note that it’s “easy to feel that she’s not shaping” the material — by which I quite clearly mean that she is shaping it, and very carefully too. In fact, one of the reasons I have trouble writing about Schrag (which I do) is that I think her writing, plotting, and characterization is extremely subtle. You really have to pay attention to figure out what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. I often have the uncomfortable sense that she’s smarter than I am, which, for a critic, is somewhat intimidating.

Anyway, the point here is that Suat spends his entire review soundly trouncing me for an opinion (“authentic unmediated autobiography is superior!”) that I don’t hold. I like Likewise better than Fun Home not because I think Fun Home is too artificial, but for almost the opposite reason. I think Fun Home is too clumsy.

Again, Suat’s usually a good bit more perceptive than that. I think it’s just hard for him to believe that anyone would find Schrag’s comics subtle — and no wonder, since, as we’ve established, he finds them so off-putting for various reasons that he has difficulty even figuring out the plot.

For the most part, Suat’s review is hard to get too upset about…his prose is, as always, enjoyable, and, since his eyes are closed throughout, he isn’t able to land too many punches. The end, though, crosses over from merely exasperating into something more problematic. Suat starts this final section by defending Kristian Williams, who I had accused of condescension. Suat’s riposte is more effective than perhaps he intended — certainly, Williams doesn’t look very condescending at all compared to Suat.

Even highly individual works have the capacity to appeal to certain sections of society. Potential speaks distinctly and eloquently to the milieu being depicted within its pages as well as those who feel that almost inexplicable “connection”. Works like these make little effort to draw in readers beyond their narrow confines. This is both one of their deepest strengths and greatest weaknesses.

For those left unmoved by Schrag’s narrative, the text remains of passing interest as personal history, social anthropology and as evidence of the growth of a young writer on her way to better things. Time will tell but I have my doubts if this will be a work which most will look back with reverence and affection in the coming decades.

I think Suat is actually trying to throw me (and Schrag enthusiasts generally) a bone here…and I wish he’d just stuck to castigating her and us. Because it’s in trying to explain the appeal of Schrag’s work to others that he most explicitly naturalizes his own alienation. Folks like Suat who find nothing in Schrag are, he suggests, the normal baseline, on the right side of posterity. Schrag’s work as it stands can only appeal to a small in-group (of young people, queers, and fellow travelers, presumably). Schrag is for for the few, whereas something like Maus is, I guess, for the ages, since everyone wants to see poorly drawn middle-class male mice whining about their relationships with their fathers at interminable length. (Plus…the Holocaust!)

This particular argument — that Schrag somehow has innately limited appeal — resonates in really unfortunate ways with mainstream discussions of queerness, of women, and of kids. Again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Suat disliking the book, nor in his attempting to explain why in terms of craft, theme, writing, or what have you. But in the last couple of paragraphs, he seems to be trying to cast the book onto the dustbin of history because it appeals to groups of people whose stories Suat isn’t especially interested in. Since those groups of people also happen to have suffered from various kinds of political marginalization, the implications of Suat’s argument here are not happy ones.

Update: The full Likewise Roundtable is here.

In Search of “It”: A response to a review of Potential

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My first contact with the work of Ariel Schrag occurred almost ten years ago following the release of Potential from Slave Labor Graphics. My renewed interest in her work stems from my host’s, Noah Berlatsky’s, enthusiasm for her comics which he considers among the best produced this past decade.

Noah is probably Schrag’s most articulate apologists and I was especially interested in hearing his views on her work before I found a review he did for The Chicago Reader which neatly summarizes his affection for the book (it might be wise to read Noah’s review before continuing with this response to that piece of criticism):

” Written while Schrag was still an adolescent, Potential seems pitched more toward her peer group than the New York Times editorial board. It doesn’t have the purple rhetorical flourishes of Fun Home or the pomo magical realist tics of Maus. Its focus is the non-highbrow subject of teen-girl angst.”

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