Tag Archives: R.C. Harvey

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Critics Are Not Here to Make You Happy

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In response to last month’s comics criticism roundtable, R. C. Harvey has a post up on the main site in which he lays out his philosophy of criticism.

But, seriously, a critic does what he does for what is a very shallow reason.
When I first set out to make a living in the world, I did it by teaching English in high school. Years later, one of my former students wrote and asked me why I chose teaching English as a profession. I thought about it and realized that I had no messianic purpose. I liked literature and I liked talking about it with others who liked literature and liked talking about it. I taught literature because that was a way of creating others who could talk about it in ways that were congenial with my own passion. It was a way of creating a conversation I enjoyed.

Harvey adds, “The other thing that criticism does, apart from gratifying the passions of the critic, is to enhance appreciation of the art being critiqued. In fact, I suggest that enhancing appreciation is the only legitimate function of criticism (beyond a critic’s self-indulgence).”

Logically enough, he then goes on to argue that the purpose of art, like that of criticism, is essentially to increase enjoyment.

The function of art, to pursue this topic into tedium, is to enhance enjoyment of life. A wise man once said, “The more things you like, the happier you’ll be.” Makes sense to me. Art—drawing, painting, music, and so forth—provide an assortment of things that one can choose from to like, thereby fostering one’s chances at being happy.

Harvey’s argument, then, as far as I understand it, is, first, that critics write for reasons which are shallow — because they happen to like things. Critics who claim to be writing for a higher (or lower?) purpose — such as, for example, to influence people, are fooling themselves. Or as Harvey puts it:

It would also be nice, and highly beneficial to mankind and civilization as a whole, if everyone would do exactly as I tell them—if cartoonists reformed and perfected their practices in accordance with my prescriptions, if other so-called critics started talking about comics as a visual art form as well as a narrative one, and if the Grumpy Old Pachyderm became the GOP of “Yes.” But—well, I, like most critics, may be self-absorbed, but I’m not delusional. Not yet.

The only legitimate purpose of criticism, then, according to Harvey, is to enhance appreciation of art. The purpose of art, in turn, is to make people happy. Thus, for comics critics, the goals are, (1) don’t delude yourself into thinking you have a deep and weighty purpose, and (2) make people happy.

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I’m going to take the second point first. Harvey presents this dictum (make people happy) as a common sense, non-weighty point (as he says, “Makes sense to me.”) I don’t think it’s either of those things, though. On the contrary, the rule-of-thumb that the goal of art and/or of life is to make people happy, and that making people happy can be tied to quantitative measures ( “The more things you like, the happier you’ll be.”) comes out of a very specific philosophical tradition: utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is usually described as “the greatest good for the greatest number,” and while it may seem common-sensical, it’s implications lead to all sorts of crazy places. For example, if you take the logic of utilitarianism seriously, you could end up suggesting that starving parents eat their children. After all, the children would die anyway; if the parents eat them, the parents at least will live. It’s a common sense solution, right?

That scenario is, of course, a thumbnail paraphrase of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Swift’s essay is art, in the sense that it is imaginative. It’s also criticism, or at least a critique. And what it’s critiquing is, in part, utilitarianism.

So…is Swift attempting to make us happy with his essay? Or is he attempting to make us — particularly if “us” means utilitarian thinkers of his time — unhappy? Does he want us to laugh at his cleverness, or does he want us to recoil in horror at the logic he puts forward, in the hopes that, by making us unhappy with the world, we may act to change it? No doubt there’s some of both in there — but surely it’s an oversimplification to say that Swift’s purpose, or his effect, is geared primarily, or solely towards making people happy.

And, in fact, art can have many goals other than happiness. Art can glorify god. It can be part of an effort to create community. It can criticize society in an attempt to change it. It can advance particular political interests. It can be intended as a moral lesson. It can try to sell us crap. And so forth.

Caro made some of these objections in comments, and Harvey responded

Art wouldn’t work to do all the things you say it does, Caro, if it didn’t also, and probably primarily, enhance our enjoyment of life. We expect it to do that, and in that expectation, we attend to art even when it is chiefly selling us something or promoting a political position.

The problem here is the problem with all monolithic definitions of complex phenomena — it’s reductive. A gospel song which explicitly tells you to turn away from enjoyment of life and embrace a glorious hereafter — is that meant to enhance our enjoyment of life? You could say “yes”, I suppose, and argue that the gospel singers are deluded about what they’re doing, or that believing in a hereafter actually enhances our enjoyment of life…but why go through all those tergiversations? Why, in short, does the “enjoyment” have to be the base, the real thing, while everything else is a secondary superstructure built on top of it? If someone says their art is intended to glorify god, or to pursue truth, or to change minds…why are those reasons less valid or legitimate or more self-indulgent? Why do they have to be transferred to a paradigm of “enjoyment” if they are to win Harvey’s imprimatur?

Or, to put it another way, whose enjoyment is enhanced, in short, by a definition of art which makes enjoyment the highest purpose? Is the enjoyment of devout Christians enhanced? The enjoyment of starving Irish peasants? Or is what’s at stake here the enjoyment of those of us who have come out modernity’s backside, for whom art is a commodity and commodity is a fetish?

“A wise man once said, “The more things you like, the happier you’ll be.” Who is this wise man? It’s not the Buddha, who would presumably argue that the fewer things you like the happier you’ll be. It’s not Moses, who told his people they’d be happier if they engaged in elaborate dietary rituals which certainly limited the number of things they could like. It’s not Kant, who believed true happiness was tied to not liking things. It’s not Marx, certainly…and not even, actually, Adam Smith, who believed fairly strongly that acquisition was not a simple game of numbers, but needed to be moderated by moral considerations. Indeed, it doesn’t, even on a commonsense level, seem to be the case that the more things you like the happier you are. Liking things can be fun, yes…but surely, liking and liking and liking in an acquisitive orgy of increase can, at times, get in the way of more important things. Like, for example, love.

I’m not saying here that Harvey is always wrong, or that it’s illegitimate to write criticism the goal of which is appreciation, or to create art the goal of which is happiness. My point is, rather, that these aren’t the only ways to approach art and criticism, and certainly not the only legitimate ways to do so. Aesthetics is about enjoyment in part, but it’s also about love, and faith, and even perhaps loathing and despair. To make it solely, or primarily, about enjoyment, I would argue, robs it of its enjoyment — turns it into a utilitarian and rather ugly machine.

So, again I ask, why does Harvey make this argument? Is he enhancing our enjoyment of life by presenting criticism as shallow and art as about happiness? Perhaps in part. But surely he also is doing exactly what he disavows; pushing an agenda, with at least some hope that it will affect or convince his readers. Humility can be a tyranny, too. “Shallowness” for Harvey is not just descriptive, but proscriptive —a stricture enforced by the waiting censure of “self-indulgence” and the accusation of “delusion.” It’s worth remembering, though, that another name for the self can be the soul, and that what one person sees as delusion, another may see as art.

Even so, we love you!

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In last week’s thread on definitions in comics, DerikB posed the question whether print advertisements count as comics. Sam Delany makes a convincing case that the question itself is impossible and probably shouldn’t even be asked, but he makes an exception for specific functional contexts where the project of definition works primarily to describe. On a case-by-case basis, examining whether or not a given definition describes a particular print advertisement (or anything else) can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of the definition as well as the advertisement.

I responded to Derik’s comment by saying that I had a print advertisement I thought should count as comics. I called it a “found comic.” Wikipedia, not nearly as averse as Delany to defining things, observes that “the term found art…describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function.”

My usage recasts this definition for the present context: “found comics describes comics that emerge out of the juxtaposition of elements familiar from comics into material forms and contexts not normally considered comics, often because they have a non-comics function.”

Of course, the two definitions are not truly parallel: a definition of found comics that fully corresponded to found art would require that the elements of the comic be “readymade,” pulled from another context and different use, retaining the traces of that use, and making meaning through the resonance and/or contrast between the original and the artistic use. Found art depends upon that trace of the original context remaining, because the impact of found art is in the dissonant resonance between the original context and the art context.

Found art exposes the ways in which context – not form, not content, but the wall of the museum and the association with the artist – transforms a thing from an object into an art object. The sense of this depends on a cult of “the original” that is very powerful in visual fine art and less so in comics art.

Comics and literature are arts where reproductions retain the artistic value of the original (although not the historical value). They thus depend less on physical materiality and more on the creative generation and juxtaposition of ideas and images. Bricolage in comics, as in literature, pulls “objects” out of their original context and recasts them, and the act of recasting is so powerful that it transforms the meaning.

We don’t really have a concept of “found literature” because literature depends upon the context and presentation to a far smaller extent than visual art. The cut-ups of William Burroughs could be shoehorned into some definition of found literature – but it is essential to note that the conceptual signification of a cut-up novel is very different from that of found art. For this reason, although comics can certainly be made with readymade images using techniques of assemblage and collage and bricolage, I don’t see any particular analytic value in thinking of such comics as found comics.

Comics that can properly be called “found comics,” like found art, are objects whose very existence forces us to re-imagine the varied critical and cultural narratives that demarcate and generate the boundaries of what we think of when we think of comics. In that respect, they gesture toward critical positions and practices that are increasingly more and more inclusive of a broader artistic conversation, more engaged with liminal and marginal comics, more engaged with the normative critical practices of other art forms, while simultaneously allowing us, through comparison, to more finely tune our awareness and understanding of the comics at the center (a center that includes both conventionally defined art comics as well as “mainstream” comics, but not print ads).

Here’s that advertisement I think qualifies as a found comic. (To read, click and zoom in.)

This advertisement appeared in the rear section of the 1950 New York Art Directors’ Annual of Advertising and Editorial Art. The last section of each year’s annual was a showcase for the trade: everything from ad agencies to typographers to paper companies took the opportunity to link their name and an impressive image in the consciousness of the most savvy and successful advertising and publishing professionals.

The agencies surely put their best foot forward in these ads, but as they were also selling a product, the work represented in that context necessarily reflected the company’s overall brand image. So to no small extent this ad represents the level of craft expected from a major advertising house, and it’s a pretty high level of craft. The faces are cubism in the guise of ‘50s flat-affect; the captions make the art director into a sort of “bogeyman wizard,” equal parts magic and intimidation. Representing the litany of criticisms and complaints the artist hears from the art director every day, each “panel” is so unique that it becomes easy for the viewer to imagine, to narrate, the day-to-day struggles of professional interaction and office life (this even without the suggestive resonance with Mad Men).

So this particular professional context certainly passes the criteria of “not usually thought of as comics.” I think I’m safe calling it “found.”

But does the ad fit any definition of comics previously advanced?
It would certainly be easy to think of it as a “single-panel cartoon.” But Scott McCloud tells us in Understanding Comics that single-panel cartoons don’t count as comics because they aren’t sequential. McCloud’s definition, building on Will Eisner’s simple “sequential art,” is “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” Does my “found comic” fit that?

I think I’d say the intended response is not so much aesthetic as meta-aesthetic, but that could arguably count. It’s definitely not in deliberate sequence. It does, however, in contrast to McCloud’s example of Family Circus, have some of the narratological elements usually associated with sequence.

RC Harvey gives us a slightly more fitting definition (copied from Wikipedia for expedience): “Comics consist of pictorial narratives or expositions in which words (often lettered into the picture area within speech balloons) usually contribute to the meaning of the pictures and vice versa.” But it still doesn’t quite work. In my advertisement, the narrative emerges as a resonance, but it’s not IN the comic, explicitly. There’s no direct reference to it. The advertisement is allusive rather than illustrative.

Both words and pictures contribute to this resonant allusive meaning, which is other than both. So the meaning is not cycling in between the words and the pictures in some interdependent “vice versa” relationship described above; instead it’s located in this third term (which I’m sure narratology has a word for that I don’t know). The text in the ad functions less to “contribute to the meaning of the pictures” as it does to anchor and restrict the meaning of the pictures, preventing a completely visceral resonance with the drawn faces –the simplistic “identification” with cartoons that McCloud talks about – and instead directing the reader to interpret the face, not only as a specific, identifiable expression but also as a moment in a narrative that the reader can fill in from general knowledge. These are clearly cartoons, but they are not “stripped down to their essential meaning” (McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 30.)

I don’t think this is really a problem with my print ad being considered comics. I think it’s pretty obviously comics. I think this is just a problem with the definitions – they are not functional descriptions of this thing. Yet it’s not news that resonant, allusive meaning is part of comics, or that not all characterization in the cartoon form works via a very personal “identification” with an abstract face. Meaning in The Bun Field for example is located entirely in metaphor and resonance.

If you’re “in the know,” if you’re already a comics reader, it’s clear that Harvey’s definition refers to, well, things that meet Noah’s criteria of “things we all agree are comics.” But if you’d never seen a comic, what does that definition make you imagine? What do you imagine reading Scott McCloud’s definition – or at least, what would you imagine if you encountered the text pulled out of Understanding Comics without the pictures to clarify? Is it possible that comics can only be defined by showing a picture of them? And if that’s the case, why is McCloud’s definitional project so entirely unsatisfying?

Personally, I think that McCloud’s definition is perfectly suitable for describing the interior design of the hotel restaurant where I ate at on my last business trip:

Remember the definition was “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” I realize the obvious response is that the definition doesn’t fit because sculpture – in this case vases, mosaic, and a light differential – are not pictorial or images. But sculpture is visual art, so there is no real reason why someone who wasn’t already familiar with comics would immediately understand this distinction. And that objection becomes irrelevant once the design is photographed. Even if the design doesn’t strictly meet the definition, the photograph does.

Both the design and its photograph are sequential because of the light differential, getting brighter moving to the right in the vases and to the left on the blue lap. There are gutters and panels. You could argue that the sequence is not “deliberate” – but there’s also no way to determine conclusively that the effect wasn’t intentional. And it certainly provokes an aesthetic response.

I’m not implying that this hotel display is comics, or even found comics, necessarily. I feel certain that McCloud didn’t really intend for his definition to include it. Definitions that emphasize the print medium certainly exclude this design outright – but I nonetheless think it’s perfectly illustrative of the inadequacies of McCloud’s definition, and surely of many others.

To come up with a definition that actually fits my “found comic” advertisement, I have to go to the barest pared-down definition: Wikipedia’s page on comics uses the phrase “interdependence of image and text” to describe comics. (Their actual definition replays the “sequential art” line.) But honestly, that’s so vague that it’s not really functionally useful for understanding anything — it’s obvious just from looking at the page, so it doesn’t add any understanding to comics, and a illustrated newspaper article technically fits.

Yet, my advertisement really does look and feel like comics. I’m sure it’s some subset, like the single-panel cartoon, but it surely belongs in the comics universe. There’s definitely something else, something not captured in any of these definitions, that makes comics comics.

If You Don’t Know, I Can’t Tell You

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I’ve been flipping through Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester’s Comics Studies Reader, and have been struck again by how much energy folks spend in trying to define comics, and at how pointless such efforts seem. In this volume, R.C. Harvey’s essay “How Comics Came to Be” is devoted to arguing that the heart of comics is the “‘blending’ [of] verbal and visual content”, and that therefore, contra Scott McCloud, editorial cartoons are too comics (though Owly is not). On the other hand, Thierry Groensteen argues in “The Impossible Definition” that defining comics is impossible — and then he goes on to state that “The necessary, if not sufficient, condition required to speak of comics is that the images will be multiple and correlated in some fashion,” — which puts us back in McCloud territory, with editorial cartoons out and Owly and Egyptian hieroglyphs in.

Neither Groensteen nor Harvey are especially militant about their positions; I’m sure Harvey would grant Owly its comicness (claiming its the exception that proves the rule) while Groensteen specifically states that he wants to “spare my reflections from any normative character.” Such Catholicism is certainly admirable, but it does raise the question: if you’re basically willing to admit that your definition is incoherent, why bother offering it in the first place?

As it happens, I have a fairly iron-clad definition of comics, which I offer with no diffidence. If you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong.

That definition is:

“Comics are those things which are accepted as comics.”

This definition has the virtue of including both Owly and editorial cartoons, excluding Egyptian hieroglyphs, and more or less ushering in things like photonovels and perhaps abstract comics. In fact, it fits perfectly the world of comics as we actually tend to define and experience it — and it has the added benefit of being both intuitive and perfectly understandable to all.

The main objection to my definition, of course, is that it’s tautological. But the thing is…the construction of aesthetic mediums as formal structures is tautological. How do you define poetry, for example? Rhyme? Rhythm? Short? Heightened language? You can find not one, not two, but numerous exceptions to all of these general rules of thumb.

Because, you know, aesthetics isn’t math. It’s not a deductive or even an inductive process. It’s a social and historical construction. And when I say “historical” I don’t just mean looking to origins and saying, “well, you can see how editorial cartoons developed so that they relied on both words and pictures blended, so blending is important to the form,” which is more or less what R.C. Harvey does in his article. Rather, I mean that we understand what comics are through a whole slew of markers, including style, history, individual creators, distribution methods, format, and on and on. If Dave Sim writes a work of prose, puts it in a pamphlet, and distributes it through the direct market, it can make sense to think of that as a comic; if Mo Willems uses a cartoony style and word balloons and sells it as a children’s book, it can make sense to think of that as a comic too. Egyptian hieroglyphs are simply not an important influence on most (any?) comics creators — suggesting that they are part of comics history therefore seems willfully obtuse. Ukiyo-e prints, on the other hand, have a significant influence on various manga-ka; it therefore makes sense to think of them as proto-comics, even though they don’t normally utilize sequence or blend words and images in the way that R.C. Harvey suggests that gag cartoons do.

The issue here isn’t, as Groensteen argues, that each comic “only actualizes certain potentialities of the medium” — rather the issue is that the “medium” that Groensteen writes about doesn’t exist as a static or formal structure at all. Comics — like literature, or art — is what people say it is. To define it is to try to reduce it to the whim of a single person — to replace a messy consensus with a cleaner, more unitary dictat.

Doing that is both futile and silly — but perhaps necessary for tactical reasons. Terry Eagleton in his “Introduction to Literary Theory” notes that literature professors were long at pains to define literature clearly not because such a definition was in any way tenable, but simply because it was hard to get your colleagues to take you seriously if you didn’t have a concrete object that you could say you were studying. Despite some advances, comics scholars are still definitively second-class academic citizens, most of whom tend to be moonlighting post-tenure from the English department. The effort to firm up this thing called comics is, therefore, no doubt helpful in the ongoing effort to secure funding and/or some modicum of respect for those in the academy — and presumably for those outside it as well (I don’t actually know whether Harvey or Groensteen have any university connections.)

It’s actually fine with me if folks with an institutional or personal stake in comics try to shore up thier positions; people have to earn a living, and nattering on about the elements which characterize comics hardly seems like even a venial sin. But I think it’s worth pointing out that, whatever its strategic benefits, the whole “how do you formally define comics?” debate is, from any other perspective, almost completely irrelevant.

Update: Slightly edited….