Off to Never-Never Land

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

First time I lost a tooth, I ran to the top of the steps and yelled, “My tooth came out!” I couldn’t see my mother in our laundry room, but she performed a reasonably convincing shout of excitement, ending with: “Looks like someone’s getting a visit from the tooth fairy tonight!”

My five-year-old body went rigid. Blood drained from my face. Tooth fairy? Who the hell was the tooth fairy?

I must have a gothic disposition, because I assumed this creature would be coming for the rest of my still-attached teeth. One of Poe’s narrators does that, plucks out his beloved’s beautiful incisors and bicuspids with a pair of pliers. But Germany’s E. T. A. Hoffman is the better source for inverted fairies. A student in my English Capstone assigned the 1816 “Der Sandmann” to our class earlier this semester. Hoffman takes the harmless Sandman, bringer of sleep to dozy children, and twists him into “a wicked man” who “throws handfuls of sand into their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them into a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones.”

That’s the guy Metallica is singing about. Although the Hans Anderson version isn’t all goodnight kisses either. Ole-Luk-Oie, the Dream-God, may be very “fond of children,” but if you’ve been naughty, he holds a black umbrella over you all night so come morning you’ve dreamt nothing at all. His sibling is named Ole-Luk-Oie too, except “he never visits anyone but once, and when he does come, he takes him away on his horse, and tells him stories as they ride along. He knows only two. One of these is so wonderfully beautiful, that no one in the world can imagine anything like it; but the other is just as ugly and frightful, so that it would be impossible to describe it.” The other Sandman isn’t a Dream-God. He’s Death.

I prefer Hoffman’s eye-plucking fairy. He reveals “the path of the wonderful and adventurous” as the child-narrator tries to unmask him. That’s right, “the terrible Sand-man” is a dual-identity supervillain. The kid recognizes his father’s business partner, a literally Satanic lawyer who practices alchemy by night. If the Faust allusions aren’t clear, then note his “sepulchral voice” and the laboratory explosion that kills the hapless dad. Hoffman even quotes Goethe after strumming the ubermench theme song: “Father treated him as if he were a being from a higher race.”

Enter Golden Age comic writer Gardner Fox. He must have spent a lot of time under Ole-Luk-Oie’s other umbrella, the one with the pictures twirling on the inside. He dreamt up the Flash, Hawkman, Dr. Fate and the Justice Society of America. Bill Finger usually gets credit as Batman’s original writer, but Fox wrote six of the first eight episodes, each almost twice as long as Finger’s introductory 6-pagers. Instead of apprehending jewel thieves and serial killers, Fox’s phantasmagoric Dark Knight faces down a werewolf-vampire and some guy who steals faces and puts them on talking flowers.

When Finger returned Batman to the grit of crime alley in 1940, Fox dreamt up the Sandman, your standard fedora-wearing Mystery Man, except in a World War I gas mask. He stole his knock-out pellets from Batman’s utility belt (a Fox invention), though they’d already been field-tested by Johnston McCulley’s Bat and WXYZ’s Green Hornet. When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon got tired of spinning Timely’s umbrella of characters, they traded in the Sandman’s business suit for a red and yellow leotard and a sidekick named Sandy. They kept the color scheme when they revised him again in 1974, this time as the Sandman of Hans Anderson lore, a protector of children’s dreams. That’s the dopey series Neil Gaiman reawakened in 1988.

I was too busy mourning the collapse of Alan Moore’s short-lived Mad Love company to take adequate notice at the time. Gaiman stripped off the leotard, but I still considered his white-skinned Morpheus just another superhero reboot. I thought the future of comics was Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers and Dave McKean’s Cages. I was wrong. McKean’s publisher Tundra died almost as fast as Mad Love. I’m sure he made better money painting Sandman covers anyway.

Sandman is easily the best-selling and best-regarded comic of the 90s. When I attended a comics forum last month, it was the only work to receive its own three-scholar panel. Unfortunately the forum was in Michigan after a bout of “snow thunder” had reduced the state to a lake of frozen slush, and none of the three panelists showed up. Maybe the empty podium was their way of evoking a night spent under the Sandman’s black umbrella.

I prefer Gaiman’s non-graphic novels anyway. Stardust was one of the last books I read aloud to my kids, my wife regularly teaches American Gods, and Coraline once shattered an MFA-induced writing block of mine, not just its twirling dreamscape, but the deceptively Stein-esque simplicity of its sentences. This also lea\d to a parenting low point when my wife and I refused to leave a matinee of the film adaptation even though our son was trying to claw over the back of his seat to escape. And yet the emotional scars did not prevent him from later writing a book report on Neverwhere. He likes Good Omens too.

Like Hans Anderson, DC spun-off the Sandman’s sibling Death, but when Gaiman killed Sandman, his contract stipulated that it would stay dead. Because, as Ole-Luk-Oie warns his listeners, “You may have too much of a good thing.” I was paying enough attention to buy that 75^th and final issue, a riff on Shakespeare’s Tempest. It turns out the bard is a bit of a Faust himself. The talentless hack accepts a contract as the Sandman’s front man, inundating the world with dream stuff for centuries to come. “There is nobody in the world,” wrote Hans, “who knows so many stories as Ole-Luk-Oie, or who can relate them so nicely.”

Asterix and the Bland Sequel

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Alex Buchet

1960, and I am 6 years old; I leave the New York Public School system for my first day at the Lycée Français de New York, the city’s French school. (I’m half Yank, half Frog.)

At the end of the day, my mother rewards me with a comics album; it features a hero I’ve never heard of, in his first adventure — Astérix le Gaulois. It was the start of a love affair that lasted until the death of the comic’s writer, the brilliantly funny René Goscinny (1926-1977).

René Goscinny

The team of Goscinny (script) and Albert Uderzo (art) produced 24 albums of adventures for Astérix and his hulking sidekick Obélix. The series sold fairly well at first, but by 1965 it had become a hit phenomenon, one that grew and grew from year to year.

Goscinny and Uderzo at work; art by Uderzo

Alas, Goscinny died too soon, age 51. His partner then made a fateful decision that would prove financially successful but artistically disastrous: he would continue the series alone.

It’s part of received wisdom that the best comics are the product of a single writer/artist, and indeed there are many examples to support this view: Schulz (Peanuts), Herriman (Krazy Kat), Crumb. It can also be persuasively argued that even cartoonists who did good work in collaboration with others, for instance as scripters (Harvey Kurtzman) or artists (Jean Giraud, Barry Windsor-Smith) did their best work solo.

The Goscinny-Uderzo team tests this tenet. Goscinny was a mediocre cartoonist who wrote excellently. Uderzo is an excellent artist…who writes very badly.

The classic team at work…

Where Goscinny had impeccable comic timing, Uderzo’s lame gags seem to plop onto the page. Where Goscinny’s stories were intricately plotted, Uderzo’s are simplistic good guy/bad guy fables with sentimental love tales woven in. Goscinny wisely limited the fantastic element mainly to the famous Magic Potion that gave Astérix super-strength; Uderzo crammed his albums with flying carpets, unicorns, Atlantis, giant babies, flying saucers and all the fantasy paraphernalia you could wish for — or not. (Actually, I have a sneaking sympathy for the artist on this last point: he had probably felt frustrated by decades of not being able to draw all this cool stuff…)

I could go on in depressing detail, but suffice it to say that over the course of eight albums what was once widely hailed as the world’s best comic, beloved of kids and adults alike, had descended into a silly, wholly childish mediocrity.

But in business terms, Astérix had become a colossus.

To give some perspective, consider that the first edition of the first album, back in 1959, was of 6000 copies. In 2005, Uderzo’s last album had a first edition of three million two hundred thousand copies — and that’s just the French language version.

Published in 110 languages, Astérix has had to date total worldwide sales of 350 000 000 copies. It has spawned 8 feature cartoons, 4 live action feature films, and an amusement park. It currently has over 100 product licenses. This is a billion-dollar property.

And one which has turned Uderzo, especially since he took over the publishing himself, into one of the richest men in France.

But the artist is now 86 years old, and determined to retire. At first he thought of discontinuing the strip as well…then decided to turn it over to a new team: scripter Jean-Yves Ferri and artist Didier Conrad.

Left to right: Jean-Yves Ferri, Albert Uderzo, and Didier Conrad

It’s not a choice a purist would wish, perhaps, but one can understand the impulse behind it. Uderzo is probably hoping to pass on a living, profitable legacy to his descendants (though as of this writing he’s embroiled in a nasty lawsuit against his daughter.) He might also feel a duty towards the employees of his company. Who knows? He might simply have thought it fun to oversee the work of new blood.

Ferri (1959– ) was best known for an album of mildly whimsical gags, De Gaulle à la Plage. Conrad (1959– ) was once considered a satiric and scatological enfant terrible of Franco-Belgian comics — little trace of that here — renowned for his skill at imitating classic cartoonists such as Franquin or Morris; this latter talent is, no doubt, the reason Uderzo chose him.

October 2013 saw the release of the new team’s first effort, Astérix chez les Pictes.

My verdict, and that of most reviewers: FAIL.

Some background: Astérix, in album after album, would visit a foreign land, and the people dwelling there would be satirised: Belgians, Swiss, Spanish, Germans (the only ones treated really viciously: understandable, perhaps — the Jewish Goscinny lost part of his family to the Nazi extermination camps.) By common consensus, the best of these particular albums is Asterix in Britain, a hilarious send-up of the English, who themselves loved it.

The target country this time around is Scotland. (The Picts were the Celtic tribes who pre-dated the Scots in what the Romans called Caledonia.)

Now, not everybody likes these national parodies, and indeed one may argue that they reinforce stereotypes and xenophobia. (One comics scholar of this opinion I found rather persuasive is Domingos Isabelinho.) However, if you’re going to satirise, then do it: don’t turn out soft-pedal mush!

Alas, that’s exactly what Pictes does. There’s some wordplay on Mac-prefixed names, fun at the expense of clan tartans or of the Scottish sport of caber-tossing, teasing about the potency of proto-scotch whisky…and that’s about it. I’m not asking that Ferri dig up the more nasty clichés about the Scots, especially the libelous legend of their niggardliness. (I’ve travelled in Scotland, and have found the Scottish people to be of extraordinary generosity and kindness.)

But why such blandness? It’s telling that throughout, the Gauls and the Picts call each other “cousin”. That’s what we get here: the Picts/Scots are just Gauls/French in kilts.

Well, on to the story, such as it is. It’s winter in Gaul, and Asterix and Obélix find a young Pictish man frozen in ice:

Once the Druid thaws him out, the Pict is unable to speak at first, but manages to carve a map to his home village.With Asterix and Obélix they set sail — which naturally means the traditional running gag of trashing the pirates. (The Pict, Mac Oloch, recovers his power of speech.)

The pirate fight seems unusually bullying this time around — as a rule they do something to bring down Gaulish wrath on their heads. This time it’s see-pirate, bash-pirate: gratuitous violence:

(The above image shows a recurring flaw in Conrad’s impersonation of Uderzo: the latter was very good at clarity in complex set-ups — his successor, not so much.)

They get to Caledonia, there’s a big welcome back, and the goodies vs baddies scenario is laid out. The villainous Mac Abbeh is scheming to take over as Great King of the Pictish Clans, and he’d caused Mac Oloch’s supposed frozen doom to set aside this rightful pretender, as well as to steal his fiancée Camomilla. He’s also plotting with the Romans to have them invade Caledonia (which they never managed in real life).

Our heroes set to work undoing this villainy, as usual with plenty of smashing the enemy, interspersed with salmon feasts, joking assimilation of Pictish bards with rock groups, whisky-sodden druids and Romans, and an excessively goofy-looking (and overexposed — see my complaints about too many fantasy elements) Loch Ness monster:

Goscinny would often slip in political or sociological commentary into his scripts. The closest Ferri comes to this is rather mean-spirited: during the final battle, in a free-for-all between warring clans, we note that each clan is distinguished by a tartan or other pattern, often ridiculous — polka dots and so on. The representative of the White Pict Clan bears the insignia of the Red Cross, and he proudly proclaims his neutrality — which leads to his being beaten up by both sides, to the evident approval of the authors.

The Red Cross (as well as its Islamic sister organisation, the Red Crescent) has always proclaimed and studiously observed its neutrality during war and conflicts. It has to. It otherwise couldn’t fulfill its mission of tending to the wounded and prisoners held by each enemy combatant. To sneer at the Red Cross for its neutrality is as distasteful an attitude as I can imagine.

Another annoyance for this olde farte of a reader: the series used to be stuffed to the gills with classical allusions, often of a very high degree of wit. None of that here. But I suppose I can’t really blame the authors. France in 2014 is not the France of 1959, when Latin was a compulsory subject in middle and high school, when most of the country went to the Latin-language Roman Catholic mass every Sunday (Asterix debuted before the Vatican II Council imposed the mass in the vernacular.) The country, and most of Europe, was steeped in classical culture. An age lost and by the wind grieved…

Are there any positive sides to the album? As I said, Didier Conrad is a pale echo of Uderzo, but sometimes his art can depict images of simple charm, such as this view of low-flying puffins:

MacOloch’s brain-damaged state is treated with genuine tact and sympathy, showing his sadness and frustration at being unable to control his speech:

I liked how the entire Gaul village rallied around this stricken castaway with kindness and tact. There is a minor sub-plot concerning a modest but zealous Roman census-taker that I also enjoyed.

There is also the refreshingly feisty figure of Camomilla, MacOloch’s lady love. He’d described her in the most cloying, sylph-like romantic flummery — but when we get to meet her she’s a short, plumpish firecracker of a lassie with a temper and a quick-lashing fist. Even MacOloch is a bit afraid of her and of her heretical feminist notions about royal succession.

To sum up, the book isn’t bad as such. It’s mediocre, and mediocrity doesn’t cut it when it comes to a once-extraordinary strip like Asterix.

The English-language version is also out, as usual translated by Anthea Bell (1936– )

Anthea Bell

Bell is one of Britain’s most esteemed and honored translators from the French, German and Danish. Although she is noted for her work with adult literature (Stefan Zweig, W.G.Sebald, Sigmund Freud) she also has a considerable body of work in children’s literature (new translations of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales) and comics. Her renderings of the Asterix books are remarkable, especially in her skillful versions of puns — the translator’s nightmare — and of cultural allusions.

Alas, her work here really can’t be commended. Uninspired is the best I can say. Look at the first panel in the page below, which carries on one of the series’ running gags, the enmity between the fishmonger and the blacksmith in the village:

Fishmonger: Frais! Il est frais mon poisson!

Blacksmith: Ouais! Bon, ca va! Il n’y a pas de quoi se vanter!

There’s a pun at work here. My literal translation:

Fishmonger: Fresh! My fish is fresh!

Blacksmith: Yeah, yeah! That’ll do! That’s nothing to brag about!

Now, the caption and the graphics tell us that this is an exceptionally cold winter. In French, “frais” can mean either fresh — as in ‘fresh fruit’ — or cold. So the punning meaning implied by the blacksmith is that his old foe is bragging about his cold fish, and so what in weather like this?

Whew. How do you translate a pun like that? Don’t ask me, but in the past Bell has pulled off miracles in this linguistic minefield. Not here, though: her translation runs:

Fishmonger: Fresh fish! Buy my nice fresh fish!

Blacksmith: Huh! Fresh, is it? Tell us another!

In other words, Bell doesn’t even try.

Mind you, she can’t be blamed for making bricks without straw. At one point the Picts welcome Asterix and Obelix with a feast of “paupiettes de saumon”, salmon paupiettes. Now, paupiettes are thinly sliced pieces of meat wrapped around a filler of vegetables and stuffing. But Conrad just draws whole salmons in the dishes. Poor Bell can’t remedy this laziness by just calling them ‘salmons’, as there’s a whole little shtick about Obelix loving the dish and asking for the special recipe. So Bell calls them “salmon portions”.

(Foreign dishes are a recurring source of humor in the series. So why didn’t the authors mention the most famous dish in Scotland, the haggis, a meat pudding wrapped in a sheep’s stomach? Even the Scots make fun of it, vide Robert Browning’s ode to haggis (“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race! Aboon them a’ ye tak yer place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace As lang’s my airm.”). My guess is that Ferri and Conrad didn’t want to invite comparison with one of the most famous skits in French radio: La Panse de Brebis Farcie, by Fernand Raynaud, about a Frenchman’s desperate attempt to avoid eating haggis.)

My main beef is that Bell made no attempt at reproducing Scottish dialect. All her Picts speak like London schoolmistresses. This is all the more bizarre as there’s also being published the entire album in Lallans, or Lowland Scottish English, as shown below:

(It’s also being published in Gaelic).

Finally, a last reason for my disenchantment. Comics are big business in France. The combined first printing of Picts comes to 4 million four hundred thousand copies, with 2 million two hundred thousand for France alone (at nine euros a pop- about $13…you do the math.) An Asterix album is given the media and advertising saturation launch of a Hollywood movie. For weeks, you couldn’t avoid the damn thing. Enough already.

Poster in the Paris metro

The problem of the legacy strip is common to France and the USA. In France, sequels to many popular series like Blake et Mortimer come out after the creator’s death, as do strips like Flash Gordon or Annie in the states. Other strips are permanently retired: Tintin, Peanuts. Which is best?

Most Overrated Television Show…And Most Underrated, If Any Exist

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I’m watching Orange Is the New Black for an assignment, and being impressed again by how the new era of television drama seems to rely on basically overrating every single thing on the tube. With the exception of the Wire and the first season of Twin Peaks, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a television drama that managed to get past sporadically entertaining and onto “good”.

Anyway, the most overrated thing I’ve seen is probably “Breaking Bad,” which is supposed to be one of the great artistic triumphs of our time but to me (in the first season at least) seemed mired in all too familiar television cliches and lazy dramatic devices. Outside of drama, there are shows I love — the Batman TV show for example, or Warner Bros cartoons, and so forth. But I don’t know that any of them are underrated exactly.

Utilitarian Review 3/22/14

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Travis Reynolds on comics gutters.

Kinukitty on bisexuality, reading yaoi, and the closet. (Part of our ongoing reposting of the Gay Utopia.)

I asked folks to list the best music of the year so far, a request that was for the most part met with indifference. Oh well; they can’t all be gems.

Ng Suat Tong on David B’s “Incidents in the Night” and the dream of books.

Osvaldo Oyola tells me why I should like the Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil more.

Kailyn Kent on service and Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel.

Michael A. Johnson on Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, Almodavar’s All About My Mother, and weeping at comics.

Me on fantasy dragons and real romance in Laura Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

— students who do sex work, and how they’re not all the same.

— Ms. Marvel and the tradition of superhero assimilation fantasies.

At the Dissolve I wrote about the vile misogynist pile of crap that is How To Be a Man.

At Salon I had a list of songs for the coming nuclear apocalypse.

At Splice Today:

— I argue that sexuality can sometimes be a choice.

— I sneered at Jonathan Chait for kicking his less fortunate colleagues.

The study guide I worked on for Rick Riordan’s Lost Hero is online at Shmoop.

Other Links

Ta-Nehisi Coates is skeptical of liberal outrage at Paul Ryan.

Alyssa Rosenberg kicks off her blog at the Washington Post with a statement of purpose re: writing about pop culture.

Tucker Stone lists the 25 best albums of 2013.

Standardized tests are an off-shoot of eugenics.

Julia Carrie Wong on journalists mining the twitter accounts of Women of Color.

The Kinship Structure of Ferns

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Lee Relvas

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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Click to enlarge images.

Real Romance

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

In Laura Kinsale’s medieval romance novel “For My Lady’s Heart,” there’s one scene where the heroic knight Ruck is guiding the noble lady Melanthe through the north of England, an area, he explains, which he has visited before while hunting dragons. Melanthe is doubtful that dragons exist in that part of the world, but Ruck insists he has killed one. Melanthe still demures…perhaps, she suggests, he merely encountered a large basilisk. He assures her that it must have been a dragon,and after a rousing tale of his battle, he offers to show her its bones, which are located in a church close by. And sure enough he does:

She saw it immediately. The skull lay in the shaft of light from the door, enthroned upon a wide bench below the crude altar. It was huge, and nothing like a basilisk’s eagle head. Just as he had said, a long and pointed snout, with great eye and nostril hollows and vicious teeth like no living creature she had ever seen. Remains of its spine lay scattered in a rough line down the bench. A fan of thinner bones, like an enormous hand or a wing, was assembled carefully on a nearby talble.

“It is a dragon.” Melanthe strode into the church, stripping off her gloves, leaving the knight leaning upon the door to hold it open. She bent over the skull.

And, bending over, she discovers that the skull is not a real skull; it’s made of stone. The dragon isn’t a dragon after all, and Ruck certainly didn’t kill it. He was lying…or, as he says, simply telling “A tale, my lady, that I made for your pleasure.”

The twist here is that the reader doesn’t necessarily know that it’s just a tale any more than Melanthe does. It’s true that up to this point in the novel, there haven’t been any fantasy elements — Kinsale’s medieval milieu includes a lot of talk of witchcraft and enchantment, but (at least until we reach the dragon) it’s all explained naturalistically. But this is a novel, not a history, and Ruck is a very honest, straightforward character — certainly as I read, I felt, with Melanthe, that maybe, possibly, he really had killed a dragon. Maybe there were more things, not necessarily in heaven and earth, but in this book than I’d initially thought. It would be fun to suddenly have a fantasy dragon make a walk-on in the middle of a romance novel. It could happen, couldn’t it?

That tease — the delighted possibility that the fantastic might be real, and the concomitant delight/reversal/disappointment that is isn’t — is a kind of magical, virtuoso acknowledgement, or demonstration, of the links and disjunctions between the genres of fantasy and romance. Romance is often sneered at for its lack of realism; for the way that, when “My lady wished a firedrake,” as Ruck says, a firedrake, and/or a perfectly noble man, is provided. Yet, if romances are about wish fulfillment, historicals like this one are also about period detail — the machinations of the Italian court, the intricacies of Ruck’s armor, even the lapse into a readable but still well-researched form of Middle English. Reality in fiction (and perhaps elsewhere?) is a negotiation; a matter of tropes and trust. Which is why Melanthe is not, in fact, delighted with Ruck’s tale. Instead, she becomes enraged, telling him coldly, “If I find thee in a lie to me again, knight, thou will rue it to thy early death.”

Melanthe’s freak out seems like caprice. But it’s actually part of the romance plot. “There is but one person on the earth that I trust, and that is thee,” she tells Ruck, by way of explaining why his dragon fiction upset her. Melanthie herself, having married into an important Italian house, with all the backstabbing and intrigue that that (stereotypically) implies, has been trained to lie constantly, to stifle all her natural impulses and do the opposite of what she feels. “I have some talents in common with base liars and cowards,” she tells Ruck bitterly.

The lying, at least, is something she has in common with Kinsale, the author of the story, as well. At one point Melanthe tells Ruck that she is always lying, and that’s the truth — everything she says is fiction. For that matter, even Ruck’s honesty is a fiction — except, perhaps, when he makes up that story about the dragon. The fiction really is a fiction; dragons, in the book and outside the book, aren’t real.

Kinsale’s narrative, for the most part, is organized to demonstrate the virtue of Ruck’s straightforward honesty in opposition to the treachery and deceit of the manipulative dusky southerners. But that binary of good-truth/evil-lies has many caveats and winks. Ruck passes Melanthe off as his “wench” at one point in order to protect her from kidnapping — or is it instead, extra-diegetically, so that she can play at being his to do with as he will, just as, through much of the rest of the novel, she is his lady, and he must do her bidding? It’s the pretense of being his lover that precipitates their first actual intercourse, immediately preceded by their private commitment of marriage before God and each other in the darkened bed-chamber. True love comes through a lie…or, if you want to take it back a step, the fiction of true love is delivered through the play-acting characters realizing that the fiction they are acting is the truth.

The declaration and marriage come somewhat early on in the book; there are many contrivances, most of them unlikely, before you get to the also-not-especially-likely happy-ever-after. But to complain about the improbability seems as churlish as Melanthe getting upset that her knight has told her a story. For that matter, even Melanthe has to admit that the Ruck’s fiction “was somewhat agreeable.” What romance writers and romance readers know, perhaps, is that it’s not so much whether the dragon’s tale is true, as whether it is told with love.

What do Are You my Mother? and All About My Mother have in common?

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

A weepy blog post composed of questions:

•One of the most interesting discussions that took place at the ICAF conference I attended a few years ago in White River Junction concerned the question of readers’ emotional responses to comics. I forget who exactly was involved in the discussion but I remember distinctly that there was somewhat of a consensus on the notion that comics are not a spontaneous or passionate medium. One reads comics analytically, obsessively, but not immersively. One rereads comics over and over, and might form intense emotional responses to the stories and characters, but not in the same spontaneous and overwhelming way we might experience when reading novels or watching films. Comics scholars in that room seemed to agree that, generally speaking, it is not common to weep in response to a comic or graphic novel. I mostly agree, although I hope to be proven wrong. The question has been asked many times before, but I ask it again: which comics have made you weep?

•I wept a few times while reading Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? It’s hard to understand why her autobiographical comic moved me to such a great degree when I don’t identify with the author’s alienated relationship to her mother and, more to the point, I find metafictional writing intellectually interesting but not moving in any kind of spontaneous weepy kind of way. So, I’d like to understand, why did Are You My Mother? make me weep (on an airplane, in front of strangers, no less)!? I don’t have an answer to my question but I do have more questions.

•As a gay man, I often find naturalizing maternal/paternal narratives, especially those that involve legacy or inherited guilt/pride/whatever to be silly and alienating; it’s a culture I was violently excluded from, being from a born-again Christian family. At the same time, like anyone, I have inherited various legacies from my family and am as vulnerable as the next person to stories about generational transmission (guilt, abuse, pride, shame, etc.). Usually such stories are intellectually interesting but not moving enough to bring me to tears. My critical capacities shut the schmaltzy response down before it can materialize. I find Wes Anderson films utterly intolerable, even though I admire his artistry, to give you one complicated example. So, the only way I can understand my response to Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? is by comparing it to the very similar emotional response I experienced while watching Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Is it a coincidence that both works are about mothers? Or that both works are intensely metafictional and citational? Am I just being disingenuous about my mommy issues?

•It’s a question I could not get away with asking in a scholarly article, but one worth asking nonetheless: do mothers and metafiction have something to do with one another? Is there something maternal about metafictional structures? Is there something metafictional about the way we relate to our mothers?

•Both Almodovar and Bechdel are interested in acting. Bechdel’s mother is an actress who, at times, plays a mother. Almodovar’s mothers are always actresses who usually play bad mothers. What is it about the mother-as-actress figure that moves me to tears? I suspect it has something to do with Freud’s fort-da, that the mother is somehow both unavailable and eternally available as a representation. Does the fact that mothers can be played by actresses disturb our understanding of motherhood as somehow natural?

•There may be a narratological term for this, and please let me know if there is, but one of the aspects of Bechdel’s and Almodovar’s metafiction I find deeply moving is the deliberate layering effects. Actresses play mothers; mothers play actresses; men play women; women play women. The play within the play is only the beginning. For Almodovar, All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire become the grounds for a series of fictional layers (fiction providing the grounds for further fictions), while for Bechdel, it is the works of Virginia Woolf and Donald Winicott, among others, that serve a similar purpose. All of these layers of fiction bring attention to the melancholic unavailability and tragic loss of some kind of original femininity/maternity. The fictional copy brings attention to the fact that the original is not, and has never been, available. Children cope with the unavailability of their mothers (be it a psychological or simply situational unavailability) through increasingly complex layers of transitional objects, all of which enable the child to grasp the reality of absence while also providing comfort in the form of a substitution. These layers are essentially fictions, and I think this might be where we can find a tie-in between metafiction and mother-child object relations. We are all moved by stories that engage mother-child object relations (unless we are psychotics) but why is it that I find myself weeping most weepily in response to stories that construe mother-child object relations in metafictional terms?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: March 2014