Vampire in the Mirror

Posted on April 30, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

In Lacan’s mirror stage, an infant looks in the mirror and sees itself as a coherent, capable whole. That joyful instant of recognition is actually a misrecognition; the infant is not in fact that whole yet; it’s a vision of what will be. Or of what the infant imagines will be; Lacan’s point is that the image is false; the vision of coherence is not really a coherence to come; it’s a fantasy. Moreover, the future imagined coherence creates a past imagined incoherence. Part of the misrecognition of the mirror stage is the illusion of a stage, the dream of chronology. The future adult self is created simultaneously with the past child self; identity comes into being at the same moment as a past non-identity comes into being. The self as a chronology is an invention; the past, like the future, is a fiction.

The child, therefore, is precisely a fiction; it is a character in a novel, with a made up background to go with the made up narrative. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, that a number of novels that are especially interested in reader identification or mirroring deliberately thematize the mirror stage (or at least an imagined version thereof.) For example, Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Identity semi-famously opens with the main character getting a crack on the skull and forgetting himself. The reader, therefore, enters the novel just as the character does — bereft of a past as of a future, seeking to piece together a coherent self which extends backwards as well as forwards in time. Similarly, in Rick Riordan’s fantasy quest novel The Lost Hero, the main character, Jason, wakes up on a bus with no memory of how he got there. More, those around him (his girlfriend and his best friend) do remember him, because the gods have altered their memories. His past is (within the book) actually false; his story is (again, within the story) actually invented. Entering the book is entering a meta-fiction; to read is to falsely identify with a character whose identity is false. The fiction is really fiction, so your identity (as hero) is all the more thorough in being true to its falseness. You are lost, and are therefore the hero.

Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling works in a similar way. The novel opens in media self — the first person narration does not know who it is; identity comes into being all at once, without a past or a chronology.

Again, the effect of this move is to put you in the same place as the character — you are linked to the protagonist through joint ignorance. Neither of you knows yourself. In the Bourne Identity and Lost Hero, this is used as an excuse to provide you with a default, standard-issue protagonist self — you become a deadly assassin (with a heart of gold) or the son of a God. In both cases, the fantasy fiction self is white, male, and heterosexual; the image sets you up as the iconic cultural mainstream.

Butler does something rather different. As you read, you discover that the fictional self you are building in the mirror is a black female child who also happens to be a vampire. Though it takes a while to figure it out, the first thing “you” do in the book is kill and eat a friend (to help you heal your wounds); shortly thereafter, you find an adult male, sleep with him, and suck his blood. In this instance, then, the child looks in the mirror and discovers that it is a black female monster, cannibal, murderer, and pedophile. The imagined self is an other; the created past is a nightmare — at least if you’re the supposed male heterosexual white male reader of the Bourne Identity.

That’s really the most interesting part of Fledgling; following the opening revelations, the book is mostly devoted to filling in details about cool vampires, a task which is ultimately as mundane as Ludlum’s genre spy story or Riordan’s video-game-esque fantasy battle set-pieces. The implications, though, are interesting. The imagined self, is, after all, not the self; that thing in the mirror is a thing, some simulacrum wearing your form (which didn’t exist before it wore it.) Who you are is a fiction, which could be a dream of empowerment, but could also be a dream of alienation and monstrosity. And Butler neatly points out that which is which is not necessarily all that obvious. For a black queer woman reader, couldn’t Jason Bourne, the violent white mass-murderer with a gun, be the monster, while the subversive super-powered vampire is the vision of coherent empowerment? One person’s joyful empowerment fantasy can be another person’s nightmare of self-alienation — especially since the one person and another person are just fictions; somebody else you devour to climb into your story, which had already always started without you.

Jack’s Dark Materials

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

I was quizzing a friend of mine at a recent dinner party about her living in England as a kid. Ellen and her older brother attended Bishop Kirk Middle School in Oxford, where she had Philip Pullman for a homeroom teacher. He also gave her private guitar lessons while not busy teaching English and Maths (the course is inexplicably plural in England). This was the late 70s, a couple of decades before His Dark Materials made Pullman an internationally celebrated fantasy author. School plays were still his main creative outlet. He wrote one a year and staged it in the lunchroom with a curtain draped in front of the counter. Mrs. Dixon, the music teacher, composed the songs and thumped them out on piano.

Ellen remembers virtually nothing else about the 1978 Spring-Heeled Jack, just that her brother played a sea captain and got to kiss the prettiest girl in school (who became a supermodel and married Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran). Pullman later adapted the play into a children’s book—which I’m holding in my hands right now. It’s part comic book, which is appropriate, since Spring-Heeled Jack is also England’s first superhero. “In Victorian times,” writes Pullman, “before Superman and Batman had been heard of, there was another hero who used to go around rescuing people and catching criminals.”

Pullman’s illustrator, David Mostyn, draws Spring-Heeled in a cape and top hat—which is disappointing if you’ve seen any of the Victorian illustrations. I don’t know how Pullman dressed his middle school actor (“the costuming was all very much pulled-together,” Ellen says), but Alfred Burrage’s 1886 penny dreadful describes “the tight-fitting garb of the theatrical Mephistopheles” which “covered him from his neck to his feet” and “made him look like a huge bat, with a body of brilliant scarlet.” This “most hideous and frightful appearance” also included a “black domino” mask, claws “of some metallic substance” (adamantium perhaps?), a “small black cap” with a “bright crimson feather” (though he sometimes substituted a “large helmet” or “the head of an animal, constructed out of paper and paste”), a “high-heeled, pointed shoe” and “something like a cow’s hoof, in imitation, no doubt, of the ‘cloven hoof’ of Satan” (“It was generally supposed that the “springing” mechanism was contained in that hoof”), and a “capacious cloak,” the flaps of which distended in flight “until they resembled a pair of wings.”

When Burrage rebooted in 1904, he added a batcave and then stole an escaped-fugitive-framed-for-treason revenge plot from The Count of Monte Cristo. Burrage wasn’t Jack’s first chronicler though. An anonymous serial sprung up in 1867, with a title lifted from John Thomas Haines’ 1840 play, Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of London. If that subtitle doesn’t sound very superheroic, it’s not. The play was inspired by the possibly hysterical reports of a real-life assailant who terrorized the suburbs of London in 1838. According to The Times, a “young man in a large cloak” tore at one victim’s “neck and arms with his claws” and “vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flames from his mouth.” Police suspected a carpenter too drunk to recall anything of the night, but spreading rumors named the devil and/or Henry de la Poer Beresford, the Marquis of Waterford. The mayor of London received an anonymous letter accusing an individual from “the higher ranks of life” of accepting a wager to garb himself “in three disguises—a ghost, a bear and a devil” and accost and so deprive “ladies of their senses.”

True or not, the tally of senseless ladies soon climbed to thirty with the Morning Post reporting how “females” were “afraid to move a yard from their dwellings.” If Jack was the devil, then Old Nick must have just flapped in from the Kentucky frontier where he was routinely sighted as the animal-headed, demon-avenger Jibbenainosay in Robert Birds’ 1837 Nick of the Woods. The devilish Marquis was never arrested, but two of his imitators were. Spring-Heeled Jack, however, had already bound into legend. The name—originally just a reference to the culprit’s elusiveness—reverse engineered itself the superpowered ability to leap over coaches and houses by supernatural and/or mechanical means. “Spring-Heeled Jack” also became a standard term for unsolved assaults and ghostly sightings, culminating with that 1888 Whitechappel serial killer dubbed “Jack the Ripper.”

I’d say Spring-Heel traffics a lot with the Faust legend too. Mephistopheles migrated from German to England in 1592 via Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. The alchemist wagers his soul to employ the devil as his personal servant. The Marquis’ wager does Faust one better—he becomes the devil himself. Burrage trades in the Marquis for a dashing young baronet, further ennobling the nobleman in the process, but the plot is the same. An aristocrat transforms himself into a man-bat to play “the part of the Good Samaritan,” a Victorian Batman protecting distressed damsels from burglars, rapists, and swindling relatives cheating them of their inheritances.

Mephisto (the truncation popular with Marvel) continues to terrorize the multiverse. He started tempting the Silver Surfer back in 1968, before contracting the Ghost Rider for his soul, duping the Scarlet Witch and Vision out of parenthood, and, in a recently flamboyant retcon, swapping Spider-Man his aunt’s life for his marriage. Mephisto also may or may not be responsible for the damnation-threatening hate mail Phillip Pullman received after his last identity-splitting novel, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. “The letter writers essentially say that I am a wicked man, who deserves to be punished in hell,” said Pullman. “Luckily it’s not in their power to do anything like sending me there.”

If Pullman did sell his soul for literary success, it was in the 1980s when sales for his children’s novels allowed him to quit his day job at Bishop Kirk Middle School. Ellen remembers the first, Count Karlstein, as another of her teacher’s beloved school plays: “Those plays were just so fun, so fantastic—he really was the best teacher. A born storyteller.” Spring-Heeled Jack ends with a mad dash to a disembarking ship where the tale’s Middle School-aged children are reunited with their father, and then the “strange, devilish figure” vanishes without a parting word.

“I wonder,” says Rose, “what Spring-Heeled Jack will do tomorrow night?”

Nijigahara Nihilism

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

A review of Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph. Translated by Matt Thorn.

“If only the last dozen years were just a dream my younger self was having, how wonderful that would be.”

* * *

When the publicist for Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph suggests that the work has “Lynchian” qualities, he probably means to evoke David Foster Wallace’s definition of the word:

“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term ‘refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’ But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is….ultimately definable only ostensibly— i.e. we know it when we see it.”

There is some of this in Asano’s manga but it never reaches that level of absurdity and distortion which we associate with the films of David Lynch. Far closer is the waking nightmare of a film like Mullholland Drive where the character played by Naomi Watts fantasizes about success and discovers her own dead body even as she festers and decays in a dark apartment.

The clues to the dream state in Nijigahara Holograph are the butterflies which flit around the panels of the manga, an evocation of Zhuangzi’s butterfly:

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, a veritable butterfly, enjoying itself to the full of its bent, and not knowing it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and came to myself, the veritable Chuang Chou. Now I do not know whether it was then I dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between me and the butterfly there must be a difference. This is an instance of transformation.”

The manga begins with a collage of past events; a god’s eye view of humanity which will be inexplicable to the reader until several chapters in. It seems for all intents and purposes to be the day dream of one of the protagonists, a grown-up Amahiko, who stares fixedly into the distance and down into the open mouthed burbling of his dying, cancerous father. Moments later, he is seen talking about his waking dreams to a complete stranger:

“These days…I have dreams. It makes me wonder if what I’m seeing now isn’t really just a dream.”

The rest of this short prologue are disconnected vignettes of characters as yet unknown, sometimes barely perceived: a soon to be familiar man eating dinner in front of his television; a couple having sex (or is it rape); a set of notebooks; and a half-seen girl about to divulge her past to a disembodied psychiatrist-interrogator (or so it seems).

A hundred pages on and a teacher (Kyoko Sakaki) is waking from a dream; lying on her futon, staring motionlessly at the ceiling of her room.

“Recently I have had dreams. Dreams of my days as a teacher. I recall the happy memories and the painful memories.”

The chapters which have preceded this moments have concerned her past students and just those memories. The page before this shows a student diving into a swimming pool as the same teacher cheers him on—a lucid moment before waking; a past recalled imperfectly. As Novalis once said:

“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream.”

Kyoko Sakaki is about to awake to the traumas of her past. The question is whether she will disappear into them.

“I felt I could swim on forever. But I didn’t even know how to kick my legs or breathe properly.”

This is the essence of Asano’s dream narrative: a foreshadowing of events; a retelling of times past; a sequence of events which moves, without warning, between the past and the future—the induction of a hypnopompic state in the minds of his readers where we can barely distinguish between dream and reality.

Much of this comic will only make sense on rereading. Discrete scenes within the author’s framework only gain resonance when the manga is taken as a whole—an experience not uncommon to prose works but quite atypical of the manga industry where ease of reading is prized over much else.

Consider the moment when Kohta meets up with Maki at the latter’s café workplace. They are old schoolmates and Kohta is Maki’s childhood crush. They met the day before after a space of eleven years and have had impulsive but congenial sex. Their meeting in the cafe is intercut with moments from Kohta’s murder of his grocery store employer (a former teacher). His threat of violence to a co-worker (who he has known since childhood) is intercut with his cold, unfeeling embrace of Maki. She agrees to meet with him at the Nijigahara embankment, a place only shown but unnamed up to this point—the monster’s refuge of children’s legend; the place of sacrifice to defer the end of the world; the nexus of all the vicious activities of that school and small community. The entrance to the embankment is an uncovered drainage hole, large enough to fit a child—both Kohta and his friend Kimura Arie are thrown into it earlier in the manga. The exit from this cave is the gaping underbelly of a bridge which yawns open like Grendel’s lair.

As it happens, Maki was involved in the attempted murder of Arie back in her school days, the latter’s body dumped into the same embankment. She reveals this sometime later in a drunken state to an admirer (her employer, Makoto). This short episode of no more than seven relatively silent pages is a repository of all the tension Asano has presented up to this point—the unexplained murders, the sought for vengeance, the desperate love, and sexual deviation.

The bestiality is everywhere but fragmented and barely broached in buried panels: the elicit love of a father for his pre-pubescent daughter (Arie)…

…the marks of abuse on an otherwise happy child…

…a faceless mother (stepmother as revealed later in the book) telling her son (Amahiko) to just die…

… the corporal punishment meted out by one of the teachers (the future grocery store owner)…

…and a senseless act of sororicide…

This last incident where Narumi is murdered off stage by her brother, Makoto, is both strange and painful in its elliptical denouement. Narumi might be the only character in this tale without a trace of malice and her death is an extinguishing of hope.

In fact, most of these acts of savagery are silently inflicted off panel save for an instance of rape.

This latter incident recalling—by means of an upturned umbrella—the previously described murder of Kohta’s employer.

The manga posits a world of existential and moral nihilism. Only the languid pacing and quiet narration prevents these relentless moments of brutality from overwhelming the reader. They seem almost matter of fact—a mother threatening her children with murder becomes no more than a creeping disease, like a father’s erection at the sight of the back of his daughter’s head. Not for these is the distress and despair of common humanity when confronted with “original sin”—like the media circus surrounding the murder of James Bulger for instance.

The appeal to Zhuangzi over the course of the manga suggest a deeper, more metaphysical nihilism if traced to our modern world—the exaltation in meaninglessness. The “monster” of Asano’s tale claims to have lost “something” on the fields of the Nijigahara embankment—perhaps it his conception of any sense of metaphysical values or consequences. As Nietzsche states in On the Genealogy of Morals:

“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” . . . Well now, that was spiritual freedom. With that the very belief in truth was cancelled. . . Has a European, a Christian free spirit ever wandered by mistake into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Has he come to know the Minotaur of this cavern from his own experience?” [emphasis mine]

One proffered explanation for this nihilism (within the context of the manga) is that they are the product of Arie’s consumptive dreams. She has lain in a coma since being pushed into a hole in the Nijigahara embankment by her classmates. On visiting her incidentally in the hospital some ten years after her incident, one of her classmates wonders “what she’s been dreaming about all this time.”

Prior to her rape and attempted murder (these two events being only tangentially related), Arie had been telling and recording a “fantastic story of a world apart from this world”—a nocturnal land where a beautiful girl foretells a terrible future to seven villagers. Fearful of her, the villagers “cut off her head and [offer] her to the monster. ”It so happens, there are seven heads looking down into the hole where she has been cast right at the start of the manga.

On a final trip with her family to that embankment, Sakaki explains that the Nijigahara embankment was named for a legend about “Kudan”, a “cow with a human face” which is known to predict plagues and afflictions for a few days before dying.

“According to legend, whenever a Kudan was sent down the river, twin Kudans would be found at this spot. So “The Plain of Two Children” was its proper name. Someone later changed it to “The Plain of Rainbow.”

As must be obvious, Arie is the “Kudan” of Asano’s narrative. Or at least one of them, for she has a twin. And as Lafcadio Hearn explains in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan:

“…the Kudan always tells the truth.”

It is never made explicitly clear who the original Kudan of the narrative is—perhaps she is hidden in plain sight (see below) under an innocuous name like the illusory embankment of the manga’s title.

In her review of Nijigahara Holograph, Sarah Horrocks submits that it is this suppression of truth which explains all the anguish which follows. Sakaki’s dissolution into a myriad butterflies (see first image above) at the steps of the embankment suggests an inevitable (and symmetrical) recurrence of abandonment and death. The twins, Amahiko and Arie, are “abandoned” by the death of their mother, just as Sakiko’s twin children are abandoned by her grief and torment.

[Spoilers Ahead]

Finding readerly joy in Asano’s manga is not especially difficult, but it is predicated to a certain extent on heavy reconstruction. More than most comics, Nijihgahara Holograph is a web of half-hidden, splintered relationships which need to be pieced together like a jigsaw. The tangled associations of the various characters seem like a kind of inbreeding of cruelty and conception. There is, for instance, the affable pedophile, Makoto, who befriends Arie, encourages her stories of monsters, then rapes her before being stopped by her teacher (Miss Sakaki) who is then assaulted with a cinder block for her pains. Miss Sakaki is seen from the start of the manga with an unexplained patch over her eye and she is the same person who nurses feelings of violence against her own children.

Makoto (the violent pedophile) also happens to be the owner of the café which Maki works at eleven years later, the same café which Sakaki walks into a decade after her initial attack. It is only in retrospect that we recognize a silent panel—with Sakaki shown with her gaze cast downwards—during that fateful meeting as one denoting recognition. On a first reading, the panel in question is entirely unremarkable.

It only through these short hints and interjections that we realize that Makoto is a psychopath—the “monster” of the play. It is never entirely clear if Arie’s Cassandra-like foretellings are the work of her own imagination or a translation of Makoto’s communications to her. At one point early in the manga, Makoto’s sister, Narumi, is observed in class by Amahiko (the framing character of the manga and Arie’s twin) and noted to be “always writing something in a notebook.” Do these notebooks foretell a similar fate and is Narumi the original solitary Kudan of our tale?

The fairy tale of the beautiful girl and the seven villagers is only ever revealed in full by Makoto himself. This uncertainty is brought to the fore when we find out that Makoto has burnt down his parent’s house and (possibly) killed his sister (Narumi) for having discovered his murderous diaries. This is but one instance of Asano’s careful seeding of narrative and memory; not so much an exercise in mysticism but a fastidiously planned look into the suppurating secrets of a backwater town.

Let us return for a moment to Zhuangzi’s butterfly. In an article at Philosophy Now, Raymond Tallis explains the “radical uncertainty” presented in that Daoist text:

“Wittgenstein…pointed out that

‘The argument ‘I may be dreaming’ is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well – and it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.’

Whether or not this is true, it is certainly the case that I must doubt that there is any audience for the words. Dreams are by definition solitary: they permit only the illusion of ‘we’. As Heraclitus said, “Only the waking share a common cosmos; each sleeps alone.” If there is no way out of the notion that the world is entirely my dream, there cannot be any way into it either, if only because there is an implicit ‘we’ in all language use, and even more so in conversation. I cannot truly share a sincere suspicion that I am at present dreaming…It reminds us that when we engage in philosophical inquiries fueled by radical doubt, we often overlook the very context that is necessary for the inquiry to take place, which has to be untouched by doubt. ” [emphasis mine]

There is no place (or need) for such contextual certainties in the encapsulated world of Asano’s manga which is driven entirely by fantasy. But there is everywhere considerable doubt as to the shared nature of Asano’s narrative of dreams—where do one character’s dreams end and another character’s nightmares begin? The closing passages of the manga both explicate and gently confuse the narrative coherency of everything that has preceded it.

The burst of disjointed imagery which opens the manga is as much a reflection of somnolent reverie as it is a statement of authorial intent; a blurring of reality and wish fulfillment; where past, present and future meet in a deliberate and calculated melding of form and content. The work as whole is a marvel of narrative needlework and one of the best comics to have been translated in recent years.

* * *

Further Reading

(1) Sarah Horrocks on Nijigahara Holograph (Parts 1 and 2)

“Violence is an important theme in Nijigahara, because one of the core aspects of the book is the constant repression by the community of prophecy, and the violent feeding of the monster who lives beneath that said community, in the tunnel at the Nijigahara embankment.”

“Life in Nijigahara Holograph is depicted through the management of trauma and memory. Adults become adults by what precious things they are stripped of as children, and how well they function as adults is down to just how well they can deny those memories….But in actuality, no one in Nijigahara forgets.”

(2) Matt Thorn on Inio Asano’s gender identity. No doubt someone out there has already linked Asano’s wish “that he could have a sex change” to the stories of the various twins in Nijigahara Holograph.

Alexander Hamilton Was an Authoritarian Jerk

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran in Splice Today.
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Back in high school, my AP History teacher presented American government as one long argument between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. On the one hand, federal centralization and unity; on the other, decentralization and liberty. Two great thinkers thinking great thoughts, founding our national discourse as founding fathers will.

What my history teacher didn’t tell us was that Alexander Hamilton was a paranoid, war-mongering loon.

In the late 1790s, when Britain and France were locked in war, the Federalist President John Adams was desperately trying to maintain neutrality and not drag the US into a massive conflict for which it was ill-prepared. Hamilton, on the other hand, was thrilled at the prospect of war. In part, this was because he hated the French Revolution, and its attack on central authority and monarchy. But it was also because he figured he could use the war to attack the pro-French Republicans led by Jefferson, a man who he later denounced as “an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics”. Placed at the head of an army raised to repel a possible French invasion, Hamilton got it into his head that Virginia was arming against the central government, and almost marched on the state. Dissuaded from starting a Civil War, he turned instead to infringement of civil liberties. After some initial hesitation, he supported the notorious 1798 Alien and Sedition acts to limit immigration and punish dissent. Then, when Adams managed to secure peace with France, Hamilton was so upset that he wrote a 50 page diatribe denouncing Adams and concluding that the President had lost “the respect of friends and foes” alike.

So, to sum up, Hamilton was bitterly partisan, eager to engage in avoidable wars, and prone to using the machinery of government to stifle dissent and persecute his enemies, real and imagined. He sounds, in other words, remarkably like Dick Cheney.

What’s interesting in comparing Hamilton to Cheney is that, while the behavior seems consistent, the political terms don’t quite match up. Hamilton was a statist big government anti-revolutionary who wanted to increase centralized federal power. Cheney was…what? In theory the Republican party doesn’t like big government. But in practice Cheney was all for everything that Hamilton was all for — militarization, civil liberties infringement in the name of crushing internal enemies, the works.

People often talk as if inter-party tension is worse now than it ever was, but as far as I can tell Hamilton was actually more scurrilously partisan than Cheney. There are Republicans who will insist outright that their opponents are traitorous scum, but they don’t tend to be leaders; even Cheney was at least somewhat circumspect in this regard. But Hamilton, one of the most influential Federalists, pretty much came out and said that the Republicans would betray us all to the French regicides.

The difference, then, isn’t so much the partisanship as the fact that with Hamilton and Jefferson, the partisanship made more sense. Maybe it was because the battle lines were new back then, or maybe it was because the revolutionary anti-government libertarians just hadn’t ever been in power yet, or maybe it was because everything got scrambled when the U.S. became an imperialist superpower.

In any case, the point is, in those early days, when America was America and men wore wigs, the pro big intrusive government authoritarians were pro big intrusive government authoritarians. They didn’t demand enormous armies on the one hand and bewail the power of centralized government on the other. They were pseudo-monarchists and proud of it. And, similarly, the radical anti-government folks like Jefferson were really anti-government; they were radicals who supported the French Revolution even on up to (in Jefferson’s case) the Terror. Jefferson declared he would rather see, “half of the earth desolated; were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.” When he said he believed in liberty, he meant he believed in liberty for everybody. Except the slaves, of course.

In short, back then we had a clear choice between naked paranoia and open hypocrisy. Now, alas, in these decadent times, it’s hard to tell which is which.

Utilitarian Review 4/26/14

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Kailyn Kent on the high art(?) of splash pages.

Chris Gavaler on cosplayers for Congress.

Chris Gavaler provides the minutes from the Last Supper.

Osvaldo Oyola on Brian Wood’s crappy all-women X-Men comic.

Patrick Carland on Zen Pencils and hating on the haters.

Orion Martin on Jodorowsky’s Incal, Prophet, and the problem of keeping science-fiction strange.

Qiana Whitted looks at how what’s in print affects comics studies (for PPP.)

On Katherine Gilles Seidel‘s novel Again and romancing the critics of romance.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Salon I have

— a list of the 20 most underrated albums ever. Plus 10 more.

— a piece about how there is no canon of romance novels.

—a piece about the Other Woman as displaced rom com.

At the Atlantic I wrote about sci-fi and the imagined colonization of white people.

At Splice Today I wrote about the new Justice League United and DC’s pitiful efforts at diversity.

And at the Chicago Reader a short review of a Batman gallery art show.

Other Links

An interview with visual artist Curtis Gannon.

Wendy at Super Librarian argues (contra my article) that there is a romance canon, and she provides a list.

Janelle Asselin on how she has gotten rape threats for pointing out that a crappy DC comics cover was crappy.

And a message to guys about sexism in comics.

Uninsured people really want health insurance.

Edward Gorey illustration for the War of the Worlds

The Love-Chutney Drawings

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Paul Nudd

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

Romance as Criticism, Criticism as Romance

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Many romances are meta, but surely few can be as meta on their meta as Kathleen Gilles Seidel’s iteratively titled Again. The novel’s heroine, Jenny Cotton, is the chief writer on a soap opera, My Lady’s Chamber, which is set in the Regency period. The novel, then, is both a historical and a contemporary, with the two constantly commenting on each other, as Jenny distributes the characteristics of her unsatisfying maybe-soon ex Brian and her possibly potential suitor Alec to various period figments of her imagination. Jenny has been with Brian since they both were children, but she only discovers that he’s a selfish git incapable of generosity or caring when Alec, playing the evil duke Lydgate (where’d that name come from?) picks up on one of Brian’s characteristic mannerisms. So Jenny reads Brian by reading Alec, or more accurately, Jenny reads Jenny by reading Alec reading Jenny reading Brian — which is to say, Jenny figures out that she has modeled Lydgate on Brian when Alec playing Lydgate picks up on Brian’s mannerisms to portray the character. Past, present, self and other, and, most emphatically, reader and read are shuffled about as in a shell game; the heart (whose heart? everyone’s heart?) is revealed simultaneously through reading and being read — the protagonist as text, reader, and critic.

Not just any critic, either. Like Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation, Seidel seems to deliberately reference and engage with the major early feminist critic of romance, Janice Radway (and probably also with Tania Modleski, whose work drew explicit parallels between romance and soap opera.) Radway argued, following Nancy Chodorow, that the romance genre was a fantasy of reconcilement with the mother. Romances, she said, presented brutal men who were eventually melted by love into unexpectedly maternal softies, providing women with the consolatory dream of a caring patriarchy of love and empowerment, and so enabling them to tolerate their inadequate marriages and lives.

Radway’s thesis is quite unpopular with many current romance readers, if my experience mentioning her name on social media is any guide, and Seidel is undoubtedly being arch when she provides an almost parodically perfect Radway narrative of man-as-mother-substitute. Jenny’s own mother died when she was a year old, and as a result she feels that she never learned how to be a woman, and never had anyone to take care of her. For his part, Alec is an obsessive care-taker; in just about his first meeting with Jenny, he discovers she’s having a miscarriage and bustles her off to the hospital, literally sweeping her off her feet to carry her at one point. She needs a mother; he’s a mother. The Radway formula, illustrated.

Except it doesn’t quite work that way. While Jenny wants a mother, she rather hates being taken care of. For his part, Alec over the course of the novel runs through his emotional reserves; he falls in love with Jenny, but the strain of constantly trying to take care of everyone (as he once took care of his terminally ill sister) eventually renders him inert. The storyline resolves not through Jenny discovering a mother in Alec, but rather through her realization that she, herself is her mother. She always thought that her mother would have been good at the “girly stuff” — dressing up, being frilly and elegant and glamorous. But after breaking up with Brian the jerk, Jenny realizes that her mother (whose chief love was driving around from pool hall to pool hall with Jenny’s pool shark dad) was just as much of a tomboy as her daughter. Jenny doesn’t need a guy to be a mother because she was always already her mother herself. Instead, it’s the mothering guy who needs to be taken care of. Or as Alec puts it (after some coaching from Jenny, feeding him his lines as is her wont) “I need you to explain to me how I need you.”

In Radway’s formulation, romance is a trans-gendered pleasure — a fantasy of women loving the women within men. Seidel’s reworking doesn’t so much put every gender back in its place as it infinitely iterates (“Again”) the cross-gender swapping. Jenny, the tomboy, becomes the caring man as mother; Alec, caring man as mother, becomes the woman swept away and cared for. “Someone else was making everything absolutely perfect,” he thinks at the end. “There was something to be said for a woman with imagination.” The “woman” there is supposed to refer to Jenny — but given the fact that imagination for Radway is figured specifically as the transgendering of the love object, it must also refer to Alec, who, transgendered himself, is the one experiencing the characteristically Radwayian romance of motherly protection from a strong patriarchal figure (she is, after all, his boss.)

This scrambling of gendered positions is in part a critique of Radway’s critique of romance. Romance, Seidel says, is not (or doesn’t have to be) about fooling oneself into thinking that the patriarchy is your mother; it can be about insisting that women can take care of themselves, both personally and professionally. But if that’s critique, it also seems like conversation — and, perhaps, assurance. Psychoanalysis is always, after all (as that prime fetishist Freud demonstrates) self-psychoanalysis, which means that Radway’s supposed excavation of the romance readers psyche might perhaps better be read as a projection of Radway’s own particular neuroses.

And that is in fact how Seidel reads it. In a footnote to her discussion of Radway in the collection Dangerous Men & Adventurous Women, from 1992 (just two years before Again) Seidel says this:

Janice Radway, in her 1987 introduction to the British edition of Reading the Romance…acknowledges the “residual elitism which assumes that feminist intellectuals alone know what is best for all women.” In a graceful, moving statement, she suggests that such scholars should offer romance readers and writers “our support rather than our criticism or direction.” She follows this generous-hearted position with the most discouraging words I encountered in all the reading I did for this essay as she dismisses the possibility: “Our segregation by class, occupation, and race [race?] works against us.” We are still Other to her; she does not believe either party can speak to the other. I find this inexpressibly sad.

Seidel, then, reads in Radway a tragic fissure, a split between women and women — which is precisely the tragic fissure that Radway reads into romance readers and writers like Seidel. It is not romance readers, but Radway, who is bifurcated; it is not romance readers, but Radway who needs to be reconciled with the mother — or, in Seidel’s version, to realize that she is already reconciled with the mother, and that the romance is already hers.

Again, then, can be read, not as (or not just as) a refutation of Radway, but as a love letter to her. And part of what that love letter says is that Radways’ book is itself a love letter — that “Reading the Romance” can itself be read as a romance.

That romance isn’t utterly untroubled. Seidel has a lot of fun in the novel with a rival soap opera, Aspen!! written by the (significantly) male writer Paul Tomlin, a man who “didn’t know anything about soaps”, and who seems to have contempt for the form and for the audience. The satire of those who hope to save romance and romance readers for better, higher things certainly implicate Radway, tweaking her condescension and her separation of herself from her subject — the way she wants to write in romance without actually writing romance.

But the very act of criticizing the critic puts one, inevitably, in the position of critic. The original name of Aspen!! was Aspen Starring Alec Cameron; the Othering Othered is also the loved one — albeit a loved one who needs to be taught to love. And that teaching is criticism, too. “I suppose we’re to conclude from that that my best chance of being an acceptable human being is to be married to you?” Alec says, after Jenny has explained their relationship to him through a critical reading of the ongoing plot of In My Lady’s Chamber. Criticism speaks romance and romance speaks criticism. And when the genres are so nested in each other, how can you tell who is outside or who is inside, or who is saving whom?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: April 2014