“When It’s Not Your Turn”: The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire”

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Sean Michael Robinson

By Joy DeLyria and Sean Michael Robinson

There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia. We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.

The Wire began syndication in 1846, and was published in 60 installments over the course of six years. Each installment was 30 pages, featuring covers and illustrations by Baxter “Bubz” Black, and selling for one shilling each. After the final installment, The Wire became available in a five volume set, departing from the traditional three.

Bucklesby Ogden himself has most often been compared to Charles Dickens. Both began as journalists, and then branched out with works such as Pickwick Papers and The Corner. While Dickens found popularity and eventual fame in his successive work, Ogden took a darker path.

Dickens’ success for the most part lies in his mastery of the serial format. Other serialized authors were mainly writing episodic sketches linked together only loosely by plot, characters, and a uniformity of style. With Oliver Twist, only his second volume of work, Dickens began to define an altogether new type of novel, one that was more complex, more psychologically and metaphorically contiguous. Despite this, Dickens retained a heightened awareness of his method of publication. Each installment contained a series of elements engineered to give the reader the satisfaction of a complete arc, giving the reader the sense of an episode, complete with a beginning, middle, and end.

One might liken The Wire, however, to the novels of the former century that were single, complete works, and only later were adapted to serial format in order to make them affordable to the public. Yet, while cognizant of his predecessors, Ogden was not working in the paradigm of the eighteenth century. As a Victorian novelist, serialization was the format of choice for his publishers, but rather than providing the short burst of decisively circumscribed fiction so desired by his readership, his tangled narrative unspooled at a stately, at times seemingly glacial, pace. This method of story-telling redefined the novel in an altogether different way than both Victorian novelists and those who had come before.

The serial format did The Wire no favors at the time of its publication. Though critics lauded it, the general public found the initial installments slow and difficult to get into, while later installments required intimate knowledge of all the pieces which had come before. To consume this story in small bits doled out over an extended time is to view a pointillist painting by looking at the dots.

And yet, there is no other form in which The Wire could have been published other than the serial, for both economic and practical reasons. The volume set, at 3£, was an extraordinary expense, as opposed to a shilling per month over six years. Furthermore, while The Wire only truly received praise from scholars, it was produced for the masses, who would be more likely to browse a pamphlet than they would be to purchase a volume set.

Lastly, one might stand back from a pointillist work; whereas physically there is no other way to consume The Wire than piece by piece. To experience the story in its entirety, without breaks between sections, would be exhausting; one would perhaps miss the essence of what makes it great: the slow build of detail, the gradual and yet inevitable churning of this massive beast of a world.

The genius of The Wire lies in its sheer size and scope, its slow layering of complexity which could not have been achieved in any other way but the serial format. Dickens is often praised for his portrayal not merely of a set of characters and their lives, but of the setting as a character: the city itself an antagonist. Yet in The Wire, Bodymore is a far more intricate and compelling character than London in Dickens’ hands; The Wire portrays society to such a degree of realism and intricacy that A Tale of Two Cities—or any other story—can hardly compare.

That is not to say that one did not have an influence on the other. Oliver Twist is a searing treatment of the education system and treatment of children in Victorian society; meanwhile, The Wire’s portrayal of the Bodymore schools is a similar indictment, featuring Oliver-like orphans such as “Dookey” and the fatherless Michael, and criminal activity forced upon children with Fagin-like scheming. Yet while Ogden no doubt took a cue from Dickens in his choice to condemn the educational institution, The Wire builds from the simplicity of Oliver Twist, complicating the subject with a nuance and attention to detail that Dickens never achieved.

In fact, Dickens, in later novels—which incriminate fundamental social institutions such as government (Little Dorrit), the justice system (Bleak House), and social class (A Tale of Two Cities, among others)—seems to have been influenced by The Wire. This is evidenced by the increased complexity of Dickens’ novels, which, instead of following the rollicking adventures of one roguish but endearing protagonist, rather seek to build a complete picture of society. Instead of driving a linear plot forward, Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House, seeks to unfold the narrative outward, gradually uncovering different aspects of a socially complex world.

While Dickens is lauded for these attempts, The Wire does the same thing, with less appeal to the masses and more skill. For one thing, The Wire’s treatment of the class system is far more nuanced than that of Dickens. Who could forget “Bubbles”—the lovable drifter, Stringer Bell—the bourgeois merchant with pretentions to aristocracy, or Bodie—who, despite lack of education or Victorian “good breeding”, is seen reading and enjoying the likes of Jane Austen? Yet these portrayals of the “criminal element” always maintain a certain realism. We never descend into the divisions of “loveable rogues” and truly evil villains of which Dickens makes such effective use. Odgen’s Bodie, an adult who uses children to perpetrate criminal activity, is not a caricature of an ethnic minority in the mode of Dickens’ Fagin the Jew.

In fact, none of The Wire’s villains have the unadulterated slimy repulsion of David Copperfield’s Uriah Heep, except for perhaps the journalist, Scott Templeton. The final installments of The Wire were sometimes criticized for devolving into Dickensian caricature in regards to the plots surrounding Templeton and The Bodymore Sun. (It is interesting to note first that Dickensian characterizations were Templeton’s number one crime, and second, that these critics of The Wire were for the most part journalists themselves.)

If at any time besides its treatment of Templeton The Wire flirts with caricature, it does so in the character of Omar Little. Yet no one would ever reduce such a monumental culmination of literary tradition, satire, and basic human desire for mythos as Omar Little by defining him as mere caricature. Little is not Dickensian. Nor is he a character in the style of Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, or any of the most famous serialists. If he must be compared to characters in the Victorian times, he most closely resembles a creation of a Brontë; he could have come from Wuthering Heights.

The reason that Little so closely resembles a Brontë hero is of course that the estimable sisters were often not writing in the Victorian paradigm at all, but rather in the Gothic. Their heroes were Byronic, and Lord Byron himself took his cue from the ancient tradition of Romance, culminating in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but originating even further back. Little would not be out of place in Faerie Queene, and even less so in Don Quixote: an errant knight wielding a sword, facing dragons, no man his master. The character builds on the tradition of the quintessential Robin Hood and borrows qualities from many of the great chivalric romances of previous centuries. Meanwhile there is an element of the fey, mirroring Robin Hood’s own predecessor—Goodfellow or Puck—and prefiguring later dashing, mysterious heroes who also play the part of the fop, as in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

As previously mentioned, Little also has the flavor of the Gothic: brooding, hell-bent on revenge. Indeed, there is a darkness to the character that would not suit Sir Gawain, but does not seem out of place in a Don Juan or Brontë’s Heathcliffe. Little is in fact an amalgamation of these traditions, an essential archetype.

Yet, despite all this, Little can still not be called caricature. There is an awareness of literary canon in Omar Little, a certain level of dramatic irony. The street children and rabble, so Dickensian in their miscellany, always announce his presence, and even as The Wire grows and expands, so does the legend of Little. The Wire is aware of the mythic quality of its character, and allows the rest of the cast to observe it, indirectly commenting on the literary traditions from which Omar Little sprang. Only in the Victorian Age could Romanticism, Gothicism, and poignant satire come to a head in such a trenchant examination of the way such archetype endures. It is lamentable that our culture today, sorely devoid of new mythos, could not produce a character of such quality and social commentary.

Many characters of the age pale in comparison to The Wire, but if any other deserves explicit exploration, it is James “Jimmy” McNulty. While McNulty is rich in his own right, he is particularly interesting in comparison to the viewpoint characters of Dickens. As Dickens progressed from his “picaresque” adventure-style novels to his more serious explorations of society, so too did his central protagonist evolve. And yet, instead of gaining in complexity, Dickens’ viewpoint characters dwindled—in personality, idiosyncrasy, any unique or identifying traits.

Scholars believe the passivity of Dickens’ heroes was a direct result of his shift in style and subject matter: in order to portray the many aspects of society Dickens wished to explore, in order to maintain a strong supporting cast of highly individualized characters, he believed the main character must be de-individualized. He must become a receptacle of the injustices perpetrated by society, so that the failure of social institution can be witnessed and explored as the reader identifies with the protagonist’s essential powerlessness. This is an elegant method, used to near-perfection in David Copperfield, in which the only uninteresting character is David Copperfield himself.

The Wire charted another course. McNulty is a challenging character; in the beginning, he is not easy to like. Though he is our protagonist and usually our viewpoint character on our journey through The Wire, he begins and ends on a note that is extremely morally questionable, despite a redemptive arc mid-series. We are unable to approve of his actions, unable to assimilate his qualities as our own. Yet McNulty is powerless exactly in the way of David Copperfield. He is used and exploited by corrupt social systems, institutions, or figures of power in exactly the way of David Copperfield or Pip from Great Expectations. He is helpless to incite real and lasting change, his passivity forced upon him as he constantly struggles against it, rather than rising from an internal lack of agency. It is this very struggle which endears McNulty to us, in the end.

In fact, the number one way in which The Wire differs from any other Victorian novel is its bleak moral outlook. Dickens’ works almost always had a handful of characters that were essentially likeable. In the end, the power of love and truth is borne out and the individual triumphs over the ugliness of society by maintaining his integrity. Trollope, Eliot, Gaskell, etc all wrote with this essentially Western—not to mention imperialist—mind-set. Only William Makepeace Thackeray, in Vanity Fair—subtitled, A Novel Without A Hero—presents an unrelentingly bleak assessment of society. The ending is unhappy, all of the characters flawed to varying degrees. It is significant that critics of the time chastised Thackeray for refusing to throw his audience crumbs of moral fiber.

The other comparison one might draw in examining the moral character of The Wire is the penny dreadful, Victorian booklets which exploited sensationalist drama, horror, and Gothic tradition. Penny dreadfuls were fiction published on pulp and could be purchased for a penny per pamphlet, often featuring monsters, vampires, highwaymen and crooks. Usually, these publications bear little similarity to the highbrow syndications of the time, their cliché down to an art form, their treatment of hackney topics procedural in nature.

By 1846, the time The Wire first began syndication, the Victorian audience was already familiar with an underworld of crime, the systems arrayed against it, the cop-and-robber story. But while only the penny dreadful exceeds The Wire in its depictions of violence, ugliness, and depravity of the world, these procedurals should be considered as a separate genre. They reached for the simple thrills of titillation. Meanwhile, The Wire had pretenses of social commentary, exposing deeper truths, persuading its readers not only to witness a corrupt society, but also to understand it.

Morality in Art was one of the most prevailing topics in both literary criticism and philosophy of Victorian times, propounded strongly by the art critic and philosopher, John Ruskin. Ruskin’s central argument was that one must reveal Truth in literature, but in doing so also reveal Beauty. One must present the moral beacon to which we all must aspire. One must not write without Hope. It is significant also that today, Thackeray is not charged with undue cynicism or depravity; rather, he is thought to be “sentimental, even cloying.”

Literature today is no longer concerned with morality the way it was in the nineteenth century. Unrelenting, bleak images of society are celebrated for their realism, as representations of humanity. And yet, we have very few images, representations, or new and challenging canon that captures the essential helplessness, the inevitable corruption, the deep-lying flaws of both society and humanity in the way The Wire does. Again, I would contend that such a feat could only be accomplished in the Victorian Age, through the serial format, which allowed for such layered complexity. In no other way could such a richly textured tapestry of a city be constructed from ground-level up. In no other way could the faults in the underlying foundations of society’s institutions be exposed. In no other way could our own society be held up for our examination, and found so sadly lacking.

Yet this extraordinary feat of story-telling could not have been accomplished solely by Bucksley Ogden. It would be a mistake to say that one creator or author was responsible for The Wire, when the illustrations played such an essential role. Just as Sidney Paget immortalized Sherlock Holmes independently of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by giving the detective his famous deerstalker cap and cape, so too did The Wire’s illustrator, “Bubz” contribute to The Wire.

Would William “Bunk” Moreland be the same character without his cigar, ever-present but almost never mentioned? Would Avon Barksdale be as intimidating and yet beautiful, were Bubz not able to capture his panther-like movement, his violent grace? Could Joseph “Proposition Joe” Stewart be as memorable and endearing were he not the portly man we grew suspicious of, and somehow at last learned to love? Certainly Omar Little would not be Omar Little without his coat, like something out of the previous century; nor would he be Omar (“Omar comin’! It be Omar!”) without the weal running down his face, signifying past violence, a life of both heroic romance and mythic tragedy.

The illustrations are yet another essential element lacking from the story-telling of today. For one thing, we would not allow our cast to be represented by the “others” in our society Bubz renders so lovingly. Bubz gave us reality, and he made it beautiful. The standards of art today are no longer concerned with reality, while our fiction demands nothing but. Movies, television, the internet have all morphed our expectations, twisted and changed our visions, until we only wish to see Ruskin’s ideal: a pristine, white, purer version of ourselves.

In our age, we can never experience a modern equivalent of The Wire. We would be unwilling to portray the lower classes and criminal element with the patience or consideration of Horatio Bucksley Ogden or of Baxter “Bubz” Black. We would be unwilling to give a work like The Wire the kind of time and attention it deserves, which is why it has faded away, instead of being held up as the literary triumph it truly is. If popular culture does not open its eyes, works like The Wire will only continue their slow slide into obscurity.

Ms DeLyria and Mr Robinson are grateful to the Special Collections department of the University of Washington for generous access to their Ogden collection, including the two 1863 editions from which these illustrations were digitally scanned. Those wishing for access to more of “Bubz” Black’s illustrations may contact Mr Robinson at seanmichaelrobinson at gmail &c. Joy DeLyria can be contacted at joydelyria at gmail &c.

________

Update by Noah: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.

Update by Noah: A sort of sequel to this post is here.

Update by Noah: Joy and Sean have written an entire book about H.B. Ogden and the Wire, entitled Down in the Hole: the unWired World of H.B. Ogden— it’s out now.

This Blog Has Improved by 13.6%

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Richard Cook

Around the end of the 19th century, Progressives celebrated the dawn of rational government. Public policy was to become a social science, and like all sciences it was to be based on quantitative facts. Every aspect of humanity and all possible outcomes would be assigned a numerical value, and then these numbers could be crunched into a thousand equations that would give us perfect governance. No more trial-and-error, no more dishonesty, no more messy emotions getting in the way of sound policy. It was salvation through statistics.

The faith in scientific government may seem absurd today, but much of our public policy is still built around the statistics game. Partly, this is because quantitative measures are generally easy to analyze and explain. If the police report that crime rates rose by 5%, we all understand what that means, and we can draw general conclusions on how to respond. Plus, statistics just seem so damn rational and authoritative, not like those touchy-feely qualitative observations. Decision-makers, bureaucrats, and the public all crave certainty, or at least a close facsimile.

But numbers can be wrong. Or to be more precise, people are lying liars who make up numbers to “prove” whatever they want to prove. In “The Wire,” the public institutions of Baltimore are constantly “juking the stats,” a term referring to various methods by which they falsify statistical data to show progress where there is none, all while the city continues to crumble around them.

While the series creators have plenty of bile for every aspect of Baltimore’s government, none of the institutions are criticized as thoroughly as the Police Department. The Department is portrayed as the apotheosis of public sector dysfunction, and juking the stats is hardwired into its institutional DNA. On several occasions, Commissioner Burrell alters statistical data so as to gloss over the embarrassingly high rates of violent crime. The simplest way that police departments juke the stats is by re-classifying reported crimes as less serious offenses (as an example, aggravated assaults become assaults). The only crime that can’t be downgraded in this manner is homicide, for obvious reasons. This was why Burrell and Rawls were obsessed with the “clearance rate” (the number of murders solved), and homicide detectives concerned about their clearance numbers looked for ways to avoid investigating a (potentially unsolvable) murder, such as by dumping the bodies on another jurisdiction (as with the bodies of the dead prostitutes in season 2).

Baltimore’s school system does not escape scrutiny either, especially during season 4. The public schools are dependent on federal funding, and juking the stats is necessary to show improvement on the standardized tests administered under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (there are unpleasant consequences for a school and its faculty should their students repeatedly under-perform on the tests). As shown on “The Wire,” one common method of improving the scores is to teach to the test. Students are given rote lessons on how to answer specific questions. This can lead to modest improvements in aggregate test scores, but the students are not really learning anything except how to take a test, and so the scores do not accurately measure the students’ mastery of basic academic skills.

For both the police and the schools, much of the problem arises from a conflict of interest: the institutions responsible for reporting the stats are the same institutions that will be judged on them. Few people are willing to admit failure, especially when the consequences include losing your job. Thus, Police Commissioners have every incentive to paint a rosy picture of the city’s crime rates. Nor does auditing by an outside agency solve the problem. An agency tasked with analyzing statistics from the police department would still be dependent on the department for crime data, which means they would likely get the same juked stats. The only alternative would be an independent means of detecting crimes and collating the data, which would be prohibitively expensive, especially for a cash-strapped city such as Baltimore.

Statistics were supposed to give us scientific government, one where the ideal public policy would be crafted in accordance with hard data. This was implausible even in the best case scenario, but when data is falsified, statistics actually grant further authority to the lies of public officials. And without trustworthy stats, how is the public supposed to the judge the performance of public institutions? How are voters supposed to hold their elected officials accountable when we can’t be sure if their policies succeeded or failed miserably?

“The Wire” doesn’t offer any solutions to this dilemma. Rather, it suggests that the nature of our political system, particularly the never-ending electoral cycle, creates irresistible incentives to lie. Mayor Carcetti, for example, initially forces Burrell to resign when he lies one too many times about the crime rates. But when Carcetti begins his gubernatorial campaign, his staff pressures incoming Commissioner Daniels to juke the stats so that Carcetti can claim that crime rates fell during his term as mayor. When Daniels refuses to compromise his morals any further, he’s forced out of office and replaced with a more compliant lackey. The public, by and large, is ignorant of the mayor’s deceit, because the city government controls most of the data collection and analysis.

So how should the public deal with juked stats? One alternative would be to provide more resources to non-governmental organizations that compile and analyze their own data, but NGOs have their own agendas and are equally capable of lying. Or we could abandon our stat-based approach to public policy entirely, and rely more on qualitative observations, such as in-depth news articles. For many reasons, this is highly unlikely to happen, but even if it did, qualitative accounts can also be fraudulent, and they are more often anecdotal rather than reflective of larger social trends.

I was hoping to end my post on an upbeat note. But this is a roundtable on “The Wire,” so maybe it’s appropriate that I throw my hands up in frustration.

_____

Update by Noah: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.

The Wire Roundtable: Season 1, Episode 1, Again

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

At the end of the first episode of The Wire, the homicide detectives turn over a dead body. As we see the victim’s face, there’s a flashback to an earlier scene. The writers are letting us know that this body with a hole in the head is what’s left of a witness who testified against the Barksdale drug gang at the beginning of the episode.

This sequence is semi-infamous because it is the only flashback in the entire five-year run of the Wire. It was, according to David Simon’s commentary, urged upon the creators by HBO, who were concerned that viewers wouldn’t be able to follow the story without the extra nudge. Simon admits it might have been the right thing to do for the first episode, where they were still setting the stage and trying to hook an audience. After that though…never again. The Wire went forward, and if you missed a plot point, you were stuck until it got reshown or you bought the DVD with its miraculous rewind technology.

The Wire, with its labyrinthine plot and characters piled on characters, is definitely meant for rewatching. That first courthouse scene, for example, is almost entirely different the second or fifth time through, when all the players —nervous D’Angelo Barksdale, the oleaginous lawyer Maurice Levy, the cheerfully dangerous Wee-Bay, the not-at-all cheerfully dangerous Stringer Bell — are known quantities. The first go round you watch a bunch of unknowns; the second it’s all old friends.

The increased familiarity allows for some new surprises. For example, the first time we see Stringer, always the businessman, he’s making notes on a pad. Detective McNulty tries to see what he’s writing. Stringer looks up at him over his glasses and turns the pad around…revealing that he’s been drawing a superhero with what appears to be Africa on his chest insignia. The superhero in the drawing raises his fist and declares “Fuck You Detective”.

Stringer the smart-ass project kid isn’t a Stringer we get to see much — not least because Stringer himself tries to bury that kid more and more thoroughly as the show progresses. In the second season, Stringer probably would have been too cautious to have a note pad; by the third, he wouldn’t have been anywhere near that courtroom. We never see any of Stringer’s drawing again, either. So the second time through, that scene seems more like an end than a beginning.

Rewatching though doesn’t always add layers. Sometimes it points out holes, or roads not taken which might have been better explored. One of my favorite moments from the first episode occurs a little later, after D’Angelo Barksdale has beaten the murder rap. The judge in the case calls in McNulty to find out (a) why a key witness changed her story, and (b) why McNulty was in court, since it wasn’t his case. McNulty explains to the judge that D’Angelo is the nephew of the current West Baltimore drug kingpin,. The gang has beaten a number of cases in court, including a past case of McNulty’s. The judge finally asks, “If it’s not your case, why do you care?” To which McNulty replies, “Well who said I did?”

Again, that’s one of my favorite lines of dialogue probably from the series: McNulty (Dominick West) sells it nicely, looking flat at the judge, with an expression somewhere between slightly amused and blandly unconcerned. The point is emphasized later when McNulty chews out his partner Bunk for picking up the phone on a murder call when another squad was up. “This’ll teach you to give a fuck when it ain’t your turn to give a fuck!” he says.

The point here for rewatching is, of course, that McNulty actually does give a fuck — way, way too much of a fuck as it turns out. He cares so much that, over the course of five seasons, he destroys his marriage, his career, and almost/maybe a second committed romantic relationship.

Which is all well and good as irony goes. But the thing is…I liked it the first time through better. David Simon on the voice over natters on incessantly about how different the Wire is from other television cop shows — and it is different in many ways. McNulty doesn’t really care about doing right, for example, as he would if he were on, say, Bones. He cares about being the smartest guy in the room and about being smarter than the crooks. It’s not about good and evil for him; it’s about ego. Which is a useful corrective to a lot of cop-show nonsense, as Simon says.

But whatever he cares about, the point is that he does…and that is not especially new in a cop protagonist, on television or elsewhere. There was something really refreshing for me about having our hero declare, boldly and apparently in earnest, that it really was nothing in particular to him if the West Baltimore drug gang beat murder number four, or twelve, or whatever. I kind of like that potential McNulty, that callous decoy McNulty, more than I like the funny, smart, but ultimately perhaps more predictable McNulty that we got.

So we have revealed depths, roads not taken…and finally, maybe a dropped ball. Two thirds of the way through the episode, D’Angelo Barksdale’s crew catches an addict, Johnny, who’s been trying to buy drugs using counterfeit money. The scene is presented as a dilemma for D’Angelo, who (as Simon says in commentary) is not a brutal man, and clearly doesn’t want to order Johnny beaten. But the boy’s ripped him off and there’s little choice; he turns away saying nothing, and walks into the camera, his face held still. Over his shoulder, and from a distance, we see Bodie, Wallace, and Poot start to beat Johnny. We learn later that they hurt him so badly he ends up in the hospital, where he had to undergo a colostomy operation.

The reason this is a missed opportunity is because of Wallace. Later in the season, the D’Angelo crew is robbed; 16-year-old Wallace provides information that leads to the brutal torture and death of one of the robbers. Seeing the torture victim upsets Wallace so badly that he falls apart. His disintegration eventually leads to his own murder at the hands of his friends, Poot and Bodie.

Wallace’s execution is perhaps the grimmest, most emotionally wrenching moment of the entire season. In retrospect, his character is almost as important as D’Angelo’s. And, as a result, the second time through this scene of the beating should be telling us something, not only about D’Angelo, but also about Wallace. The Wallace we know later is so upset by brutality that he first becomes an addict and then turns his crew in to the police. The Wallace here, on the other hand, is so comfortable with brutality that he enthusiastically joins in beating a young man almost to death.

The point isn’t that the characterization is inconsistent. People are capable of different levels of brutality at different times, and there is, after all, a line between “beaten almost to death” and “beaten to death.” Still, if you’re going to talk about that line, you probably do in fact need to talk about it, and the Wire doesn’t. For that matter, Simon doesn’t mention it in his voice over. Rewatching here doesn’t so much add resonance as reveal that there isn’t any. The creators didn’t link what Wallace does here to what Wallace does later. As a result the the possible connections just sit there, looking a little lost.

People often argue that the sign of great art is that you can go back to it again and again and find new depths and meanings. I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. First impressions have their own aesthetic worth; a song that sounds amazing the first time you hear it has achieved something, even if it doesn’t bear up to repeat lisening.

The Wire doesn’t collapse under repeat viewings. Still, seeing that first episode again and again was not entirely beneficial. When I finished watching this episode the first go round I think I was ready to call it great. After seeing it a few more times, I still like it, but I’ve got more reservations.

____________

Update: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.

The Roundtable Has Pants: Mr. Campbell Speaks

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Matthias Wivel

Wrapping up our roundtable on Eddie Campbell’s Alec comics here at HU, we present to you an extended conversation with Mr. Campbell himself about work, life, and fate.

The interview was conducted via email during the course of the past two weeks or so. It focused primarily on the Alec comics as collected in The Years Have Pants (2009), so all page references, whether unspecified or in the context of individual stories, are to the pagination of that book. Except for when we talk about Campbell’s most recent personal book Fate of the Artist (2006), which is not included in Pants. I should note that Caroline Small (Caro) graciously stepped in at the eleventh hour and formulated a couple of incisive questions about that book that I couldn’t have come up with myself. They have been inserted near the end.

My thanks to Mr. Campbell for taking the time and for helping out so promptly with edits and images. ‘Nuff said!

Authenticity
At the beginning of How to Be an Artist you write with a certain amount of irony, but fundamentally seriously, “I will only lie in the service of truth.” This seems to me a good starting point for discussing your autobiographical work, since Alec clearly has had a complex and evolving approach to truth, with the issue perhaps most clearly articulated in Fate of the Artist. What is your truth in autobiography?

Firstly, let’s dispense with ‘autobiography.’ I felt uncomfortable when that word crept into comics, and even more so with the more recent ‘memoir,’ which I believe arrived with [Alison Bechdel’s] Fun Home. In the contract of fiction a storyteller says ‘let’s make believe’ to his audience. Let’s make believe there’s a person named Alec MacGarry. If the outline of this character’s life largely resembles my own, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t mean we’re no longer ‘making believe.’ And just to remind you where we are, let’s make believe he makes a bargain with the deity Fate, who allows him three wishes. The “I will only lie in the service of truth” is just a variant on “Every word I tell you will be true. It happened long ago…” It’s just opening the door. It’s part of the storyteller’s craft. I’m looking at two books on my shelf. One is The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd, and the other is The Collected Stories of O. Henry. I’d put my book beside the O. Henry.

I understand, but you’re still working in a reality-based register with your Alec comics, no? And at least in the case of How to Be an Artist there must have been documentary concerns, since it concerns in part an extended number of public figures in the comics world. I guess that what I’m interested in is your way of negotiating material that is in large part lived with your wish to craft a story, and the reason I’m asking is because reality-based material has been so central to the development of comics in the past few decades – a notion of, or at least a feeling for, truth must be essential to it, as you indicate.

Okay. First thing that springs to mind here is The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, and I can’t recall where I read this, in an interview somewhere, but while he was interested in Picasso and Braque and the story of Cubism, he felt that more was needed for a ‘graphic novel,’ and so he introduced this magic absinthe idea, or whatever it was, but it was a supernatural element. I was so disappointed; I mean not in the work itself, but in that there was a presumption that comics can’t function without a super-element. As though you couldn’t find enough daftness for cartooning purposes in among Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and that whole nutty circle without needing to bring in supernatural stuff.

In my own case I was dealing with a much smaller event, the ‘graphic novel’s’ first crash and burn in the early 1990s, and there certainly wasn’t any need to make things up to keep it interesting. Just figuring it all out was enough of a feast. A good storyteller can make a banquet out of much less than what was on offer in that case. But I think comics are mostly dealing with a very immature taste among its readers. There was a fellow pitching an idea at San Diego, and I can’t remember why he was pitching it to me, perhaps I was listening just to be polite, but he started ‘There are these vampires—‘. I cut him off. ‘Stop! I’m bored already.’ There’s only one vampire I have time for and that’s the Count on Sesame Street.

How to Be an Artist could have been done as a complete fiction quite literally, except it would have taken five times as long to do. Referring to real artists living and dead really wasn’t what it was supposed to be about. That was just an extra sheen. Fictitiously I wanted to create a sense of a lot of names and styles, and some of these would appear once and never be heard of again, some would recur, and others would become significant players in the drama, while others yet again would be established as a category of ‘old masters’ that could be referred to almost in the prayers of the protagonist (King, Herriman, Caniff). In fact there is a sense that Drake, in my epilogue, is the last of these old masters to pass away (even though he isn’t literally – Feiffer is still alive – but my point is that the reader should think of it as fiction).

Also, I was thinking about Tolkien and the way there are names that exist in the mythology of Middle-Earth, and also the way some of these characters are about to enter into that realm, like Galadriel, if I’m remembering it correctly, it’s been a long time (I adored the Silmarillion). Like Tolkien, I wanted to establish a dense mythology, but in a very short space. And on top of that, the effect I wanted, is that this is what the artistic environment is made up of. In fact it’s what life is like. School, work, etc. At first there is a crowd, and in time individuals stand out, and there are departed individuals that are only ever referred to and are never met, and in time you may become a significant figure yourself as you achieve credit for your actions. The novice has to negotiate his way down a populated road.

I could have made up a lot of stuff, names and titles of their works, like Eisner did in The Dreamer, but why cheat the reader of an extra layer to the work? And you could do the same thing for a musical environment, or art of any sort. So rather than ‘drop names’ as one critic has said, it was necessary to represent each occurrence of such a personage in my story by showing an image from his work. And then, so that this didn’t seem like an arbitrary art-book thing, I challenged myself to find an image that commented on what was actually happening at the exact point in the story into which it was being inserted. It works as often as not. So anybody just skipping those panels because they’re not interested in that artist, is missing the meaning of the scheme. An average reader, I have discovered, is only willing to recognize a limited number of characters, six or seven or whatever, and I’m sure somebody somewhere has tabulated it. Beyond that they tend to complain.

So just pretend they’re made up. Although, as it happens, a lot of those old masters are in print now, who weren’t when I drew my book, so maybe a lot of that stuff is less obscure than it might have been. And Umberto Eco in his Queen Loana used a lot more obscure stuff than I ever did…. There was a moment when my confidence in what I was up to threatened to fail, but I came across a couple of quotes that shored up my resolve. The first was “Literary history is a modern invention and so is the automatic sense which a modern writer must have of his location in the flow of literary time.” The full thing is on page 249 of my book. It encouraged me to believe I was on the right track. The other one relates to Alan Moore’s position in the story. When I knew I was going to end with the Big Numbers fiasco, and I knew from the start, I started working in allusions to chaos theory, and then I stumbled upon that great paragraph from R.G. Collingwood “The same instability which affects the life of the individual artist reappears in the history of art taken as a whole…” He glimpsed the fractal idea way back in 1924. I had to put the whole quote in there.

Anyway, there was an investigative angle to How to Be an Artist. Why do these things fail? Art in the bigger sense, and the artist’s life as a microcosm of that. And since it was my intention to find useful answers to these questions, there was no room for making things up. Even if I’d changed a name it would have ruptured the fragile fabric of it. Apart from MacGarry of course, but by that time everybody accepts that as a metaphor for ‘Okay, make yourself comfortable and I’ll tell you a story.’

I watched The King’s Speech last night. Good movie, and it’s amazing that a story about a guy overcoming his stammer gets to be Picture of the Year, but a few things niggled as being implausible, and when I looked into it, sure enough, those were the parts of the story that were tweaked ‘for dramatic effect.’ In movie-making there’s a presumption, in fact it appears to be a commandment, that ‘there can be no drama without conflict,’ and so conflict has to be manufactured where it can’t be found growing naturally. I’m referring in this case to the depiction of King Edward, who has to be made somewhat unlikable for the purpose of making George look good. In another story it’s easy to make Edward’s story the love story of the century. He gave up his throne for the love of a woman. But here he’s an air-headed Champagne Charlie who mocks his brother’s speech impediment. That’s the movies for you. As soon as I see the cheap mechanisms at work, it tends to weaken my willingness to suspend disbelief. (Lest you assume I’m against movies per se, there are some that I do have an enduring fondness for: prime Laurel and Hardy, such as Blockheads from 1938, Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not, Jules Dassin’s Rififi, and many more, none of which are based on real events.)

Before we leave the notion of autobiography behind, I wanted to ask about your distinction between that term and what you are doing – isn’t all autobiography, even as commonly understood, a kind of storytelling? Does the term seem to constrictive for what you’re trying to do?

After I sent you my previous I thought to myself, what was I trying to say there? My point I think, if I were to finish circling around it, would be that I resent mechanical interference in narrative configurations that occur naturally. What attracted me to real life events in the first place was that they always happened in ways that didn’t fit my preconceived notions of narrative logic, arrived at by years of reading books and comics and watching movies. When I first started thinking about this I’d take bits of business that I’d observed in real life and then fit them into my work. But later I’d resent the damage I had to do to the observed moment to make it fit in. There are non-obtrusive things you can do, like juxtaposition, or a bit of careful pruning can help nature along. And a short story doesn’t need to arrive at a snappy conclusion. Even as recently as the new stuff in the The Years Have Pants there are a couple of places where my interfering hand may have gone too far. Hatfield and Fischer’s ‘tiny fragments’ theory is a useful reference here. Sometimes the preciousness of the found moment is best preserved by keeping it along with other found moments and not trying too hard to connect them.

Regarding autobiography, yes it is a kind of storytelling. It’s just that I consider it the shelf of people who have done important things in the world. And ‘memoir’ by definition means looking back, which is not always what I’m doing. And a diarist is recording the days in order one after another as they happen. All of these are literary terms. Something bugs me about this, and what I’m trying to say will probably occur to me after you send your next question.

Right, I definitely see what you’re saying about found moments. In Graffiti Kitchen, however, you have this line “I am the only element of continuity in my own life”, which you end up subverting as an egotistical conceit, but which still remains what seems a certain statement of purpose. Making sense of one’s life, one seeks continuities, and reading the Alec comics in their entirety, this seems a driving principle. Would you agree?

I have to keep on answering for the egotistical blather of that young whippersnapper, Eddie Campbell. That’s my problem right there. I realize now that at the beginning of our exchange I was attempting to express my current aesthetic position, which is inevitably going to make me contradict myself, if the younger me still has a voice. If that amounts to continuity then so be it.

Thinking about my impasse in my previous response, I’m remembering that I have always been striving to get back to a more immediate kind of story-telling. I mean telling of an oral sort. Talking. In talking, one simply begins ‘I heard,’ or ‘do you know who I bumped into’, or ‘I was reading about this woman…’ (naturally establishing ‘I’ as the author and motivator of the anecdote.) However, the writing of fiction, and autobiography for that matter, involves this whole other formal way of going about things, such as: “From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that the light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.”

I can see how in that first book, The King Canute Crowd, I was trying to do that very thing with “Danny Grey never really forgave himself for leaving Alec MacGarry asleep at the turnpike”; all this creating characters and putting them in a very particular time and place. I think I’ve been wrestling with trying to defeat this aura of the literary ever since. I feel that it’s a formal screen erected between speaker and listener. On this subject, I greatly enjoyed [Michael] Chabon’s recent Maps and Legends. It’s a collection of essays I suppose, or at least that’s how it would have to be described, but it’s really all of a piece, and it involves talking about stories and telling stories. And in it I feel that he was talking directly to me without that formal thing between us, that contract of ‘Let’s make believe…’, that same situation which is where I placed myself at the beginning of this chat, which started two days ago but is probably only eight inches above here. And since the tension between one mode and the other is exacerbating my paragraphs here, maybe it’s the same tension that gives a certain frisson to my better comics, that setting up of a literary pretension and then its casual deflation.

Literature and art
In your discussions of the graphic novel you’ve raised the term ‘literary’ as a defining aspect. I take it you mean literary as a register, rather than specifically text-oriented. How are comics literature?

If you go back to where you found that reference, you’ll probably find that I was representing Will Eisner’s original intention. When Eisner used the word ‘novel’ he was alluding to literariness rather than to a ‘prose work of more than 70,000 words’ (as science fiction societies that give out awards like to define a novel). And by literariness he meant seriousness of meaning, and a book that stays on a bookshelf as opposed to a periodical that gets thrown out after its use-by date. (Curiously, a book-writer I recently encountered was nonplussed upon observing that comics now stay on the shelf forever, no matter how awful they are whereas regular books have their moment in the daylight, get remaindered and are never seen again outside of garage-sales.)

On the other hand, when I used ‘literary’ above I meant it in the sense of written as opposed to spoken (and spoken here meaning straight from brain to tongue, not reading aloud a prepared speech as in the movie mentioned above). The three-panel gag comic can still be very close to the spontaneous, to the told joke, or to the scurrilous caricature sketched on the outhouse wall. A short comic book can still be analogous to, or a rendition of, a memorized tale. But to spin a comic out for a hundred pages (or even 48 pages, as in Graffiti Kitchen, or all of the stories in [Eisner’s] A Contract With God) and do it successfully (by which I mean it holds the attention of a ‘reader’), involves a kind of long-range planning that can only be arrived at by ‘writing.’ (In the same way, the symphony could only have been conceived in an era of written music, and at some point in its evolution, The Iliad shifted from an oral tradition to a written one (As M. L. West demonstrates in his magisterial The Making of the Iliad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; ”…at some point Homer wrote down or dictated his material, and in the course of years or decades he composed the vast panorama of The Iliad, expanding his early draft…”)

I could draw a large number of images, as say for instance Picasso does obsessively in his ‘Artist and Model’ series of Dec ‘53/ Jan ‘54, in an improvised, purely mind-to-hand way, or as Al Columbia did equally obsessively in his recent Pim and Francie, but something like The Arrival by Shaun Tan, even though it has no words in it, is a book complicated enough (this is not a qualitative argument) that at some point in its evolution, it would have required a written plan, even if the writing consisted entirely of hieroglyphs that neither you nor I could interpret.

In this way, comics become a kind of literature if we do not intend that to mean that they now reside on Parnassus, as a fellow comics practitioner seemed to be presuming was my intention on a panel, a few years ago, for which I had pre-proposed the subject “Will the literature of the future have pictures?” ‘Comics are not literature, they are comics!’, he declared emphatically at the outset, leaving us wondering where the discussion could go next. (This was not at a comics event, but at a writer’s festival, which was casting a sidelight on the ‘graphic novel’ phenomenon, and so the literary angle opened a potential channel of connection.)

And would you say that comics as literature in this sense is constituent of your conception of the graphic novel? Clearly it is not the only criterion, and I know you’ve more or less disavowed the term because of its dissolution in the market, but is it salvageable, and what role would this literary aspect play for it?

An artist usually wants to be part of something bigger than himself, but ‘the graphic novel’ no longer seems like any kind of worthwhile aspiration to me. Nor does the prose novel for that matter. My thinking has been floating adrift for some time. I’m working hard on a new book, but I don’t think of it as being part of any current dialogue. Maybe I’ll come out of that and see everything in a different way.

In your foreword to the collected edition you write that part 1 of The King Canute Crowd was where you found your artistic voice, and that’s precisely the story that starts with that line “Danny Grey never really forgave himself for leaving Alec MacGarry asleep at the turnpike.” It’s a very ‘literary’ opening as you say (and a very fine one, if you ask me), but in some ways it feels more poetically wrought than your graphics – the generally large grid, the preference for medium- and long shots, and the general lack of dynamic panel layouts; the sketchy, notational drawing style, etc. The continuity between that through your current work makes a lot of sense to me, but I’m curious as to how you’ve refined this ‘voice.’

It takes a long time and a great effort to cut away all the dead wood and get things as straightforward and simple as you describe. The first thing that had to go was everything that was cinematic. Next, anything that looked like comic books, and most comic book readers are not even aware of the peculiar pictorial syntax of comic books, the way characters stand in a panel in relation to each other and in relation to the frame and the way word balloons sit in a panel unrelated to everything else in there. ‘Panel layouts’ is a term I haven’t used in a long time. It’s a comic book term, like ‘nine panel grid’; ‘medium shot’ and ‘long shot’ are cinematic terms. I threw all of this stuff out of my vocabulary long ago. They’re part of the dead wood. In an early attempt to start the book, the characters had the slightly enlarged heads of a cartoony style. That had to go too. To have repeated it in panel 2 would have been the makings of a ‘style.’

I read an art instructional book once, I can’t remember who wrote it, but I extracted a valuable lesson from it. That is, that an artist should spend his artistic career expunging from the work everything that he recognizes as a habit. If he finds a neat way of doing something, instead of using the trick again, he must refrain from ever doing so. He must cast it out. A particular brushstroke or a figural gesture, or whatever. Comic books are entirely made up of this sort of thing. I have a pal who loved the way Berni Wrightson drew the strings of saliva stretched between upper and lower teeth, so he borrowed the device and still uses it forty years later. Wrightson himself got it from Graham Ingels, and he may have invented it or got it from somebody else, perhaps the face of a witch in the illustration in an old book of fairy tales from the turn of the nineteenth century. So this ugly device has been perpetuated through several generations, perhaps a whole century. Acquiring an artistic voice should be a subtractive process. Get rid of everything that you recognize as a device, or an aspect of style. Try to have no style, to go beyond the idea of a style. And what’s left will be your own voice, which you can never properly recognize, and then get rid of that too. Transform yourself. The book didn’t go that far. I’m extrapolating now.

It seems to me, however, that there is still a stylistic choice involved – the stories are very determined by the narration, sustaining the notational aspect of the drawing and leaving less room for images of a more independently evocative nature. Such drawings as the silent one in chapter seven of How to Be an Artist (p. 258 in Pants) where your brother plays clarinet from the basement window of your building are few and far between. I assume there’s a conscious choice involved here, perhaps having to do with reflexive tenor of the narration?

I had to go back and check that because I remember I was consciously avoiding silent panels by that time. In going for a verticality, I’ve pushed the caption dangerously high up there so that in a quick reappraisal you’ve overlooked it.

Argh! How did I manage simultaneously to read and overlook that caption?

…In fact I’ve broken one of my own rules about caption placement and suddenly feel embarrassed. I shall seize upon one aspect of your question and surge ahead. Looking at it now, I feel that I was resorting to a cheap cliché there. I had decided by then that silent panels were a gimmick that belong in the Eisner-Steranko school of comics art, in which analogous techniques are found for representing time and sound (or its sudden absence). You can certainly find passages like that in the King Canute Crowd, such as page 93:

…or in close proximity, page 101. But at the time I drew those pages I would have been incapable of something as complicated as the Big Numbers fiasco (pages 305-310, or “OUCH!” on pages 468-471:

…or speaking of the wispily poetic, the graveyard sojourn on pages 569-570. For everything gained, some other thing must be abandoned).

I always felt that my challenge was to make my little paper characters live in the reader’s mind. Too handsome images can be a distraction. When I read Gasoline Alley, I always prefer the workaday dailies. The Sundays sometimes interrupt my suspension of disbelief just by being so stylistically interesting.

I guess what struck me about that panel was that it was uncharacteristically ‘poetic’, as if you for once ease your grip and let the drawing resonate.

You’re forgetting that the crux of How to Be an Artist, the hinge upon which the whole book turns to face its conclusion, is an extremely poetic moment, both verbally and pictorially (since you are separating the elements here). Beginning with the third and final lapse of faith in the bargain made with Fate (the crushing void of space around MacGarry in that central panel on page 294) with Skeezix, Terry Lee and Krazy Kat then all doing walk-ons (‘walk’ literally, compare the motifs in pan 2 and pan 9 of page 295), with MacGarry by contrast dormant until Fate animates his rigid form by dripping molten silver on his head from a Coconino moon (while he is sleeping at the turnpike no less).

Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that there was no poetry in your work – the poetry is one of the reasons I like it so much! It was merely that that particular panel in that sequence seemed uncharacteristic in context and therefore stood out, prompting my inquiry.

We’ll rub a hole in that panel if we pay it any more attention. :)

[Laughs] I definitely see what you mean about cliché though, but then in After the Snooter you have a couple of silent passages when you slip into internal, symbolic sequences. This seems a departure from your earlier work, and anticipates some of the choices you make in Fate of the Artist. Could you talk about your motivations for this?

There are always going-backs of course, reversions to see if I missed something. I’m always wrestling with problems on the conceptual level of the art of making a comic strip. Sometimes I follow a thought as far as it can go. I come up against a block and have to trot back to an earlier position and pick up the thread.

I’m talking about my best work there, the Alec books. Otherwise, I can get all that old-fashioned action stuff out of my system by doing a book like Batman: The Order of Beasts, or The Black Diamond Detective Agency. But with my personal books, I’m trying to be pure.

On the other hand, looking through Pants I’ve just fastened on a panel relevant to the discussion of silent panels. Panel 6 on page 618:

…one of the new pages drawn for the book. I drew that thing several times, and it even had a caption at one point. But there it is frozen in its silent glory. Alec opens a tough bag of sweets at the cinema. A rare instance when I appear to have done a whole page just to set up that silent panel.

Worth capturing
Those sequences in Snooter are dealing with inner life, in this case semi-awake dreaming I guess, in a fairly expressive manner:

This is something you hadn’t done all that much of before in the Alec stories, which leads to a more basic question: with a few notable exceptions – parts of Graffiti Kitchen and Fate of the Artist – you seem to avoid addressing moments of strong emotion, preferring to suggest your character’s emotional life subtly in his narration and, in the images, through observation – I’m thinking here in particular about the retrospective undercurrent and lingering despair in the margins of Snooter. This runs counter to a lot of comics autobiography where the extremes of their author’s experience often take center stage. What are your thoughts on this?

Of course, I’m Scottish, as you know, and we don’t do emotion. I’m reserving the emotional thing for some real catastrophe (there might be some raw emotion in my book about money that I’m working on). All through this endeavor I’ve had the idea that by the end of it I would like to have covered the whole spectrum of life in our times. I don’t mean I want to dig into all the dark corners of experience. I’ll leave that to Alan. But rather that the commonplace life is a thing worth capturing. That’s why I referenced Gasoline Alley in my introduction. What is interesting about life at 20, at 40, at 50? etc. In theory anyway, it’s a goal. I often have readers say they liked The King Canute Crowd, but that things tend to slope off after that. Then they come back after a few years and say they missed half of what The Snooter was about the first time around. Which is another reason why I avoid making up stuff, since I need the work to hang around for a long time. The bogus parts look pretty obvious after a few years.

Purity or not, your prose style is so distinct, and I find passages not only in the earlier work, but in After the Snooter that seem to me fully as wrought as the “turnpike” line. This is not a criticism – I think it is part of what makes your storytelling voice so compelling, this intermittently poetic, if also often straightforward or ironic, approach to the mundane. Any thoughts on this?

Just yesterday I took a few lines out of the thing I’m working on, because they sounded just like the self-conscious Alec MacGarry narration of the Canute years. It took me a few minutes to figure out that that’s what was bothering me about them. There’s nothing like hearing my lines quoted back at me, as my wife often does, to make me go off them very quickly. The ones I’m happiest with are usually phrases that I dropped by accident when I was in the right mood. A lot of my stuff does look caption-heavy when you skim through the book, but it would be difficult to reduce any of it. It’s all contributing vital information. If Alan had used captions in From Hell we could have wrapped the job up in nine months.

It’s not so much that the use of captions feels heavy to me, but rather that they tend to steer the narrative considerably more than the images, which accent, deepen or provide counterpoint. Is there some sense that the images, left to their own, would risk skewing the narrative toward a more ‘seductive’ register? In some ways, Fate takes more risks in this respect.

Yes, Fate is my only personal book where I let single pictures fill up whole pages. Other than that however, way back in the 1970s I felt that comic books had become these fat ugly things that wallowed in bad drawing. I rejected them then and I do so even more vehemently now. At that same time I discovered the old strips of Noel Sickles and Roy Crane. (Matt Seneca’s review of the Buz Sawyer reprint at The Comics Journal yesterday just reminded me of this: “During the frequent artistic high points, the panels are suffused in a glossy, bracingly realistic natural light…”) And I thought that this was a whole other thing entirely, and I wanted to work in that idiom, with the small compact black and white drawings, but with this great sense of real sunlight created with the doubletone board technique.

So I developed my own version of that (in the King Canute Crowd), using letratones. Putting the stuff on flat tended to kill dead any sense of light, so I cut the stuff up into fragments, letting the scraps lie at odd angles to each other. Panels 5 and 6 on page 77:

…are good examples of what I was trying to do, where I step out of the narrative for a second and enjoy the mist rising on a May Sunday morning. But it’s not obvious. I don’t make a big deal of it, but those are two little panels that succeed in taking me to another place when I look at them now. Elsewhere I might have dwelt on it more consciously, for instance the bottom panel of page 404 in The Dance of Lifey Death is a little contemplation of nature running wild under Alec’s house. If you follow the gradations of tone on the wooden fence slats, you might be pictorially astute enough to notice that I have spread out my entire range of tones from 100% black through 90%, 80%, etc down to 0 at far right.

On the whole, the reader is always aware of a hand making a drawing. It’s never reduced to the hieroglyphic manner of Nancy or some of the other newspaper funnies, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the reader is always aware of a hands-on event taking place. There are many places where I’ve done a whole scene because I wanted to draw one thing, but I usually disguise my intention. I’d feel terribly vulgar if a reader thought ‘ah, there’s the money shot!’

Your visual-verbal register is, I guess, largely an attempt at realism, but your use of letratone makes me think of the way comics historically have often achieved naturalistic effect through abstraction – the dark winter sky in Canute on p. 51, for example, or the Vermont landscape in The Dance of Lifey Death, on p. 370, are fairly abstract suggestions of real phenomena.

I suppose you feel your way towards an equilibrium between such instances and more barebones linework, or images making direct of symbolic imagery to illustrate concepts, and I guess the use of color and the opening up of the images in Fate was a challenge to whatever equilibrium you had built? Comics seem to accommodate a fairly wide range of approaches without too much difficulty, but it still can’t be easy to make things cohere seamlessly.

Having set my course I have to keep coming up with little pictures and every one of them has to be different from all the little pictures that have preceded it. And every page has to say something that hasn’t already been said. The techniques used in Fate certainly point me in a new direction. My next book in the autobiographical mode, if we are agreeing to call it that, is in colour and I’m producing it mostly on the computer.

I wanted to ask you about irony. It’s a big part of your humor and, consequently, your self-representation. It seems to me a risky approach when striving for authenticity, and it is, I’m sure, hard to control how people take it?

I don’t think of irony consciously, but I do scrutinize my writing like it’s a legal document before I let it go. Does this phrase leave me open to such and such an interpretation, does that one contradict my earlier position, does this other one cut the matter finely enough? I’ll tweak it to add a mischievous note, but over-tweaking introduces the danger of a formality creeping in. I see that in my old blog when I find myself re-reading parts of it. One’s audience is so widespread nowadays, and its educational status widely varied, that pinning down all the possible misinterpretations can wind up piling extra hours onto the job. I also find that humor itself is complicated. I know well-educated people who have a very primitive sense of humor.

But it’s one of those things where people always think it’s the other person who hasn’t got it. I read a review of Fate of the Artist, which emphatically declared that Honeybee was not funny in the least. Since it was essential that it should be funny, being the work of A. Humorist, whose ironic tale ends the whole shebang, I obviously wasn’t getting five stars from him. In fact, I think of myself specifically as a humorist, but I so often find myself out of tune with what passes for humor today. Myself, I can sit through a half hour (well I can’t literally) of stand-up comedy in a wretched state of dismay. I understand that to amuse a room full of average citizens requires sticking to a very obvious line of quips. If there were fewer of these citizens you could just get them on the floor and tickle them I suppose.

It seems clear that a lot of your work derives quite directly from oral joke- or storytelling, not the least the gag strip. Why do you consider that in some ways quite strongly determined format to work better for your representation of daily life than the literary register that you seek to purge from your work?

Did I say purge? These things change from phase to phase. With the Snooter book, which appeared piecemeal as it was being drawn, I wanted to have it both ways, which is to say that I wanted the spontaneous quality of ‘something funny happened today,’ like you get from [James] Kochalka’s diary comics, in the way that James studiously avoids any hint of continuity. I wanted to do that but also have a big mosaic of pieces at the end of it. So going in I had no idea how or if it would end, except that a storyteller worth his salt always finds a way of wrapping things up before closing time.

Anyway, my point is that there is a quality about improvising humour from day to day that can’t be manufactured in a looking-back kind of way. But at the same time, interspersed among that, I was looking back at childhood memory for about thirty pages if you add them all up. I hadn’t done childhood before that, I mean from the inside, first person, if you think about it, except for a brief one-page interlude in The King Canute book.

Another thing about oral storytelling; whenever I’m put in the position of giving advice to a student comics artist, I always say, tell your story orally to one or more people first. That way you’ll quickly figure out how the ‘timing’ needs to work. Then when you draw it you have to figure out something that is graphically analogous to real timing. There’s one page, in the ‘Fragments’ section of the Pants book, which appeared in The Australian newspaper’s magazine section in the week that the Melbourne Writer’s festival was giving the ‘graphic novel’ a guest-spot. The editor is a lady who interviewed me for a huge big tabloid profile-spread ten years ago and figured I could do a colour page for her that would fit the requirements and subject. Anyway, time was tight and I had to call back in a few hours and tell my piece over the phone, which is unnerving, as you can’t see how it’s going down, and there was a nice piece of cash involved. ‘That’ll work’ she said and I was in. So oral storytelling is a useful skill apart from being an aesthetic position.

High/Low
Stepping back a bit: you’ve emphasized often enough your interest in early modern cartooning and the visual-verbal vernacular it developed, and it’s clear that your work is informed by it. At the same time, of course, Alec is clearly a project with high art connotations. What is your take on the dissolution of modernity’s hierarchical structures of high and low culture and what’s the potential of comics in that context, now that they are increasingly integrating high art registers?

The problem with the dissolution of the high/low hierarchy is that it’s been replaced by communities. And each community goes to great lengths to define itself and repel boarders. So they establish definitions. Thus you find, last week when Shaun Tan’s film won an Oscar, on The Beat’s news site:

“Whatever you thought of the hosts, the win in the Best Animated Short Film for Shaun Tan …was a nice win for a very talented artist. Although the Australian Tan is more of an illustrator than a cartoonist, his best known work, THE ARRIVAL, is certainly an example of graphic storytelling — so if he isn’t exactly on our team, he’s pretty darned close.”

So we have ‘Team Comics,’ which is defined by its geekiness. Just a few days earlier, the recommendation for Lady Gaga’s latest video had a different tone:

“Lady Gaga’s nerd-friendly world…If you like Fritz Lang, Giger, Superman, Sin City and Bernard Herrmann, you are sure to like this short SF film!”

I much preferred the old High/low thing. On the other hand, I’m not sure I agree with the ‘high art connotations’ in that my work, however intellectual it gets, is still always ‘about something.’ It is illustration in other words, and that has for a century and a half run in a contrary direction to ‘high art.’

So, when you say you hope to represent the entirety of life, you don’t think that’s a high art ambition? I know there has been Gasoline Alley, but largely that’s been the domain of literature, right?

I wrote something here then deleted it. I really don’t know any more. ‘High art,’ ‘literary’… these kinds of frames are usually describing our relationship to something rather than the thing itself. And Gasoline Alley might be confusing the picture here. That’s a depiction of a pleasant ordinary ‘everyday’ in small town America like you might have heard on the radio. In the context of our current overblown comic books it appeals for its ordinariness and also it represents America’s view of itself in a time and place. If I used the word ‘entirety’, I meant let’s not leave out the commonplace.

OK, this notion of illustration then: do you mean your comics are illustration or that your drawings illustrate your text, or rather – the ‘literary’ writing behind it?

In the larger world of art, anything representational is seen as illustrating something other than itself. A painting of two people talking illustrates a conversation. A picture of a bowl of flowers is an illustration of a bowl of flowers. A painting that has no relationship to anything in the real world however, is pure and escapes from the supposed taint of illustration. Pure painting is not representational. (Even something like Lichtenstein, a discussion of whom both you and I got involved in a couple of years back: his picture of a girl with a tear in her eye is not an illustration of a weeping girl in the same way that the source panel from the comic book is… but that’s an argument for another day…) I’m always illustrating something, so I can’t imagine my work ever being discussed in a conventional fine art context. There would have to be a rather dramatic change in the game for that to happen.

In a narrower context, illustration is making pictures to order for commercial purposes. In an infinitesimally small context, illustration is saying one thing in a caption and same thing in the drawing that it is attached to. In an even more conservative version of that, it’s crafting the picture into a very attractive representation of the thing it is describing, more attractive than is theoretically necessary. A hundred and fifty years ago, being well read was considered a good thing to be, therefore pictorial art that referred to scenes from books (e.g. the Pre-Raphaelites and their contemporaries) was held in high regard, and in due course there was a golden age of illustration that gave us people like Norman Rockwell. But the literary establishment came to see illustration as a low thing, because it corrupted the primacy of the word. That’s not even a Victorian thing, because the Victorian era was the great age of illustration, but a later superiority that crept into literary establishment. The theory was conceived that it stunted the imagination of the young.

This of course is nuts. I often look at the ease with which old-time illustrators drew the rigging in an old ship, or something equivalent to the remoteness of that from our own experience. How could you ever know about something like that unless you see it in a picture (short of seeing it in life of course, always preferable)? To tell somebody that they have to imagine it is willfully illogical. But that is the tenor of the age we grew up in and the residue of which we still find ourselves confronted with. (In the one-year foundation course in art I did at college I was horrified when they realized they were going to have to give us a lesson in perspective, because only half a dozen people in the class knew anything about it. Representational drawing had fallen so low, but this is something I smile at when I still hear some old codgers complain about it)(maybe you just did :) ). The lowest of all arts is the one that is made up entirely of illustration, the one that we are discussing. There used to be something raffish about the contrariness of that. There isn’t any more, which depresses me. But if I think about it too much I’ll go mad. Which is not to say I haven’t already.

I hear you, but I’m not sure I follow entirely: the visual fine arts historically have been and continue to be representational in large measure, and aren’t we, in fact, seeing this rather dramatic shift taking place, where comics are being discussed increasingly in such a context? And couldn’t one make the argument that your comics contributed toward this shift? I mean, the Alec stories explicitly champion comics as an art form, From Hell does it at least implicitly, even Bacchus has that subtext. I guess what I’m trying to get at is your notion of what comics have to offer as an art form, and how they might derive and realize such potential precisely because of their lowbrow history. Is your point that such terminology gets in the way of the “thing itself” – and if so, what framework would you prefer for the discussion of it?

We’re discussing it seriously here, but in the world out there I’m concerned that what has happened is that the culture at large has, instead of leveling out the high/low thing, plunged to the level of comic books. So I don’t think there is a fine art to aspire to any more, except insomuch as one might aspire to live in a bygone age. Good work happens wherever it happens. There are no ‘art forms.’ The best work happens independently of that. Think of Tom Phillips’ The Humument or Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. And as for comics, they start to interest me somewhere after the point where they stop being comics. Apart from the very old stuff of course. I’ll always have a fondness for the classics.

The high/low thing has been replaced in the present-day by an obsession with categories and genres and trying to draw lines of demarcation and hold everybody to them. You get articles around the comics net in which writers try to figure out what exactly a comic is, and what qualifies and doesn’t qualify. Order is wanting and people will make up some system of order rather than face having to get along without it. Now we no longer say ‘Is it art?’ or ‘is it literature?’ We say, ‘yes but is The Arrival comics?’ or ‘is Vonnegut science fiction,’ or ‘the graphic novel is not a genre, it’s a format,’ or ‘This isn’t gangsta rap, it’s crunk.’

Also, in my experience, anyone who describes themselves as a “fine artist” usually turns out to be an idiot.

Disappearance
From Alec McGarry to the disappeared Artist, your central character has always been an unstable entity, and you’ve moved toward fairly extreme dissolution in Fate of the Artist, which sees theoretical concerns take over what has generally been, or at least felt like, a fairly realistic, accessible narrative in earlier books. The book evinces a tension in the work that one realizes was there all along, but less foregrounded. Where does this tension come from, and did you find it impossible to proceed without addressing it?

I’m guessing you mean the idea of art and MacGarry’s relationship to that. As early as page 68 in the Pants book there’s a direct reference to this, although prior to that we would always be presuming that he had some other agenda above working in a factory. In Graffiti Kitchen it’s there, but there’s always a certain cynical caution about the subject. By the end of How to Be an Artist, the disappointments are accumulating. Fate of the Artist is a full-fledged attempt to bail out. Perhaps he would like to turn back the clock to the years of, in the words of Nietsche, “…that happy state in which one does not yet know the limits of one’s gifts and thinks that all objects of love are attainable.”

CARO: Both How to Be and Artist and Fate of the Artist are very concerned with influence, but How to Be an Artist references are much more overtly to comics history than Fate’s, which reference art and film and literature. The influences in Fate seem much more distant than those in How to Be an Artist; there’s no image of you knocking on the door of the Petersplatz or the Globe. The story of the CDs implies a deep investment in music, but it’s still depicted with distance, due to the conceit of the author being missing. The effect of reading them back-to-back is that affectionate intimacy of your relationship with comics comes across really strongly. The pan-arts references in Fate are something I really like about the book, but do you think you could have written Fate referencing the history of comics in the places that you referenced the history of the other arts, or was it essential to you to cast a wider net?

In How to Be an Artist the idea was to present comics as an art to stand in for all arts. The book was in the form of a comic and it was relevant to use the history of that idiom. But I’m interested in art as a whole. And on page 298 I let R.G. Collingwood make it clear on my behalf: “The story is the same whether we look at Samian pottery or Anglian carving, Elizabethan drama or Venetian painting…” In Fate I wanted to develop the theme further. In the interim since I had started How to Be an Artist (1996), I had become more consciously interested in postmodernism. This consciousness began with a chap who wrote his university thesis on aspects of postmodernism in my autobiographical work. I got to thinking, ‘hey, I better look into this whole thing, check out some of these texts I keep stumbling upon.’ No big surprises, as I think I must have breathed in a lot of information without being aware of it, but this did help me out of an impasse. I had started writing Fate as a prose novel, believe it or not, which is the point here. It wasn’t a comic, so my affection for comics wasn’t going to be relevant to it, in answer that part of your question. And during this time I had been keeping the roof on the house by doing Batman and other superhero things, not all of which were mentioned by Alex Boney the other day. But I was having trouble writing in a voice that didn’t sound bogus. In fact most fiction sounds bogus to me. I can rarely get past reading the first page of other people’s novels. So I let it be bogus and threw in a lot of other bogus pastiche stuff, even using O. Henry’s voice to say what I wanted to say, and the thing ended up being another big complicated comic, but that is the odd direction by which I arrived at it. My own voice is a visual/verbal one I guess.

CARO: Fate opens up a nice double entendre in the title (the kind that would have been immediately obvious if it were in French): it’s both the artist’s fate and artistic “fate”, both “the fate of the artist” and “the kind of fate appropriate to the artist.” And that “fate” appropriate to the artist is a chaos, held together with a paperclip (the paperclip on the toilet, the paperclip on the brick). So there’s a really nice synergy between the “not very tightly held together” chaotic universe and the “not very tightly held together” artistic identity. And Evans’ desire for control is, in the end, what kills the artist off.

The book itself is pretty tight conceptually, though, even though you do a great job of making it seem insouciant. There’s this cluster of contradictory things at the center of this view of art, which is why, I think, it’s so compelling as art to me. Re-reading this immediately after How to Be an Artist, though, where “fate” was more a motivating force that you had to submit to, I wonder how much the idea of submission to chaos, not trying to control, is meant as advice, a philosophical assertion of how to approach making and taking in art.

The dichotomy is between the arts on the one hand and the sciences and other more logical disciplines on the other. Once again, R.G. Collingwood: “To the historian accustomed to studying the growth of scientific or philosophical knowledge, the history of art represents a painful and disquieting spectacle.” That one line expresses my overriding theme in all of these books. In our own time this spectacle consists of the upsetting of the traditional high art/low art balance. Campbell’s issue with this is that he thought this meant that comics would be accepted as a medium, with its particular forms, and also with its rich background of having evolved through its Kings, Herrimans and Caniffs, etc., etc., but what has actually happened is that the whole geek thing has prevailed and we have a huge proportion of the movies coming out of Hollywood being based on superhero comics, or they might as well be, and genius-grant-winning novelists writing issues of superhero comics. And fine art, somehow missing the fact it’s now on a level field, is still appropriating crap all over the place with all the imagination of tribute bands. It’s such a crushing disappointment, the whole current artistic landscape. Things didn’t turn out as I dreamed they might have. The potential satisfactions perceived at the outset have disappeared in the reshuffling.

I didn’t exactly say that in Fate, as ordinary readers are unlikely to know what I’m talking about (he gets to draw pictures for a living; what’s he got to complain about?). So I went for a more conventional and more entertaining malaise, the problem of being a vampire in my use of living people in my work, a thing which does worry me from time, and its accessible. And it’s not like I’ve thrown in a bottle of magic absinthe. And knowing that was the conclusion, I built the book toward that. But in a much more general sense, and I think this should come across in the work, the idea of art and being an artist never pays off in the way we imagined it would. (Hence my forays into history in Fate). For every Shakespeare or Mozart there’s a Louis Gabriel Guillemain who wanted out of the world enough to stab himself fourteen times before expiring, or a Henri Duparc, a composer who destroyed all his work except for a dozen songs that escaped from him and you can find on one CD, who wrote in a letter to a friend: “Having lived 25 years in a splendid dream, the whole idea of [musical] representation has become – I repeat to you – repugnant. The other reason for this destruction, which I do not regret, was the complete moral transformation that God imposed on me 20 years ago and which, in a single minute, obliterated all of my past life. Since then, [my opera] Roussalka, not having any connection with my new life, should no longer exist.” So there’s also a mysterious psychological element to investigate. But that’s perhaps for a future project. Fate exhausts the theme for now, and my next book, which I’ve nearly finished, will be all about money, you’ll be glad to hear.

It seems clear that Fate is your most complex effort so far to step outside yourself and to go beyond the already fairly complex set of narrative registers you’d operated on up till then, i.e. the narrator in the captions, the Alec character who morphs into Eddie in Snooter, the different versions of same that appear occasionally, the intermittent spilling over of inner (verbal) monologue into symbolic imagery, etc. An attempt to suppress that, while acknowledging the inescapable presence of you as an author – did you have a concern that your work might otherwise risk solipsism?

To avoid tipping over into insanity I should think. How sane that fellow looks, at the end of Fate, now that he has managed to escape from himself. I guess he was doing it by increments over the years. I see what you mean though. Even in fairly straightforward sequences there was often a switching from third to first person, long before I complicated it by introducing the second person, and from past to present tense, before I threw in the future. Occasionally I would catch myself doing those first/third changes and past/present and then wonder whether I should leave it or change it. I’d scour assorted literary works to catch the masters doing it. It’s everywhere in Henry Miller, so I figured that it must have been debated already as much as it needs to be debated. So the authorial identity uncertainties were part of the prevailing neurosis of my oeuvre before I threw MacGarry out altogether.

The next step was to cast the actor Richard Siegrist in my place. I didn’t develop this as there was already too much in the book already, so it remains an extra-textual thing that never got invited in. Somewhere in all my files and collection of old jazz music, the name Siegrist appears as a confusion of Secrest. Andy Secrest was a trumpet player who as a young man fell under the influence and artistic spell of the great Bix Beiderbecke (who pops up on page 75 of Fate as one of the author’s circle of imaginary friends… to the true inhabitant of the imaginary realm, one’s heroes are really in the room), and who got his first big break in music by subbing for Bix in the Paul Whiteman orchestra. By all accounts, he was an amiable chap whom everybody liked, including Bix. An Italian film-maker, Pupi Avati, made a drama-biopic of Bix’s life in 1991, which I haven’t seen (trailer).

This relates to what I was saying earlier about movies and ‘there can be no drama without conflict.’ In the same way that Salieri was made the envious villain in the life of Mozart first through Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri of 1831, an apparent falsehood perpetuated all the way through through Shaeffer’s play, Amadeus of 1979. In the same way, the innocent Secrest was cast as a scheming and jealous rival to Bix in Pupi’s film (so I have read). You can see how this relates to my thesis about the artist’s fate being in the hands of an unreasonable world. I satirized the absurdity of this baloney in Fate by having author Campbell murdered by his book-designer, Evans. I even describe the body ‘double-bagged.’ Since he wasn’t in fact murdered, obviously, all the other suppositions must also fall apart.

The funny part about it really is that this murder was an addition that I put in at the twelfth hour because my editor, Mark Siegel, felt that the drama of the book had been left unresolved. And funnier still, the designer, who was the last to handle the digital files, wreaked his own vengeance by salting away a secret message in the small print on page 46 of Fate, which wasn’t discovered till after the book was printed. I turned the story of this conflict into a stand-up comedy performance, which was filmed in Chicago by Bookslut. All of this is a huge self-indulgence unless we allow that it illustrates my point about the artist’s fate being swallowed in a vortex of untruths that are superfluous to the simple facts of his short time on the planet. And if you shouted ‘Self-indulgence!!’, I can only wonder at how you got all the way to the end of a huge interview with an author about his 640-page autobiographical comic. [Matthias laughs].
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The entire roundtable on The Years Have Pants is here.

In addition, our colleagues at the Panelists held a simultaneous roundtable on Campbell, focusing especially on the Playwright but touching several other works as well. Their roundtable is here.

The Wire Roundtable: Every Man a King

Posted on March 20, 2011 by kinukitty

This is the first in a series of essays this week about The Wire. (David Simon bless us, each and every one.)

Season one laid the framework – the main problem in Baltimore (and, by extension, all major U.S. cities) is drugs. It is a problem because people are poor, the police department is inefficient and corrupt, and the drug organizations can be pretty solid in their business practices (much more so than my office, even if my office were allowed to kill people, which would admittedly change the paradigm, perhaps for the better). Season two is an exercise in correcting any misperceptions we might have developed from season one – to whit, it isn’t just poor black people who do illegal things. It’s also working class white people. Season three expands on that to make sure we understand that business people and politicians are also corrupt.

Having made these points, The Wire pulls back in season four for the wide angle shot: inner city kids. You might have gotten through the first three seasons without feeling that everything was hopeless – depressingly, unutterably, I want to run out into traffic right now hopeless – but I guarantee you won’t finish season four with that kind of feckless optimism intact, even if you watch each episode, as I did, while flipping through bright and shiny European fashion magazines. (Kinukitty endeavors to seek balance in all things.)

Then, as you lie panting and exhausted, washed up on the shoals of abject despair by the unrelenting bleakness of season four, season five arrives to provide some respite. Everyone is still corrupt and characters are still dropping like flies – some of which is quite dismal indeed – but this time the focus is on the newspaper, and we don’t really give a damn about that.

The Wire is not as simplistic as my drive-by summary makes it sound. Its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, but this series was remarkable in its nuanced approach. The conceptualization, writing, and acting are all consistently – sometimes very, very good. It gives a great background on how ghettos, drug organizations, unions, schools, politics, police departments, and city government really work, and one only rarely wishes they’d climb down off the soapbox and perpetrate some character development and/or plot, already. All these institutions are interconnected, and the people within them, too, and the five seasons of the Wire run down these connections in sometimes subtle and often realistic ways. The actors are believable. I sometimes found myself thinking about plot points or scenes from the Wire as I tried to fall asleep at night.

I have never seen a television show explicate a complicated situation so thoroughly. I was shocked to watch it happen. When I started watching season one, I couldn’t believe this wasn’t the most popular show that had ever been broadcast. It has everything – action, truth, a brilliant and charismatic but out-of-control alcoholic Irish detective. I finally saw the problem, though. I got something important from this show; entertainment, yes, but also understanding. But too much understanding petrifies (quoth James Merrill). I was sodden and hopeless with it. I came to the end of season five feeling like I’d had a melodramatic and rancorous love affair. I’d gotten things out of it I wouldn’t want to forget, but at the same time I was tired and bedraggled and very much ready to call it quits.

I watched the entire series in one stuttering, intermittently obsessive sweep. It took me about three months. This is an unheard-of level of commitment for me, and I felt like I’d accomplished something. And the surprising thing is, I did. I thought thinky thoughts, and I put things together thinkily. As it were. Things I hadn’t quite put together before. Sort of like when you go to several different neighborhoods in a big city, and then you unexpectedly drive on a street you’ve never taken before and find out that it goes through all those neighborhoods, and now you understand how they fit together. (This happened to me recently, by the way. You can take Roosevelt to Halsted, drive through the UIC neighborhood, and you’re in Pilsen! I had no idea.)

In the months since I’ve been parted from the Wire, I’ve been trying to figure out how I could possibly write about it. Because, like I said – all that thinking. Not necessarily thinking that would impress anyone else, but an interesting diversion for me. I was tempted to talk about the last season and the way newspapers work, because I worked at a newspaper, and while the perfectly insightful and never profane news editor was way, way too good to be true, and, as much as I hate to say it, the dumb, smug editor in chief was too dumb to be true, overall, the newspaper scenes made me writhe in an agony of painful recognition. I have also worked with city governments, and that part of the civics lesson felt pretty spot on, too. What I have settled on, though – and only about seven hundred words into the essay – is season two, and the unions.

Here’s what happens. Container shipping has changed the nature of dock work, and the harbor in Baltimore needs a major improvement to make it ideal for the way shipping works today. As a result, the stevedores – all union workers – sit around most days and wait for work. They do not sit around and wait for work in a cheerful, “Ah, I don’t need to work because I have a union job!” sort of way, either. The days are gone when these men, who have a high school education or less and no specific skills, can provide a comfortable living for their families – or much of a living at all. The union president, Frank Sobotka, is doing everything he can to get legislation passed for that harbor improvement, and most of what he’s doing is illegal or immoral. He’s bribing people, dealing with organized crime, working with lobbyists. Among other endeavors, the organized crime guys supply most of the heroin in Baltimore by smuggling it in through the harbor. This connects us neatly to the Baltimore detectives and drug community of which we grew so fond in season one.

I do not come at this plotline from a neutral perspective. I come from a blue-collar, pro-union background, and although I’m not from Baltimore, I knew those dock workers. There were middle-age and up men who looked older than they were from a life of working hard, real physical labor, and from not knowing how they were going to take care of their families any more now that their livelihood was drying up. And there was that generation’s progeny, idiot and otherwise – the guys I didn’t want to date in high school, partly because whatever else happened to me, I did not want to wind up married to one of those boys. I already knew how that story ended. Anyway, my point is that the Wire presented the dock workers just right. If you are a product of that kind of working class background, you will recognize it. If you are not, you can watch it and gain a more thorough understanding than you can from listening to Bruce Springsteen songs.

Unions are both magnificent and corrupt, and the Wire explains this well, even if it does kill off a dozen Russian hookers in the first episode to make the point. Which seems excessive, doesn’t it? Well, these things happen. The union president is in bed with some very bad people (I find myself talking like that when I refer to the Wire; it has a very satisfying noir-ish slang quotient), but he’s helping them smuggle their drugs and their hookers for a good cause – if he can just get this legislation passed, his family and friends a neighbors will have work again. Then they can drop this organized crime wheeze and get back to their jobs, and everyone can keep their luxuries like houses and cars and food and education and health care. Well, it doesn’t work out. None of it. And that should be good, since corruption is bad and if you drive with corruption, we all lose, or something like that. Nobody wins, though. Instead of the harbor jobs, we get another manicured patch of badly constructed luxury condos. The hookers are still dead, and the heroin is still selling. Not much of a victory.

I think this arc is generally seen as sympathetic toward the unions. At least, those are the informal findings of my highly unscientific study of the issue (to wit, asking the one other person I know who’s seen the show – that would be Noah). After all, the union boss winds up being a sympathetic character. Dying for his sins, and all – voluntarily, even – I mean, that’s a pretty high standard. I forgive him, anyway. And you do come to see the union guys as people, rather than caricatures of lazy entitlement. You see them trying to take care of their friends and family, and you see how frightened they are about what the future holds (or doesn’t), and how much they want to work. In my experience, this is in fact the way it is. Just like ’70s country radio.

I am no longer working class, though. My father’s grinding, exhausting union job made it possible for me to grow up in a small, kind of depressing but safe and well-equipped home (there was always a nice television); to attend school without having to worry about working to help support the family; and thus to have enough space to dream of something else, and enough backup to achieve it. I have never held a union job, and the sum total of physical labor I’ve done amounts to bussing tables and waitressing when I was in college. There’s a point here – bear with me. One of the most important questions thrown out in season two is when Sobotka talks to his lawyer, a man he grew up with. Frank appeals to the man on this basis, and the lawyer points out that he went to law school and made something of himself, while Frank and the rest of the union guys just clung to what they knew, ignoring the signs that it wasn’t going to last.

And when I was watching that scene, my emotional reaction was “Yeah!” Because I have some buttons, you know? Recognizing the union guys was not exactly a joyous reunion for me. And beyond the intrinsic importance of my personal reaction, there are a slew of policy initiatives about this shit. Blue-collar workers are being told to go back to school and retool, and many arguments imply (or flat out state) that these idiots should have seen the writing on the wall long ago. So, on the one hand, yeah – go to college, you intellectually lazy bastard. Become a lawyer, like the rest of us. On the other hand – seriously? How does somebody who’s never seen this “go to college and become a lawyer” stuff in action make it happen? How do you do it if you don’t know how it works and you don’t have parents, etc., who went to college and know how it all works? How do you pay for it when you’re making forty thousand a year? And how does a whole class of people do it? And if they don’t do it, what happens to them? Well, that one is pretty easy. Most of them sink from working class to working poor. Or just poor.

It is far from being an abstract question, or a dramatic exaggeration. Look at what Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin. He sees this as the moment to start knocking down the dominos. If state workers can be stripped of their collective bargaining powers, that takes out the largest group of union workers left in the United States. And it’s not an unpopular stance – everyone has heard of the excesses perpetrated by the unions. It’s easy to take that rhetoric at face value and say, yeah, those guys have it too good. Fuck them. But if you look at the union workers as people – the way the Wire forces you to – the issue gets murky.

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Update by Noah: The entire Wire Roundtable is here.

Utilitarian Review 3/18/11

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Actually…I think I am no longer going to list the week’s posts, unless there is an outroar or upcry. It is a bit of a pain, and I think the new format keeps pieces visible long enough that the recap is not necessary.

And as I’ve noted before, when I have links to provide I usually just tweet them. So sign up there if you want those.

I’ll still use this for publication announcements, I think. So!

Bert Stabler and I talk about whether or not god is artificial.

At Splice Today I talk about Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

And also at Splice I explore my Irish roots.
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Also, please use this space to tell us how the new site is going. Derik has fixed a bunch of things this week, but if you find something else please let us know.

Fractured Shell (No Ghost)

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Anja Flower

For my temporary stay here at the Hooded Utilitarian, I’ll be doing a series of pieces on the intersection of comics and related media with queer genders and sexualities, including how these issues have touched on my own life. I thought I’d begin with the gender politics of the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

Two panels from the Ghost in the Shell manga; Motoko Kusanagi points out to a colleague that they can’t really prove that they’re human.

It was as a freshly-minted teenager that I was first captured by Mamoru Oshii’s original film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. I was at a transitional point in my life, having just been transplanted into a new family and still learning to grasp uncertainties around gender, sexuality and my own body, and Oshii’s Motoko Kusanagi did something for me. She fulfilled a function, acting as an icon of strength outside of the conventional definitions of gendered behavior – and the borders of human life – with which I was familiar. I was able to construct a narrative around her which served a desperate need for some model of humanity I could relate to.

Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, in Queer Images: a History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America, write about this as a common queer spectatorial experience:

“…the desire to see queer characters onscreen was an important one. Such images could let isolated queers know that other queers existed and how they possibly looked, acted, or lived their lives. Such images could validate a queer spectator’s very existence, even if the images were (as they usually were) stereotyped, derogatory, or even monstrous. Queer audiences thus learned how to read Hollywood films in unique ways – often by looking for possible queer characters and situations while ignoring the rest. As Henry Jenkins explains in his study of media fandom, specialized audience members (such as queers) learn how to ‘fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprints, salvaging bits and pieces of the found material in making sense of their own social experience.’ That process formed the basis of queer reception practice for most of the twentieth century.”

Many films became widely known for their queer readings – All About Eve and The Wizard of Oz being prominent examples. Queer filmmakers such as James Whale and Dorothy Arzner encoded queer signals in their work, and queer overtones were present with varying levels of menace and stereotype in a variety of classic films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Old Dark House, Queen Christina, Rebel Without a Cause.

Although it’s difficult to exactly describe what made Ghost in the Shell and its lead character so appealing to me, certain anchoring points of that appeal are in hindsight quite obvious. Motoko Kusanagi is at once powerful and beholden to power, at once commanding and enslaved to uncertainty. She is constantly on top of her situation, always the quickest of mind and fleetest of foot; in an elite team of cyborg special agents, her dominance is unquestioned. Yet, she comments to Batou after going diving that while her body may be able to process beers in minutes without a trace of hangover, the body which allows her such control is completely owned by the government for which she works. Were she ever to leave Section 9, she would have to leave her body at the door along with her uniforms and equipment; she retains her power only so long as it is used according to the wishes of those with greater power still. Neither can she be certain as to her own origins; “Motoko Kusanagi” is stated in at least one iteration of the franchise to be a pseudonym, and even though in at least one case she’s given childhood memories, she can never be certain they weren’t simply programmed into her head. In both the first Oshii movie and the original comic, she points out to a co-worker that she can’t prove that she’s not just an artificial personality programmed into a cyberbrain; indeed, her inorganic body leaves her open to being mistaken for a robot, and in the comic, she is – by a sexbot collector, no less. She is at once heroic and very relatable for someone as mired in identity uncertainties and as alienated from those around them as my 13-year-old self was.

A page from the original Ghost in the Shell manga: the Major discussing with a colleague the definition of “human,” and the impossibility of really knowing if either of them is human.

Then, of course, there is her gender encoding. There seems to be within geekdom, and popular culture at large, a sacred circle of acceptable gendered appearance and expression for “tough chick” characters outside of which creators (mostly cisgender [non-transgender] men, of course) very rarely step. The territory outside of this circle is in one way or another too uncomfortable for the assumed male gaze of the audience – too “mannish,” too far outside of binary conceptions of gender, too little interested in catering to what is understood to be hetero cisgender male taste. The hetero cis male majorities within fandom certainly take part in policing the sacred circle’s boundaries; I’ve seen forum threads ridiculing designs of female characters for being just a bit too masculine, too square of jaw, too muscular, not enough designed for sexual objectification. Even Xena and Buffy, famous girl-power icons, are well within this sacred circle. Oshii’s Motoko Kusanagi is not. Such characters can hold a totemic power and be quite alluring and empowering, as any Rocky Horror Picture Show fan can attest.

Motoko Kusanagi as Mamoru Oshii and his team constructed her: well outside of the circle of fanboy-safe “tough chick” gender expression, and well outside of Masamune Shirow’s own vision.

The incident in the manga in which she is mistaken for a robot by a lecherous male sexbot collector draws attention to another significant way in which the Major is unfree. Although Oshii’s construction of her gender encoding steps firmly outside of the sacred circle of acceptability and grants her periodic nudity a sort of liberated power only fully available in absence of the obvious tropes of objectification under the heterosexist, cissupremacist male gaze, this was clearly never Masamune Shirow’s intent. In fact, Ghost in the Shell is an exercise in essentialism; the idea of a ghost – an essence – existing within the body forms the very title of the franchise. This essence grants a body personhood, regardless of whether that body is organic or manufactured. Shirow goes even further in embracing the “spiritual essence” narrative, endorsing the spiritualist concepts of souls and extra-sensory perception. His essentialism allows him to elide the obviously severe implications of cyborgization, ghost dubbing and cyberbrain technology for social constructions of gender and gendered expression. By assuming the existence of essential differences between (feminine, “female-bodied,” male-attracted) women and (masculine, “male-bodied,” female-attracted) men, he is able to skirt these implications and resume policing gender in ways that please his gaze and keep the gendered underpinnings of the erotic fantasy that is Motoko Kusanagi intact.

In the original Ghost in the Shell comic, as in Appleseed and other Shirow works, the assertive and militaristic female lead is in many ways kept in her place: put in highly male-gaze sexual attire and situations while male characters are frequently designed in ways that are clearly meant to be read as at least unsexual, and at most quite ugly, paired with enormous and extremely masculine male leads (Briareos, Batou), shown breaking down in tears while those male leads remain stoic. Their environments are filled with feminine female characters, frequently in subservient roles (informational robot, nurse, assistant, sexbot, even wall decoration), and masculine men in commanding positions (bureau chief, politician, general, weapons dealer, government council member, commando, company president). In fact, there is a sort of “femdom” role-reversal narrative to Motoko in particular. She seems to provide titillation to the presumed hetero cisgender male reader by deviating from her own assumed feminine nature; this excitement could not be had if the roles, and the rationale for their existence, were not re-asserted in the first place. His essentialist logic prevents Shirow from considering, for example, the social implications for a male-assigned/male-identified person of having himself transferred to a body which consists of a box with legs and manipulators (the president of Hanka Precision Instruments) or the logic of using “he/him” pronouns on an intelligence born in cyberspace, and whose first physical body is presumably meant to be perceived as “female” (Project 2501/the Puppet Master).

This thinking is fully exposed in all its spectacularly thin logic at the end of the comic. The Major has fused with Project 2501, and Batou has transferred Kusanagi/2501 into a new body, long-haired and feminine in appearance. Kusanagi/2501 informs Batou, to his surprise, that zir new shell is that of a “guy.” Confronted with his shock, ze replies, “Yeah. This is a male body. You want proof?” The reader is led to believe that zir new body has a penis, which apparently settles the question of its “maleness.” Bodies are not only sexed but inherently gendered, the transcendence of human bodies and brains be damned. A body can throw all sorts of signals outside of those approved for “men,” but as long as it has a penis (and no significant breast tissue, one guesses), it is sexed male. Motoko/2501 goes off to find a more suitable, “female” body. The Major can even merge with a cyber-intelligence, but as long as she inhabits a body, she cannot escape the social slavery of coercive gender roles to which all human beings are subjected. Even if she were to transfer to a masculine, male-assigned body, she would only trade one set of social strictures and assumptions for another. She might find herself more or less suited to the body’s advantages and disadvantages and to the social roles it would shove her into, but she would be restricted either way.

I cannot imagine how Masamune Shirow would respond to being confronted with a transgender person of non-binary gender such as myself. As much as I admire him as an artist and storyteller, I’m not sure I want to know.

Shirow’s big reveal at the end of the original Ghost in the Shell manga: genitals are destiny! The divide between “male” and “female” must be maintained, even when the “woman” in question is actually the fusion of a previously female-assigned person with an autonomous intelligence born in freaking cyberspace.

Like other queer and transgender people, I’m used to scavenging for my queer and gender-variant stories, situations and characters amongst works made by overwhelmingly cisgender, predominantly heterosexual creators in fields dominated by men and by male gaze. This scavenging process can be incredibly gratifying, but also deeply problematic. It means embracing images of gender variance and queerness which are built to fit the perceptions and satisfy the desires of people who are not queer or trans, and may know little of real queer and trans people’s lives. These images can be as coded, as stereotyped, as condescending, as negative and as thoroughly exoticized today as they were decades ago. It can be deeply frustrating finding one’s empowerment in yet another character created as some cisgender straight guy’s wank fantasy, and cisgender straight women’s wank fantasies often aren’t much better. Just as frustrating, if not moreso, can be to see powerful and defiantly non-gender-conforming characters “put in their place” by cis straight male fans (and, again, sometimes cis straight female fans) eager to turn them into fodder for yet another tiresome role-reversal or power-stripping fantasy. This is done in the form of constant commentary within the fandom, doujinshi, slash, or simply fan art which modifies these characters’ gender coding in various ways and drags them back into the sacred circle of acceptable gender variation. However, it doesn’t seem sensible or right to allow these norm-reinforcing readings center stage. Benshoff and Griffin again:

“As critic Alexander Doty describes his own spectatorial response to popular culture in his book Making Things Perfectly Queer, ‘I’ve got news for straight culture: your readings of texts are usually ‘alternative’ ones for me, and they often seem like desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture.”

This is the part where I go out on a limb.

I’m no semiotician or Theorist, but I think there’s something interesting going on here. If we refuse to accept Masamune Shirow’s essentialist assumptions about gender and instead focus on the act of gender as it is “performed” by the fictional character on the comics page, all sorts of interesting possibilities are opened up. Even laboring under the assumption that Motoko Kusanagi is bound by an underlying essence, we must admit that this binding essence is fictional – that in fact “Essential Motoko” is a construct we amalgamate out of images and ideas accumulated from consuming the Ghost in the Shell franchise in its various forms. Abandoning this idea, we are free to focus on the Major as she in fact is: a series of images and text snippets juxtaposed. Seen this way, gender can be read into just about everything: into the whole book, into whole characters to be sure, but also into scenes, pages, panel sequences, environments, color/tone palettes and individual colors/tones, outfits and items of clothing, poses, facial expressions, speed lines, patterns and symbols, inking techniques, even single lines. The changes in gendered expression from line to line, color to color, face to face, panel to panel are often tiny, but they are important because they provide an entirely different image of gender in comics. This image is not one of an immutable essence limited to characters and rarely or never changing, but as an everpresent jumble of tiny shards of signification, only semi-coherent at best and only even pushed into appearing as constant (if fluid) by the reader’s ability to imagine the gaps in information between panels – the device of “closure” described in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Gender overgrows in every direction, abundant shards of it popping up wherever the particular reader’s subjectivity allows it; it is subjective, certainly, and also cumulative and temporal, agglutinating and morphing as the reader reads and re-reads, consumes new additions to the franchise, looks at new pieces of fan art, comes to greater understanding of plot points, digests criticism. Each of these experiences provides an abundance of these shards of gendering for the reader to plug into their gender-concept of the entire franchise, the individual story or character, the individual page. The reader is selective in doing this, and the shards from which they select appear different as the reader acquires different sets of eyes.

Various different Motokos from the original manga, each with her own marginally coherent assemblage of gendered signals to give off.

The Hooded Utilitarian

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Monthly Archives: March 2011

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Utilitarian Review 3/18/11

Fractured Shell (No Ghost)

Two panels from the Ghost in the Shell manga; Motoko Kusanagi points out to a colleague that they can’t really prove that they’re human.

A page from the original Ghost in the Shell manga: the Major discussing with a colleague the definition of “human,” and the impossibility of really knowing if either of them is human.

Motoko Kusanagi as Mamoru Oshii and his team constructed her: well outside of the circle of fanboy-safe “tough chick” gender expression, and well outside of Masamune Shirow’s own vision.

Various different Motokos from the original manga, each with her own marginally coherent assemblage of gendered signals to give off.