Category Archives: Roundtables

Cuckoo for Copyright: Read This And I Own Your Brain

Posted on by

This week on HU we’re going to have a roundtable discussion on issues around copyright and free culture. The roundtable will be anchored by an interview with artist and free culture advocate Nina Paley, conducted by Caro, which will be posted in a few days. We’re also going to have a guest post by Pallas, a sometimes HU commenter who has studied intellectual property law. Finally, we’ll have a guest post by Jonathan Newman, a contemporary classical composer and a bit of a free culture skeptic.

To start things off, I thought I’d reprint one of the first things I wrote for The Comics Journal way back when. This was reprinted by the good folks at Poor Mojo’s Almanac a while back, but hasn’t appeared on this blog before. Thanks to Alan Benard of Poor Mojo’s for putting in all the useful links, for updating them, and for figuring out how to allow me to reproduce them despite my tragic lack of tech savvy. (And Alan himself may appear here later in the week with links to some of his favorite mashups.)
______________________________

READ THIS AND I OWN YOUR BRAIN

This article [except for some very minor alterations] first appeared in The Comics Journal #268. The rights have now reverted to me (that’s Noah Berlatsky, the author), and so I’m releasing it to Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k) (and to anyone else who would like to reprint it) under the Creative Commons license Attribution-Sharealike 1.0. Basically this means that you can reprint the article for free, without permission, as long as you (1) credit me, and (2) make it clear that others are free to copy it under the same conditions. So, as I understand it, including this note should cover you. For more information on this Creative Commons license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/

Laws mainly benefit those who can afford lawyers, and intellectual property laws are no exception. If you’re a huge media conglomerate, copyright restrictions can transform you from a humble peddler of ephemera into an intergenerational dealer in cultural crack. The public wants their lovable icons — the public needs their lovable icons — and, as the only source, you can turn that rascally rabbit into a jagged, futuristic obscenity, sneer at your customers, and still walk away with a tidy profit.

ARTISTS VS. ART

This view of intellectual property has been heavily promoted by those media conglomerates mentioned above, all of whom want you to feel that, say, illicitly downloading the latest Destiny’s Child hit single is the moral equivalent of stealing an aged relative’s food stamps. Never mind that most musicians don’t get a dime from their record sales 1. Forget that artists from Jack Kirby to Billie Holiday have been systematically screwed despite (or often because of) copyright law. The ideal remains in the mind of the public, the legislature, and the judiciary: copyright laws are designed to protect artists from exploitation.

But they aren’t. The U.S. Constitution clearly states that intellectual property laws are designed “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” In other words, rights are granted specifically to promote art, not artists. Copyright law assumes that artists won’t spew forth innovation without economic incentives. To give them those incentives, we grant them exclusive rights to their products. In the 1994 case of Fogerty v. Fantasy Inc., the Supreme Court reiterated this point, explaining that “The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an ëauthor’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good. 2”

Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that since the post-Enlightenment apotheosis of capitalism and the printing press, the profit motive has become an important motivation for many artists. Trollope, for example, self-confessedly wrote to make money first and foremost. If copyright were eliminated entirely and he couldn’t gain a middle-class income through writing, he might well not have bothered. The same might be said of Dickens, Stephen King, and a whole host of others — or as Harlan Ellison put it in Following Cerebus #3, “What we’re looking at is the egregious inevitability of no one but amateurs getting their work exposed, while those who produce the bulk of all professional-level art find they cannot make a decent living.”

Of course, Ellison is seriously overhyping his vision of aesthetic apocalypse, and downplaying some even more important dangers. While creators can be threatened in certain situations by a lack of money, they are certainly and always threatened by a lack of access to the work of other creators. Art is built out of other art 3. Shakespeare stole most of his plots from other sources. One of Rachmaninoff’s most famous compositions is based on an idea taken from Paganini. The novelist Henry Fielding wrote not one but two novels — Shamela and Joseph Andrews — using characters lifted from Samuel Richardson’s extremely popular Pamela. Raphael, Da Vinci, and all the other old masters used images suggested by the Bible. Walt Disney used public domain folk tales for many of his classic movies. Many of Harvey Kurtzman’s greatest efforts were close parodies of the works of other cartoonists 4. And on and on. It’s hard to think of a single piece of art that isn’t inspired by, responding to, or ripping off another piece of art.

All in all, therefore, the original copyright law, passed in 1790, was a very canny compromise between the artists’ need for a financial return and his need for access to other art. According to this act, creators had to register their work with the government, making it easy to tell which works were copyrighted and which were not. Once registered, the copyright term ran 14 years. During that period, the artist had monopoly rights to publish, distribute, and/or license the work as he saw fit. At the end of that time, if the creator was still around and thought there was still money to be made from the work, he could register for a 14-year extension. And that was it. A maximum of 28 years, and then your work went into the public domain — which is to say, it could be used freely by all. In other words, if this law were still in effect, not only Superman, but Daffy Duck, Spider-Man, the Grinch, and Snoopy would be available for many purposes, free of charge, to any artists who felt like using them 5.

ARTISTS VS. THEIR GRANDCHILDREN

Now, public domain characters and works can still generate income. Publishers continue to reprint the works of Mark Twain and Winsor McCay, for example, and people continue to buy them. Nonetheless, no media mogul can build his fortunes on licensing Mark Twain properties for film adaptations, because anyone can make a Huckleberry Finn movie for free. Nor are Little Nemo T-shirts, pajamas, and lunch boxes likely to make anyone filthy rich, because if they caught on, every schmuck with a scanner could start churning them out. Multimedia assaults don’t work unless you hold exclusive, monopoly rights to a story or character.

Big media, then, has a vested interest in extending the reach of copyright — and since big media also has a great deal of money, it should come as no surprise that copyright protection has, in fact, been enormously expanded. Thus, today, you don’t need to register your work with the government; in fact, you don’t need to do anything to copyright your work — even that little "©" is unnecessary 6.

In addition, Congress has repeatedly extended the term of protection for new works, and they have generally made these extensions retroactive, applying them to works already created. Thus, if you wrote a poem in 1977, your copyright would last for 56 years. Then, in 1978, Congress changed the law; suddenly, your copyright was guaranteed until your death, plus 50 years. According to the theory of copyright in the Constitution, this is pointless, of course. Copyright is meant to be an incentive, but if you’ve already written your poem, you’ve already written your poem — more encouragement, in the form of more copyright, might theoretically get you to write another, but no one can argue that it’s going to make you write the first one over again.

However, Congresspeople aren’t elected to promote progress, or even logic — they’re elected to kowtow to special interests. This goal, at least, they pursue with unwavering dedication and skill, as they demonstrated once again in 1998 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act [.pdf]. Named for a notoriously derivative songwriter-cum-legislator and backed by all the might of Disney, Inc., this bill extended the term of pre-1978 copyrights by another 20 years. Thus Mickey Mouse, due to go into the public domain in 2004, will continue to bolster the sagging Disney brand for another generation. Almost as an afterthought, post-1978 copyrights were also extended by 20 years. A new work created today will be under copyright for the life of the creator plus 70 years 7.

One interesting thing about the Sonny Bono Act is that, in their haste to propitiate their corporate overlords, Congress has abandoned not only the goal of promoting art, but also the goal of helping the artist. Copyright now extends long after the creator is dead. Indeed, in most cases, the creator’s spouse and even the creator’s children will have expired long before the copyright does. With the Sony Bono act, then, authors can dream, not merely of fame and riches in their own lifetime, but of grandchildren and even great-grandchildren growing ever more bloated and idle as they suck, leech-like, on the corpse of their ancestor. And if an author happens to be sterile, or single, or just hates his kids, at least he can comfort himself with the thought that a giant marketing nexus will tramp forward into the next century bearing his mark.

Of course, many may covet but few will ever actually attain this level of dynastic bliss. For the rest of us, the extension of copyright ensures, not greater wealth, but more certain obscurity. Take me, for example. I’m a very minor league critic and zinester. Yet, if I live an average lifespan, this article will not be in the public domain until sometime in the 2130s. Needless to say, by that point, there is a fair chance that my reputation, The Comics Journal, and even Fantagraphics [the publisher of The Comics Journal] will all have ceased to exist.

Imagine now that, for whatever reason, some academic stumbles across a copy of this issue in some library archive in 2105, and wants to reprint my article. She will of course need to secure the rights. Remember that copyright is no longer linked to year of publication — so to determine if the article is out of copyright, our academic will need to find the date of death of some anonymous reviewer in a tiny, defunct, decades-old magazine. If she’s particularly savvy and interested, and has time and money, perhaps she’ll ask the copyright office to run a search — which may or may not be definitive, since, as mentioned above, copyrights no longer need to be registered. Alternately, she may just reprint the piece, hoping that nobody will bother to sue her. But there’s also a fairly decent chance that she’ll just say “fuck it” and forget the whole thing. This is too bad for her, obviously, but it’s also too bad for me, and for anyone who writes with the desire to have their work read by as wide an audience as possible. [Licensing this article under the Creative Commons license is meant to address some of these issues, at least as far as this particular article is concerned.]

Works whose creators can’t be found are sometimes known as “orphaned works.” As copyright is extended, orphaned works by obscure or unfindable authors become more and more common. Already, films and comics from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s are deteriorating beyond recovery because no one knows who has the right to restore and reprint them. This isn’t intentional — it’s a kind of accidental, bonus censorship. Indeed, it’s so clearly pointless that Capitol Hill — prodded by public-domain advocate Lawrence Lessig — has actually shown some vague interest in fixing it 8.

But the extension of copyright contributes to more straightforward censorship as well. First, copyright holders may try to stamp out works that they don’t own, if they feel that those works are derivative. This often occurs even — or rather, especially — if the derivative work is of higher quality than the original, as was arguably the case, for instance, with the original Captain Marvel.
Second, copyright holders often try to suppress controversial works to which they themselves own the rights. Thus the James Joyce estate has long worked to suppress Joyce’s racy letters to his common-law wife, Nora Barnacle.

FAIR USE VS. GOBS OF MONEY

The problems discussed above are supposed to be mitigated in part by a principle called “fair use.” According to fair use, a small portion of a work may be reprinted for educational or critical purposes, without getting the permission of the copyright holder. “Fair use” also allows artists to create parodies based closely on a copyrighted work 9.

Fair use is absolutely vital for the open discussion of ideas; without it, free speech would be seriously curtailed. For example, fair use is what allows critics to quote from the books they are reviewing — or to reprint art for purposes of discussion, as The Comics Journal does on this page*. And thanks to fair use I can tell you, despite the wishes of his estate, that in one letter James Joyce told Nora that he wanted to “fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair.” 10

The problem with fair use is that its application is not clear-cut. When a magazine like the Journal prints pictures for review purposes, there is no problem, because the people who own the pictures want the publicity, and are therefore unlikely to sue. The quote from James Joyce is a different story. The passage is quite brief and is being used in a critical article. Nonetheless, there is a small chance that the James Joyce estate could sue the Journal over this quote. Printing it, therefore, requires a calculation of benefits and risks.

The Journal made one determination in this instance. But it should come as no surprise that the threat of a costly lawsuit can be very effective in keeping unseemly material under wraps. For example, David Stowe, a professor at Michigan State University, wanted to reprint, for scholarly purposes, racist cartoons from the ’40s which were run in Downbeat, a jazz magazine. Downbeat refused to grant permission, because they found the images embarrassing. Stowe (very understandably) felt that he couldn’t risk the lawsuit 11.

THE OLD NEW VS. THE NEW OLD

Stowe has professional credentials and is doing nothing particularly original — scholarly critique is a well-established genre. He had a good chance of winning his case in court. Yet copyright law effectively silenced him. What, then, is the likely fate of artists who want to use old works for entirely new purposes? What can they expect from intellectual property law?

They can expect to have their asses sued, is what they can expect. Hip hop, the most innovative musical form of the last 25 years, has been shaped as much by lawyers as by artists. Some of the greatest albums in the genre — De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet — used a kind of sound-collage technique, interpolating multiple brief-but-recognizable samples into each of their songs. Lawsuits inevitably followed, and the result were rules that made indiscriminate sampling prohibitively expensive. Today rap artists either use one sample per song, or else use samples that are so brief and processed as to be unrecognizable. Some performers still work in the older style, mixing and matching beats and riffs from numerous other albums — people like DJ Z-Trip — but, because they can’t release their work commercially, they are permanently relegated to a quasi-legal underground. Similarly, copyright law has crippled the growth of “mash-ups” [a.k.a. “Bastard Pop” – Ed.], recordings in which the vocals from one record are digitally placed over the music of another record: The most famous is an inadvertent collaboration between Chuck D of Public Enemy and Herb Alpert. A few mash-ups have been released
commercially, but most, for obvious reasons, have not been. When DJ Danger Mouse put out a full-length CD mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album, the Beatles’ label, EMI, hit him with a cease-and-desist order. So he ceased and desisted 12.

But at least rap and all its stepchildren exist. Hip-hop pioneers figured out a way to capitalize on new technologies and old beats before the major labels could catch them. Copyright law has altered the genre — and undoubtedly for the worse — but it didn’t prevent it from coming into being.

If only comics could have been so lucky. Technological change has transformed the processing of images just as it has the processing of sounds. Photocopiers, scanners, Photoshop and the Internet have all made it easy to alter, combine and rework pictures and drawings in ways that would have been either dauntingly laborious or actually impossible 20 years ago. So where are the collage comics to rival ’80s hip hop? Where are the mash-ups of Dilbert and Prince Valiant? Where are the comics made up entirely of altered photographs, or tweaked advertisements? For that matter, where’s the American equivalent of doujinshi fan-fiction — a sub-industry in Japan that has contributed hugely to the popularity and creativity of comics in that country?

It’s not like I’m the first one to come up with these ideas.13 But few of them have been extensively explored, and thanks to copyright law, even fewer of them have been — or will be — exploited commercially. Meanwhile, DC and Marvel relicense the same damn stories with the same damn characters over and over again, an ongoing outburst of mediocrity enabled by federal fiat. Encouraged by copyright law, American comics treat the past like a kind of congealed, brittle monument, to be worshipped and imitated, but never used. No wonder the kids prefer manga.

ENDNOTES

1. For a discussion of what happens to a band financially when they sign with a major label, see Steve Albini, “The Problem With Music,” available online at http://www.negativland.com/albini.html. Go Back

2. Gerard Jones’ recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times follows this same logic — comics aren’t any good, he argues, because the industry has historically failed to adequately compensate its writers and artists. See Gerard Jones, “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s the Fading Future of Comics,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2005. Go Back

3. This is a slight alteration of a quote by Northrop Frye: “Poems are made out of other poems, novels are made out of other novels.” Go Back

4. I’ve always thought that Kurtzman’s parody of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, itself a superhero parody, was one of the century’s meta-artistic highwater marks. Go Back

5. All of these characters are trademarked as well as copyrighted, so there would be restrictions on some uses. If you’re interested in finding out more about trademark law in the context of some of the issues I raise in this essay, a good place to start is the intellectual property page maintained by Negativland, a group of sound-collage artists. The address is http://www.negativland.com/news/?cat=5. Go Back

6. Registering your work with the copyright office does provide some benefits. See the government copyright office website: http://www.copyright.gov/register/. Go Back

7. A more complete discussion of the terms of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act can be found at http://www.keytlaw.com/Copyrights/sonybono.htm. The controversy around the act is discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sonny_bono_copyright_term_extension_act. Go Back

8. See http://www.eldred.cc/. The page also has links to information about Lessig’s unsuccessful efforts to challenge the Sonny Bono act on constitutional grounds. Lessig is one of the people behind Creative Commons, an organization designed to help artists make their work available to the public domain in certain circumstances. See http://creativecommons.org/about/.
I should also note that even the mild “orphaned art” reform suggested by Lessig has caused outrage in some quarters. American Society of Illustrator’s Partnerships (ASIP) — an umbrella group of artist’s trade organization — is vehemently opposed to Lessig’s efforts. ASIP member organization Illustrators’ Partnership of America sees the new copyright environment as an opportunity for visual artists to become the Mick Jaggers of the future, making oodles of money long after they’ve ceased making worthwhile (or even any) art. IPA’s philosophy (Mick Jagger and all) is outlined at http://illustratorspartnership.net/downloads/IN_2.pdf. Their discussion of Lessig’s proposal can be found at the IPA Orphan Works Blog, under the entry for February 10, 2005. Go Back

9. For a good discussion of the extent of fair use and of some other limitations on copyright, see Susan M. Kornfield, J.D., “A Principled Approach to Copyright Policymaking [.pdf],” available online as a PDF at http://www.umich.edu/~langres/copyright.pdf. Go Back

*: [Editor’s Note: The illustrations that accompanied Noah’s article in The Comics Journal were unavailable to include here. So, go get a copy and look at them there, so TCJ can continue to help feed and clothe nice people like Noah.] Go Back

10. A little more of this letter, and a further discussion of the controversy, can be found in Richard Zacks’ An Underground Education (Doubleday, 1997). According to Zacks, the whole series of letters can be found in The Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellman (Viking, 1975; now out of print, but available in many libraries). [Ed.: Joyce’s racy letters to his common-law wife, Nora Barnacle.] Go Back

11. Stowe’s problems with Downbeat are discussed in Lydia Pallas Loren’s “The Purpose of Copyright [.pdf],” published in Open Spaces Quarterly, Vol. 2, #1, located online at http://www.open-spaces.com/article-v2n1-loren.php. Go Back

12. For a full discussion of the DJ Danger Mouse controversy, see http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62276,00.html [Ed.: See also Electronic Freedom Foundation: “Grey Tuesday: A Quick Overview of the Legal Terrain“.] [Ed.: See also these PMJA favorites: djbc: The Boston Mash-up Project; Girl Talk, Feed the Animals; The Kleptones; Jay-Zeezer, The Black and Blue Album; DJ Lobsterdust – Queen vs. Satan ft. pastor Gary G. “It’s fun to smoke dust”.] Go Back

13. Lawrence Lessig has talked about doujinshi and copyright in his article “free culture,” available at http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/freeculture.lawrence.lessig/doc. In America, Paper Rad has flirted with copyrighted characters on occasion; and in a circumspect way, so has Alan Moore. See also http://castlezzt.net/, where some Garfield comics are altered. My first exposure to collage strips like this was probably 10 years ago, when I saw Nanonuts, a zine by my friends Bert Stabler and Mike Denlinger, in which Peanuts characters are hideously transformed. [Ed: See also Poor Mojo Newswire thread: “Elizabeth gets Raped in Tomorrow’s ‘For Better or for Worse’“. Anonymous message-board participants spontaneously detoured and hijacked the comics nearly effortlessly using common computer applications, until the postings were removed by the message board owner under threat of legal action. See also: Garfield Minus Garfield.] Go Back

Note: Hyperlinks added by Alan Benard, who is solely responsible for their appearance here except as included in the orginal text of the article. Hyperlink references updated March 6, 2010.

Update: You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.

Likewise, A Response

Posted on by

THANK YOU

First of all, thank you to everyone for taking the time to read, interpret, write about, and discuss Likewise. When I was writing Likewise (age 19, in a windowless basement in Brooklyn) I spent a lot of time fantasizing about people one day analyzing the book. That this is now happening is really exciting.

OVERALL

One issue with Likewise is that it works much better if you’ve read the previous three books in the series. I originally envisioned the series as one 737-page book titled Likewise, Potential for the Definition of Awkward: The High School Chronicles of Ariel Schrag. The series is about the evolution of one person – the developing art and writing over the course of the four books parallels the act of growing up. For this reason, much of Likewise references the other three books.

RESPONSE TO EACH POST

DICK TALK – NOAH

“Ariel thinks about penises the way constipated people think about their bowels. When your bowels are in good shape, they only draw your attention every so often, and otherwise you don’t need to worry about them. If your bowels are off though — well, you focus on them a lot.”

This is a pretty funny and for the most part accurate analogy for the role of penises in Likewise. As we all know, the penis is the focus of sex in society and considered the most important player in the sexual act – there are dildos for lesbians, but no fake vaginas for gay men. Many people (including Ms. Salt!) affirm that dildos are not “penises” – but even if it’s blue and shaped like the Virgin Mary, if you strap it on and fuck someone with it, it’s going to kind of seem like a penis. In Likewise, Ariel is obsessed with the idea that lesbian sex – even though she prefers it – is still missing something.  She fears that lesbian sex can never reach the “ideal” that sex with a penis achieves. So yes, she thinks about penises a lot – but more as a frustration object, than a pleasure object.

This theme ties into ideas of masculinity and identity. If you want a penis, but don’t want to be a man, where does that leave you?  As Noah writes:

“…That last panel, where she thinks “I’m not a woman” — that’s not a victory. Being taken for a man doesn’t make her a man; it unsexes her. When her phallus is most manifest is when she measures up least.”

Noah writes that more important than Ariel’s desire for “a penis” is her desire for “the phallus.” He equates this idea with the discussion of “It”:

“It, then, is cool; It’s ease with authority; It’s mastery. I think Freud would call it the phallus… Ariel in the comic declares, “My comic has It.”

Art is Ariel’s solution to the phallus problem – it’s her solution to every problem. Which becomes the problem itself. To some extent Art as Phallus works – it’s a place where you have total control and the goal is clear.  It’s a way to show off how great you are.

“…far from being constitutionally inadequate, Likewise is, in the way of ambitious art, swaggering. If the book’s about wondering where your dick is, it’s also about pointing down and saying, “check this motherfucker!”…. She demonstrates she has the thing by the skill and humor with which she shows she doesn’t… Creativity, in short, is the biggest, most potent penis of all…”

But art is ultimately outside of yourself – no matter what, it’s still just you at the end of the day. As Likewise continues, the failure of depending on art to solve your life is revealed. As Noah writes:

“…is the distancing of meta; the constant drive to observe and record herself pushing authentic reality away? Or is it working through different ways of holding onto reality — and maybe finding that grasping it a little less firmly makes it easier to hold?

IN SEARCH OF “IT”: A RESPONSE TO A REVIEW OF POTENTIAL  – SUAT

Suat begins this post with a summary of the plot of Potential:

“Ariel goes to high school, “discovers” that she is a lesbian, meets other girls and has occasional sex and alcohol.”

Once I read this summary, I couldn’t take much of what Suat had to say seriously, since he hadn’t really read the book.

Noah’s post BATTLE AT THE LIKEWISE ROUNDTABLE sums up my general response.

LIKEWISE DESIRE – CARO and HOW ALIKE IS LIKEWISE – NOAH

Caro: “So she failed at the impossible task of writing a graphic equivalent to Ulysses — but fucking hell she tried, and that’s much more ambition than most graphic novelists show.”

As was concluded in the comments to this post, I wasn’t trying to write the graphic novel equivalent to Ulysses. Ulysses plays a significant, but not overarching role in Likewise. It is both a talisman and an artistic influence. Caro does a great job of describing Ulysses’s role as talisman, noting that it represents both what Ariel finds so appealing about Sally – that Sally read this impressive book as a teen and Ariel’s desire to be like her – as well as Ariel’s relationship to her comic – her desire to create a Great Work of Art like Ulysses.

As an artistic influence, Ulysses inspired various techniques in Likewise: complex structure and order, significant use of certain words and numbers, stream-of-consciousness narration, employment of unique styles to represent different modes of reality, emphasis on graphic sexual and scatalogical content, and literary allusion.

Caro: “(Parts 2 and 3) prioritize grafting Schrag’s narrative onto the structure of Ulysses and are more Baudrillardian: she tries to follow the contours of Ulysses and ends up creating something that is not-quite-a-simulacrum but that certainly aims there.”

The use of different styles in Parts 2 and 3 of Likewise is inspired by Ulysses, but the goal was not to create a simulacrum. Similarly, while there are some allusions to other books and comics (Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov and Maus, primarily), these references are not central to Likewise the way literary allusion is to Ulysses. Ulysses was an inspiration, and Likewise is in some ways an homage – but it is not a simulacrum. Rather, just as Ulysses is a simulacrum of The Odyssey, Parts 1, 2 and 3 of Likewise are simulacrums of Potential, Definition, and Awkward, respectively. Creating simulacrums of your own books is, I know, completely self-obsessed and claustrophobic – but that pretty much sums up being an 18-year-old.

As a high school senior, the creation of the comic series and the identity that had given me had taken over my life. Creating simulacrums of Awkward, Definition and Potential in Likewise, was one way of expressing that.

In the latter half of DICK TALK, Noah points out many of the ways in which Parts 2 and 3 of Likewise mirror Definition and Awkward. Jason Thompson does this as well in ARIEL SCHRAG, SUBJECT AND OBJECT.

In the Comments, Caro writes:

“But I do tend to think that’s not uncharacteristic of juvenalia: here you are, writing along, working on the autobiography you started when you were 15, and suddenly you have a Big Idea. So you crowbar it into the project you’re already working on, rather than recognizing that it’s its own thing. And then you end up with a single book that’s really two books, and the two books compete against each other. The autobiography part of this could have been much shorter and more focused on interesting episodes, and the Ulysses part could have been much more successful if it didn’t have to mesh with the life story.”

I disagree with this. The idea with Likewise was to mesh teenage autobiography with a book like Ulysses – that’s specifically what I found interesting and novel. I liked the idea of fusing highbrow and lowbrow – a modernism-inspired book confined to the content of one year in the life of a teenage girl. This fusing of highbrow and lowbrow, of mature and immature, is what appealed to me about comics to begin with. Comics were barely a respected art form when I started writing, and I loved the idea of taking a “for kids” medium to write adult (sexually graphic, complex emotions) content.

Noah writes:

“I actually like the way the book both fetishizes modernism and distances it through various techniques (the very lowbrow reliance on diary; the DIY art, parody.)”

The following from Noah in DICK TALK relates to this:

“In this sequence, Ariel’s reading Ulysses, and she comes to a section where Joyce describes a penis… The best bit here, though, is not the visionary penis, but rather the vision itself. The wobbly panel borders above are not just filligree; they’re there because Ariel’s stoned. Her paean to Joyce’s penis can partially be read as “Joyce — he is a genius, and I appreciate him.” But it can also be read as, “Wow—like— everything’s really meaningful when you’re stoned, dude.” Literary critics singing modernism’s hosannahs are deftly equated with gently tripping potheads.”

Likewise is about being aware that you’re a teenager – knowing there’s something ridiculous about yourself. The self-obsession, the sex obsession, the obsession with being cool… these things are with you your whole life – but never as strong as when you’re a teen. You know you’re taking yourself way too seriously, but you just can’t stop.

In the comments, Caro writes:

“Looking back, it’s striking to me that the “father of thousands” scene Noah referenced is almost exactly the half-way point in the book and really marks this shift from her interest in actually existing penises (and phalluses) to the more aesthetized “phallus” of her artistic ambitions. That’s what the different drawing meant to me there: “here is the moment where Art becomes a theme.””

This is true. Shortly after this scene is the first instance of Art usurping Life. On page 221 Ariel is having an emotional breakdown in the car with Sally when Ariel’s stream-of-consciousness narration transforms into a past-tense typed story on the computer. The visual cuts from Ariel and Sally in the car, to the future Ariel typing at the computer. Ariel is saved from this painful event by existing only in the artistic recreation of it. At this point in the book the different methods of recording start taking over the storytelling.

ON TEENAGE FETISHISM

Caro writes: “But by the time you’re 30, if you’re still fetishing teenage screams, you’ve got a problem (and there are a lot more ways in which this is a problem than actually destructive pedophilia). The problem isn’t the teenagers — they’re age-appropriate. The problem is middle-aged people who are still fascinated by adolescent things at the expense of grown-up things.”

I disagree with this. What I love about teenagers and literature or movies about teenagers, is that everything is so extreme. As adults we all still experience many of the same emotions, but because we’re not having them for the first time, they aren’t paid as much mind, or we’re more ashamed of them, or we deal with them in more responsible and practical and well… boring ways. No one should act like a teenager as an adult, but I don’t think it’s wrong to have a fascination – I think that fascination is with your inner self.

ARIEL SCHRAG, SUBJECT AND OBJECT – JASON THOMPSON

I really enjoyed Jason’s post on reading autobiography with an interest in the author as a person as well as a character. It’s how I read autobiography too, and the author is definitely asking for that on some level.

This post is especially important in how it relates to Ariel’s character in Likewise.

The fascination I experienced people having with me as a teenage autobiographical cartoonist strongly effected my sense of identity – and that is one of the primary themes in Likewise. The comics made people like me, pay attention to me, treat me as someone special – and that attention was addictive.  The comics became the most important part of who I was – and it’s always dangerous to have one thing define you.

Jason also writes about comparing the different books in the series to each other:

“It’s the same reaction made by many people within Likewise itself, who are disappointed by the clinical nature of Potential… compared to the exuberance of Definition. To dismiss Likewise for not being Definition is to dismiss Schrag for growing up.”

I appreciate this comment. It always bothers me when I read a review that wishes Likewise was more like Potential, or Potential more like Definition. The books are about someone growing up and exploring all the different parts of being human. To me, Awkward is the most pure, Definition is the most funny, Potential is the most emotional and Likewise is the most intellectual. You may prefer one to the other, but they are all parts of yourself.

NOT JAMES: Y-FRONTS, DICKS, AND DYKES – VOM MARLOWE

“…when one is commenting on a persecuted group, especially when dealing with identity,  it’s worth knowing how a person stands: with, against, or where.  So I’m not straight and I’m female, and there you have it.”

Vom Marlowe’s decision to refer to herself as “not straight” rather than “gay” or “lesbian” or “bisexual” or “queer” is intriguing. Often (and this is not necessarily true of Vom Marlowe) when women define themselves as “not straight,” it means they at one point slept with women, but are now with a man. Personally, although the “lesbian identity” has had its benefits for me – getting lots of girls, getting to write on a hit TV show – I’m pretty anti-label. I think queerness should be visible and celebrated as part of human diversity, but I also think sexuality is, for everyone – albeit in different ways – ultimately fluid. And labels and fluidity just don’t match up.

“Except she has the same problem I do, ie, hips much bigger than the waist, which means that the damn jeans hang oddly.  (This is why I am in love with certain hip-curvy jeans that came out after Likewise was released.)”

This cracked me up. The low-rise jeans made with 1% spandex that first made an appearance in the early 2000’s are a HUGE improvement on the hips/jeans problem. I often wonder if this section of Likewise won’t resonate with later audiences who take these new jeans for granted.

“…it’s not just Ariel’s sexual identity in question, but her sexual identity in relation with others, especially Sally.”

Much of the gender confusion in Likewise has to do with being in love with a (mostly) straight girl. It’s always fascinated me how a person’s gender representation changes depending on who they are dating. For me, I think there is an inherent “butchness” inside me – something that’s been there since I was a kid – but the degree of that butchness has varied drastically over the course of my life, and often depends on the particular chemistry I have with another person.

“When Ariel goes home, she looks in the mirror, popping zits, and is comfortable with what she sees there.  The regular clothes, the regular face.  It’s not a collection of stressed voices recorded from other people, but her own perspective, her own art, her own voice… I am arguing, that she tried being what Sally liked: played at being more of a man, played at comic-creating more like Joyce, but she decided instead to be who she is…”

Much of this analysis is true, but the last page of the book is more about Ariel’s freedom from the comic than anything else. After the batting back and forth between different recording styles in Part 3, the last page of Likewise ends with the style from Part 1 – the present day, stream-of-consciousness narration. Senior year is over and Ariel finally doesn’t have to keep recording her life for everyone to read. For the first time, in a long time, she experiences a private moment.

GENERAL QUESTIONS:

CARO QUESTION:

“You know — I really wanted to understand what was going on with the occasionally absent facial features and I haven’t gotten that worked out yet. Any tips?”

NOAH: I think it’s an attention thing in part; folks who Ariel’s not concentrating on tend to shift into anonymity.

This is right. I didn’t want to draw attention – although it often seems to draw more attention! I inked the expressions just as I had drawn them in my rough sketch, and if I didn’t draw the mouth or eyes in the rough, I didn’t consider them necessary.

DAVID QUESTION:

I’m especially curious to see what Schrag thinks she would do differently were she moved to recreate the story of her senior year now, a decade later.

I would not be moved to do this.  For one thing, I’m not interested in autobiographical confession and exhibitionism in the same way anymore. The main reason I wouldn’t rewrite this book, though, is that it would go against the idea of the book itself. As I said earlier, the idea behind the high school comic chronicles is the evolution of a character. Many parts of Likewise make me cringe and the writing and drawing could certainly be better, but it needed to be written by a 19-year-old. I didn’t change anything as I inked it over the past decade, as much as I saw room for improvement. The purity of a “real-time” chronicle was the most important thing.

LIKEWISE TECHNIQUE BREAKDOWN

For those who are interested, here is a breakdown of the stylistic shifts in Likewise. While much in Likewise is subtle, these shifts were meant to be obvious, and I think it’s a failing of the book that from what I’ve gathered, most people don’t recognize them. So while I generally don’t believe in over-explaining one’s own book, here it is:

Stylistic shifts in Likewise:

Present Day:

Drawing style:  Black and white with cross-hatching.

Storytelling style: Present tense stream-of-consciousness narration. Dialogue.

Flashbacks (past events in which Ariel was present):

Drawing style: Computer gray tone. No solid black.

Storytelling style: Dialogue and Ariel’s thought bubbles.

Imagination (imaginary scenarios or past events in which Ariel was not present):

Drawing style: Hand drawn stippling. No solid black.

Storytelling style: Sparse Dialogue.

Present Day in which Sally is present

Drawing style: same as Present Day, except without panel borders.

Storytelling style: same as Present Day

Typed Computer records

Drawing style: Ink wash and solid black.

Storytelling style: Typed first-person present and past tense narration. Dialogue.

Handwritten Journal records

Drawing style: Unfinished sketches.

Storytelling style: Journal excerpts on notebook paper. Dialogue.

Tape-recorded Audio records

Drawing Style: Heavy black and white on a black background.

Storytelling style: Tape-recorded dialogue.

_______
Update by Noah: The whole Likewise roundtable is here.

Not-James: Y-fronts, dicks, and dykes

Posted on by

I’d like to make a couple of notes before beginning.

Autobiography. I’m afraid that I approached this comic like a book, a story, a tale.  In truth, the story isn’t a story crafted and directed by the author except in methods of portrayal.  The other actors aren’t characters, they’re people with their own agendas and abilities to walk off stage when the story theme would dictate that they stay and kiss under the mistletoe or at least buy a pink rabbit with pearls.  The main character is a person, not a character.  But in order to engage in the story, I treated her like a character in my head.  I liked her, and I grew to hate Sally, and I thought the mom should’ve gotten a grip, and a thousand other reactions that more befit a novel than a nonfiction book.  Throughout this essay, I’ll probably engage with Ariel-the-character as well as Ariel-the-author even though I know Ariel-the-person will be along soon.  *gulp*  But I can only approach it as best I can and as honestly as I can as a critic and as a reader even if I know that the person might be hurt or affected by my words. 

Queerness.  Second, usually I think it’s good to know nothing about the personal life of a given critic, but when one is commenting on a persecuted group, especially when dealing with identity,  it’s worth knowing how a person stands: with, against, or where.  So I’m not straight and I’m female, and there you have it.

That preface over with, I’m going to dive right in.

In this essay, I’m going to address: the art and its changes through the story as well as some technique choices, Joyce and Sally sitting in a tree, lesbian fashion choices, Ariel’s fashion choices, dildoes, and It.

In the beginning, Ariel and her friends discuss It.  I was struck by how close this high schooler discussion reflected academic politics, how much Ariel felt the need to have It, how much she felt Sally had It, and how fashion reflected the presence or absence of It.

In the comic, Ariel portrays herself with a few simple visuals: she has dark, short hair; she wears converse and jeans; she wears a white or a black tee shirt; her underwear are Y-fronts.  All of these code for a butch lesbian, in fashion terms.  At one point in the roundtable, Caro noted (and then later pulled) a comment that Ariel had answered the gender question by saying to the Barnard interviewer ‘I am not a woman’.   But I don’t think the book ever really seriously suggests that Ariel is trans; I think instead it addresses her as a woman, a very butch woman, who is a lesbian in a mostly straight world.

One of the funniest sections in the comic is when Ariel decides to change her appearance.  She gets some new jeans and tries to wear them the way guys do.  Except she has the same problem I do, ie, hips much bigger than the waist, which means that the damn jeans hang oddly.  (This is why I am in love with certain hip-curvy jeans that came out after Likewise was released.)  Ariel compares herself to the guys, trying to wear them the way the guys do, with hilarious results.  She tries them pulled up like most women, especially Sally.  Then she tries the half-hip look, which made me smile fondly.  She ends up wearing something that isn’t what a man would wear–that doesn’t work.  But the femme look doesn’t work either.  So what is it?

I’d argue that she ends up dressing like a butch lesbian.  Which is still female.  Later, she is choosing her dick, a new dildo, and she decides to get a semi-realistic but not skin-toned one.  Her harness is simple.  If I may be delicately blunt here: it reads exactly like a toppy but female choice.  Not a choice that’s going for a true male dick, but for the kind of appendage that allows for a pleasurable toppy experience for a woman with another woman.

There are a few comments in the comic where people take her for a guy and I’d like to address one of the most problematic aspects of this.  I think the Sally issue complicates things.  Sally’s not bisexual; she experiments, but she prefers men.  Ariel’s in love with Sally.  Who among us hasn’t tried to turn ourselves inside out to become the person our loved one wants?  (I’ll grant that some of you out there haven’t, and if so, more power to you.)  Playing at being more male is one way to get Sally.  So to be taken for a man isn’t as simple as a yes no issue, it’s not just Ariel’s sexual identity in question, but her sexual identity in relation with others, especially Sally.

Sally is the instigator of a lot of the fashion choices, the cutting of the hair to super-short, the hip-sliding jeans, the imagining of a pair of older overweight butch dykes walking together.

So if Sally brings up the issue and muddles it, I think Ariel answers it herself.  I think the gender identity is resolved in two places: The first hint comes when Ariel walks into the bathroom on her birthday and looks at herself in the mirror, “I’m pretty.”  She is dressed as herself–same dark shirt and jeans and sneaks and eyeglasses.  She’s just herself.  What she wears when she’s drawing at her desk.

The birthday instigates getting the dick and breaking up with Sally.  Even though Sally wants her again, she says no,  breaking off contact, choosing the healthier route.  The route where she’s not turning herself inside out.

The comic then switches to a whole lot of experimentation.  The first shot of experimentation reveals Ariel in a weird, blocky jacket in a whole new art style.  Trying different things with the recorder and talking to new people, hanging out in new locales, experimenting with different kinds of relationships.

See, I think my fellow roundtablers are right that Joyce’s Ulysses is a main theme and influence for Likewise.  I think they’re wrong to suggest that Ariel is allying herself with Joyce, that she’s trying to do a comic Ulysses.  Instead, I think she’s doing something much more daring: I think she rejecting Joyce and his Ulysses in favor of something else.

In this last part of the comic, the art switches from style to style, sometimes mimicking the emotions at play (as when it slides into scratching gestural drawings for sadness) or shocking with different locales (the music club, the strip club) and more black shapes.  Sometimes the comic becomes washes, sometimes pen on wet paper, sometimes sketches, sometimes obsessively detailed.  It has a patchwork feel, a taking a little of this from here and a little of that from there, and putting it together.  Which is much of what Joyce does.  He takes the structure from other works, makes references and in-jokes, patches together bits of literature from across the canon.  It’s interesting and engaging to be sure, but–

Given the option (as I am), I prefer the Odyssey to Ulysses.

It’s not that I feel the last section of the comic is ineffectual.  I think it accomplishes what it sets out to do: the comic records the voices of other characters through the recorder, through the dialog, through the written poems, through the musical lyrics.  It is as though the artist is trying on different clothes.  New outfits.  Let’s wear Madame Bovary today, or let’s put on some New York.  That’s a very Joyce approach, and I think the tension of what Ariel is expressing (other people’s voices, their stories, the strangeness of emo girl at the signing) is the tension that happens as people create themselves, but also as some of the modernist stories are written.  Bits of this and that, woven together to create something else, but with the bones showing.

And towards the end, the experimentations die down.  The drawings return to a style that seems to be more like the main style of the comic.  Sure, there are ink washes, but it’s still recognizably the base style.   The clothing settles back to a dark shirt, Converse, jeans.  The heroine celebrates her graduation with her real ally, the unapologetic dyke Ms. Salt (who wears very dyke outfits).  When Ariel goes home, she looks in the mirror, popping zits, and is comfortable with what she sees there.  The regular clothes, the regular face.  It’s not a collection of stressed voices recorded from other people, but her own perspective, her own art, her own voice.  Which is different from Joyce’s Ulysses.  Sally loved Joyce, and Ariel read it, and I think, I am arguing, that she tried being what Sally liked: played at being more of a man, played at comic-creating more like Joyce, but she decided instead to be who she is (or be comfortable with who she is) and draw what she draws, write what she writes in her own voice, and let go of Sally (and Joyce).

Update by Noah: The whole Likewise Roundtable is here.

Ariel Schrag, Subject and Object

Posted on by

ARIEL SCHRAG, SUBJECT & OBJECT

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

“Not really.”

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

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

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

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

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

Update by Noah: The whole Likewise Roundtable is here.

How Much Alike Is Likewise?

Posted on by

In comments, David rephrases Caro’s argument that Likewise ultimately fails to be enough like Ulysses.

Let me see if I’ve got Caro’s basic “Likewise” argument right. The relative newness of the graphic novel as a distinct art form means that it has not yet evolved the deep and complex machinery necessary to successfully compete with the richness of the bi-i-ig novel.

And therefore it’s not very useful to discuss things like “Likewise” using the same concepts and vocabulary, because the bucket just isn’t big enough yet to carry that kind of water.

This isn’t a smash on Schrag; she couldn’t do what couldn’t be done, and her intent wasn’t to write “Ulysses II” anyway. But it is a recognition of the nature of the graphic novel, the state of the art currently, that a “Ulysses II” is not yet possible in the genre. The question then becomes, how does “Likewise” stack *within the current possiblities of the genre*.

My own sense is that the formalist playfulness is there but isn’t extraordinary, nor is it even the strong point of the work; if Schrag hadn’t put the Joyce and Gifford into so many frames, that topic might not even have come up at all. But those who knew me in high school know how I brandished my Kafka and Vlad McNab, so I can absolutely accept why the book plays the role it does. To say the structure of “Likewise” reflects the book in a profound way is to imply that Schrag has given it a profound reading, and I’m not convinced a 19-year-old can read it profoundly. I know that’s true for me; I was 18 the time I first read “Lolita,” and the part I remember liking the best was the games with the license plates in the hotel registeries — “WS 1564” and stuff like that. What a yotz! Reading it now makes my eyes well up.”if Schrag hadn’t put the Joyce and Gifford into so many frames, that topic might not even have come up at all.

I don’t agree with this. It seems to me that Joyce is very important, both as an inspiration for style and structure and as an icon of (male) artistry which Schrag both embraces and I think undermines.

It’s the undermining that is a sticking point for many (Caro says it’s one for her, if I understand her comments aright.) Critics see Schrag’s failure to write like Joyce, or to get Joyce’s level of metatextual control, as a sign of immaturity, or as indicative of the historical difficulties of writing a graphic novel rather than literature, or just as a failure of competence.

To me, though, Schrag’s distance from Joyce seems thematic; it seems to be what the book is about. It’s a feature, not a bug. I actually think that it would be thematically *incoherent* for her to have gotten much closer to the experience of Ulysses than she did. Likewise is really in many ways about not succeeding — at being Joyce, at being an artist, at being a man, at being straight — as it is about succeeding. That failure isn’t tragic; in fact it’s the point; the book ends up accepting the inability to be Joyce, or to be straight, or to be a man, as a kind of triumph.

Caro says at the beginning of her post:

he title of the last volume of Ariel Schrag’s graphic memoir, Likewise, appears four times in Joyce’s Ulysses, most prominently in Episode 7, Aeolus, as one of the hyperbolic newspaper headlines: What? – and Likewise – Where?

(Aeolus is the Greek god of wind and Episode 7 is the chapter where Joyce satirizes “windy and inflated” reporting. Suat might call this poetic irony.)

Schrag’s Likewise, it seems to me, is about inflated rhetoric and desires, about embracing them and stepping away from them at the same time. It’s also about being like and not being like, and about how somewhere between the two you find yourself.

The whole Likewise Roundtable is here.

Likewise Desire

Posted on by

Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof. – Ulysses, Episode 7

The title of the last volume of Ariel Schrag’s graphic memoir, Likewise, appears four times in Joyce’s Ulysses, most prominently in Episode 7, Aeolus, as one of the hyperbolic newspaper headlines: What? – and Likewise – Where?

(Aeolus is the Greek god of wind and Episode 7 is the chapter where Joyce satirizes “windy and inflated” reporting. Suat might call this poetic irony.)

As Noah has pointed out, the role of Ulysses in Likewise is talismanic, not only in the senses that he describes – to be like Sally and to be(come) to Sally what Joyce has been – but also in the rigorously Freudian sense of an object that stands in for an unfulfilled wish. Ulysses acts in these pages as a substitute for Sally.

For this reason, it feels insufficient to argue that this book is about gender identity. The pages of this book are more saturated with the not-unrelated concept of desire: am I desired, do I desire the right people, why is there a mismatch between my biology and the people I desire, and most importantly, her constant and omnipresent desire to make this comic.

Noah rightly talks about Ulysses as phallus and about the phallus as mastery, but he doesn’t explicitly complete the syllogism. Yet Ulysses does indeed stand for mastery: to read it, to understand it, is to become what Lacan calls “The Subject Supposed to Know.” In this case, it’s not only to know Sally (as Noah suggests, although that’s certainly going on) but also to know … well, how to make sense of Ulysses. Ulysses is the ultimate symbol of the writer’s craft, considered the greatest achievement of English prose. As Likewise progresses, Ariel (the character) gets less preoccupied with Sally and questions of homosexual identity and more concerned with her identity as a writer, and those parts of the book are the ones that mimic the structure and rhetorical diversity of Joyce’s novel. The desire for the phallus in Likewise is not only the desire for mastery of the social dynamic of “It”; it is not only the desire for Sally or the desire for a clear identity – it is the striving for mastery of the comic itself: the obsession even greater than the obsession with Sally.

The equivalence of Sally and Ulysses as objects of desire is evident in the book’s mapping techniques (it’s not particularly evident in the memoir’s “plot”). Part I is concerned with mapping the contours of Sally’s body and the relationship between Sally and Ariel, and is mostly traditional: a literary cartography made from lived experience. The remaining parts prioritize grafting Schrag’s narrative onto the structure of Ulysses and are more Baudrillardian: she tries to follow the contours of Ulysses and ends up creating something that is not-quite-a-simulacrum but that certainly aims there.

This effort to make the comic “like” Ulysses plays counterpoint to her frustration over the naturalized ideas of sexual difference. She is frustrated that she can’t fit her own pleasure with the normative biological imagery and by a visceral sense that her homosexuality is biological too. She is frustrated by the actual lived awkwardness of teenage relationships (gay or otherwise), and the difficulties of sexual and emotional intimacy in general.

In contrast, intimacy with Ulysses is achievable — not the typical romance-novel version of “being meant for” or even being desired by, although those make an appearance in her record. The idealized intimacy is “being like.”

The comic demonstrates that similarity allows for a kind of intimacy that is likewise, in both dictionary senses of the adverb:

like•wise
? ?[lahyk-wahyz]
–adverb
1. moreover; in addition; also; too: She is likewise a fine lawyer.
2. in like manner; in the same way; similarly: I’m tempted to do likewise.

This is why this book is, to me, even with all its angst, a celebration of queer desire: desire that is both/and and not either/or.

=========================

The construction of desire is immensely appealing and the most successful aspect of the book, as Noah’s post demonstrates. But it could have been accomplished in far fewer pages. The effort to create a simulacrum is staggeringly ambitious, and it fails spectacularly. It fails, however, primarily for reasons that are not Ariel Schrag’s fault.

Ulysses in many ways triggered the birth of experimental fiction: playing with style, form, structure, language, voice, and the dynamic interplay of meaning, it has exerted some sort of influence on almost every “literary” writer since its widespread publication in the early 1930s. The book is a puzzle-box, itself a simulacrum of The Odyssey and replete with literary references – the most obvious of which is a compendium of literary devices and styles. Pretty much every significant device from the history of Western literature makes it into Ulysses at some point (which is why most people, including Ariel, read it with a copy of Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated close at hand).

Western literature has had about 3000 years to codify devices and build references with widespread cultural relevance. Schrag’s novel suffers from the fact that graphic literature doesn’t have this much history. There isn’t a “Concise Oxford History of Graphic Literary Terms.” Art is much harder to pin down semiotically than literature. The success of Joyce’s novel relies on the fact that his starting point was a fairly rigid and well-established tradition of literary history and technique – it is easy to recognize at the surface level the use of drama, poetry, stream of consciousness, and other devices, even if the precise significance of each is a puzzle.

In contrast, Schrag is working in an idiom with about 100 years of history and an incredibly fluid semiotics. It’s really hard to get granular — and impossible to get granular enough for Joycean pleasure — because the interpretation of artistic variation is so impressionistic. Schrag’s choice to use very DIY visuals exacerbates this.

The deeper problem, I think, is that the Joycean project is fundamentally at odds with the autobiographical one: literary history and device are shared cultural phenomenon, whereas the interest of autobiography (as Suat points out) often comes from the uniqueness of the individual perspective. At 19, Schrag simply wasn’t quite deft enough to knit those two threads together into a completely successful text.

So she failed at the impossible task of writing a graphic equivalent to Ulysses — but fucking hell she tried, and that’s much more ambition than most graphic novelists show. I hope her example will inspire more experimental graphic fiction, because I don’t want to wait 3000 years to get the graphic novel that succeeds.

_____________
Update by Caro: I was convinced by the comments below taking me to task for the sentence saying Ariel “resolved” the gender question. I edited the post to pull that sentence out. It’s not resolved; it’s just less important to me than the issue of desire.

_____________
Update by Noah: The entire Likewise Roundtable is here.

Battle At the Likewise Roundtable!

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: The full Likewise Roundtable is here.