The Twilight of Intercourse

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Romance was her suicidal substitute for action, fantasy her suicidal substitute for a real world, a wide world. And intercourse was her suicidal substitute for freedom.
— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 1987

In the quote above, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin is speaking about Madame Bovary. But she could just as easily be referring to Bella Swan, the heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s preposterously successful tween vampire book and movie series Twilight. In Twilight, Bella does substitute romance for action, abandoning her future plans, her academic interests, her family, her personality,and her life for her vampire lover Edward Cullen. She substitutes fantasy for reality in a manner which is literally suicidal, choosing to die and enter the twilit unageing faery world of the undead rather than grow into the responsibility and autonomy of adulthood. And she substitutes intercourse for freedom, believing that being “bitten” will grant her self-determination and happiness, when, in fact, it will simply kill her.

In short, the millions of tweens trooping in lockstep to the Cineplex to see the latest Twilight Saga installment might as well be trekking over Dworkin’s corpse. It’s a wonder she doesn’t just rise right out of the ground, fangs bared, spitting blood, and personally castrate both Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner with a rusty cleaver out of pure spite.

I don’t really have much doubt that Dworkin would really and truly have hated Twilight. She hated most things; it was part of her mean-spirited second-wave charm. At the same time…there are aspects of Twilight that resonate in odd harmony with Dworkin’s particular feminist convictions.

The most obvious of these is virginity. Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon, and her novels are obsessed with self-control in general and chastity in particular. The chastity is both literal and metaphorical; Edward won’t sleep with Bela before marriage both because he doesn’t want to damage her immortal soul and because he’s afraid of hurting her physically— he won’t bite her and turn her into a vampire for analogous reasons.

On the one hand, this virginity seems to be more about Edward’s struggle; a typical conservative vision in which female safety is placed in the hands of male renunciation and chivalry. But there’s also a sense in which virginity is not about Edward at all, but is instead Bella’s gift. Edward has a special vampire superpower, and can read minds — but for some reason he can’t read Bella’s. Over the course of the series, Bella proves immune to the mind manipulation powers of various other vampires; she is “safe in her own mind” as the books put it.

This brings to mind Dworkin’s discussion of Joan of Arc:

there was no carnal desire felt [by men] in the presence of [Joan’s] beauty [although that beauty was] female by definition…. This brings with it the sense that it was physically impossible to do it; her body was impregnable…. Joan accomplished an escape from the female condition more miraculous than any military victory: she had complete physical freedom, especially freedom of movement — on the earth, outside a domicile, among men. She had that freedom because men felt no desire for her or believed that “it was not possible to try it.”

The analogy isn’t perfect; Edward wants Bella sexually, and as a vampire he finds her blood especially attractive (“You are exactly my brand of heroin” he says.) Joan mystically shuts down male desire, thus becoming herself masculine; Bella on the other hand inflames desire, becoming all the more stereotypically female. But if Dworkin would no doubt see Twilight as a self-defeating fantasy of objectification, the fact remains that neither Edward nor anyone else can get inside Bella — and this fact eventually allows her, at the climax of the final book in the series, to save her family and change the geopolitical balance of the vampire kingdom. For both Dworkin’s Joan and Meyer’s Bella, virginity is power.

So if Dworkin and Meyer are chattering on about the wonders of virginity, that must mean they hate sex, right? This is certainly the mainstream vision of Dworkin,— her critics often claim that she believed that all heterosexual sex was rape. Though she explicitly denied that, her take on sex is hardly a cheery, rah-rah, Susie Bright one. As she says in Intercourse

With intercourse, the use is already imbued with the excitement, the derangement, of the abuse….Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society — when pushed to admit it — recognizes as dominance…..There are efforts to reform the circumstances that surround intercourse….These reforms do not in any way address the question of whether intercourse itself can be an expression of sexual equality.

So intercourse isn’t quite rape…but it is dominance, is inherently unequal, and it is not subject to reform. Intercourse oppresses women.

Again, you can see why people think that Dworkin has a problem with, as she often calls it, fucking. And yet, the truth is almost the opposite. Dworkin isn’t down on sex because she hates it. On the contrary, she hates sex as it is practiced not only because it defiles women, but because it defiles sex itself. When sex is rooted in self-knowledge and love it becomes, she says,

a complex and compassionate passion…. Fucking as communion is larger than an individual personality; it is a radical experience of seeing and knowing, experiencing possibilities within one that has been hidden.

Behind and in between Dworkin’s condemnation of fucking there is this other vision of sex as a sacrament; the idea that intercourse is an expression of the bonds between loved ones and is therefore holy. The introduction of dominance, hatred, hierarchy, and cruelty into sex is for Dworkin a kind of blasphemy; an original sin, if you will. Intercourse for Dworkin is always already corrupted, evil because, in some unknown place and in some unknown way, it was first good.

women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too….These visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them. They are not searching analyses into the nature of intercourse; instead they are deep humane dreams that repudiate the rapist as the final arbiter of reality. They are an underground resistance to both inferiority and brutality, visions that sustain life and further endurance.

They also do not amount to much in real life with real men.

Dworkin won’t embrace the vision…but she still sees it. Which makes me wonder, if after all, she might not have found something to respond to in Twilight. In the last book of the series, Breaking Dawn, Bella is finally transformed into a newborn vampire, with physical strength that is (for a time) even greater than Edward’s. Suddenly it’s she who has to be careful not to hurt him when they embrace. Before the transformation, she was afraid that the elimination of the differences between her and Edward would spell an end to their passion; he would no longer find her soft or warm, no longer feel the pull of her blood calling him. In other words, she worries that becoming strong will make her unfeminine. But that’s not what happens at all.

He was all new, a different person as our bodies tangled gracefully into one on the sand-pale floor. No caution, no restraint. No fear — especially not that. We could love together — both active participants now. Finally equals.

In her essay in the Atlantic about the Twilight series, Alyssa Rosenberg argues that the vampirized Bella “cuts even the romance buffs out of the equation” as Meyer rambles on and on about how Bella can now see Edward like never before and appreciate him in ways beyond the merely human. “Meyer is telling [her audience] that they are literally incapable of seeing through Bella’s eyes,” Rosenberg notes, as if this were a bug. But, as Dworkin could tell her, it’s a feature. Intercourse with men in this world is inherently unequal, and therefore inherently flawed. There is a dream, though, that things can be different. Or, as another imaginer of other worlds and other loves once put it, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The transformation Bella experiences is not just personal; it’s social. On the surface, Meyer’s fantasy is of a traditional patriarchy. The Cullens are an extended family living under one roof led by a benevolent father. In addition, the book resolutely champions the iconic conservative social issue when Bella refuses an abortion despite the fact that her pregnancy endangers her own life. Though this kind of conservatism is usually seen as denigrating women, Andrea Dworkin had another take. In her 1983 book Right Wing Women, she argued that conservative social arrangements actually offered women some modicum of protection and dignity.

Right-wing women consistently denounce abortion because they see it as inextricably linked to the sexual degradation of women. The sixties did not simply pass them by. They learned from what they saw. They saw the cynical male use of abortion to make women easy fucks…. Right-wing women see in promiscuity, which legal abortion makes easier, the generalizing of force.

Thus, for Meyer, the ultimate expression of Bella’s virginal inviolability is her decision to have her child — a decision whereby she refuses to allow sex to become inconsequential.

But while Meyer is in some sense a proponent of traditional (and Mormon) values, in another sense turning into a vampire involves a rearrangement of familial relationships which can only be described as perverse. The Cullen vampire household is composed of a bunch of married couples who all also see themselves as the children of Carlisle Cullen — so in becoming Edward’s wife, Bella also becomes virtually his sister. Bella’s child, in perfect horror movie tradition, grows at a superfast rate — and is barely out of the womb before she “imprints” on Bella’s best friend and former suitor Jacob. Meyer swears up and down and all around that there’s nothing sexual about this Oedipal imprinting…but even Bella herself finds that hard to believe.

In fact, if the land of vampires is an Eden, then it makes sense that (except for that one about biting the red apple) taboos no longer apply. And this too resonates with Dworkin — particularly with the writing of one of her chief inspirations, the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that:

without the incest taboo, adults might return within a few generations to a more natural “polymorphously perverse” sexuality, the concentration on genital sex and orgasmic pleasure giving way to total physical/emotional relationships that included that. Relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of…. Adult/child and homosexual sex taboos would disappear, as well as nonsexual friendships…. All close relationships would include the physical, our concept of exclusive physical partnerships (monogamy) disappearing from our psychic structure as well as the construct of a Partner Ideal.

Meyer’s vampiric family is, then, in its own way, a kind of prelapsarian feminist utopia, pointing on the one hand to a stable, benevolent society in which all can live safe from the threat of sexual violence, and on the other to a world of libidinal overflow in which staid restrictive rules are smashed in an onrush of egalitarian ecstasy. Vampires, significantly, experience unchanging, never-ending passion — Bella and Edward can fuck monogamously forever without ever tiring or growing bored. And so they will every night for the rest of their eternal lives…though every morning they pause to go to hang out with their family in sort-of-bourgeois domestic bliss.

In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin actually has some things to say directly about vampires. Talking about Dracula, she writes:

vampirism is — to be pedestrian in the extreme — a metaphor for intercourse: the great appetite for using and being used; the annihilation of orgasm; the submission of the female to the great hunter…. While alive the women are virgins in the long duration of the first fuck…after death, they are carnal, being truly sexed…. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth-century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, no matter with how many, no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freeom)…we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched unless blood has been spilled…this elegant bloodletting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair.

For Dworkin, then, Dracula is the ultimate profanation of both virginity and sex; a reimagining, in fact, of one as the other, and both as death. Instead of virginity leading to autonomy, it becomes just another fetish, to be consumed like all others. Instead of sex being a sacrament of love and connection, it becomes a form of “freedom” from connection, an alienated desire which feeds on itself. Vampirism is a way to make intercourse penetrate virginity, corrupting freedom without allowing for love, leaving only a life in death. It’s sex as consumption.

Stephenie Meyer’s vampires, though, don’t swallow Bella’s virginity. On the contrary, the point about the vampires seems to be that they can have sex and still remain virgins, inviolate and unchanging. After Bella has sex, both really and through the metaphor of being turned into a vampire, her power to stay safe in her own mind expands, until she can shield others from psychic invasion the way she shields herself. And at the very end of the book she gets the best power of all; the ability to let Edward read her thoughts when she wishes. Eternally loving, equally superhuman vampires joined in a monogamous relationship consummated by a perfect meeting of the minds. That’s a kind of intercourse maybe even Andrea Dworkin would have approved of.

Criticism Before Art; Lizards Riding Pendulums

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I’m probably overly pleased with this comment from the ongoing theory vs. art debate…but, hey, it’s my blog, and I will highlight it if I want to:

In terms of instinct…I sort of said this before, but…I don’t think the kind of instinct you’re talking about in terms of art is the same as the general understanding of the word instinct. That is, it’s not the same as the instinct which makes a lizard bask in the sun, or a bee go to a particular flower. Those are instincts that are outside of language; they’re innate.

Making art though isn’t instinctual. It’s learned. And what’s good and bad in art isn’t instinctual either. It’s part of a communal or social agreement or process. Art is like language; it’s a form of communication, which makes it shared, not isolated. That’s what Hauerwas is talking about when he says imagination is a communal project. It exists within a society, and that society gives it meaning (and, arguably, vice versa.)

When I make art (whether poetry, art, criticism, or whatever) it’s obviously something of a mysterious process. Any thinking is, because we don’t know ourselves — in large part because so much of ourselves are other people. In that vein, I’d argue that the praxis of art making is itself infused with ideas; what you create, how you create is, what you think is good and what you think is bad, is all dependent on a conversation with other artists, with other critics, with ideas and arguments. Art is made out of other art, the standards of art come from other art, and that making and those standards are a discussion.

My problem with making that into a shorthand called “instinct” isn’t that it’s untheoretical. As I noted before (and as Bert did), I don’t really know that artists necessarily benefit from reading theory. But…making art into instinct makes art seem like a lizard sunning itself, or a person urinating. Art’s not a natural process like that. It’s a social thing and a cultural thing. Which means that art is never one voice; it’s many different voices. Criticism isn’t an outside thing that takes away from praxis; criticism is praxis, and vice versa. Thought and intellect are what art is made of, just as they’re what people are made of, to the extent that people aren’t just animals (of course, people *are* animals too…but art is not the animal part.)

I mean…it’s possible that I’m misunderstanding you and that you in fact agree with all of that. But when you appeal to temperament or instinct, it seems to me like you’re trying to deny the social and communal aspects of art. The artist is alone with her instinct, creating a thing of beauty which is beyond analysis. Humans do arguably create things like that — they’re called children. And despite the artful comparisons of metaphor, art isn’t children.

The point is, when you say that without instinct art is nothing…that’s an aesthetic opinion, which one can agree or disagree with. But without intellect without language, there literally can’t be art. In that sense, criticism, or language about art, precedes art itself.

And, just to make this a little less solipsistic…here’s Bert Stabler talking about radical and conservative art.

Well, we just have, at bottom, a “conservative” and a “radical” stance. Zizek of course privileges the radical, but I don’t, out of hand. Franklin and Alex see an old order, a natural harmony, an organic tradition that surpassed language, invaded and overturned by an alien force, a new regime of arbitrary artificial homogeneity. Caro and Nate (and to an extent Noah and I) are agitating on behalf of a foundational tension, rather than a foundational order, within which Theory is only the latest in a series of attempts to cope symbolically (through language).

I think there’s kind of a historical pendulum (swinging but also rotating– you know, rotation of the earth and all that)– the Enlightenment gave us liberal universalism, and the 19th century reacted sharply, with conservative particularisms (colonial revolutions rather than domestic ones), fighting for sacred tribal earth. The twentieth century brought conservative universalism in the form of various large-scale assertions of absolute truth, and one might hope that this century would grant us some liberal particularism. That means that the totalizing arrogance of radical stances needs to start recognizing boundaries, and the vicious purity of the conservative will have to be redefined in humility.

Twilight: the Battle for Legitimate Art

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A lot of critical analyses of Twilight, the award-winning series by Stephenie Meyer, focus on legitimacy.  Is Twilight literature?  Is it good literature?  Is it worthy of critique?  These questions reveal the fundamental fallacy rooted deep within our culture: the idea that art should be questioned at all.  Art is art.  It needs no explanation, no analysis, no excuse.  Art is the expression of our inmost psyche, our deeply-rooted desires, our secret yearnings which would otherwise be impossible to express.  Twilight is all of this and more.

Instead of interrogating this text from this perspective, I would like to pay homage to this great work by exploring the characters and plot with the same simple lucidity and attention to detail Meyer paid them.  I want to get inside this work, to live in it, and experience it again.  I want to feel what people feel when they immerse themselves in art such as this; I want to touch nerves in the same plain yet oh-so-effective way.  I want people to be moved, and I want them to be entertained.  Let us cease to critically analyze; let us not merely destroy.  Let us create.

Let us use our hearts, not our minds.

Let’s do art.

 

TWILIGHT

Art is Beauty

Original Art: A Kat in the House

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“Too much ink has already been spilled on Herriman’s passing for white, and how the strip’s shifting perspectives and mutable characters reflect that decision. And none of it is worthwhile. Doubtless there is a relation, and I’m certain it’s too complex to be formally drawn out and distilled.” [Emphasis mine]

Harry Siegel at the New Partisan


The 16th Krazy Kat Sunday published on 6th August 1916. It has an image area of 18″ by 21.5″ and a water stain marking its lower border.

Background. I’ve been searching for a Krazy Kat Sunday for some time, and I managed to acquire this example only because none of the usual players were interested in it. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there’s the water damage at the bottom of the page which is a minor problem in my book. The other factors are the lack of a brick gag (which I’m not particularly interested in) and the fact that the formal elements in this Sunday are not front and center.

That last point is of importance to me, but this page has other elements which make up for that deficiency. It comes from a period of great creativity for the artist, with some of the most famous episodes crafted during the space of a few years. It is the intricate inking from the early years which I am most fond of: the light touch delineating the characters, and the gentle hatching describing the illuminated night sky above the pueblo. It didn’t take long for Herriman to find his way around the large space of a Sunday page, and here we see him showcasing the wide vistas and deep perspectives so typical of the strip. Most of the major characters are represented here including Joe Stork and Ignatz’s family; all coupled with a constant movement towards the right side of the page.  The final panel is a pretty good summary of Herriman’s eternal triangle.

The Plot. Alderman Tsheez is announcing a “sad event to his constituents” who remain determinedly unimpressed if not hostile — the disappearance of Ignatz Mouse (here enjoined by the multifarious sorrow of his wife and children). A mercenary with a walking cane and ten gallon hat listens to all of this and is soon traversing the canyons and mesas of Coconino county. The reward if he succeeds is a pound of the best cheese. His cooperative guide is a “Mexican bandit” called Don Kioty; the quest which the soldier of fortune is about to undertake will take on the color of that guide’s name. The bandit points him towards the Mesa Dedo del Pie Grande which lies in the distance like a stubborn windmill; a big stub of a toe scratching the vault of the sky, and a distant cousin of the oppressive thumb which presses firmly down on Krazy in the Sunday of 2nd December 1917.

His ultimate destination is a land of humor and fear. There is a darkness on the horizon, and it is the process of enveloping the pueblo he has to visit to complete his mission.

George Herriman, so we’ve been told on numerous occassions, always wore a hat when he went out.

The better to hide the curled locks of his “mixed” heritage. A man in disguise just as his much beloved kat is in disguise in this Sunday. Krazy’s mask is a polished beard and a crumpled tail covering his/her ebon caudal appendage, now all burnished white. A cane — a comedienne’s aid — is held firmly in his hand; the tool by which she will make that connection with her desired audience both in the happy end we see on the final panel of this Sunday and the deployment of Herriman’s craft.

The mouse from whom she desires love and affection is a rascal; always mean, treacherous, and selfish in the pursuit of his own ends. The periodic beaning of the kat’s head is unambiguous to all but the love struck feline; the crowd of disgruntled onlookers in the first expansive panel is a chorus announcing the only possible diagnosis when it comes to their relationship. Offissa Pup never suspects, half in love yet always on guard; the tenacious attendant of a system of denigration — the very well from which the kat and her master derive sustenance on a daily basis.

The harsh desert glare which opens this chapter is in stark contrast to the night enveloping the pueblo on the third tier of this page. The walls of Joe Beamish’s store on the next line show a progression from watery shadows in the first instance to fuliginous night in the last, quite perceptible in the original if not on the printed sheet. The moment of confrontation is anticipated with relish by the offissa with his truncheon, and there is an evocation of tenebrosity in his words (“I’ll be made a Captain for this night’s work sure.”)

It is a forbidden place of dangerous transaction; a cage with an irresistible bait, easily resisted with the “crutch” of Herriman’s artistry and craftsmanship.

And then, that persistent dream of a safe and blissful conclusion…

…seen once again in this panel of solemn pining from 1917…

…never to be resolved even at the very end, the kat fading quietly into the arms of time and its inquisitions.

NOTE: Some images taken from the collection of Rob Stolzer.

Robert Binks and His Art ( part 2 )

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Robert Binks has worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and artist for more than sixty years, during which time he has created a stream of inventive and delightful works. We began our sampling of his career last week, and scans of  his illustrations for the Ogden Nash collection The Old Dog Barks Backwards can be found here.

This week we open with some of Mr. Binks’s work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where he was on staff from 1957 to 1991. (These works are all © CBC/Bob Binks.) Here we see Mr. Binks early in his career, posing at his drawing board for a publicity shot as a colleague leans an elbow next to him:

 

 

From 1966, two illustrations by Mr. Binks for a retelling of the parliamentary system’s history. The book accompanied a CBC radio series of the same name:

 

We see a young Winston Churchill in mid-oration. The way the MPs fall into well-defined, heavily drawn columns provides an example of the high, packed compositions Mr. Binks sometimes prefers. But the columns, most of them, are set at a slant, which brings the heaviness a bit of spring and bounce. All in all, the drawing manages to bring life to an arrangement of 25 men without giving each figure an individual posture.

The line work is very detailed. Mr. Binks does the same for Elizabeth I, in this case working up the patterns for her dress and, especially, her lace collar:

 

Now the sequence from which we took this post’s lead-off illustration. The four drawings are cells for an animated sequence the CBC inserted into Sesame Street so that there would be some material in French:

 

 

 

 

 

The look on the cow’s face when it’s in the subway … Come to think of it, I like the lady with the feathered hat too. The sequence shows Mr. Binks’s ability, when necessary, to get a certain amount of endearing personality into the bare minimum of lines for a character.

We’ll close with three of the artist’s freelance assignments. First off, there’s the card he did in 1970 as a work sample for his New York agent to show around:

 

 

I’d call it a charming exercise in Peter Max/Yellow Submarine popism. The figures are reduced all the way to design touches, slender pen strokes that have no faces and end in bellbottoms. The approach is typical for Peter Max, unusual for Mr. Binks. As we saw above, he usually gets a face in there, stylized but with at least a touch of personality.

Now a page from “The Pied Piper of Harlem,” a story that appeared in a mid-1970s school book. The brick work and the crowd of rats show Mr. Binks’s vigorously detailed line work and narrow, stacked compositions:

 

 

We close with an illustration that ran in the Toronto Daily Star in 1979. The theme is familiar to anyone who knows the Canadian winter:

 

 

I think the nine cartoons in a row illustrate Mr. Binks’s knack for deceptively simple illustrations that grab the eye. The way they mix good humor, quick communication, and visual resourcefulness is very satisfying.

Next week we’ll focus on Mr. Binks’s private artwork. Drop by!

Franklin Einspruch on The Limitations of Theory

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We’ve been having a spirited debate about the place of theory in comics in response to Caro’s recent post on the subject. In particular, Franklin Einspruch vigorously contested Caro’s position. It seemed a shame to leave his responses buried in comments, so I thought I’d pull a couple out and highlight them here.

Here’s Franklin’s first comment.

There’s only one way to verify Caro’s assertion, stated a few different ways, that lowercase-t theory or uppercase-T Theory have something important to offer comics. That is to create said comics and see how they turn out. There’s nothing wrong with suggesting that such-and-such might to be possible in comics, but there’s a huge problem with suggesting that “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” would come into existence if only the creators employed particular philosophical or literary models. Art just doesn’t work that way. Attempting to make it that work that way gives you mannerism. I call it the Shopping List Problem. One can see certain characteristics in a successful innovation of style, inspiring other creators to copy the characteristics. But quality in art is not a shopping list of characteristics, checked off and accounted for in the new work. It’s an integrated whole that generates forward from the intuited feelings of individual creators. The head serves the heart. The other way around is poisonous.

At least as far as visual art is concerned, Theory has totally failed to account for that aspect of art-making. In fact it has put concerted effort into demolishing the very notion of universal value, and replace it with these checklists. I recently learned that a friend of mine, a beautiful realist painter, is having a show of new work in which she has more or less discarded painting. The gallery is thrilled that the exhibition “will be strikingly conceptual in its trajectory” and that she has been “gradually moving in a more conceptual direction.” A conceptual program, of course, is the major item on the checklist of contemporaneity as subscribed to by a certain species of art-worlder. People used to take it as a sign of progress when figurative artists went abstract. Now people expect them to go conceptual. This is mannerism at its worst. I nearly cried.

With all due respect to Caro, I suspect that her idea of “truly ambitious, truly literary comics” is in fact comics that better emulate the characteristics she finds attractive in a particular strain of literature. Someone who finds those characteristics exciting, and I mean genuinely enthused, butterflies-in-the-tummy excited about them, ought to have a go at it. The rest of us ought to be left alone to pursue our ambitions and literary inclinations as we see fit to do so. Something entirely new might arise, not dreamed of in her philosophies. I hope she doesn’t subscribe to the arrogant presumptions of historical inevitability, finality, and perfection that makes the culture of capital-T Theory the moral and intellectual sinkhole that it is.

One more observation: A picture is only worth a thousand words when you’re dealing with description. When it comes to dense, complicated fiction, words become noticiably more efficient. It distresses me that comics critics calling for Booker-sized ambitions seem not to notice this.

And after a bit more back and forth, Franklin added:

I have run into these notions before, namely that any kind of intellectual work done on behalf of art is theory, and that only theory stands in the way of sentimental or formal disasters. Both of them are mistaken.

Recasting traditional poetics and narrative as just another theory, even if you have to scare-quote “theory” to assert it, is certainly flattering to the culture of theory. Thus theory can be said to exist everywhere and at all times. I’ve even seen references to “Greenbergian Theory” as if non- or even anti-theoretical approaches to art merely constituted another theory. (For the uninitiated, the reference is to Clement Greenberg.) “Non-ideology, or non-theory, is an ideological and theoretical position, even if unacknowledged,” as Noah puts it. I’m sorry to be rude, but this is the sound of academic culture pleasuring itself. A finally fed-up Robert Storr wrote this in late 2009:

Speaking with a po-mo savvy young artist this week, I felt compelled to ask him what, given his approach to critical theory, was his attitude toward praxis? A puzzled look crept over his face, and, with a candour as admirable as it is rare among those who keep their verbal game up, he replied, ‘What’s that?’

The fact of the matter is that certain structures look good, sound good, or read well for some reason and seem ripe for reuse in an original way. Thus art progresses forward, by execution, not theory. When Caro claims that “You can’t feel your way around a 600-page novel unless you want that 600-page novel to be a rambling, solipsistic disaster,” I have to ask her how many 600-page novels she’s written, because that doesn’t sound right to me at all. I’m going to guess from the longer nonfiction I’ve written that really do have to feel your way around it, and you have to feel your way around it so thoroughly, self-critically, and intensely that the ramblings, solipsisms, and all the other weaknesses expose themselves as such. Then you root them out. Theory doesn’t save you from this work. As far as I know nothing does.

Are there broad biases against “literary thinking” in comicdom? I’m just as inclined to think that the Booker-style graphic novel envisioned by Caro would have to be the size of a children’s encyclopedia in order to achieve the same scope of ambition, because for certain narrative problems a picture is worth about six words instead of a thousand. Can one really just use more words? In my experience the words and the images have to sync at a certain rate or you’re not making comics anymore. We like making comics.

There’s something more than a little silly about critics, having trained on a certain specialty of literature, calling upon comics creators to acquire the same training so they can make equivalent comics. This is getting the cart so far in front of the horse that they’re not even attached anymore. Look, Caro, you’re a writer, you understand the literary angle that you’re looking for better than anyone, so do what I did when I wanted to see comics done a certain way and make the damn things yourself. As it is you might as well be standing on the sidelines of a football game yelling at the players to start playing hockey.

Jane Freilicher, Dark Afternoon. Franklin mentioned Freilicher in the course of the discussion.

You’ve Lost Your Way, Charlie Brown

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This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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Conventional wisdom would have it that Peanuts fell off precipitously as the strip entered the 80s. On the evidence of the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts, covering 1979-1980…well, conventional wisdom may have a point.

The art in Peanuts had by the 80s long since declined from it’s early heights. Over the decades Schulz’s line had lost much of its nimble dexterity — so much so that it’s easy to forget how good he was back in the day. The whole point of this sequence from February 1964, for example, is the kinetic elegance of the motion lines.

By 1979, though, the battle between Snoopy and Linus has been robbed of its energy; all that’s left is a couple of almost apologetic motion scratches and an anti-climax. The fight has gone out of the art.

In the mid-70s, Schulz made up for the relative tameness of the illustration with some of his most adventurous narratives. For example, one storyline which stretched through September and October of 1976 began with Peppermint Patty’s relatively innocuous effort to go to private school. It then quickly spiraled into escalating heights of absurdity, as Patty went to the Ace Obedience School for dogs and finally the tale ended in an epic battle with a cat which Patty had mistaken for her attorney, Snoopy. In fact, at the end of the story, Schulz seems almost to be taking advantage of his reduced drawing skills, moving the most frantic action off-panel to suggest a spectacular conflict which can only be imagined, not rendered.

In 1979-80, though, the long meandering narratives have gone the way of the exciting line work. There are still some extended stories, but they lack the snap of the sequences from just a few years earlier. A storyline where the kids end up at an Evangelist camp has an unfortunate air of hesitant moralism. Schulz’s world is too small to even fit adults, much less adult opinion, and his hesitant jabs at the Moral Majority seem like they were faxed to him by a focus group. Berkeley Breathed would soon wed something of Schulz’s aphasiac genius to political commentary…but whenever Schulz himself tried for relevance, the results were ugly (*cough* Franklin *cough*).

One muffed storyline could happen to anyone. But Schulz increasingly relies on recurring gags which simply aren’t that funny. The chief offender here is Snoopy’s Beagle scout troop. Snoopy leads Woodstock and several other birds over hill and dale, up mountain and down, making cute little quips about angel food cake. It’s not that it’s horrible, exactly — I chuckled at many of these strips. But, at the same time, the conceit really plays against Schulz’s strengths. The birds are all visually interchangeable, and because they speak in bird language which only Snoopy understands, they don’t have the strong distinctive personalities of Schulz’s other players. And without those distinctive personalities striking off each other, it’s hard to generate much conflict or interest. You basically end up with Snoopy talking to himself in front of a bunch of ciphers. A little of that goes a very long way.

And yet….while there’s no doubt that this volume is an inferior work of genius, there’s also no doubt that it is, still, the work of a genius. In some ways, the genius shines through even more brightly when the general level is lowered. In the 50s and 60s, Schulz operated at such a consistently transcendent peak that you could start to take him for granted. Here, though, there are dull patches to remind you just how good the good parts are. Without the distraction of the motion lines, for example, this Sunday strip we looked at before:

attains a purity of fuddy-duddiness. The whole comic comes down to that last panel, where everything has misfired. There’s no glorious rush, just a stumbling, thumb-fingered, doofy perfection.

And then there’s this:

That left me laughing helplessly. It’s a platonic Peanuts joke; that last line doesn’t even rise to a pun. Instead it’s simply flat, unexplained surreal nonsense, delivered by a dog with a giant nose and a blank expression.

There’s no doubt that Schulz lost his way in the 80s. But his strip was always about losing its way. As he grew doddering and inconsistent, he moved closer to the doddering inconsistency at the core of his art. The pleasures in this volume are fewer, but, for fans at least, when they come they have a special bonk.