Tag Archives: Noah

Bombs in NeverNeverland

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I wrote this almost twenty years ago for a course on representations of war when I was a junior in college. It touches on some issues raised in the comments section of Alex Buchet’s recent post on war comics, so I thought I’d resurrect it. I think I still agree with the main points, though the prose would probably be a trifle less earnest if I wrote it now. But, for better or worse, here it is.
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“All children, except one, grow up,” writes J.M. Barrie at the beginning of Peter Pan. In many ways, the fictional constructions of war created by Tennyson, Kipling, Remarque, and Zola, appear to be attempting to deny this insight; appear to be attempting to suggest that war provides a return to an idyllic youth and innocence which allows the men who participate in it to escape from the mores and constrictions of adult society and return to an idealized childhood in which manners and restraint are cast away and replaced by simplicity and exuberant enthusiasm. War, for these authors, is an arena in which adventures can occur; in which heroism and enthusiasm triumph over the stodgy grind of day to day life. One can almost hear the cavalry in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” declaring, with Peter Pan, “I’m youth, I’m joy” as they thunder towards the artillery guns, can almost hear Peter’s cocky self-assurance in Kipling’s breezy assumption that “of course” the British forces broke the “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”. The soldiers of which Kipling, Tennyson, Remarque and Zola speak have no fear, they have no doubts. They live, like children, in their own world with their own rules, in their own “NeverNeverland” separated entirely and forcibly from the reach and understanding of adult society.

Yet, despite this separation, the soldier is not ostracized, not attacked or unaccepted by the society which he seemingly rejects. He is not, in fact, a threat to civilized society, but is rather a delightful dream, an idea with great appeal both to the emotions and to the imaginations of people of the time, as the popularity of Charles Gordon demonstrates. Thus Kipling’s “Tommy” is a man (or, perhaps more correctly, a boy) who should be admired and loved even though he does not really fit the mores and norms of society, even though, as Kipling puts it, his “conduck isn’t all your fancy paints”. It is, in fact, Tommy’s separation from fine society which make him an attractive figure; his very simplicity, the very fact that he does not want luxuries but only wishes to be treated “rational”, composes his glamour. Tommy does not want “better food”, but only to be accepted by society without having to conform to its rules. He wants (and appears to receive from Kipling) to be given the freedom not to conform and to be admired for his very possession of that freedom; wants, like Peter Pan, to receive unconditional affection and yet to never have his mind cleaned.

It should, of course, be impossible to be at one and the same time independent and dependent, impossible to be heroic for the sake of the sympathy and admiration which that heroism brings. Only if one is capable of a total lack of self-reflection and self-awareness is this contradiction resolvable; it is only through his total naivety that Peter Pan is able to both expect admiration and receive it. Through war, Kipling, Tennyson, Zola and Remarque appear to suggest, through becoming a soldier, this simplicity can be (re)gained, this idealized childhood can be (re)found. Soldiers, like children, are, for these authors, not concerned with whether what they do is correct or incorrect, they do not agonize–they simply are. The soldiers whom Zola describes are “Like children and savages, their only instinct…to eat and sleep in this rush towards the unknown with no tomorrow”, Remarque’s Paul notes that “The national feeling of the tommy resolves itself into this–here he is.” The soldier is unthinking; in fact, thought is his enemy, his destroyer. The self-reflection which connotes adulthood, the loss of innocence and unselfconsciousness, results, in these fictions, in age and death. When the soldier begins to think, as Lapoulle does after killing Pache, he is destroyed. As Remarque’s Paul says, “we [the soldiers] are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.”

Remarque, of course, is contending that it is the horror of war, not of adulthood, which makes this jollity necessary; that to think about war would cause madness, insanity. But in many ways Remarque’s novel makes a statement not that war is too awful to think about, but that it is, in fact, aging which is the greatest horror. It is for this reason that the older men in the War are not as tragic as the men of Paul’s generation, for the older men have no youth to lose. For Remarque, the tragedy of the war is a loss of childhood, is the fact that through the war, Paul discovers death and sexual initiation (“the curse of a soldier” as Kipling writes), fear and vulnerability. Yet all of these discoveries are, in fact, not unique to wartime; as Paul himself realizes, they are instead the necessary adjuncts of adult life, the manifestations of a superficial society which delivers coffins punctually before a battle and places you under the arbitrary control of a postmaster. The war is the extension of civilian societies cruelties and artificialities, stupidities and absurdities. But even as it is so, the war also provides a means of escape, a strategy of resistance, a means whereby youth can be retained through “the finest thing that arose out of the war-comradeship.” Through this camaraderie, the trappings and foolishness of civilization, the unnecessary clutter of the school room, can be shrugged off and subsumed in the contentment of a good meal tasted among good friends. Paul relishes the experience of sitting with his comrades on their makeshift toilets not in spite of the primitiveness of the facilities, but because of it. Remarque views culture and civilization with suspicion, and finds in war a way to sidestep them, to return to the idyllic childhood which Zola describes the young intellectual Maurice finding in the arms of the simple peasant Jean when “Maurice

…let himself be carried away like a child. No woman’s arms had ever held him as close and warm as this…Was this not the brotherhood of the earliest days of the world, friendship before there was any culture or class, the friendship of two men united and become as one in their common need of help in the face of the threat of hostile nature?

Through his relationship with Jean, Maurice regains infancy; he is tended too, sheltered, cared for. War in The Debacle provides Maurice with a way to return to simplicity, with a means of becoming both noble and tragic. He becomes one of the “poor boys, poor boys” to whom his sister refers; he becomes innocent. In its creation of an arena in which life becomes more simple and true, war also, then, absolves of guilt even as it confers naivete. The soldier makes a sacrifice for crimes he did not commit. Like the men of the Charge of the Light Brigade, he goes unquestioningly to his death, following orders to the last. The betrayal of the soldier by civilians and generals is made all the more poignant because the soldier has done nothing wrong; has, in fact, placed his whole trust and hope upon civilian assurances of glory and easy victory. The betrayal is, in fact, like the betrayal which Peter Pan experiences at Hook’s treachery on the rock in the lagoon, the betrayal of a child’s total trust by a parent’s unfairness, after which, Barrie writes the child “will never afterwards be quite the same boy.”

It is this betrayal which Paul feels has robbed him of his youth when he says that, “I am young, I am twenty years old yet I…see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. [italics mine]” Remarque claims, then, both that the soldiers have lost their innocence, and that they retain it. Remarque says that their parents have failed them, and yet he still conceptualizes them as children. They have discovered that the world is unfair, and yet Remarque, through Paul, still perceives them as innocent. Paul repeats over and over that his generation is lost, it is useless, it is old and destroyed, but he never once decides to stop fighting, and even pushes Himmelstoss forward when the former drill master falters. Self-consciously martyred, Paul cannot solve, but can only revel in his troubles, just as Mr. Darling revels in his sojourn in the kennel.

Mr. Darling is, of course, not really comparable to Paul. He is not as young, nor in as much distress; he was not in the trenches of the First World War. Yet, in a deeper sense, Mr. Darling is very much like Paul, very much like Maurice, very much, for that matter, like Charles Gordon. He is a man who wishes more than anything to be admired, as Paul and Maurice did when they joined their respective armies, but who, through that very wishing, has condemned himself to an unadmirable existence. He is a conceited fool, a whining incompetent, a desperately contemptible figure when placed beside the apogee of unconscious grace and youthful innocence which is Peter Pan. And yet, while no one would want to be Mr. Darling, no one can wish to be Peter Pan either, because the very wishing dooms the attempt. One either has “good form” or does not have it. To have good form is to be young, unconscious, free. But “All children, except one, grow up.” And that one, as Barrie surely knew better than anyone else, was not real.

This is, I think, Barrie’s central insight, is the reason that Peter Pan , if it does not really oppose war, offers a way to oppose war that none of the other pieces of literature we have studied manage to suggest. For if, in fact, childhood is unattainable, if simplicity is gone, then the attempt to recapture that simplicity and childhood through war is not only misguided, but is actually dangerous, futile, and pitiful. Barrie loved children, he loved childhood. But he knew that he was not a child, and that he could not become one by travelling to some foreign field with a rifle and a battalion of comrades. Childhood games played by adults are not touching or cute; they are pitiful and even terrible. When Mr. Darling pours the medicine into Nanna’s bowl, he does not appeal to the reader in the same way that Peter does when he plays the game of question and answer with the pirates. Similarly, Peter’s comment that “to die will be an awfully big adventure” is charming and witty only when uttered by Peter’s naive voice. Kipling’s effort to capture what appears to be a similar sentiment sounds incredibly cold-hearted and callous, advising as it does that a soldier wounded on the field of battle and facing imminent mutilation ought to “Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains.” On the other hand, the French mutineer’s letter telling his sweetheart that, “I love you, and I don’t want to die”, is touchingly painful, and would be just as out of place in Peter Pan as would Kipling’s injunction. Real horror (though apparently Kipling, whose brain may itself be scrambled in some anomalous fashion, does not know it is real horror), and real fear are not part of the world which Barrie describes.

This is, of course, because Barrie’s world is not real. NeverNeverland is named so for the obvious reason. Tennyson, Zola, Kipling, and Remarque, in attempting to locate it within the context of reality, in attempting to suggest that NeverNeverland is obtainable within a historical rather than an imaginary framework, trap themselves within the very mundane existence that they wish to escape. In trying to escape adulthood, in trying to leave behind their responsibilities, they succeed only in making Mr. Darlings of themselves, only in placing themselves in a continuum where they refuse to face their problems because they wish so badly to transcend them. Tennyson cannot feel outrage or shock at the death of the Light Brigade, Zola can create only shallow caricatures in the place of real characters, Remarque can not move past self-pity and gruesome imagery to register any deep and meaningful moral objection to the carnage he witnessed, and Kipling appears to have buried any decent human compassion at all beneath a glut of imperialist fervor. Each is left romanticizing stupidity and horror in the hope that in doing so they can rediscover the childhood that they have lost.

Barrie offers no alternative to this quest. He, too, cannot turn from childhood, cannot stop seeking Peter Pan. But he knows, as Tennyson, Kipling, Zola, and even Remarque do not seem to, that the quest is futile, knows that Wendy and John and Michael and the Lost Boys must grow up eventually, must take up a mundane existence no matter how boring or dull it appears. And once it is recognized that war is not a return to some idealized NeverNeverland of childhood, then perhaps a convincing opposition to it can begin to be formulated.

R. Crumb vs. Kierkegaard — Battle of the Floating Heads!

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Langlois’ formulation is the denial of time: an idea of history not as something past, things having happened and remembered, but something entirely now, aggregated all together, present – meaning both presence and in the present tense. — Caroline Small

There was once a man; he had learned as a child that beautiful tale of how God tried Abraham, how he withstood the test, kept his faith and for the second time received a son against every expectation. When he became older he read the same story with even greater admiration, for life had divdied what had been united in the child’s pious simplicity. The older he became the more often his thoughts turned to that tale, his enthusiasm became stronger and stronger, and yet less and less could he understand it. Finally it put everything else out of his mind; his soul had but one wish, actually to see Abraham, and one longing, to have been witness to those events. — Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis does precisely what Caroline Small and Kierkegaard ask of art and of faith. In Crumb’s literal reading, with its physicality, and its playful touches of cartoonishness, the Bible is transformed from a fusty, inaccessible monument to boredom and bewildering begats into “something new,” a text that makes the familiar alien, or, at least, more familiar. In giving flesh to the Biblical narrative, Crumb allows us to do what Kierkegaard, tragically lacking the technology of sequential pictograms, could not. We can “actually…see Abraham” drawn before us, and watch the flickers of agony, hope, love, and relief flow across his comfortingly craggy patriarchal visage, as if he were Patrick Stewart reacting with satisfying aplomb to the Romulan menace.

Moreover, Crumb penetrates to a truth that Caro and Kierkegaard fail, each in their own way, to understand. Making something new is best done, not through imaginative engagement, but through rote drudgery. Clichés are our deepest selves; to present them with minimal comment or inquiry is therefore the artist’s highest calling.

Pesky floating bearded heads — didn’t I spray for those?

You can tell I am remembering because I am pointing to my head!

You can tell I am listening because I am cupping my ear!

Why do we see God as a bearded patriarch? Crumb cunningly investigates and undermines this image through his steadfast refusal to investigate or undermine it. Deftly deploying the poverty of his visual imagination as well as a deep spiritual engagement, Crumb shows us a God daring in His vacuousness; a children’s book deity who pantomimes and points in case the kiddies can’t parse the text, yet who thoughtfully problematizes His own superficiality not through any actual ideas or initiative, but rather through the very fact of being in a big honking coffee table book by R. Crumb.

Crumb’s insistence on transcribing every word of Genesis without bowdlerization or omission again makes history new by bringing into focus many aspects of the narrative previously glossed over by Christian and secular readers alike. For example, Crumb shows us that women in the past had nipples. He also demonstrates that Adam had a penis, even if nobody else in particular did, (Update: Robert in comments points out that at least one other person in the book has a penis too.) and that when people are anxious, little sweat drops fly off of them.

And, of course, he provides visual referents for the begats.

Another artist, less versed in the transcendentally validating power of banality, might have attempted to visually integrate the passage’s obsessions with patriarchy, seed, age, and death. One can imagine Chris Ware, for example, creating a single intricate image of lineage, or Johnny Ryan (channelling the younger Crumb) treating the text as an opportunity to create an extended daisy chain of sentient semen. Far better Crumb’s vision — a series of small disconnected drawings of more or less random scenes of life, recalling a light television montage that gets up on its hind legs to say, “Humanity! How heartwarming!” Time passes, life passes, Crumb draws, and the strings swell. Crumb has commented in interviews on the strangeness of the Biblical narrative; what better way to emphasize that strangeness than to turn it into a drab sentimental parable?

Ng Suat Tong started this Genesis discussion off by comparing Crumb’s visuals to the efforts of great artists of the past. Of course, it is not really cricket to put Crumb next to artists like Blake since Crumb draws lots of pictures on a page, thus obviously quantitatively overwhelming painters who only drew one at a time. Similarly, it seems unfair to place Crumb beside mere authors since mathematically: pictures + words> words. Still, I think it’s worth looking at this passage by Kierkegaard to show exactly what Biblical exegesis has been missing up to this moment.

It was early morning. Abraham rose in good time, had the asses saddled and left his tent, taking Isaac with him, but Sarah watched them from the window as they went down the valley until she could see them no more. They rode in silence for three days; on the morning of the fourth Abraham still said not a word, but raised his eyes and saw afar the mountain in Moriah. He left the lads behind and went on alone up the mountain with Isaac beside him. But Abraham said to himself” “I won’t conceal from Isaac where this way is leading him.” He stood still, laid his hand on Isaac’s head to give him his blessing, and Isaac bent down to receive it. And Abraham’s expression was fatherly, his gaze gentle, his speech encouraging. But Isaac could not understand him, his soul could not be uplifted; he clung to Abraham’s knees, pleaded at his feet, begged for his young life, for his fair promise; he called to mind the joy in Abraham’s house, reminded him of the sorrow and loneliness. Then Abraham lifted the boy up and walked with him, taking him by the hand, and his words were full of comfort and exhortation. But Isaac could not understand him. Then he turned away from Isaac for a moment, but when Isaac saw his face for a second time it was changed, his gaze was wild, his mien one of horror. He caught Isaac by the chest, threw him to the ground and said: “Foolish boy,, do you believe I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you believe this is God’s command? No, it is my own desire.” Then Isaac trembled and in his anguish cried” “God in heaven have mercy on me, God of Abraham have mercy on me; if I have no father on earth, then be Thou my father!” But below his breath Abraham said to himself: “Lord in heaven I thank Thee; it is after all better that he believe I am a monster than that he lose faith in Thee.”

Kierkegaard uses the story as the occasion for an inquiry into faith and love between God and man, father and son. He does this by treating the story as his own; it is a coat that he can put on, adjust, take in or let out. For him, reverence involves dispensing with reverence; to understand the story of Abraham as it is, he has to defile it with his own imagination.

Crumb, on the other hand, treats the story as an inquiry into the story. It is his job to clothe the text, not to have the text clothe him. You can see him doing his best to provide a striking garment; Abraham looks grimly determined here, sweatily panicked there, movingly relieved in the center panel of the second page (perhaps the strongest single image in the book, despite the yep-there-it-is-again light from heaven.) But this is gilding, not defilement. Kierkegaard fucks with Genesis and ends up begatting a new creation; Crumb puts a few ribbons of varying construction in the text’s hair and sends it on its way.

And, surely, this is the great contribution of comics to Biblical criticism and to art. Without much of a tradition of accomplishment, sequential pictographs are perfectly situated for the aesthetic task of the future — namely to rehash what has gone before as doggedly and unimaginatively as possible. Perhaps Caro was wrong after all; the best way to deny time is not to recast the past as present, but the present as past. Nothing has happened, no one has spoken, neither God nor our ancestors have taught us anything, and so the most lackluster retread deserves the most heartfelt hosannahs. If defilement is reverence, then reverence is the truest defilement —both of the Bible and of art, which are cast together, through the power of Crumb’s genius, out of the flawed garden of giving a shit and into the absolute purity of irrelevance.

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For a less gratuitously mean-spirited take on R. Crumb’s Genesis, I’d urge folks to read the heartfelt and thoughtful defenses by Alan Choate andKen Parille. The entire ongoing back and forth about Genesis on this blog can be found here.

Utilitarian Review 7/31/10

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Announcement!

Alex Buchet, who wrote a lovely series on Tintin and racism last month, is going to be joining us as a regular columnist. His column will be called “Strange Windows” and will run the first Monday of every month except when it runs at sometime different because our scheduling is wiggy. In any case, we’re very glad to add Alex (who resides in Paris) to our multinational cast, and look forward to his first column (on Harvey Kurtzman’s war comics) which will run later this week.

On HU

Last week on HU began with Domingos Isabelinho’s discussion of the boys’ comics of Argentinian comics writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld.

Ng Suat Tong looked at whether or not the interviews of Gil Kane could qualify as criticism.

Richard Cook continued his look at Silver Age Flash comics.

As part of our slow-rolling roundtable on R. Crumb’s Genesis, Alan Choate offers a lengthy defense of the book (to enthusiastic plaudits form Jeet Heer, Matthias Wivel, and others in comments.)

Also, at his own site, Ken Parille discusses some further thoughts on Genesis.

And Ng Suat Tong offers a brief reply to Alan.

Vom Marlowe finds a mainstream comic that does not suck and there is much rejoicing.

And Caro talks about what comics can learn from film archivist Henri Langlois.

Also, because you demanded it an evil metal download!

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I discuss the new Angelina Jolie vehicle Salt.

Perhaps this ties in to the most unexpected result of having a female protagonist: it seems to have completely drained all the sex from the film. The film is amazingly circumspect; Jolie is dressed sensibly throughout, and even at times (as when she disguises herself as a man) more than sensibly. There are no sex scenes, and barely even any romance—there’s one mildly intense kiss with her husband, but that spy-thriller staple, the seduction of the enemy, is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps part of the problem is the old double-standard; men can seduce lots of women and that makes them rakish; if Jolie were falling opportunistically in bed with the enemy in order to manipulate them, her character would be far less sympathetic. So instead the film opts to make her traumatized, humorless, and almost neutered; she might as well be in some sort of earnest movie of the week weeper.

Other Links

What the rest of the world thinks of Comic Con.

Utilitarian Review 7/24/10

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On HU

This week started out with Suat’s reply to Ken Parille’s discussion of R. Crumb’s Genesis.

Then commenter/guest blogger Alan Choate replied to Suat.

And Suat replied to Alan. (Alan is planning a guest post for next week as well.)

Also this week, I talked about Gary Groth, Victorian dresses, and comics criticism. A huge comments thread resulted.

Kinukitty complained about the lack of sex in Otodama.

Richard Cook complained about the excess of nostalgia in Flash Rebirth.

I discussed Marston/Peter’s original Wonder Woman 21 in terms of doll stories and atomic silliness.

And Caroline Small posted a gallery of images from John Vassos’ Ultimo.

Also, this thread about elitism and standards and aesthetics and ethics just kept going, with Domingos Isabelinho, Matthias Wivel and Charles Reece weighing in.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I look at some crappy super-hero comics at Splice Today.

Marvel has ret-conned and alt-universed Spider-Man so many times it’s a wonder poor Peter Parker has enough brain cells left to pull his red tights out of the way when his nether web spinner incontinently dribbles. In theory this story is about an exact duplicate who’s replaced our favorite web-slinger, but I prefer to think that it’s just the same old Peter bashed one time too many in the head by the latest creative team and trying desperately to recover.

I’ve got a short note about Peanuts in Shaenon Garrity’s discussion of comics that make people happy.

At Madeloud I review the latest blackened doom slab from Ruins of Beverast.

At the Chicago Reader I have a brief blurb about an exhibit on good design.

I haven’t managed to read this yet, but Matthias Wivel has a massive discussion about Renaissance drawing at his site.

Other Links
I liked David Hadju’s take on Harvey Pekar, though it would have been nice if it had been a little longer.

In the interest of inter-blog amity, I thought I would point out that this piece by Tim Hodler raised some interesting questions.

Alan Choate on R. Crumb’s Genesis, Part 1

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Alan Choate left a long series of comments on Suat’s discussion of R. Crumb’s Genesis. Alan is actually going to post some additional thoughts on the blog here next week, so in preparation for that I thought I’d move his initial discussion into a post where it would be more easy to access.

The discussion of Genesis has turned into a kind of slow motion roundtable, so I thought I’d put it under one rubric. You can read all of Suat’s discussions and Alan’s (and maybe others if they pitch in!) Under the header Slow-Rolling Genesis.

So here are Alan Choate’s original comments.
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Hi, Suat. I want to answer your review at some length because I have a lot of problems with it. I see numerous errors, a casual reading of the book, and some shaky assumptions supporting the whole thing. You make a number of dismissive remarks in the review and the comments that strike me as haughty, unfair, and wildly off-base. The biggest problem is that you’re falling readily into a basic error for a critic: refusing to assess a work on its own terms.

I should add immediately that I have an indirect entanglement with this (as they say.) You mention my suggestion “…made in all seriousness” in the comments to Heer’s post that Robert Alter, in his review for the New Republic, “would feel threatened (the words used are ‘nervousness’ and ‘professional jealousy’) by Crumb’s awful biblical scholarship,“ calling it ”laughable if not symptomatic of a deranged comics provincialism.“ It’s not right for me to get after you for saying things I find arrogant without apologizing for that. ”Professional jealousy“ was way too strong, and I take it back.

What I said was that Alter seemed nervous about the use of his translation- he spoke of his ”entanglement“ in the project, and the man’s job is choosing words- and may have nursed what I did call a professional jealousy between one exegete and another. I found Alter gracious and full of biblical insights, saw that he made a good effort to engage Crumb, but my reason for saying that was that he treated the adaptation as a failure because it couldn’t be regarded as definitive. I thought he was basically telling us why we should still read the Bible (preferably with his notes), and didn’t seem to grasp that Crumb was suggesting possible interpretations in much the same way he did, though his commentary did have the advantage of being able to list several at once. I‘d never say ”Crumb’s awful biblical scholarship“ was threatening to him, rather the rampant popularity that defenders of the canon ascribe to comics, and the notion that youngsters who read it might assume they’d read Genesis itself because the comic book has every word.

I am honestly not bothered by being called a ”deranged provincial“- feel free to look at me that way- and I hope it will be apparent that my issue is with other things you’ve said. According to you, Crumb did not ”read closely and with an intent to understand,“ his adaptation was ”stripped of emotional and mental investment,“ it suffered from ”artistic lassitude“, ”awful biblical scholarship,“ and an ”almost anti-intellectual approach“. You even pull ”half-digested pabulum“ out of the Comics Journal grab-bag. (Could it also be pernicious, odious, fatuous, and supererogatory?) ”Those with a serious interest in the original text and the rich tradition of biblical illustration“ can only find the book a ”well-crafted curiosity,“ and it ”might be of greatest use to readers whose minds are in a more formative state.“

This is strong stuff. I want to examine it by looking at the same parts you do and I’ll try to build into an overall assessment of your approach. I hope to also answer not just your review but a certain strain of commentary I’ve seen about the book.

The creation and fall of man are ”the two most famous chapters in Genesis… these factors will make the ascertainment of the extent of Crumb’s achievements in The Book of Genesis that much easier.“

This convenience is significant. My unscholarly sense is that visual adaptations of Genesis tend to fall back on the Garden of Eden and the Flood, with the second rank including the Tower of Babel (one famous image), Sodom and Gomorrah (fiery rain and pillar of salt), the sacrifice of Isaac, and Jacob’s ladder. Creations have been done but seem a bit vague for most artists; I think I should be able to call a famous Cain and Abel to mind, but can’t. Much of Genesis, as with the rest of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, is unfamiliar in visual art or dramatization, and parts may never have been depicted. (Anybody can scrape up examples with an image search, but let’s play fair; you know what I mean.) Jesus and Mary have been the stars of Western art, and the Hebrew Bible is recalled in a sprinkling of highlights.

A comprehensive visual dramatization of Genesis is unprecedented. This is a major part of this project’s reason for being. As Crumb says, “they gloss over it. When you’re a kid, they don’t inform you that Lot has sex with his daughters. Or that Judah slept with his daughter-in-law. Those parts are just glossed over. In illustrating everything and every word, everything is brought equally to the surface. The stories about incest have the same importance as the more famous stories of Noah and the Flood or the Tower of Babel or Adam and Eve or whatever. I think that’s the most significant thing about making a comic book out of Genesis. Everything is illuminated.”

There are other virtues to the adaptation, which will hopefully emerge in my examination and will be discussed as I wrap up. But the glaring obviousness of this one makes me wonder how seriously you’re taking this when you say things like ”there seems little point in retreading ground your artistic betters have fully exploited half a millennium ago.“

Your choice to focus on the Garden of Eden is itself interesting, since it’s highly atypical. It is the only part shorn of costume, tools, man-made structures, and any human culture at all. The characters are ideal ”types“. Visually, the rest of the book is astonishing in its quotidian detail, and one can find new delights on any page even after multiple readings, but the relentlessly straight-on layouts and total commitment to a credible milieu for the patriarchs create a rigorous visual style that could be considered as much a demand on the audience as classic art-house cinema. You can dismiss it as boring (for devil’s advocacy, here’s Johnny Ryan), but there’s also a seriousness to it.

By contrast, the Garden of Eden scenes are playful and fanciful. You point out this lightness, comparing the moment when Adam and Eve cuddle next to God and the woodland creatures to Disney. And you’re not wrong. (Though this is right before a startling tonal and narrative shift when it to a different version of man’s creation, this one primal and stark, right on the same page- a bold feature that I’ve never seen in an adaptation.) But your handling suggests that the tone of these parts is consistent with the rest of the book. You even point to the Adam and Eve scenes to answer Ken Parille’s description of the book’s aesthetic, without any hint of their difference:

”Crumb’s illustrations assume a sort of perfection of human form and behavior as far as Adam and Eve are concerned. I presume that this is one example of the “beautiful” materiality of The Book of Genesis which Ken mentions in the excerpt above. There is certainly a degree of exaggeration and a filtering through the artist’s eye but this is not a particularly earthy version of Eden… There is very little of that grimy commonness which we see in the Gospel adaptations of Pasolini or Chester Brown.“

You write of Crumb’s drawing of the creation of Adam,

“His solution was not an uncommon one during the Italian Renaissance, here made fresh by showing the stages in this act, in particular the breath of life given to Adam (the word “breathed” or “blew” here suggesting the intimacy of a kiss). Crumb’s adaptation is also notable for showing Adam in his clay-like state, a reminder of the Egyptian (see The Hymn of Khnum and Hekat) and Mesopotamian (see Enki & Ninmah, and Bel) myths which carry the same motif.

“As articulated in his short commentary found at the end of The Book of Genesis, Crumb is particularly interested in these ancient tales of creation and periodically inserts them while neglecting to emphasize the many internal consistencies, dilemmas and word plays in the Biblical narrative. Thus, for example, the “dirt of the ground” is linked to pagan tradition and not to a play on the words “man” (adam) and “ground” (adama) where “man is related to the ‘ground’ by his very constitution (Genesis 3:19), making him perfectly suited for the task of working the ‘ground,’ which is required for cultivation…his origins also become his destiny” (Kenneth A. Matthews).“

Where do you see a pagan tradition being inserted? The text specifies that God blows life’s breath into the man’s nostrils. Adam’s constitution from the ground is vividly illustrated. It could be reminiscent of Mesopotamian or Egyptian motifs but Crumb never mentions this in his notes, and the Bible does say “the Lord formed the man from the dirt of the ground.” It’s not clear what suggests to you that the artist is unaware of the link between man and ground or his destiny to work it, or what kind of signal you were hoping Crumb would send.

But you miss the way Crumb does emphasize Adam’s name and connection to the ground after these three panels. You’re not much impressed with the high-volume dressing down Crumb has God give Adam and Eve: “The entirety of God’s judgments from Genesis 3:14 to 19 are depicted without comment or analysis. The artist’s hand here is as distant as a machine-operated drafting tool.” But surely you noticed God’s jabbing finger. He does it a lot in that scene. The action through the Creation has been led by what God does with his hands- always with open palms, arranging things, introducing people to each other and their habitat. The only time until now that he pointed was to identify the forbidden tree. The only other pointing was Adam’s, naming the animals. Now God points at him: “To Adam he said… Cursed be the ground because of you!… By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for from there you were taken! For DUST you are, and to DUST you shall return!” (Crumb’s emphasis.)

It’s easy to miss, but until now Adam has been “the man.” This is where he is named- named earth, or dust. Crumb has associated pointing with forbidding, punishment, and naming. For the expulsion from the Garden, God sends “him”- not “them“- “forth to till the ground from which he had been taken,” and Adam is shown carrying a tool. They’re in new, uncomfortable clothes, distressed, and getting ready for a life of work. On the next page we meet Cain, “a tiller of the soil”- who is constantly shown flushed and sweating. Crumb is recalling God’s line that “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread.” Cain’s offering to God is “from the fruit of the soil”- unspecific, but Crumb shows it as a basket of grain. (Jacob is also shown pounding down what might be grain or flour with his mother- is Crumb using Esau’s skill in hunting to set up a parallel?) The meaning of all this would take us into Biblical analysis, but Crumb has helped guide us to these issues.

“The stated “literalness” of Crumb’s adaptation as well as its generally bland imagery will lull many readers into the false impression that Genesis intends a deep consideration of centuries old biblical scholarship. It doesn’t, an important point which I will address in more detail later.“

It gives me the impression that he intended to consider the Bible. I don’t see how later scholarship is suggested, and surely Crumb wasn’t surprised to read these lines on the inside front cover: ”Using clues from the text and peeling away the theological and scholarly interpretations that have often obscured the Bible’s most dramatic stories, Crumb fleshes out a parade of biblical originals.“ This is an important point which I will address in more detail later.

I pointed out some interesting things in Crumb’s depiction of God in the comments section over at Blogflumer, and defended it as the kind of subtle commentary and exploration of the text that people are claiming he doesn’t make. To address some of your points here:

You claim that this line in Crumb’s notes: “after closely reading the beginning of the Creation, I suddenly imagined an ancient man standing on the shore of a sea, and gazing out at the horizon, and seeing only water meeting the sky”- is “an explication of his choice to so portray the Almighty.” It’s not. Crumb’s “ancient man” is not God, but to a man of ancient times trying to figure out his world. Crumb is describing the Hebrew vision of the universe (diagrammed here) and speculating about how they might have come up with it.

You say “one glaring problem” with Crumb’s traditional image of God is that “it conjures up all kinds of unflattering comparisons to his artistic forebears.” But I don’t find the examples you cite so unflattering; painters generally seem a bit uneasy with God the Father, which probably reflects a sense that the Almighty is not really like that, and the need to use the figure to tell the story.

“It also conveys an all too facile understanding of Adam being made in the “image of God” (imago dei), whether this is rooted in the theories and debates surrounding the terms “likeness” and “image” (e.g. in the writings of Irenaeus and Thomas Aquinas), the existential and relational readings of Karl Barth or the functional readings which altogether dispense with the idea that the “image” must consist of non-corporeal features [I think you mean “corporeal”] (i.e. the “image of god” as seen in man’s dominion over the earth and animals). This is but one indication that Crumb’s journey through Genesis was more personal and instinctive than cerebral.“

I must confess I didn’t reread my Irenaeus, Aquinas, or Barth for this, but could it be that their efforts to expand the meaning of “image” and “likeness” had more to do with a desire to reconcile their own idea of God with an ancient text than it did with determining the original meaning of the words? Whether or not you agree with Crumb’s references to the description of God walking in the Garden or sitting under the Terebinths of Mamre, or his assessment that “the God of Genesis is severe and patriarchal… he’s older than the oldest patriarch,” are they evidence of a “personal and instinctive” rather than cerebral approach?

You see his patriarchal vision of God as influenced by “the capricious Mesopotamian gods the artist is so enamored of” (lovely wording), but there’s nothing in his statement to suggest that, although the view that the Hebrew’s God had its roots in such figures is that of historians and Robert Alter. (Many Christians don’t have a problem with the notion that humanity had an evolving idea of God.)

However, there is a sense in which his choice is personal, as he’s said this God resembles his father and came to him in a dream. (From the Paris Review: “He was warning me about something… about some destructive force that was getting stronger… he was enlisting me to be one of the people to protect this reality from that force. When I was trying to figure out how to draw God I remembered that image, which I could only look at for a split second, it was painful to look at this face, it was so severe and anguished… I tried to [give him that face in Genesis]. It doesn’t quite capture it. That was my reference point. All the way through I would go back and rework the face, I kept whiting it out and redoing it, to try and get it right.” This actually resembles the last appearance of God in the book, to Jacob in a dream- see if you agree.) But can you reconcile that with your claim that Crumb had no emotional investment?

Finally, can we admit that Crumb could plausibly have had an interest in using this figure, with his unusual physical presence that I’ve described elsewhere, to startle us and make us consider our own concept of God, and what the concept, and the idea of having encounters with him, might have meant for these people at the time? Or is “deconstructive” a credit we only give to dystopian superhero comics?

You write,

“Crumb’s almost anti-intellectual approach to Genesis continues to pose difficulties throughout the rest of these two chapters.

“While few would question the rigor with which the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is drawn, it remains at best only a fruit bearing tree. One might view the central image of the tree of life (many branched, filled with knots and ramrod straight) as a representation of the masculine ideal and the tree of knowledge in the background as the curvaceous and deadly feminine, but there is little beyond this to recommend it.”

Let’s look at the illustration more closely. It’s arresting. The tree of life centrally and powerfully dominates the composition, with a “ramrod straight” trunk, as you say, until it reaches a mass of exposed branches, each vivid and separately delineated- so clear, in fact, because they are bare of foliage. The leaves only appear around the outer edge, like a brush. This is such an unrealistic effect that it’s obviously deliberate.

So why do you think Crumb did it? To me, the image suggests a genealogical table. By contrast, the tree of knowledge of good and evil squats in the corner, visible but less differentiated from the dark woods. It’s low, undulating and twisty, with a negligible trunk and branches that cover one another before they’re cloaked with a huge mass of leaves. What might that say about “knowledge of good and evil”? We don’t have to treat this like an English class, but surely he wants to make us consider the issue. Is “only a fruit-bearing tree” fair? (You suggest it’s a contrast of masculine and feminine, but that might be a mistake to see in an artist who’s stated his intention to bring out the buried evidence of a matriarchy that lived on equal footing with the patriarchy [shown in his repeated drawings of Adam & Eve standing together with God behind them]- although I agree the trunk for the tree of life is phallic.)

Another interesting feature is that only the tree of knowledge of good and evil has fruit. Like so many details, this is founded in the text. God commands Adam, “From every fruit of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not…” There is no prohibition against eating from the tree of life. There is also no reference to its having fruit. God says, “Now that the human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever.”

A less attentive artist would simply have drawn the tree of life with fruit, but Crumb has addressed a textual problem. If God didn’t want them to eat from the tree of life, why didn’t he forbid it? Why did he tell them they could eat from every fruit in the garden but that of the tree of knowledge? Another telling detail is that the tree of knowledge is quite low, with fruit that’s easy to grab. But whatever the humans might take from the tree of life, they’d have a hard time, because the branches are so far off the ground. God never prohibits them from eating from the tree of life, although he fears it after they take from the tree of knowledge. Did it not occur to him because they wouldn’t have been able to?

His answer doesn’t quite solve the problem, is not the only possible one, and may just address a meaningless oversight of the writers. But Crumb caught it and attempted to make a coherent story the story from the words (something you repeatedly claim he doesn’t do.) The reader can accept or reject this explanation as he pleases; after all, every word is right there, and I think that’s important to Crumb’s method of exegesis. (It’s not the clamping down on possibilities Alter describes.) Crumb offers a possible answer while calling attention to the problem- I’d never noticed it.

Back to you: “What we don’t find in these illustrations is any evidence of the speculative richness the idea of the tree of knowledge has evoked through the ages; be they the ideas concerning sexual awareness proposed by Ibn Ezra, the capacity for moral discrimination, the granting of paramount knowledge or the bestowal of a divine wisdom.”

But Crumb did not set out to address the speculations of Ibn Ezra and the ages, he set out to explore the original text. You appear determined not to perceive this.

“All that we find in The Book of Genesis is a personal mythology influenced in sections by the somewhat discredited theories of Savina Teubal (which I should add is still preferable to the alternative of unthinking transcription…“

I could have done with less Teubal myself, but I think I’m showing how Crumb’s work is hardly “unthinking transcription”. “Personal mythology” is wildly inappropriate given Crumb’s minute fidelity to the text.

“In much the same vein, the encounter with the serpent in Genesis chapter 3 is reduced to a flaccid conversation with a walking reptile. Adam is absent throughout this version of events, though the presence of the plural form of “you” in 3:1-5 suggests he is with Eve but not deceived like she is.“

I’m no expert, and certainly the kind of beginner you concede might like the book, but couldn’t the serpent’s plural address refer to God’s having given them a command that applies to them both? (“Though God said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden-”) I can easily imagine a conversation with a lone Eve where he addresses her this way. If Adam was present, why does God tell him, “Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree…” If he was there to hear the serpent, wouldn’t he have been listening to his voice? Likewise, he defends himself by saying “the woman gave me from the tree”, and the story describes her giving it rather than his taking it from the tree. In any case, it all starts with “The serpent said to the woman…” There are many suggestions that Adam is not present, and we’d need a Hebrew scholar to settle the one that might.

“Crumb sticks to his vow of straight illustration, refusing to explore the reasons for Adam’s acquiescence despite his absence from the serpent’s exchange with Eve in this account.”

True, he could have shown Eve caressing and tempting him, although that would have been more in line with later portrayals. Instead the panel is as direct as the line. What I like about it is that the ease with which Adam breaks the prohibition (“Oh, OK”) leaves Adam looking rather childlike, which I think is appropriate. It’s like two kids in the backyard; you run to answer the phone and when you get back they’re playing with a broken bottle.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #21

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We’re up to #21 of the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman. The last few have been not so hot, and I have to admit that I’ve had a moment or two of doubt. After all, this is January/February 1947 here; when it was published Marston, who died of cancer in May, had only a couple of months to live. So…it seemed reasonable to wonder if maybe he hadn’t lost the spark, the edge, the compulsive and not at all unchaste desire to watch bound and blindfolded women perform surprising acrobatics with their teeth. Maybe the best was over.

I needn’t have worried. #21 is — well, let’s let it speak for itself.

And Grant Morrison thinks he’s weird.

So, yes, as you may have guessed, this issue is, in post-Hiroshima mode, all about the perils and possibilities of atomic energy. Only, you know, it’s Marston, so the perils aren’t oh-my-god-the-bomb-will-fall-on-us-and-incinerate-us-to-death. Instead, the fear is that an evil matriarch ruling over a mixed community of females and robots on the surface of an atom may find a way to conquer the world!

Not very probable, you say? Well sure. But…look! Pretty colors!

This is a lovely meta-moment from early in the comic; Wonder Woman and the Holiday girls are looking at a Uranium atom through an Amazon microscope. At first, they see just random bits of clumpy, sciency-looking stuff — inert, not human, and not especially Marston. But as they stare, the atom takes on more familiar characteristics. The protons look like red women, and the neutrons are “turning into creatures like robots!” That is, the way WW phrases it, it’s not just that she is able to see better or focus more clearly; rather, the atom is actually transforming before her eyes. It’s like the microscope looks into Marston’s brain, where the idea of atomic power lodged and, after a bit of a struggle, got transmuted by the alchemy of fetish into something closer to his usual concerns.

This is an amazing panel:

WW and the Holiday Girls are being shrunk down to the atom planet here…but the stiff stylization, the solid red background, and those awesome Harry Peter curlicue scribbles all make it look more like they’re being turned into wallpaper…or maybe dolls.

The way Marston links scientific miniaturization (atoms, protons, neutrons) to a feminized miniaturization (dolls, dainty frills) is brilliant, I think — it’s fascinating to see him incorporate cutting edge pop science into his preexisting edifice of crankery. But beyond that…well, thinking about this comparison has led me to realize the extent to which Peter, throughout WW, looks like he’s drawing, not people, but dolls.

The contrast between the stiffness of the figures in that upper left panel and the frilly, poofy expressiveness of the dresses — they look like porcelain figures.

I mentioned Sharon Marcus’ Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England last week. Anyway, in the book, Marcus devotes a great deal of space to talking about women’s relationship with their (female) dolls. She talks especially about “doll tales,” a genre of stories about girls acquiring, loving, and often abusing and leaving their dolls. Or as Marcus puts it:

Children’s literature tendered stories of imperious girls punishing, desiring, adoring, and displaying dolls that resembled fashionable adult women. In Victorian children’s literature, dolls are…beautifully dressed objects to admire or humiliate, simulacra of femininity that inspire fantasies of omnipotence and subjection…..Vicotrians did not confine objectification, domination and idealization of women to men. The stories they told about girls and their dolls show that Victorians imagined girls…enmeshed in indealizing and aggressive homoerotic fantasies.

You can see Marston having to stop at that point in order to fan himself vigorously.

Marcus argues that this kind of cultivation of homoerotic fantasy was not, in the Victorian context, lesbian. Victorians didn’t draw the strong lines between heterosexual and homosexual that we do…as a result, women desiring women or fantastizing about women didn’t necessarily make one less heterosexual. In fact, Marcus argues, the cultivation of homoerotic fantasy (through fashion plates or doll tales or through romantic female friendships) was seen as an important part of heterosexual female identity. Marcus notes, for example, that girls who treated their dolls well were supposed to make better wives; the cultivation of a partially maternal, but also potentially sisterly, bond, was indicative of one’s general capacity for love and care.

Since Marston lived with two female bisexual lovers, it seems, shall we say, unlikely that he didn’t see homoerotic fantasy in a potentially lesbian context. Still, I think Marcus’ take on doll tales gives a context for Marston’s particular interests. For instance, look at these pages again:


It’s not so hard to imagine the queen here as the little girl in a doll tale, abusing her dolls, commanding them about, gloating over their beauty (“pretty protons”!) and anticipating with relish a the continuing and ever-more-restrictive action of her own will. As in a doll tale, or in doll ownership, the female reader (or doll owner) is called upon to appreciate, manipulate, and sadistically control an icon of femininity. On the one hand, as Marcus notes this gives her a freedom of action to experience what are usually considered masculine pleasures — pleasures which would in most (Victorian and later) venues be denied her. On the other hand, (and here Marcus is suggestive but less clear) the sadistic inhabitation of femininity is a kind of practice. Linda Williams in Hard Core argues that the point of much pornography is to uncover or expose women’s inner self — that it’s primary impulse is a drive for total (sadistic) knowledge and occupation — an eradication of female self and replacement with male will or fantasy. Doll play, then, might be seen similarly as a drive to sadistically penetrate to the core of femininity — to pleasurably occupy it not in order to replace it with male will, but rather to settle down inside it as a grown woman.

What’s great about Marston is that he takes this already-queer woman-on-woman eroticized pedagogy and fetishistically flips all the genders. It’s not just boys who get to inhabit the feminine and so assert masculine power and mastery — girls can do the same.

Here the Queen is strapped into a Venus Girdle, making her loving and peaceful and generally the soul of femininity. And as soon as that happens she can go off and….participate in violent deeds of daring sport atop giant kangaroos!

By the same token, it’s not just girls who sadistically inhabit the feminine in order to become mature women — rather, boys also get to manipulate the feminine in order to become mature women.

Here Steve is positioned as the doll owner; his giant hand set beside the miniaturized WW and Holiday girls. He is, moreoever, feminized — he’s the worry wort fretting about when hubby will come home. The last panel dialogue could be a sitcom back and forth “Wife: Where were you! I was worried sick!; Husband: Aw, it was so sweet of you to worry you pretty thing!” With a little imagination, you could see this as showing Steve playing with dolls in order to prepare himself for his (proper) feminine roll.

Of course, the genders are also mashed because WW was read by, and aimed at, both boys and girls. Marston wants everyone, boys and girls, to enjoy dominating and controlling femininity in order to teach themselves how to become better women. The male gaze, so despised by feminist film theory, is here seen as the key to ushering in a feminine, and indeed a feminist, utopia, where boys and girls join in joyful sisterhood, and militant atomic power is transformed into love which heals the crippled children.

And what better symbol for this new age than…enormous mechanical yanic penis!

__________________

Okay; I have to show this too.

That’s WW rescuing a ship from a runaway overgrown atom.

And then there’s this:

My favorite thing about this is that you know — you know — that Marston thinks it’s sexy to have an atomic world filled with women lodged on Wonder Woman’s ear. He’s in his fifties, he’s dying of cancer — and he’s still updating his masturbatory repertoire with the very latest technological advances. It kind of makes me tear up.

Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Gary Groth and Victorian Dresses

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A week or so back, I posted a response to a post by Jeet Heer which prompted a strenuous objection from Gary Groth. In the course of responding to Gary, I said this:

I was replying to the structure of [Jeet’s] argument and to his examples, not to his actual argument per se.

There seemed to be some confusion about this, and some suggestion that more explanation would be helpful. So I’m going to give it a try. This is going to be somewhat ad hoc, and I suspect if I knew my linguistic theory better, I’d be able to (a) have better terms at my fingertips, and (b) present a better case. But you work with what you have.

Right; off we go.

Any work of art (defined quite broadly here) is going to create meaning in various ways. I’m going to divide those ways of creating meaning into two.

First, you have what I”m going to call “emphatic” meaning. I also thought of referring to this as utilitarian meaning or didactic meaning. This is the meaning that is purposeful or directed; it’s what the work of art is saying that it is about. In a novel, this might be plot; in a portrait, this might be the effort to represent the sitter. Intentions aren’t always easy to parse, but with that understood, emphatic meaning would in general be the obvious, intentional point of a piece.

Second, you have what I’m going to call “phatic” meaning. If you’re not familiar with the term “phatic,” Wikipedia is helpful as ever.

In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information. The term was coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s.

For example, “you’re welcome” is not intended to convey the message that the hearer is welcome; it is a phatic response to being thanked, which in turn is a phatic whose function is to be polite in response to a gift.

Here, though, I’m using “phatic” not just to mean a word or phrase meant as a social placeholder, but rather any element in a work of art that isn’t directly pushing the emphatic meaning. The phatic here is the excessive, the superfluous, the additional. I think you could argue, in fact, that the phatic defines the aesthetic; it’s the additional meaning beyond the utilitarian, which creates ambiguity, frisson, beauty, and the other kinds of confusions and responses we think of when we think “art.”

These distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, and you could argue about whether a particular meaning is phatic or emphatic. And of course most critics (which is to say, most readers or viewers) don’t systematically separate out meanings in this way. But I think the terms and concepts can be useful in thinking about what we’re doing as critics or readers.

Okay, so let’s try some examples. Here’s a Victorian fashion plate, as shown in Sharon Marcus’ 2007 book Between Women: Friendships, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.

The emphatic meaning here is, obviously, “look at the pretty clothes.” (Though you lose some of the emphasis thanks to my not ideal scan; sorry about that.) The image is designed so that the viewer (presumably female) can look at the dresses on display. The dresses themselves, then, are the emphatic content. In some sense, you don’t need anything but the dresses. The dog, the horse, the guy in the background, even the women filling up the dresses are superfluous. They add charm or interest, but they’re not the emphatic point.

So if you wanted to talk about this picture looking at the emphatic meaning, you could critique the rendering of the dresses (are they accurate? are they pleasing?) and you could also pull back and talk about whether selling dresses like this is a worthwhile use of art (capitalism, Marxism, hackwork, what have you.)

However, there is also phatic content in the picture — that is, it isn’t just two dresses standing there. There is the dog, there’s the guy, there’s women filling the dresses out. Though the point is the dresses, those dresses have been placed in a scene — and we can think of that scene as excessive, or phatic.

Now, you could just say, “well, the scene isn’t the point — it’s phatic, and so it’s not worth getting into how it’s set up or why the artist made the choices he/she did.” That’s one possibility. But you can also take the phatic content as being as, or even more, important than the emphatic content. That is, the phatic content has meaning too; it’s excess, but it’s not empty excess.

So here’s Sharon Marcus, doing a critical reading based mostly on the phatic content of this image;

Fashion plates were images of women designed for female viewers, and that homoerotic structure of looking is intensified by the content and structure of the images themselves. Fashion plates almost never depicted women singly or coupled with men, but most often portrayed two women whose relationship is contained and undefined. An 1879 plate shows a woman on horseback staring intently at another woman whose back is to us and appears to return the rider’s gaze; a male figure in the background appears to look toward and reflect the viewer, who watches the two women as they inspect one another. The park setting and the physical distance between the two women code them as passing strangers, intensifying the erotic valence of their mutual scrutiny. The composition suggests that the two women are about to move toward one another….Fashion, often associated with a sexually charged inconstancy, becomes a respectable version of promiscuity for women, a form of female cruising, in which strangers who inspect each other in passing can establish an immediate intimacy because they participate in a common public culture whose medium is clothing. That collective intimacy extended to the fashion magazine itself, consumed by thousands of female readers separately but simultaneously.

A woman who looked at a Victorian fashion plate did not simply find her mirror image, for in that plate she saw not one woman, but two.

In a bravura move, Marcus takes the excessive phatic meaning (not one dress, but two women) and twists it back into the emphatic meaning (fashion as not just intended to sell dresses to women, but to sell the women in the dresses to each other.)

An analogous example in prose: Marcus in her book does an extended reading of Great Expectations. She talks a good deal about the plot…but she also pays a lot of attention to when Dickens does and does not describe Pip’s clothing. In one sense, the description of fashion is always superfluous to the plot; you don’t need to know what Pip is wearing to know what happens to him. But Marcus argues that the book is in large part about Pip’s effort to escape his social class, which is equated with his masculinity. That is, Pip is trying, in her reading, to become a woman, and the sign of this in the text is his relationship to his clothes. His finery, therefore, is a sign of his progress towards (or a failure to progress towards) his Great Expectations. The excess phatic meaning is not just excess silk and lace, but something which can be read as important in its own right.

Doing a reading that includes a discussion of phatic content isn’t at all controversial. On the contrary, the phatic content is the focus of a lot of the most creative criticism, precisely because it is less straightforward and often more open to interpretation.

But, at least among the folks I talk to in the comics blogosphere, there seems to be some resistance to thinking about phatic fripperies as central when it comes to critical prose. For me, on the other hand, it seems like a very natural thing to do. That’s what I did in my initial discussion of Jeet Heer’s post. In particular, when Jeet said this:

If we define criticism narrowly as analytical essays on an art form or particular works of art, then it’s true that criticism is a minority interest. But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself. To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc. As Joe Matt mentions elsewhere in the discussion, he turns to interviews in The Comics Journal before anything else. Without these interviews, our entire sense of comics would be very different.

I responded by saying this:

For Jeet, the ultimate justification for criticism seems to be that artists do it.

Gary in turn responded by saying this:

Jeet said nothing of the sort, seemingly or otherwise, in the paragraph you quote to support that assertion. His point, obviously, is that criticism takes place in interviews.

And Gary’s right; that is the most obvious point of Jeet’s statement. In the terms above, it’s the emphatic point. Jeet’s argument, the point he is getting at, is that there is criticism in interviews. Period.

But there’s more in the statement than just “There is criticism in interviews.” Jeet doesn’t just say, “There is criticism in interviews” (or,more fully, “There is criticism outside of analytic essays.”) He fleshes that argument out with other words, examples, and rhetorical flourishes. All of that excess is the phatic content. And if you look at how the argument is arranged, what you see is that Jeet states in general that there are many different kinds of criticism, and then clinches (or makes concrete) the worth or importance of those kinds of criticism not by attempting to explain why criticism is important or necessary in itself, but instead by making an appeal to authority.

This is why Gary is especially wrong when he says that “Jeet doesn’t let Matt off the hook”. Because if you look at the way the argument is structured, the final appeal to authority is to — Joe Matt. The argument is structured not in terms of, “Joe Matt said this dumb thing, and he’s wrong for this reason.” Rather, it’s set up as a tension between authorities. Joe Matt said this; however, that contradicts other authorities — and ultimately, when we look at it closely, we see that Joe Matt is actually not opposed to criticism at all, but supports it in the context of interviews. Far from undermining Matt, Jeet uses him as the final prop for an argument whose other supports are a series of imposing appellations (“Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc”.)

You can see a similar process at work in this sentence:

But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.

The main point here, the emphatic meaning, is that “If we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art…criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.” Nestled in between that if/then construction, though is phatic content: the phrase “including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art.” The second bit there is the clincher; we already know about “conversations” (a synonym with discussion), but Jeet feels it necessary to add, to highlight, the phatic fact that the response of artists to earlier art is part of criticism. The very fact that the phrase is superfluous to the argument gives it weight; it’s what Jeet decided to add even though he didn’t have to. In short, while Jeet’s emphatic meaning is a simple assertion that criticism is important, his phatic excess points again and again to artists as the exemplars and support for his statement.

In this context, I think Jeet’s note in comments that ” I think you are reading implications into my writing that weren’t meant to be there (and which other readers aren’t seeing either),” is an interesting commentary on emphatic (intentional, sometimes common sense) and phatic (excessive, implicit, requiring interpretation.) Jeet’s forswearing implications, especially those he doesn’t see. But surely part of what critics do is precisely to look for those excessive, phatic moments not, perhaps, directly connected to artist intention, but still, perhaps even all the more, important for that. Jeet’s emphatic point may not have been “criticism is valid because artists do it,” but his phatic excess shows that he validates criticism through reference to the fact that artists do it.

So here’s a final example: Gary’s response to me in comments.

It’s as if you just want to argue for arguing’s sake and since no one of any prominence is stupid enough to suggest that we substitute artists for critics or justify the validity of criticism on the grounds that artists do it, you extrapolate wildly from an essay so that you have something to argue with. You’re like a precocious 12 year old who hears the grown-ups arguing and has a compulsion to enter the fray without having the wherewithal to know what’s being discussed.

The emphatic argument is basically “you, Noah, want to argue for arguing’s sake.” But, there’s also excessive, phatic material here, perhaps best exemplified by the analogy in the last sentence. Gary accuses me of being “like a precocious 12 year old who hears the grown-ups arguing.” The phatic meaning zeroes in on generational conflict; Gary wants to infantilize me. He and Jeet are the grown-ups, I’m the precocious 12-year-old. This is especially resonant, of course, given Gary’s status as éminence grise — and given his longtime campaign to pry comics away from their status as children’s entertainment. (Indeed, the argument over who is or is not juvenile gets picked up again in later comments; I throw it at Tom Spurgeon, who volleys it back with gusto. )

Gary’s discussion is especially relevant here since he actually maps the adult/juvenile discussion onto what can be seen as an emphatic/phatic distinction. That is, he accuses me precisely of arguing for argument’s sake — for phatic (excessive) fripperies, rather than for good, emphatic reasons. Emphatic arguments are adult, phatic arguments are childish…and Gary sides with adulthood.

Supposedly. The irony is that phatic readings are, as I noted above, really what experienced “mature” critics are supposed to do. The phatic is what criticism is made of; it’s where creativity comes into criticism. It’s this kind of effort that Tom Spurgeon revealingly (and phatically) denigrates as “mak[ing] shit up.”

For Tom, making shit up, in reference to me, is a synonym for lying or, more kindly, for inadvertent but systematic misrepresentation. But, of course, making shit up is also what artists are supposed to do. And it’s what critics have to do as well; there’s an imaginative effort to figure out what the author or artist is and isn’t saying, and how that can be rephrased, rethought, recreated. The emphasis by Tom, Gary, and Jeet on intentionality, the nervousness around interpretation, does precisely the opposite of what Gary seems to hope for it. It doesn’t make writers about comics look adult and serious. It makes them look petulantly childish.

Not that Gary would necessarily be opposed to that entirely, I don’t think. After all, you don’t go around calling someone a 12-year-old if you aren’t enamored to some degree of schoolyard taunts. And Gary shows other signs of waffling around the issue of child/adult when he notes that

If Jeet has any fault as a blogger, it’s that his posts are virtually impossible to argue with — smart, literate observations that are by and large uncontroversial.

There’s a sense there that Gary wishes Jeet were maybe just a little less grown-up; that there was more juvenile, phatic pep in his posts (though, as we’ve seen, Jeet provides plenty of phatic goodness if you’re willing to look for it, and so Gary’s criticism in this case is really just unfairly projecting his own emphatic dullness.)

The emphatic point here, of course, and at length, is that I am right and everyone else is wrong. But secondarily, I want to note that the central place of interviews in comics criticism which Jeet points out seems to me to be of a piece with the tentativeness in this conversation around phatic meanings. To see the artist as the best or most important interpreter of his or her own work inevitably privilege intentionality and emphatic meaning. There’s a feeling in these discussions that phatic readings may undercut everything Gary and his cohorts have worked so hard for; that if you start playing with too many meanings you’ll end up acting like a child. Artists know best what artists say, and that emphatic meaning is and always will be, “we are not just precocious 12-year-olds, damn it.”

And that’s right, actually. Precocious 12-year-olds are smart, they’re fun, they’re surprising. If I have to choose between the 12-year-old and the intellectually stupefied eminence defending his turf…well, it’s not a hard choice to make. But really, and overall, I’d rather not pick one over the other, but just put bustles, and petticoats on both. The excess on life is art; the excess on art is crit; and the excess on both is the blogosphere with its endless rustling of frills.