Acephalous

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

Oscar Wilde and the Quirks of the Academic Review

(x-post from the Valve.  For those wondering where Cerebus went, I note that my reading Wilde in my spare time has something to do having received Melmoth last week.  More on that later.)

I’m reading literary biographer extraordinaire Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde and, as I always do with scholarly material, I hopped onto JSTOR to read reviews.  (Were this another sort of post, I’d write something about why I feel the need to read reviews of every scholarly monograph I read.  Were this another sort of post, I’d write about how frustrating it is to not be able to find any reviews of scholarly monographs until five years after they’ve been published.  Were this another sort of post, I’d announce that our solution to this problem is host yet another book event, this time on Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World.  But this is not another sort of post.)  As I was saying, I was sifting reviews of Oscar Wilde when I stumbled upon a review of Melissa Knox’s Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide.  Its reputation seems to hinge on how the reviewer feels about vulgar Freudianism—recent concessions about literary Freudianism aside, I think my position on psychoanalysis sufficiently established—still, I’m baffled by the final sentence of John Stokes’ review:

A book as profoundly wrong-headed as this can never produce the right answer for the very reason that psychic processes are of their very nature over-determined, which is also why the debate about Wilde and syphilis will fester for a long while yet.

I understand that this is one of those rare cases in which literary interpretation can yield a correct answer—Oscar Wilde either (1) did or (2) did not contract syphilis—so the nod to “the right answer” is not throwing me here.  Nor is it the pun on syphilitic discourse—although I wonder whether the question of Wilde carried what the English called morbus gallicus ("the French disease") and the French called la maladie anglaise ("the English disease") will fester in quite the same way its trademark pox will.  What confuses me is that Stokes seems to identify as “profoundly wrong-headed” the very methodology he employed in judging it “profoundly wrong-headed.”

This oddity can be attributed to a problem with conventional academic reviews.  Unlike popular arbiter-of-taste—who, if not a known quantity, borrows some cultural capital from the venue in which the review is published—no one assumes any academic reviewer is without methodological bias.  There is no singular conception of quality to which an academic reviewer can pretend to measure a work against.  Despite this, most academic reviews are written as if there were, the result being strange compressions like the one quoted above. 

Obviously, this isn’t the only problem with academic reviews, and my annoyance is such that I may even start a series in which I complain and complain and complain ...

Cerebus and Modernist Freedom, Part III: Homosocial/Homosexualist Frames (They're Fabulous!)

The oddest thing about Jaka's Story is the relation of its frame-narrative both to the ongoing story and to the overall narrative.  As I mentioned in the previous post, much of what we know about Jaka's life in the royal palace comes from Jaka's Story.  In those later interviews, Sim himself suggests that we can trust the information communicated in this book—which is strange considering it is it delivered, secondhand, by Rick to Oscar Wilde, then embellished by the latter in an attempt to extort more money from his stingy publisher.  Those of you who haven't read the book are no doubt confused, so let me back up.  Here are the panels of the frame narrative from the first number of Jaka's Story (click to enlarge):

Sim interleaves these images of Jaka's childhood with the main narrative—which involves, among other things, the return of Cerebus in Jaka's life and the consequences of the abortion I discussed last week—but as a frame composed by a notorious embellisher, the truth-content of these imbricate panels shouldn't be taken at face value.  This is not to say they brim with conscious lies; only that of all the narrators ever, Oscar Wilde stands astride the pile of those I would trust the least.  Consider this: the information contained in these panels is related to Wilde by Jaka's insecure husband, Rick.  That's one layer of interference—and a significant one, given that the entire book will, in the end, turn on the breach of his trust.  But more on that later; for now, I want to talk about what the habitation of Wilde's voice freed Sim to accomplish.

Sim revels in ventriloquism—and well he should, as he is among the most talented literary ventriloquists I've come across.  He's no Pynchon or Gaddis, mind you, but the man has talent.  In addition to Wilde, Cerebus features believable impressions of the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and the Rolling Stones, to name but a few.  When he decides to inhabit the voice of Oscar Wilde, he frees himself from the constraints of the narrative voice he's established in Cerebus.  (This goes without saying.  And yet, here I am, saying it.)  At this point, I should mention Wally's desire for me to account for the introduction, because it would seem to be important here.  After all, in it Sim says that he

never considered Oscar a "homosexual character" per se (though homosexualist he is).  First, last and always (to me) he is an Artist and the tragedy which befell Wilde, [he] can't view in any other context than "Society vs. the Artist." (8)

All well and good, and yet the relationship between Oscar and Jaka's husband, Rick, entails oodles of what we literary types call "homosociality."  I know, I know, you don't come here for the queer theory; but the drawing rooms in which Oscar and Rick meet; their secret liaisons, which Jaka spies from a distance; the fact that the sole topic of conversation when they meet is Rick's wife, well, that's the very definition of homosociality.  In this instance, the theory fits the text to a T. 

What these two share is the substance of the frame-narrative.  In fact, the frame-narrative moves parallel to the main until a very important moment, one in which the fiction of the frame slams into the reality of the main.  More on that later, as it requires more panels and those of you without broadband are already cursing my name.  (And worse ... not that those rags look anything like me.)  What I want to juxtapose now are two facts: the first is that Sim adopts the voice of a "homosexualist" to tell the first half of Jaka's story; the second, as I discussed last week, that she represents a transitional moment in his (call it) philosophizing, one in which a woman loses her individuality in the face of an overwhelming desire for system.

At this point, I fear those of you who've read the book know exactly where I'm headed.  I admit: I'm not being too adventurous here, but that's not because I don't want to be clever.  (Because I do, most certainly, else why would I blog?)  As with all the best work, I think quality comes from the rearrangement of half-thoughts into a hitherto unimagined intellectual mosaic.  When you slap your head at the obviousness of what you've read—when you dog yourself for having missed it—that is when you know someone has a point. 

(Here I could talk about Walter Benjamin and his theory of interpretation-as-constellation—the randomness of stars suddenly clicking into image, an Orion here, a few bears there—but this post is far too long as stands.  Still, it feels like a placeholder, but that's more the medium than anything else.  Were I certain that most of my readers were already familiar with Cerebus, I would've zipped through the enframing argument and launched into more original territory.  For now, though, I hope you won't hate me if I leave it at "more tomorrow.")

Cerebus and Modernist Freedom, Part II: Snow-Machines, Archaeology, and the Damage Done

(This is the second in an ongoing series.  Part one can be found here.)

If I'm to discuss Jaka's Story, I should at least be polite enough to introduce to you to Jaka, pictured here in a rare happy moment.  Her life has not been an easy one: she was born into the royal family of Palnu, but a life of royalty she did not lead.  From the moment she awoke, her nurse hounded her every movement—and perhaps this was for the better.  In the few hours when the nurse wasn't roughly scrubbing this or manhandling that, the six-year-old Jaka was molested by an unknown member of the royal family or the palace staff.  (These nightly molestations are alluded to on a single page, but it is a significant page, and one I will return to later.) 

The reader is first introduced to Jaka as a young woman dancing in a nightclub.   According to Sim in his editorial introduction to Cerebus 114—the "Prologue" to Jaka's Story—she is based upon the mistress he had when he first married his wife, Deni: "I was naive and ridiculous and the poorest imaginable husband material (still am) but my subconscious was at least able to dredge up what I considered a particularly interesting character out of a singularly unstable period of my life."  Then again, in response to a letter in Cerebus 268, Jaka is "a spoiled, myopic, insensitive, self-absorbed and self-important harlot princess (quite apart from her position in the heirarchy of the city-state of Palnu)."  I mention this not to point to Sim as a hypocrite, but as a way to track the development of his thought: Jaka begins as a complex character with a fraught and troubled past, but in the end becomes a symptom of feminist effrontery.  In the strict allegory into which Cerebus will eventually descend, Jaka will come to mean something.  She ceases to be a character with motivations the minute she becomes this meaning-laden symbol in possession of an established allegorical function. 

To belabor this point, indulge me in a brief discussion of another allegory, Dante's Commedia.  Every character in the Commedia symbolizes and personalizes the sin.  In the Inferno (Canto V), the soul of Francesca da Rimini is blown about by the winds, the perfect contrapasso for a woman whose lust led to her ruin.  Dante uses a familiar figure from (then) recent Italian history in order to prevent his readers from falling into a purely allegorical mode of the sort found in Le Roman de la Rose, in which a Lover is thwarted by Jealousy.  Sim's revisionary account of Jaka shovels abstract generalities on top the rich character he had created, much like a snow-machine transforming the rugged terrain of an archaeological dig into a pristine white field.

Why would someone take a snow-machine to a dig?  Because life is easier when less complicated.  Because history can be rewritten with a little effort and lot of alcohol.  Those are fine, if ultimately inadequate, answers.  What I want to argue here is that coming to understand individual lives with the bulldozer of a comprehensive world view flattens people into allegory.  Once Sim underwent his idiosyncratic religious conversion, he had no choice but to deny Jaka her individuality.  The strength of Jaka's Story comes then not from a full-fledged recognition of her humanity, but from the inchoate desire for system which will one day result in his endless talk of Woman and The Void.  It is this very teetering—this desire for a system, this need to impose upon the world a narrative—which invigorates this book. 

Which is, to return to our story, the tale of a young girl, molested at age six, who leaves the "comforts" of the royal palace for stripping in the slums.  She is a divinely good stripper—so talented, so lovely, the future Prime Minister and Pope, Cerebus, spends both glorious careers pining for her.  When they both have ended, he seeks solace in her company, only to find her (still) married to a dolt named Rick, but without any children.  When he was Pope, she cited her pregnancy as the reason she could not leave Rick for him, so from the moment we see her in Jaka's Story, the absence of any children is palpable.  Tomorrow I will discuss how this absence is made wrenching by the various frame narratives Sim employs, but I want to end this post with a brief discussion of Pud, the barkeep who takes Jaka and Rick in.

Pud stands in neatly for the kind of narrative tension Sim eschews in the later books.  He is a simple man with simple pleasures: unbeknown to Jaka, he houses and employs her at great personal expense, and their relationship is touchingly unsettling.  He longs for her, but knows he cannot win her directly.  So he practices his lines—the little manipulations which he hopes will bring harvest—and while they should disenchant the reader, they never do.  Pud is the portrait of a man struggling with lust who, despite himself, is not the beast he could have been.  Like Sim at this point of his career, Pud is infinitely better than he thought himself to be.  Had he a faith forcing him to repress his lusting, his victory over it would not be so moving.  Now, that victory is not complete—circumstances intervene, and it could be argued that he merely lacked the opportunity, that he would've taken it when the moment finally ripened—but I have a panel which says otherwise.  It'll be the last one in the (fairly lengthy) series of images linked to below the fold.