Observations on the Latest Modern Fiction Studies

(x-posted to the Valve )

The Winter 2006 number of Modern Fiction Studies hit the streets this morning.  This issue is special, devoted to what it calls “graphic narrative,” but which everyone I know calls “funny books.” De gustibus, yes, but accompanied by a strong impulse to legitimize the objects they’re studying.  After all, this is MFS, not The Journal of Popular Culture.  For the sake of reference, the previous special issue (Summer 2006) was devoted to Toni Morrison, not exactly a marginal figure in contemporary literature.  Reading the introduction and first three essays, I sense that the audience of this issue is MFS readers, not scholars of the works in question.

More evidence: Art Spiegelman’s Maus rests the on the tip of everyone’s tongues.  Not that Maus isn’t brilliant—although, what with my interest in race and essentialism in contemporary literary studies and fin de siècle evolutionary theory, I find elements of it highly problematic—only that scholars have been embracing it for the better part of two decades.  Project Muse alone pulls up 261 references to it, many of which with serious, scholarly titles like Erin Heather McGlothlin’s “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus” and Victoria A. Elmwood’s “‘Happy, Happy, Ever After’: The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.”  Being the subject of articles in Narrative and Biography indicates a work has acquired canonical cachet—so much, in fact, that its mention lends prestige to the lowly genre to which it belongs. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven, the editors of this issue, say as much:

The project of this special issue is to bring the medium of comics—its conventions, its violation of its own conventions, what it does differently—to the forefront of conversations about the political, aesthetic, and ethical work of narrative. For many of us interested in graphic narrative, without any clear-cut methodology established for considering contemporary comics texts as multilayered narrative works (aside from debates within the field of postmodern fiction and postmodernism generally), and, until recently, without a range of examples to sit next to Maus on our bookshelves, Maus itself set the terms for ways to talk about what comics could do. It continues to set the terms, as a great, lasting work.

While I endorse all Chute and DeKoven say here, I’m a little perplexed by the notion that “until recently, without a range of examples to sit next to Maus on our bookshelves.”  Cerebus—about which I’ll say more in a minute—hit its stride thirty years ago with High Society, Church and State and Jaka’s Story; Neil Gaiman started publishing The Sandman in 1988; the first volume of Maus appeared in 1986.  All of which is only to say, if someone couldn’t find something to put on their shelves alongside Maus, they must not have been looking.  And before anyone complains this is my inner enthusiast speaking, let me state plainly:

It isn’t.  It’s my inner historicist—who is, admittedly, no less petulant—compelling me to defend the genre.  Spiegelman may have been key to its acceptance in academic circles, but he sits at the end of a long tradition; one which, as long traditions will, contains a robust culture of immanent critique.  To return to Dave Sim’s Cerebus: it began as a parody of works like Conan, Red Sonja and Prince Valiant, but eventually became a 6,000 page novel about conflicts between political and religious authorities, abuses of power and the feminist-homosexualist axis.  The open embrace of misogyny is certainly unfortunate, but it points to one aspect of funny books the focus on “graphic narratives” or “graphic novels” ignores—being produced monthly, they capture the development of a person’s thought in a way other, more novelistic genres cannot.  The Dave Sim who in 1995 wrote “Male Light does not Merge ... Thinking, Reason, is best served by solitude, isolation” is not the same man who appropriated Oscar Wilde’s voice to tell the story of a young woman coming to terms with her life in Jaka’s Story.

Or maybe he is.  It’s arguable.  However, the inability to revise work once it’s been published—to smooth over stylistic infelicities, to correct errors of fact or judgment—means that what comic artists produce is a record of thought unlike the one produced by novelists. Intellectual and artistic development can be tracked, month by month, in a way only available to students of the novel after their teachers have died.  All of which is only to say that the focus on “graphic narratives” fails to address this particular historicist’s pet concerns.  Which is fine.  In the coming days, I’ll address the articles individually.  Maybe it’s because this is the first time since I renounced my Joycean heritage that I’ve read every single primary text discussed in an article, but for some reason, I feel eminently qualified to analyze this issue of MFS.

Comments

[Kyler Kuiehn]

You wrote:
"...the inability to revise work once it’s been published—to smooth over stylistic infelicities, to correct errors of fact or judgment—means that what comic artists produce is a record of thought unlike the one produced by novelists."

So, more like blogs, then?

I think the comparison is a fascinating one to pursue. Novels can offer a deep stare into an author's (and/or a culture's) psyche, but they're much closer to a single snapshot. In this analogy, comics and blogs both have aspects more akin to video recordings than to still photographs--it seems to me that authorial or cultural progress, or at least change, can be brought to the fore much more readily in "ephemeral" works rather than in novels. So while any conventional comic comprised of several dozen panels is not likely to be of comparable intellectual heft to works like, say, On the Origin of Species, the meta-narrative of real-life development can certainly make for interesting study too.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'd agree, but then Kotsko would accuse me of triumphalism. (Not that you're wrong, though.)