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.

From Cerebus 115:

Download Page 20
From Cerebus 119:
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From Cerebus 122:
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From Cerebus 123:
Download Page 1
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Download Page 20
From Cerebus 124:
Download Page 1
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From Cerebus 126:
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From Cerebus 127:
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From Cerebus 129:
Download Page 17

Note how, in the last panel on 129, Jaka moves beyond the script he'd written for her, and becomes to him a person. It's a small moment, I admit, but there aren't many more with Pud against which to measure it (for reasons to be discussed at some future time).

Comments

[Kip Manley]

More, please.

[Sisyphus]

You _have_ been reading Faulkner lately! It reminds me of Lena Grove, or Caddie Compson. When I first looked up this series in Wikipedia, I thought I'd skip your essays 'cause who has the time to read more about the same old boring misogynist rants that appear everywhere? But I like your reading of the desires for simplicity and systemicity, particularly around "fixing" the identity of women. The way the vertical panels draw your gaze to his repetitive fantasies, while accentuating the focus of his (Pud's) gaze, is also masterful. Pun intended.

[Doug M.]

It's probably worth posting Sim's own comments on Jaka here.

Here's Sim in _Cerebus_ #114, c. 1988:

"I admire the character [of Jaka] far more than any of the other characters in the book.... [she] is someone I would happily spend a lot of time with. She embodies those qualities I always look for in a woman. She has a very simple way of thinking for which she is unapologetic. She's loaded with common-sense and self-confidence. She is direct and has a low threshold for bull-shit. She has virtually no interest in material possessions though she has an appreciation of them. She is almost certainly on the top rung of the karmic ladder and won't be back for another life-time."

Then in _Cerebus_ #268, c. 2001:

"For the first time he [Cerebus] was able to see Jaka precisely as she was and as she is and as she always would be: 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)."

From his Q&A Session from Going Home, 2004

"Q: Many readers perceive a difference between the character of Jaka in the first half of the book and the character of Jaka in "Going Home." Do you think the character changed, and if so why and how, and if not did you deliberately display her in a different way or do you see the perceived difference as largely the responsibility of the readers?

"DAVE: I think I kept Jaka pretty consistent. In my experience women are like cats. When you don't want them you can't get rid of them and when you do want them it's like trying to pick up lint with a magnet. All that changed was that Cerebus switched from not really wanting Jaka to really, really wanting her (after issue 74-75). As soon as you switch, they switch. Jaka is a self-absorbed aristocratic airhead. She always was."

Doug M.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I dunno, Scott. The sequence you present shows an undeniable formal mastery of certain elements -- the use of shaped panels, the repetition with slight variation, the use of twisted reflections (though all of these are cinematic standards) -- but the whole thing still has the same offputting content that I originally thought it had. Pud isn't trying to seduce Jaka, at least not past the beginning of the sequence; it turns into rape fantasy. According to the last link that I hunted up for comments, an interview with Sim (who knows from what era) says that Pud eventually intends to rape Jaka but that she throws up on him while he's still nerving himself up to do it. And the last panel that you present doesn't show her "becoming to him a person": she says he's great, kisses him, there is a "pop" from the bottle he's holding near his groin, and so, symbolically, they've had sex -- she's given him what he wants.

I don't think that the point is whether the reader can find Pud in some way sympathetic or not. The point is that the author is highly present in the text (author-function if you prefer), and that it's a highly nasty author. Jaka *is* using Pud, after all -- surely she must wonder why he's giving her free rent, low-cost delicacies, and so on. Sim's later characterization of her as spoiled, myopic, self-absorbed, and manipulative fits the actual facts of the situation as he's set them up. His later more mysogynistic characterization is indeed implicit in his earlier one.

Comparing PKD, since I brought up the comparison, I always found his mysogyny more bearable because it had a weird economic component that played against social stereotype. PKD resented the fact that his wives generally economically supported them, and his books are full of domineering, life's-desire-spoiling wives or wife equivalents -- but they don't have the same "why won't she have sex with me" thing.

For the ultimate in repetition, shaped panels (using words only), and a person working his way out of fantasy, I recommend again Alasdair Gray's 1982 Janine.

[belle waring]

wow, scott, thanks for reminding me about how incredibly fucking creepy dave sim is. I'm interested to hear more of what you think about cerebus. I gave up after flight, I think.

[Steve Bolhafner]

"So he practices his lines—the little manipulations which he hopes will bring harvest—and while they should disenchant the reader, they never do."

I'm sorry, but I strenuously disagree with this. I think most readers *do* become disenchanted with Pud, and you've even posted in your picture sequence the exact place where: #123, page 3. "Don't move, Miss Jaka. I'm not going to hurt you."

It's interesting that I just posted something about this very same sequence yesterday over on my blog (stevesreads.blogspot.com) without even being aware of yours. As I said of that moment, "the ominous reflection of Pud's face in a puddle of water on the floor that he is mopping, looking not at all harmless and ineffectual but dangerous and threatening." (the syntax is screwed up because that's part of another sentence, but what the hell)

Anyway, you've got some interesting commentary going on here and I'm glad I found it. Keep up the good work.

[Ray Davis]

I don't know if a poll's of any use to you, but just in case: I'm another one who's always read Pud as creepy and meant to be creepy. His role as Jaka's and Rick's main protector doesn't make him seem like a better human being; it makes them seem more helpless and alone: their "friends" aren't their friends.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Steve, I just read your latest post with interest, although (not surprisingly) I'm not sure I agree. I don't think Pud's is a Christian redemption story so much as one of isolation. Here's how I read it:

Before Rick and Jaka arrive, Pud is an extremely lonely man who's inherited a fortune and a tavern. Afraid to leave the tavern, to abandon the life he's known, he instead reaches out to the first people who come his way in need of help. Sure, there's something sexual about it, in that he's been lonely, physically and mentally isolated since his mother's death. Because he's a mother's boy, the odds of him ever having been with a woman, you know, normally are slim. He's a sad and creepy figure, but not necessarily an unlikeable one. We all know the type: a genuinely good person unequipped to live in a world of sexual beings, Pud lets his sexual tension get the better of him; he lets his fantasies escalate until he almost loses control of them. But he doesn't. Jaka's vomit was like ipecac for the soul, in that it, her weakness, humanized her. This is why I believe he's ultimately responsible for his own redemption (with a splash of circumstance, of course, but when doesn't circumstance play some part in redemption?).

I'm not sure if I'm explaining this adequately, however. I think Pud was a decent person on the path to monstrosity, but one who caught his wits before he fully embraced what isolation and sexual frustration drove him to.

[Matt]

Didn't anyone else get that Pud is Sim's version of every 'Fanboy' personified? The off-putting rape fantasy can be seen as the way Sim felt at comic book conventions at the time, having his creativity raped by fans who simply wanted a dancing monkey who would sketch Cerebus as Spiderman, or Cerebus drunk, or Cerebus doing the hokey pokey with Jaka, or whatever. I'm not saying anything new here, this is a fairly commonly held view of Pud as a character (i.e it is generally agreed that Pud represnts 'Fanboys', as a whole). The sequence is deliberately off-putting, Sim wants everyone to feel as uncomfortable as he does as conventions. He wants you to squirm, so with a stroke of his pen, he makes the reader squirm. The way Sim hijacks the readers emotions and does with them as he pleases is one of the many signs pointing to the fact that Cerebus is a great work of literature. I don't agree with a great deal of his views, but dammit, I respect the hell of of Dave Sim as an artist.