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.")

Comments

[The Little Evil Cerebist]

That's it, I'm changing my name. Damnit. (Sigh.)

[Sisyphus]

Ok, technical question? Don't make me get out the Abrams Glossary, just clarify --- doesn't a frame narrative have to have the teller in it, or show that it is a frame, like Marlow in Heart of Darkness? You've _shown_ pages from the back story but only _told_ about the pages where the speaker and auditor (Rick and Oscar Wilde) are present. Is there a reason for that? Am I just confused about terms? And how do the creepy portraits of the little girl and all that sensual emphasis on her victimization relate to the people exchanging the frame story?

[Ray Davis]

Scott, I'm enjoying this, but I have another mild dissent,,,, "Consider this: the information contained in these panels is related to Wilde by Jaka's insecure husband, Rick." Rick insecure? He may be the least jealous man in American comics (after R. Crumb, anyway). Don't you mean "trusting"? That's why understanding that his trust has been betrayed causes such a violent reaction.

Sisyphus, the trouble is that Scott's spoiling one of the major surprises of the book. The reader isn't sure where these prose inserts are coming from until almost the end. We have to take them at more or less face value as an interleaved flashback meant to complicate our present-day view of a stripper gone underground with her ne'er-do-well husband.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Well, Sim later reinterpreted the Oscar / Rick relationship with his snowblower, it seems. From an online interview
(here and elsewhere):

"Take the three love triangles in Jaka's Story: Cerebus wants Jaka real bad, but he sleeps in the little guest room eating his heart out and actually makes friends with Rick even though he's Cerebus the Barbarian. Pud spends every night alone with Jaka who is dressed in a sexually provocative manner and just makes amiable chit-chat or listens to all of her petty little problems for hours on end. Oscar has got a major woody for Rick. And even with all this sexual tension that is so thick you could cut it with a knife, still all of these people keep very much to their own side of the sexual barricade."

So Sim at this point analogizes the Oscar/Rick relationship to the Pud/Jaka relationship. That's not especially homosocial.

I do think that all of this is an interesting depiction of the limits of a disregard for authorial interpretation. Why are so many people interested in what Sim thinks about his story? Well, for human interest in Sim as a character in part, because (I would say) Sim is very present as an author-function in the story, but also because Sim has written and continues to write so much about it. I tend to think of authorial interpretations that you read as being in some way added to the story as a sort of appendix -- you can't completely ignore them, even if you'd like to. So the criticism I've glanced at about Cerebus seems divided into two categories, fan criticism (which concentrates on What Happened and What Dave Said) and critic criticism, which tends to get subsumed by Saving Cerebus From Sim. For the critic to write, the author must shut up.

[Tom Hitchner]

This is more of a quibble, but am I the only one who doesn't think that Wilde is particularly well ventriloquized in the pages given above? The writing seems to be from the school that feels that a Victorian style is constituted of a heavy use of adverbs and parenthetical phrases. "To call Nurse's porridge irredeemably unpleasant is to compliment it extravagantly," "Having risen (the 'shine' part was both conversational formality and small irony for Nurse was, in fact, thoroughly intolerant of morning cheerfulness -- or cheerfulness at any other time of the day, for that matter), Jaka faced her morning bath" -- Wilde's prose was never as strong as his dialogue, but these sentences are Bulwer-Lytton caliber. (The author and the contest.)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

First, I'm not ignoring her: the Little Womedievalist and I settled her rechristening off-blog.

Second, Sisyphus and Ray, I was trying to save the surprise -- or replicate it, if you will -- for the next post. There's no way around the spoiler here, other than to not make it an issue. It will, however, be the focus of my next post.

Ray, I see him as insecure; after all, anytime Jaka even looks in the direction of another man, he demands she prove her love for him with sex. (Not that he always receives it, mind you.) That happens four or five times in the book. You're correct, though, that reading him as trusting makes the ultimate betrayal that much more wrenching. For some reason, I've always found these sorts of disagreements interesting on the theoretical level -- why do I see insecurity where you see trust? I'm not sure, in this case, but it does have something to do with how we contextualize and prioritize other information we know about the character. (I'm blathering here, but you know that.)

Rich, I don't think the author must shut up -- however, that sentence's snappily written -- so much as cede interpretive fiat. Sim can say whatever he wants to about his own work, but it's going to end up in the matrix of readerly assumptions which has Ray seeing trust where I see insecurity. There's something to that acknowledgment: namely, that if you take the chance and try to move readers, you're going to compel them to respond individually to what you've written, ipso facto you can't control it. I'm not sure why I'm feeling so Iser-lite today, but there you have it. ("It" being "nothing much," hence the "-lite.")

More later, after I reinsert my thinking thing into my noggin.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Tom, your comment wasn't there when I composed mine. Here's what I'll say: the ventriloquizing effect is cumulative. Yes, the mileage on individual sentences varies, but the overall effect is convincing. That's one of the reasons my "spoiler" isn't much of a spoiler: well before the ruse is revealed, it's fairly obvious that Wilde's the author of the interwoven narrative.

That said, you have a point about those sentences.

[Rich Puchalsky]

The author can't control interpretation of his or her work, that's a given. But Sim has been highly successful at making all critics concerned with Sim's interpretation. People can disagree with it, but I doubt that anyone in the history of critical interpretation of Cerebus is going to blithely ignore what Sim has to say about it. The double go-around is a highly inspired move in this game; writing a contemporaneous introduction / lettercol apparatus, plus a years-later contradictory interview series, means that in addition to Sim As Author there is also an Early Sim As Critic and Later Sim As Critic.

[Doug M.]

"Sim revels in ventriloquism—and well he should, as he is among the most talented literary ventriloquists I've come across."

I don't think that's quite right.

Sim was an incredibly talented /mimic/. He's the guy who could do a great Groucho Marx. And this is no small thing. It's painfully easy to do a bad Groucho, really hard to do a good one. And Sim could mimic a wide range of artists in a variety of fields.

But "ventriloquist", to me, means a creator who can make his characters speak with voices that are clearly not his own. And I think this is what Sim _couldn't_ do. He could borrow others' voices, but he had trouble creating fresh ones.

IOW, much of what's good in Cerebus is not very original; and much of what's original is not very good.

Doug M.

[Ray Davis]

Sorry for spoiling your spoiler, Scott. (Luckily, smart readers skip my comments anyway.) As an afterthought, wouldn't it be more accurate to call the prose an "embedded narrative" than a "frame narrative"?

And wow, we really did take away different views of Rick in Jaka's Story. When I look at him, I see a lazy, good-natured horndog. Like a sexually active Jughead or Maynard G. Krebs. He believes he's very lucky to have gotten Jaka, but he doesn't obsess over the possible fragility of the relationship. If his frequent suggestions were treated as unwelcome (instead of inopportune), the effect might be different.

Maybe it's the tension between taking what we view as comic convention or as nuanced realism? That seems to be the biggest theoretical difficulty posed by Cerebus. Although Sim's tonal clashing is less controlled than, say, Jaime Hernandez's or Walt Kelly's, at his best, and with the right readers, it really clicks (with a loud gear-stripping groan). But it clicks differently for different right readers. (John Marston might make a good comparison.)

[Rich Puchalsky]

Reading the series backwards, doesn't Cerebus realize that he's going to Hell at the end precisely because Rick isn't there? I had thought from snippets gleaned here and there that Rick == Jesus, in an ironic but also serious fashion. That means that his relationship with Jaka is supposed to be characterized by an unworldly trustfulness, doesn't it?