Cerebus and Modernist Freedom Revisited

Some of you may remember this series (Part I, Part II, Part III) from long ago.  The Interwebs did, and so arose an opportunity for revision and publication (complete with preapproval from Sim and Gerhard to include panels and pages from the series) in a forthcoming collection.  Below is the abstract I concocted while foolishly spending much of my time writing the actual essay, but that's neither here nor there.  The close readings of the texts themselves will commence somewhere near the end of this capsule history of what I'm calling "modernist freedom," but previews of them can be found at the links above.  That said:

Cerebus and Modernist Freedom

When Dave Sim and his fiance, Deni Loubert, founded Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc. in 1977, its express purpose was to publish Sim's own parody of the sword and sorcery genre typified by titles like Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja.  Two years, twenty-five issues, countless tabs of LSD, and a stint in a psychiatric ward later, his increasingly threadbare parody—later collected in phone book-form as Cerebus—was re-envisioned as a project of almost unimaginable magnitude when the 23-year-old Sim declared that the series would run for 300 issues, at which point he would be 48 years old.  For a writer to dedicate 25 years to a single project is not merely unheard of in the domain of serialized comics, but in literature at large, comparable in stamina to the 26 years William Gass labored on The Tunnel and superior in final effect to the nearly half-century in which Ralph Ellison failed to complete Juneteenth.  Moreover, Sim rarely had—or, at least, rarely abused—the luxury of stopping production on Cerebus to write essays in the mode of Gass or Ellison, as the schedule required to produce a monthly comic demanded that he work without cessation.  Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the serial nature of monthly comics eliminated the possibility of revision in the traditional sense.  Sim could not simply revise a previously unpublished chapter to accord with another of similar status, he had to incorporate previously published material into his increasingly complex cosmology—a feat he accomplished sometimes brilliantly, sometimes not.  He possessed, in 1979, the kind of creative freedom editors can afford Grant Morrison today: he could remake this fictional world so that it functioned in accordance with his vision of it.  When coupled with the increasingly popularity of his title, this freedom from editorial interference allowed Sim to develop Cerebus solely in reference to his expectations and those of his readers, a financial and artistic arrangement that shares more with that of Continental modernist literature than not.  James Joyce knew Ulysses would continue to be serialized in The Little Review because of the number and influence of its subscribers and the unflagging support Sylvia Beach; this knowledge afforded him the opportunity to risk formal and narrative strategies at which an artist lacking it might balk.  Despite Joyce's constant anxiety about money—he once wrote his mother, "Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two)," as if the gravity of his situation could not be communicated unless he literally spelled it out—the commercial success of the book was assured long before its serialized chapters were bound, so the question of whether the final version of Ulysses would represent Joyce's vision of it never needed to be asked.  In short, at issue was not whether Joyce had creative freedom, but what he would do with it.  Because Sim worked under circumstances that are, at the very least, analogous—only with independent comics in the 1980s taking the tenuous position of little magazines in the 1920s—the central question should not be whether he possessed creative freedom, but how he exercised it.  Joyce is not the singular Irish modernist for Sim—that title belongs to Oscar Wilde—but the comparison warrants further investigation.  In what follows, I will trace the evolution of Jaka from an early parody of a foreign stripper, complete with references to herself in the third person ("Jaka thinks you are cute!" [Cerebus 126]); to the complex subject of an Oscar Wilde novel charting her life as a Princess of Palnu in Jaka's Story; and ending with her being, as Sim wrote in Going Home, "pretty consistent ... All that changed was that Cerebus switched from not really wanting Jaka to really, really wanting her ... As soon as you switch, they switch [because] Jaka is a self-absorbed aristocratic airhead.  She always was."  This final diminishing in her author's eyes sells his characterization of her short, but it is indicative of how Sim would later come to abuse the very creative freedom that once allowed him to become one of the strongest and most innovative in literature, of the graphic variety or otherwise.

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

"it is indicative of how Sim would later come to abuse the very creative freedom that once allowed him to become one of the strongest and most innovative in literature, of the graphic variety or otherwise."

There's the decline-and-fall criticism of Sim, or -- put another way -- the genius-gone-crazy summary of Sim.

And I don't think it meets the facts of a close reading of Cerebus. Whatever his biography was, Sim as author always was a misogynist. It's true that as the series went on, he elaborated more and more complex crazy theories to justify his misogyny. Is that an abuse of creative freedom? Or is that a bigoted person giving full development to the artistic expression of his bigotry?

As I've said before, I think that the genius-gone-crazy bit is more for the benefit of the critics than it is a really valid critical reading of his work. The critic says that a) Sim's a genius (something which I dispute, but never mind that for now), b) his views are really objectionable. As insulation from the second of these, they invent two Sims, the second of which failed the first. But the first was doing moronic, sexist jokes from day 1. And really, I think Sim's view of his character Jaka always being the same, and changing more because of the narrative viewpoint on her than anything else, is more accurate than yours.

Compare a reading of PKD. Did PKD go crazy and start writing a lot of religious gibberish? Well, yes. Were his later, religious novels notably different from his earlier ones? Again yes. But the religious themes in his later work were always there in his earlier books. He flipped out and lost the ability to write as he previously had, in many senses, yes. But that isn't "an abuse of creative freedom" -- since PKD by that time was starting to get a certain degree of creative freedom too -- it's an unfortunate mental-health-disease event in the life of the author that brought out, in exaggerated form, what was there already.

[SEK]

And I don't think it meets the facts of a close reading of Cerebus. Whatever his biography was, Sim as author always was a misogynist. It's true that as the series went on, he elaborated more and more complex crazy theories to justify his misogyny. Is that an abuse of creative freedom? Or is that a bigoted person giving full development to the artistic expression of his bigotry?

I think I mentioned this last time, but I lump Sim in with Faulkner: great artists with obvious character faults that they could, if they chose to, struggle to overcome. I think Faulkner came closer: he was born, raised and died a racist, but a work like Light in August documents the struggle of a mind attempting to overcome its own prejudices. I think Jaka's Story represents the last bit of struggle Sim would attempt, and as such is an interesting document in its own right. There's a reason I contrast the Wilde quotation from 126 to the unhinged rant in 182 in that first post: they're indicative of two incompatible, if intuitive, theories of the value of and rationale behind artistic expression, and they differ so strongly from one another that it's almost difficult to believe the same person endorsed each of them in a little under four years.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I understand the point about Faulkner, but I guess I think it's important to distinguish between "abuse of creative freedom" in style and in content.

Did Sim abuse his creative freedom by diverting his comic into long rants that had no appreciable aesthetic value -- irrespective of content? Perhaps we can agree on that in some form. The rants began in his letter pages, if I remember rightly, and spread to the comic itself. I think that some of the later pages that are basically nothing but rant can be judged as artistic failures without really getting into what is being ranted about.

Did Sim abuse his creative freedom by taking once-complex female characters and flattening them into stereotypes, as consistent with his elaborated misogynist ideology? That's what you seem to be getting at with the "It is indicative" quote at the end. Sim asserts that the character of Jaka was always a self-absorbed aristocratic airhead, and that the later Jaka is consistent with the middle Jaka. And this is held up as an example of what happened in the work itself.

And I'm not sure I believe it. I guess I should hold off here -- or go back to the earlier posts? -- but to show this, you're going to have to show that Jaka has some complexity that goes beyond what the male narrative viewpoint of the comic imputes to her. I know that authorial interpretation doesn't control the meaning of a work. But I'm particuarly suspicious of counter-authorial interpretations here because people basically create two or three Sims in order to do it, an early one who writes trivial parodies, a middle one who creates art, and a later crazy one who "abuses the creative freedom" won by the middle one. And I don't see as much difference between the three as all that.