I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Week 12: Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

I included American Born Chinese on the syllabus because I admire its construction--on every level, from the compact layouts to the slippery three-part plot--and because I thought my students would find its perspective on racial alienation and assimilation both familiar and enlightening. I've found in the past that works about racial identity by non-black authors can be a great tool for discussing representations of race in a black classroom with a white professor. They open a kind of third space that allows everybody in the room to approach the issue on more or less equal footing, without as much at stake.

All of those things played out exactly as expected, but I ended up looking at American Born Chinese a lot less favorably than my class did. Much as I admire its construction, I'm not sure I care at all for its message. Or the fact that it has a "message," which is surely part of the problem. Accept yourself for who you are is one of the most banal themes in popular culture (rivalled only by Follow your dreams!) but in this particular book it takes on a sinister insinuation. In this book, accepting yourself the way you are sometimes means accepting that your racial and ethnic identity is as immutable and inescapable as your species, your mortality, your very position in a great chain of being that stretches to the heavens.

The book follows three plots, with the story of student Jin Wang coming of age in 1980s California sandwiched between a retelling of the legend of the Monkey King and a horrific sitcom in which all-American white kid Danny is visited by his cousin Chin-Kee, a living embodiment of every Asian stereotype Danny has tried to suppress or flee. The book initially suggests that the Monkey King and Chin-Kee stories are meant to be taken as symbolic commentaries on Jin Wang's desire to assimilate--an interpretation that persists even after we learn they aren't strictly symbolic. 

In the course of condemning internalized racism and self-loathing, Yang analogizes Jin's dilemma to that of the Monkey King, who insists he's a god even after God Himself tells him otherwise and who suffers for his presumption until he learns to accept his simian nature, which sets him on the path to happiness and divine ordination. Working back to Jin, though, the Monkey King's acceptance implies that the ethnic, minority, or immigrant cultural identity is always the foundational one--Jin will always be Chinese, just as the Monkey King will always be a monkey. It's one of those classic comic-book analogies we can only pursue so far before we have to abandon it or accept some pretty unsavory implications, but American Born Chinese never tells us that it's time to bail out.

The best defense I can muster is to say that if you don't like those unsavory implications, you only have to wait a few pages. This is a book of contradictions--of realism and fantasy, cultural isolation and exchange--and every value it holds turns into its opposite. If the use of the Monkey King and Chin-Kee as symbolic commentaries on Jin's story seems trite or predictable, the final chapters will throw you a major curveball. If their essentialism grates, you only have to remember that this is a book in which no identity is stable for long. If you think the finale emphasizes ethnic isolation at the expense of cultural fusion, the book is still filled with characters and stories that cross cultures.

Although that can be a problem too, particularly when Yang takes the Buddha out of the Buddhist epic Journey to the West. Buddha is missing from the Monkey King's story, replaced by a distinctly Christian god (complete with shepherd's crook!) who's served by the animal symbols of the four evangelists. The original journey to the west (to retrieve the Buddha's sutras) is gone too, supplanted by a journey to celebrate the nativity of Christ. Maybe it's supposed to be syncretism, but it sure looks like subordination. Yang spoke about his intentions for the story in a Comics Journal interview, which Ng Suat Tong quotes here: he describes the Christianized myth as a simple combination of stories, but I think the work deviates quite a bit from his stated aims.

That lack of self-consciousness may be the root of the problem. I realized, after my last class on the book, that American Born Chinese didn't rankle because of its analogies or the friendly face they put on their essentialist view of race. This isn't the only book we've read that raises some troubling implications; it's just one of the few that doesn't know what to do with them. Maus has some pretty suspicious metaphors too, and Fun Home trots out its stereotypes in more realistic fashion, but those works invite readers to pick apart their assumptions--Spiegelman pretty much forces us to with all those devices that explode the artificiality and the implicit stereotyping of his animal avatars. American Born Chinese, like Nat Turner, doesn't invite us to question its implications; it may not even know they're there. It's the difference between a book in which the metaphors are supposed to break down and a book you just aren't supposed to think that much about. One can sustain or reward the most rigorous critical analysis, and the other just can't.

None of this rules against teaching American Born Chinese again, by the way; I find these dilemmas a lot more fascinating and productive than the trite messages of self-acceptance that the book advertises as its themes. But I will need to come up with some new ways to problematize this book for classes that have been taught to recognize the expression of racial and ethnic pride as the noblest aims of art--the most unimpeachable way of accepting yourself for who you are.

Week 11: Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth

I've been reluctant to mention that I have an essay in the newly-published The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking. In my imagination, the collection gathers fourteen paeans to the indisputable brilliance of Ware's comics along with my piece on the middlebrow conservatism of his anthologies for McSweeney's and the Best American Comics series. My essay is a more developed, more thoroughly researched approach to some of the arguments I've made on this blog in the past and I'm very proud of it, but until I actually see the book and its no doubt measured and judicious works of criticism I can't help but feel like the guy who came to the party just so he could drop a turd in the punch bowl.

Teaching Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth for my class was a welcome reminder that I can really enjoy Ware when he's producing his own work instead of curating his tired canon of alternative comics.

Not that his work is exactly divorced from that canon. Jimmy Corrigan begins as a fairly typical example of the sullen, snarky, defensive style that characterized the leading alternative comics of the 1990s. The impotent fantasies that lampoon popular genres, the portrait of Jimmy as comics nerd manchild--these are the relics of an alternative comics culture obsessed with defining itself against the genres that, at the time, still dominated the view of comics in the general public (to say nothing of the shelf space in the direct market). Ware was already outgrowing these elements as he wrote Jimmy Corrigan and it's a relief to see them disappear as his interests turn to the more compelling material of the extended Corrigan family, although Jimmy himself never quite clicks for me. At best he's a cipher to build a fascinating story around, but his interior life is too stunted to fascinate. While Jimmy Corrigan grows into a graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan stubbornly remains an alt-comics shlub to the end.

But he does have his moments. His richest fantasy, from a classroom point of view, is the one where he notices the price sticker on his father's generic coffee table and imagines him renting and furnishing the equally generic apartment as part of an elaborate scheme to lure unsuspecting fatherless men to their deaths. It's the only fantasy to go beyond the Oedipal dramas of his awkward reunion, diagnosing something deeply wrong not just with Jimmy's life but with his world.

It's a world whose artifacts are devoid of personal craftsmanship, whose makers are even more anonymous than their consumers. Whose buildings have lost the ornamentation and the scale that once indicated they were meant to be viewed and inhabited by humans. Whose postcards, if anyone bothered to make them, would have to show gas stations and stretches of asphalt. Whose logos and brand names fake a lost community, and fake it badly: Food Towne. Burger Kuntry. Pam's Wagon Wheel, "Since 1977." (In a story that has to be set sometime in the early 80s!) It might as well be designed by a serial killer. It would make more sense.

The flashbacks to 1892-1893 and the World's Columbian Exposition offer some respite, but Ware--bravely fighting against every aesthetic proclivity he has ever had--doesn't allow himself to cloak the past in nostalgia. Idyllic visions of a handmade past are compromised not just by the endemic prejudice (our first images are from a racist magic lantern slideshow, followed soon after by William Corrigan's carefully aimed but barely audible racial vulgarity) or by James Corrigan's emotional isolation but by the first stirrings of the depersonalized mass production that Ware deplores in the present. The World's Columbian Exposition might look like the apex of 19th century culture but it carries the beginnings of the 20th--its grand neoclassical buildings are made of cheap staff, its high-minded statues of the Union soldier freeing the slave are lined up in rows in the workshops, and the early motion picture technology in the Zoopraxographical Hall is only going to lead to those movies Jimmy says he watches but can't describe.

The highly personal, semi-autobiographical focus of Jimmy Corrigan never quite edges out the national, historical story that's unfolding in the background and in the maps and diagrams that punctuate the comic so explosively. At its best, in the flashbacks, the personal traumas become a means of accessing the national and historical traumas whose traces are felt, imperceptibly but powerfully, in the Corrigan family. But if the Jimmy scenes in the present seem less connected, less a part of this saga of the building of the nation, that's part of the commentary too.

I've always preferred James to Jimmy, and this rereading confirmed why. His dilemmas seem so much more serious--even when they aren't, initially--than his grandson's, partially because we feel sympathy for a lonely child who suffers in silence but scorn for an adult who reacts the same way. It helps that James is more emotionally open to readers. The narration attached to his story is so much more eloquent, verbally and visually, than the blunt conjunctions that guide us through Jimmy's story that we can't help but get a better sense of his turmoil. It's possible I have recently become a sucker for little wide-eyed bald-headed guys, but this picture always gets to me:

So much more recognizable, more sympathetic than the thirty-six-year-old man who can't work up the courage to speak to his family. Or women. Or anybody.

If I've said very little about the actual teaching of Jimmy Corrigan thus far, that's because most of the classes were exercises in exploring the different areas I've sounded out here. The students followed their standard pattern of initial frustration followed by growing fascination, one I've learned to anticipate in my lectures; I'm glad we didn't tackle this book first. We began with detailed close readings of a few early graphics (the diagram of comics reading on the inside front cover, the diagram tracing the history of the picture in Jimmy's drawer, and of course Superman's plunge, one of the simplest and most important pages in the book), talking about how to read Ware's comics before moving on to the more important and rewarding question of why they're worth reading. Our class found plenty of different ways of reading them--psychoanalytic, formalist, historicist--all of them paying off with insights not just into Ware's work but the worlds he describes. Despite the snow week I was able to preserve an extra day for this book, and not a minute of it was wasted. In fact, I probably could have added another day just to discuss the design and material history of all the different incarnations of this story (although we got a lot of mileage out of looking at the hardcover dustjacket and contrasting the hardcover's ending with the paperback's epilogue). This book will be staying on the syllabus for a long time.

I hope these classes, and this post, have done their own small part to clean out the punch bowl.

Week 10: Gilbert Hernandez, Human Diastrophism

You would think I'd have more to say about teaching "Human Diastrophism," one of my favorite comics in the classroom, but this was my fourth pass at the story and most of the classroom surprises have been played out. The greatest remaining challenge is just the problem of extracting one storyline from Gilbert Hernandez's long-running Palomar setting and fitting it into a single week of class discussion.

My classes' reactions to "Human Diastrophism" have changed over the years, and mostly for the better. Seven or eight years ago a few of my students were awfully interested in branding the women of Palomar as "sluts." (Khamo, Borro, and the other men got a pass, of course; the monogamous Pipo and the celibate-but-naked Tonantzin did not.) I can't say I'm sorry to see that discussion fall by the wayside. I wonder if that's a benefit of the growing awareness of comics as a mature medium. Eight years ago my students had never read a graphic novel in the classroom before, had perhaps never read a graphic novel period, and certainly didn't see them as an adult mode of expression; the mere sight of naked cartoon women was enough to provoke a moral panic. None of those things seem to be true anymore--at least not among the self-selecting group who would sign up for an entire course on comics. (And after Watchmen and Fun Home, sex is no longer a novelty.)

This class did catch me by surprise with some initial hostility to Hernandez's elliptical structure. A few of the more vocal students were turned off enough by the abrupt transitions and the sprawling cast to proclaim their complete mystification, but that didn't last. After a couple of days sifting through the plot and looking at all the elements that link Hernandez's fragments--the encroaching outside forces, the conflicting reactions to modernity, the shifting drawing styles, even the accelerating pace of the transitions--the complaints disappeared and some of the most vocal critics become Hernandez's biggest fans. This pattern seems to play itself out every week as the class adjusts to the new artists, learning that what they see as flaws (Spiegelman's animal metaphors, Bechdel's erudition) can also be some of those artists' greatest assets.

I have some sympathy for the initial frustration, though. This was my first time teaching "Human Diastrophism" in the new paperback collection, a format that does not serve the Palomar story particularly well. The book collects all the post-HD Palomar stories (excepting Poison River) up to the end of the original Love and Rockets in 1996. "Human Diastrophism" reads pretty well in isolation in the old Blood of Palomar trade paperback; if nothing else, that ending retains its original horror when you don't know there's another Palomar story on the next page. (That said, I would kill for just one affordable collection that grouped it with "Duck Feet," its closest companion and most important precursor.)

Following it with the subsequent stories only reminds the novice reader how much they're missing, especially since a lot of them aren't really Palomar stories. Maria and her daughters muscle everyone else out of the spotlight, and that only draws attention to the gaping Poison River-sized hole in the center of the collection. Maria's a fascinating character, but she's a lot more fascinating when you know the history that Hernandez established for her in previous issues. I'm not sure that she works without Poison River; I'm not sure Fritz and Petra work at all until Hernandez starts fleshing them out in the second volume of Love and Rockets.

On the other hand, it was nice to wrap up the class discussion with "Chelo's Burden," to check in on the final evolution of Humberto's art and to see the completion of Palomar's development into a matriarchy. And it was gratifying to see that many of the students read the intervening stories after I'd made them optional. But if you're going to collect "Human Diastrophism" with other long-form Palomar stories, you could at least throw in "Duck Feet"! And "An American in Palomar." And maybe...

Maybe there is no ideal way to read the Palomar stories under the time and monetary constraints of the classroom, but it's a shame that the setup of the new collection makes "Human Diastrophism," a story I could teach in my sleep, a slightly worse fit than it was before. On its own, insofar as it can be read on its own, it's one of the great American graphic novels. With its companions it's still just as great but it's only one piece of a much longer story that's nearly impossible to excerpt.

A comic book, in other words.  A wonderful format, but not one you can easily fit into a classroom.