I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Forget It, Marc

My graduate course in modernism, postmodernism, and the detective story discussed Chinatown yesterday, and despite my early qualms it turned out to be one of the best classes we've had yet.

I think I let Thom Andersen's extremely critical reading of Chinatown color my opinion of a film I hadn't seen in a few years.  Andersen thoroughly demolishes the conventional wisdom that Chinatown accurately exposes some primal Los Angeles myth, but just because it makes a hash of history doesn't mean it doesn't offer other virtues.  In fact, John Cawelti's masterpiece of seventies film criticism, "Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films," argues that Polanski's movie is interesting precisely to the degree that it uses nostalgia to comment on its generic forebears in the hard-boiled novel and film noir, not to recreate the past.

Chinatown proved an extremely supple text to play off against Andersen's historicist takedown, Cawelti's archetypal criticism, and the week's final theoretical reading, Fredric Jameson's definition of postmodern pastiche and nostalgia from "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism."  The movie doesn't fare well under the two historicist/Marxist critics, and for reasons that make complete sense given their priorities; Roman Polanksi and Robert Towne offer a sham version of the thirties and a deeply mythologized, thoroughly inaccurate account of the irrigation of Los Angeles and the San Fernando valley.

Yet Cawelti produces an equally compelling reading that neatly situates Chinatown among both its noir predecessors and its fellow saboteurs of the classical Hollywood genre film.  In his hands not just a "nostalgia film" a la American Graffiti or the late sixties neo-noirs, but a critique of the political unconscious of the hard-boiled detective.  I had already come to admire Chinatown again after a morning spent watching it, but Cawelti makes it look all the more impressive.  The article is a joy to read in itself, a lucid, accessible essay (in that sense, I admit, quite the contrast to Jameson) that defines postmodernist cinema with barely any references to the term "postmodernism" and therefore makes an ideal introduction for students.  I don't remember enjoying the piece this much when I first read it (must have been back in 1993 when I first bought the massive Braudy, Cohen, and Mast Film Criticism anthology, surely a rite of passage for many a film geek).  I can only hope some of that enthusiastic reception transferred to the students.

As for the movie, it thrives under genre, psychoanalytic, and mythological or archetypal readings even if the history comes apart faster than Jake Gittes's car.  My favorite performance - after John Huston's chilling turn - may be Polanski himself as the Man with the Knife.  In a movie where everybody else is working so hard to play against hard-boiled type, Polanski gleefully serves us a short little psycho straight up in the best Wilmer (Elisha) Cook manner. He utterly steals his one scene even before he doles out his famous punishment.

A great class all in all.  The only downer came when I announced that my grad students do in fact need to read The Waste Land at some point in their studies and that next week is the only good time to do it.  The Waste Land and City of Glass in the same class - they'll thank me for it later, I'm sure.

Unsolicited Advice

In which I butt in on somebody else's conversation for an easy post and a cheap bit of self-promotion.

Jog fields an interesting question in the comments to this post, where a reader tells him,

I recently got an e-mail from one of my professors saying "I'm kicking around the idea of a class looking at the golden age comic books, the novelists that are riffing off them now, and then contemporary comics that participate in the same commodity pool as Chabon and Lethem and all the guys who are mining their comic book nostalgia." and then asking for suggestions.

As it happens, I spent about half of last year working on an article about this same group of nostalgic comic book novels (current status:  finished, submitted to a journal, waiting patiently to hear back from them, still ensconced in slow time), so I naturally think this would be a fantastic idea for a class.

Jog offers some good suggestions (Alan Moore's Supreme) and reluctantly tenders some not-so-good ones (it may fit the bill, but I'm not sure I could recommend teaching Kingdom Come under any circumstances).  I would add that since many of these novels express nostalgia for Silver Age comics, particularly Marvel Comics, comics trading on that period would serve just as well.  Kurt Busiek's Marvels and Astro City ought to be at home on any syllabus that can include Rick Moody's paean to the Fantastic Four.

Any comic that deals with comics as objects (particularly fetish/nostalgia objects) would match the tone and content of many of these novels, so Jog's suggestion of Clowes's David Boring works perfectly - even though I suspect Clowes's work would especially suffer in comparison to actual examples (and fine examples) of the psychologistic, novelistic mode he so frequently apes.  Indy comics, and Clowes's comics in particular, are littered with comics/nostalgia fetishists and a few representatives would make a nice complement to the novels and superhero comics.

Finally, there's the Escapist comic itself - not great comics by any means, but an interesting example of Chabon's Golden Age nostalgia coming full circle.  Of course, I'm not sure the Escapist series does the historical pastiche thing any more inventively than Planetary or the dozens of other meta-comics, mostly dull, that have come out in the past decade or so.

What would be really interesting, in light of Moody's and Jonathan Lethem's celebrations of the intricacies of continuity-heavy Bronze Age storytelling, is to find a well-done modern nostalgia comic that looks back to that era.  It may be too soon, but it seems like superhero comics have just wrapped up a wave of Silver Age nostalgia and are pushing into the 1970s, with reprints of everything from Luke Cage, Power Man to Super-Villain Team-Up.  Writers like Brad Meltzer and Geoff Johns are frantically referencing the comics they read as kids, but they usually incorporate them into a distinctly and unpleasantly modern style of storytelling.  I'd think there must be somebody who's writing Bronze Age homages in the Bronze Age style and writing them well, but I can't think of anybody at the moment.  I suppose Busiek and Nicieza tried to pull it off in their Marvel work, but there's a difference between copying Bronze Age comics and writing about them as a site of nostalgia, and it seems like this hypothetical class would require the latter.  Perhaps this comic is yet to be written.

Other suggestions?  Send 'em Jog's way!

(By the way, that same post links to this group of reviews of Grant Morrison and Philip Bond's Vimanarama #1 - scroll down for Olivia Woodward's fascinating reading of religious symbology in the double-page splash, hidden in plain sight!)

Mysteries

As promised (threatened?), here’s the schedule for the class that will be occupying a good deal of my intellectual energy this semester, and hopefully generating a good deal of it as well - a graduate class on modernism and postmodernism as apprehended through the detective story.

The class is technically an open-topic course designed for readings in American literature, although I broke that when it came to Conrad.  If I had more time - the Monday night classes only meet thirteen times this semester! - I would have liked to include Borges’ “Death and the Compass,” some Conan Doyle stories, and perhaps Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, but I’m very pleased with what I was able to accomodate.

ENG 662, Studies in American Literary Thought (3). The Graduate Catalogue describes ENG 662 as “A consideration of the intellectual, social, political, economic, and historical trends which have strongly influenced literary and popular thought.” This course focuses specifically on modernism and postmodernism, two closely related intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and historical movements that shaped the twentieth century and continue to shape the twenty-first.

We will examine these movements by pairing some of the most influential and perceptive critical studies of modernism and postmodernism with a series of detective novels and films. As many critics have noted, the detective story is one of the most perfect popular expressions of the modernist impulse to organize a chaotic world through heightened perception. By examining how this genre intersects with the tenets of modernism, and how it is revised or altered by postmodernism, we will see how these two movements have structured our understanding of the modern world.

1/24 Introduction: Why mysteries?

1/31 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”
Sean McCann, Gumshoe America pp. 6-15

2/7 Pauline Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter
Stephen Soitos, The Blues Detective ch. 3, esp. 52-76
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, ch. 1

2/14 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, “Modernity and modernism”

2/21 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
The Maltese Falcon, dir. John Huston
McCann, Gumshoe America pp. 88-91, 167-171

2/28 Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem
Soitos, The Blues Detective ch. 5, esp. 142-163

SPRING BREAK

3/14 Film noir
Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles
Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder
Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

3/21 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, “From modernist to postmodernist fiction”

3/28 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey ch. 6

4/4 Chinatown, dir. Roman Polanski
John G. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films”
Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” pp. 16-25

4/11 Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, and David Mazzuchelli, City of Glass

4/18 Miller’s Crossing, dir. and prod. Joel and Ethan Coen
The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
Paper drafts due

4/25 Paper workshop

5/2 Final Papers due
Final Exam due

As the fella says, persons attempting to find unaltered reflections of culture in these narratives will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find authorial intent will be banished; persons attempting to find allegories will be shot.

Kingdom Come: Dull Reflections

Kingdom Come is the last comic I thought I'd be writing about when I started this blog, but one of the comments on the last post raised some points that merit a longer response.

Kingdom Come had a fair amount of commentary about the comics industry in the early/mid 90s.

From that, one could argue that comic books, and by extension Kingdom Come, were a reflection of the times in general.

[...]

If one approaches Kingdom Come from the above angle, then it could be taught in a politics course.

I'm not we can or should make the leaps from commentary on the comics industry (which Kingdom Come has in spades) to "reflection of the times in general" to the conclusion that Kingdom Come must therefore have something interesting to say about politics (especially about real-world geopolitics in the manner Comic Book Politics presents it).

Just because Kingdom Come advertises an overt comics-industry allegory doesn't mean it comments meaningfully on any other parts of its culture - especially since in 1996 the direct market collapse was already well underway and comics were rapidly detaching themselves from any relationship with the larger non-comics reading public. That doesn't mean a comic written in the mid-90s can't respond to circumstances outside the comics industry, but Kingdom Come would make a particularly poor test case for such readings. Like Marvels before it, it was one of the first works to coddle an inwardly-turning fanboy audience in the manner that's come to dominate superhero comics today - and Kingdom Come targets an audience so ingrown that it actively rejects other, newer fanboys and their style of superheroes.

I'm also personally wary of using what's sometimes derisively referred to as "the reflection theory" to direct the study of popular works. The shorthand version of the argument runs something like this: popular works reflect the times they're written in; any popular work can be proven worthy of academic analysis by showing how it reflects, without any invention or commentary, some contemporary social or political development. The exact mechanism for this reflection is never explained; any authorial agency tends to disappear in these readings.

An illustrative digression: I saw exactly this argument at work in an MLA panel on comics at the conference last December. It wasn't a bad panel overall, with an excellent paper on Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers - a presentation that almost made me rethink my disappointed reaction to that work - but the Spiegelman presentation and the paper on women in superhero comics showed a telling difference in methodology. The Spiegelman paper assumed In the Shadow of No Towers was the work of an auteur, with formal properties and rhetorical strategies that result from conscious decisions by its writer/artist. The superhero paper, however, didn't mention a single creator, even when it would have helped the argument. The genre comics might as well have arisen fully-formed from the ocean froth or the skull of Zeus - or from "the culture," which they were busily reflecting. The result was a profoundly incomplete paper; it made some interesting assertions about superhero comics confirming "postfeminist" myths about the end of gender discrimination, but it was completely unaware of the modes of production that created those comics, and completely unwilling to consider that such comics might create their own statements about gender.

Ultimately, "reflection theory" arguments tend to boil down to a simple and unenlightening claim:  comics and other popular works reflect back whatever something else in the culture is already saying, but they don't comment or invent.  The reflection theory isn't interested in finding any readings of the comics that cannot be attributed to some collective cultural unconscious.  In the end, art only says what everybody is already thinking anyway - and this is somehow supposed to justify it as an object of study.  I don't find that a particularly productive approach in my own work or in the classroom.

The most important thing to look for in any reading (comics or other) is the writer's intent.

On the other hand...  Contrary to everything I just said about the importance of reading authorship, autonomous expression, and conscious design in popular works, I would never reduce the interpretation of literature solely to the matter of divining an author's intent.  Authors can be notoriously silent, deceptive, contradictory, paradoxical, or disingenuous.  Often when readers claim they're looking for the author's intent they're really just working from the text, which is usually all we have to work with anyway and is, from my formalist biases, exactly where we usually ought to begin.  But regardless of one's position on authorship, the primacy of authorial intent has been in dispute for at least a century; there are too many competing models of interpretation out there - good, well-tested models with serious theoretical work backing them up - to make flat declarations like the one above.  Even if you agree with the sentiment, it simply isn't something you can assert without acknowledging the serious contests to that claim.

In any case, I suspect that readings of Kingdom Come, especially politically allegorical readings, would fail abysmally under an approach that privileges authorial intent.

(I do agree with Dominic on one point - a class that's had its appetite whetted for allegorical interpretations may be just as likely to hunt for them everywhere as to wait for the professor to reveal them like a magician explaining his tricks.  That I instinctively went for "passivity" rather than "paranoia" probably says more about my experience teaching Ellison last semester than about teaching allegory in general.)

Kingdom Come: A Clog in the Plumbing

Abu Aardvark directs our attention to Comic Book Politics, a thoughtful blog for a one-month-long college course of the same name.  It looks like a great class, but unfortunately, despite the counsel of the solons of the blogosphere, the syllabus at Comic Book Politics includes Kingdom Come.

I'm predisposed to like any post on Kingdom Come that begins with the apt title "Plumbing the Shallows," but the instructor reads the comic through a method of interpretation I just can't support.

Take Superman. What exactly is he supposed to represent? Can he be read as standing in for the United States geopolitically speaking? Not clear. Could be a warning against isolationism - if America turns its back on a world consumed by horrors, then the world will fall apart (as it does when Superman goes into seclusion). Maybe.

In my opinion, these are exactly the wrong kinds of questions to be asking, especially at the start of any interpretation.  The questions make two highly debatable assumptions:  that the text has a coherent political theme and that this theme is expressed primarily through allegory.  Then the reader has to troll through the text, casting each major character or incident in light of the supposed political allegory to support the presumption of its existence.

I'm not simply denying that Kingdom Come is sophisticated enough to offer such allegories, although that's no doubt a part of my reaction.  I have the same response when students attempt to interpret, say, Invisible Man in this fashion, and that's a text that at least advertises a range of sophisticated metaphors and allegories and invites such interpretations.  But I don't think approaching texts as codes waiting to be broken leads to productive engagements with them - especially when the reader starts by picking out a "key" more or less at random and then filtering everything through it.  Decide that Kingdom Come must represent something political and you will eventually find a political reading of every item in the text - this is tautology, not interpretation.

When I teach Invisible Man I try to wean my students away from pre- (and over-) determined allegorical readings and encourage them to focus on the text first.  What signals is it sending us?  What questions or dilemmas seem to preoccupy it?  What recurrences or comparisons or contrasts demand our attention?  Once we've identified the parts that appear to work through some theme, then we can start worrying about what they "represent" (although even then, I stress that metaphoric or allegorical representation is only one of many types of meaning at the writer's disposal).  That way, we aren't presuming the answers before we even ask the questions.

It's a difficult struggle with Invisible Man, which courts symbolic interpretations at every turn.  It should be much easier with politics in Kingdom Come.  Mark Waid and Alex Ross loudly tout a number of allegories - allegories for the comics industry and a particularly blunt, yet almost content-free, appropriation of apocalyptic religious imagery.  But the politics in Kingdom Come are so vastly oversimplified (all political institutions are unproblematically reduced to the United Nations, which can apparently authorize unilateral nuclear strikes) that any more sophisticated political readings would have to emerge against the grain, in spite of the comic's overt thematizations.  Comic Book Politics makes a good game of it, but while we can certainly read the internal politics of any narrative (his post, for example, examines the reasons why Superman loses his leadership position), those readings won't always translate into a neat allegory about geopolitics.

I think the cart is driving the horse here.  This teacher wants to teach Kingdom Come in a course about comics and politics, goes looking for interpretations that support the claim that Kingdom Come is "about" politics, finds them (some quite interesting, some forced), and, to his credit, reaches the only reasonable conclusion, namely that the politics in Kingdom Come are underdeveloped and superficial.  I have to agree - which is why I think Kingdom Come probably shouldn't be taught in a course about comics and politics in the first place.

Between Comic Book Politics and Dave Fiore, though, I'm tempted to do some academic blogging of my own.  Maybe I'll post the syllabus for my grad course on modernism, postmodernism and the detective novel after I wrap it up.