A long chain of barely-connected thoughts about comics and literary theory that I warned you aboutHere's TS Eliot on James Joyce's ULYSSES: "...a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.... Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art." Almost a century old, that quote. And it speaks directly to modernist literature becoming postmodern literature and eventually to what James Wood called "hysterical
realism," where, in his view, the welter of facts and events and *things* in a certain style of writing threw overboard the ability and intent to talk about real social conditions, real people and real beliefs. "How the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." And I'm sitting here thinking, yes, he had a point, when it's done badly (I'll leave you to decide those examples). And, hell, maybe even when it's done well and according to an authors' intent of showing how the swirl of events makes even great humans into tiny flotsam (AGAINST THE DAY). The systems of the world are, from one perspective, the only thing worth talking about, but maybe there are only so many times we can show that before it becomes
"hysterical." The comic has disadvantages and advantages in this space. Comics struggles to condense into the per-page density of information that the prose page can hold. On the basis of strict textual information containment, the comics page will always be lighter. But that's a cold and incomplete way to look at the form. There's a brilliant little bit on, of all places, Wikipedia, about literary maximalism -- the root of hysterical realism being the style of throwing everything even vaguely relevant into a book, kitchen sink and all: "These maximalists are called by such an epithet because they, situated in the age of
epistemological uncertainty and therefore
knowing that they can never know what is authentic and inauthentic, attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging to that age, to take these authentic and inauthentic things as they are with all their uncertainty and inauthenticity included; their work intends to contain the maximum of the age, in other words, to be the age itself, and because of this their novels are often encyclopedic." (Bold text mine) Suspension of disbelief is inherent in the comics form because we pick up a comic already understanding that we're seeing a heavily filtered and codified representation of the world. Real
and irreal use the same visual codes. Unreal figures in comics are made of the same stuff as the real ones. Talking about the systems of the world is just telling stories that try to explain how the world works. Picking up a comic, you already know that at least one person is essentially lying to you. (art spiegelman does a wonderful gesture to this in MAUS, where in book 1 all the Jewish characters are drawn as mice, in past and future, but when spiegelman shows up in book 2 to comment on book 1, he draws himself as a human wearing a mouse mask.)
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