AN ODD JOHN

In MADNESS TO OUR METHODS I addressed some of the questions about the applicability of different types of criticism to different types of works, even by the same author.  Since the essay was inspired by critical debtate over the proper way to approach Chester Brown's graphic novel PAYING FOR IT, I showed how Brown himself had produced works that had strongest affiliations to three critical persuasions-- YUMMY FUR to archetypal criticism, THE PLAYBOY to aesthetic criticism, and LOUIS RIEL to ethical criticism.  At the time I wrote the essay, I hadn't read PAYING FOR IT, whose descriptive subtitle, for anyone who's not heard, proclaims the work "a comic-strip memoir about being a john."

Now that I've read PFI, this essay will follow up some of the ideas expressed there.  I wrote:

If as I suggest Spurgeon's review is in essence an aesthetic one, then one may conveniently label the type of criticism Heer and Berlatsky stump for to be "ethical criticism." Based on descriptions of PAYING's subject matter, and on my acquaintance with earlier Brown work, I can see some validity in either approach. However, given that the work's content is both biographical and hortatory, in all likelihood the third-named critical orientation, that of "archetypal criticism," would probably be a bad way to analyze PAYING in that such narratives tend to put forth a very low level of symbolic discourse.

That said, if PAYING is indeed amenable to both ethical and aesthetic criticism, not all such works, even by Chester Brown, are so well-balanced.

Back then I was giving PFI the benefit of the doubt in saying that it might be equally amenable to both forms of criticism, though given that it was one of Brown's autobiographical efforts, I doubted that the archetypal form would be espeically applicable.  Now that I've read it, I think the aesthetic approach advocated by Tom Spurgeon has nearly no application whatever. I've certainly seen examples of Chester Brown work which possess the quality Spurgeon calls "quiet insistence."  But I don't see any of that in PFI.  It's possible that Spurgeon sees something there that I don't.  It's also possible that he's allowing for some "carry-over" from other Brown works to affect his judgment.  Neither verdict matters all that much, to be sure.

My reason for not seeing this "quiet insistence" is chiefly due to Brown's choice of format, in which all or most panels in PFI are about 1 1/2 inches by 1 inch.  I found this to be an effective size for communicating the discursive ideas of his topic but not for communicating anything pertaining to mood or tonality.  I've only read one Brown interview given to MOTHER JONES on the subject of PFI, which doesn't comment on his format-choice.  However, the interviewer does ask:

MJ: Why did you choose to depict the sex instead of fading to black or doing one of any other artistic sleights of hand?

And Brown responds:

CB: I suppose I could have. There were a couple of instances where what I'm thinking during sex was relevant, so I might as well show myself having sex. I could have gone from a shot of the bed to just showing the ceiling and my thought bubble. Or maybe just show the feet. It just seemed, sex was taking place—why drag the camera someplace else in the room?

The thought struck me that in a sense, by choosing such tiny panels for PFI, Brown had not so much dragged the camera to another part of the room as he had changed the lens-size.  I can't be sure until I come across Brown commenting on the matter, but the tiny size strikes me as an ideal way to literally "reduce" the subject matter so that it becomes ipso facto less prurient in presentation.  (Brown does comment that while it wasn't odd for him to draw himself having sexual encounters, he does get some interesting reactions showing the pages blown-up for slideshow displays.)

Now, while I think PFI proves fruitless to analyze from both archetypal and aesthetic approaches, the ethical approach is a different animal.  As far as I can tell, most of the critical reactions to PFI do take the ethical approach, frequently slamming Brown's ideas as unworkable and the like.  Brown has anticipated all or most of these reactions, for the appendices to his memoir assails most if not all of the familiar arguments against the decrimininalization of prostitution.  For the record, Brown, a libertarian, is also against the legalization of prositution, arguing that this would simply create a "black market" for sex workers, which would in turn maintain the associations between prostitution and criminality.

I'm not going to debate any of Brown's theories of decriminalized prostitution here.  As a critic I defend Brown's intellectual discourse on the same terms that I defend Dave Sim's.  Whether or not an artist succeeds in proposing an ethical schema that has real application to society or not-- a goal which more noted authors, such as Ezra Pound, failed to do-- the work may remain significant purely in terms of the technique the artist uses to make his salient points.  As a pluralist I can condemn any number of ethical opinions on an individual basis, while maintaining the POV that even bad ethics can make for great storytelling.

I wouldn't precisely call PFI "great," even within the confines of autobiographical comic books. But even recognizing some of the default errors of libertarianism, it's still a work that demands one's full attention in debating/refuting it.

ADDENDA:  I will note in passing that according to Brown's memoirs his encounters with prostitutes in Canada were amazingly restraind and-- to resort to that old Canadian stereotype-- unfailingly *polite.*

And on the purely practical side of things, that's probably why, even if decriminalized prostitution *could* work in Canada, it would probably never work that well in the United States of America-- for one simple reason:

Americans are thoroughly addicted to the art of screwing each other over for a buck.

MYTHCOMICS #25: YUMMY FUR #1-18 (1986-89)

PLOT-SUMMARY: Ed the Clown lives in a city overrun with cannibalistic pygmies. He has the misfortune to receive an interdimensional transplant from an alternate-Earth dimension, in that the head of his normal penis is replaced by the miniature head of President Ronald Reagan. While the inhabitants of the other dimension strive to retrieve the head of their president-- which remains able to talk even while it’s a part of Ed’s anatomy-- Ed is pursued by police and pygmies. He’s succored from time to time by a few allies: Christian, a ghoul-like alien, and Josie, a young woman who becomes a vampire after she’s murdered by a serial killer. Josie kills her murderer but a ghost tells her that her killer’s spirit will go to heaven because he repented his act, while Josie’s spirit will go to hell because she didn’t have time to repent of evil. Eventually, after Ed’s story has hosted a menagerie of bizarre characters-- cow-stealing aliens, Jack’s beanstalk, vampire hunters and the Frankenstein Monster-- Ed regains a normal penis. However, Josie is killed by the disembodied hand of her killer, which causes her vampiric form to be exposed to sunlight.



MYTH-SUMMARY: I haven’t attempted to trace in great detail this YUMMY FUR continuity-- later collected under the title “Ed the Happy Clown”-- in the same detail that I have in other “1001 comics” posts. Here a full plot-summation would be gilding the lily, in that plot is not really very important in Chester Brown’s surrealistic opus. In this story characters come and go with no more causality than one sees in “Waiting for Godot,” thus rendering the idea of plot-mechanics nugatory. At a convention I asked Chester Brown if he had any particular reason for using the Frankenstein Monster in issue #16, whose cover shows the creature skydiving. As I remember, he said he just happened to want to draw Frankenstein at the time, so he worked that desire into the narrative.







“Life sure can be ironic sometimes” states a minor character in YUMMY FUR #2 (albeit in a side-story not connected to the “Ed” continuity). Ed the Clown is one of the most perfect examples of a protagonist that works within the literary mythos Northrop Frye calls an “irony,” for ironies concern characters stuck in a world where human action can have no meaningful effect. Ed’s first six-page story in YUMMY FUR #1 depicts him on his way to a hospital to entertain sick kids, only to learn from a doctor that “the hospital burned down and everyone died except us doctors.” One page later Ed breaks his leg in two places purely from the action of walking down the street, suggesting that his pipestem limbs are always in danger of shattering. He’s almost eaten by a horde of rats, and he’s only saved because city authorities turn loose a tribe of pygmies to fight the rats. However, the authorities blunder by air-dropping the pygmies, who go splat on the city-concrete and are apparently eaten by the rats. Ed is simply “saved” because the rats overlook him for their new prey.



Ed’s penis is victimized in the course of a very involved storyline. The scientists of another dimension invent a device with which they can use our world as a “dump” for all of their “dumps”-- i.e., a place to deposit unwanted tons of fecal matter. Initially the fecal matter comes through one man’s anus, but he dies and the “hole” to the other dimension is blocked when President Reagan (who looks nothing like the real article) falls into the machine. Somehow this causes his head to be plucked from his body and exchanged with the head of Ed’s penis. Presumably Brown enjoyed the prospect of debasing President Reagan, turning a figurative dick into a literal one, but to say the least it “unmans” Ed as well. In issue #8 he breaks down weeping, telling his talking penis, “My life is always like this. Everything’s always awful. Even my own penis hates me.” The Reagan-penis, after raging at Ed a little more, tries to calm him by telling him that it’s not his fault that “awful things happen to you,” which is quite true: Ed is the victim of both his author and his literary mythos. He does get a normal penis again, but Ed only survives all of his ordeals by dumb luck.


Josie, thanks to having become a vampire, seems at first glance the obverse of her friend Ed. She’s killed by her crazed lover, and becomes a vampire because she was “actively engaged in a grievous sin.” As a vampire Josie is immensely strong and cannot be killed by conventional weapons, and she conceives a sisterly protectiveness toward the helpless clown. But in Brown’s chaotic world none of her heroic actions can save her, for she’s condemned to hell as her killer apparently is not. In addition to being fated to go to hell once her undead life ends, some quirk of fate allows her killer’s disembodied hand to prematurely end that life.



In the novel MANHATTAN TRANSFER, author John Dos Passos shows fires continually breaking out all over New York, a leitmotif that suggests that the city is falling into apocalyptic disorder. Brown’s use of fire isn’t quite a leitmotif, but it’s certainly significant that the ED story starts with a hospital burning down (except for the savvy professional men) and ends with the conflagration of an apartment building, in which only Josie the Vampire dies. Fire is irregularly seen throughout the storyline-- Ed dreams of a fiery void, aliens speak out in space amid flaming bodies-- and the last panel of YUMMY FUR #18 is just one big panel of flames, suggesting the fires of hell to which Josie stands condemned. But surely it’s not just Josie that stands condemned. Her sacrifice saves Ed for a little while, as the sacrifice of Pirithous saves Theseus from death. But Ed and his world remain well and truly doomed.

RATIOCENTRIC REBELLION

After my dream I lost command of words. All the chief words, anyway, the most necessary ones. But never mind, I shall go and I shall keep talking, I won't leave off, for anyway I have seen it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. But the scoffers do not understand that. It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination. Oh! As though that meant so much! And they are so proud! A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted—you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times—but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness—that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

-- Dostoyevsky, DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN, 1877 (tr. Constance Garnett)

Once or twice I've tossed out the neologism "ratiocentrism," loosely defined as a reaction against what I deemed false impositions of rational/reductive interpretations-- especially of literature, though the same principle could apply to any human activity. Ratiocentrism is my reaction against the post-structuralist concept of logocentrism, best defined as the "small-r" rationalist's extreme wariness of any system's evocation of a "Logos" in the form of an organizing principle or principles.

The last lines of the Dostoyevsky quote apply particularly well to those individuals goverened purely by reductive rational principles. For them "the consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness." One hears echoes of this attitude in every elitist critic who insists that a given reader is intrinsically better off to read that which gives him a deep sense of that which is "grave and constant in life" rather than that which makes him happy.

Of course this attitude is far from exclusively modern, as Eccelesiastes tells us:

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

The rise of Derrida's form of logocentrism and of its literary response in post-structuralism was enchanced by a society that has enshrined the rationalization of life's processes over life itself. As a pluralist I would argue that one may learn as much, if not more, about the nature of life in the House of Mirth, whereas the House of Mourning may be a place where a given body may be subjected to dissection and/or embalming before it's properly dead.

That said, I don't agree with the vision of Dostoyevksy's narrator in his thinking that living by the Golden Rule alone could so transform society. And yet practitioners of literary pluralism should, after a fashion, value loving others as one does oneself, and, by extension, cultivating some degree of love for genres or literary modes even if one doesn't like every manifestation.

For example, I'm not fond of autobiographical comic books. Sometimes this has been a specific reaction against a particular creator, as with Harvey Pekar. Years ago, having read only one odd issue of AMERICAN SPLENDOR, I praised one of the sequences in a long essay written for COMICS JOURNAL (though it was unceremoniously re-routed to AMAZING HEROES, presumably because the essay said nice things about certain superhero books as well). Later, after I got to know Pekar's works more fully, I considered him a less than admirable practitioner of that genre. Nevertheless, I still esteem that one experimental sequence that I liked, even if I can't see much value in most of Pekar's work.

OTOH, I started buying YUMMY FUR early in its Drawn & Quarterly phase as a B&W independent. With the conclusion of the "Ed the Happy Clown" sequence, Chester Brown veered for the most part away from surrealist fantasy and concentrated far more on autobiography. And yet Brown's work retained a fascination for me despite his more mundane subject matter.

I might even characterize the two of them in terms Dostoyeskian: Brown gives the reader his life, while Pekar merely gives the reader his particular intellectual (or, in my judgment, pseudo-intellectual) take upon his life.

Therefore, thanks to Brown and occasional other toilers in this genre, I can stop worrying and learn to love autobio, at least as much as is humanly possible. I suppose there may be elitists out there who make some comparable on behalf of the occasional "good superhero," even if they disdain the genre as a whole.

Chilling thought, that there may such a thing as a conscientious elitist.

Not that I've run into many on the 'net lately. But hope springs, eternally ridiculous.