NULL-MYTHS: "DAVID BORING" (EIGHTBALL #19-21, 1998)

At some point in his career, Woody Allen made the public claim that he suffered from a condition he called *anhedonia,* which signified an inability to feel pleasure. Allen made indirect reference to the psychological term in the title of his 1977 film ANNIE HALL, wherein the two romantic leads are unable to reach any sort of "happily ever after" rapprochement in their relationship, and so are forced to part. Despite all of the characters' neurotic quirks, they are still recognizable as human beings with many different emotions.

Dan Clowes never references anhedonia in his incredibly overrated opus DAVID BORING, but the graphic novel is permeated with a staggering lack of affect: far more than any section of ANNIE HALL. For amusement's sake I went through each page to see how often in the GN's hundred-plus pages any of the characters smiled. If I include smiles that appeared in the comic book that protagonist Boring obsessively re-reads, I counted about seven. If I included ironic half-smiles, it might go up to ten.

I'm not faulting Clowes for failing to provide the reader with tons of sweetness and light. I'm sure he chose to downplay the normal range of affect in his characters for what he considered sound intellectual reasons. I deduce the same ironizing strategy in his giving his protagonist the name "Boring," perhaps anticipating that many comics-readers would find the GN "boring" if they read it at all. But the perpetual gloom of the story-line calls so much attention to itself that, in contrast to the no less pretentious ANNIE HALL, the work as a whole loses all claim to mimetic fidelity. Given that most of the narrative is assorted sexual encounters-- protagonist Boring is an experienced, if not especially credible, pick-up artist-- I find it counter-intuitive that nobody is seen experiencing so much as a balmy afterglow.

But it may be fairly asked, should BORING be judged as a failure of mythopoeic art, given that it focuses so much on intellectual tropes? Many of the ones in BORING don't rate as anything but leftovers from French New Wave cinema-- inexplicable doppelgangers, ambivalent doomsday-scenarios. The one exception, however, is a leitmotif involving an ironic reading of commercial comic books-- a reading that lacks any of the wit or ingenuity found in this week's ironic myth-comic.

Presumably Clowes wants us to believe Boring to be an unreliable narrator, given that he tells readers on page eight that "I'm not the least bit nostalgic and my aesthetics are up-to-date"-- yet throughout the narrative, he continually mulls over the pages of a scanty number of comic books drawn by his absentee father (a character never seen "on-panel," and who is said to die during the course of the story). The comics panels comprise the aforementioned leitmotif, in that they repeatedly interrupt the very serious main narrative with moments of childish whimsy.

I don't know what Dan Clowes actually believes regarding the content of mainstream comic books. He may or may not be as obsessive as his character about comics, particularly DC's Superman comic books of the Silver Age (the author patently names the protagonist after Superman-artist Wayne Boring), or he may simply be exploiting their supposed lack of content to please his main audience, the bloody comic book elitists, who want to believe that there's nothing but whimsy to stupid superhero comics. However, in addition to Clowes' verdict on the topic being extremely derivative and unimaginative, this too violates any claim the character might have to mimetic fidelity. A real human being, seeking to make some imagined connection with a parent he'd never known through the medium of that parent's art, would be obsessively seeking meaning in even bad commercial-art, and in all likelihood would project meaning even if nothing could be credibly proven to "be there." In contrast, because Clowes wants to reproduce the appearance of a fetishistic obsession without giving it any emotional heft, he has to elide any imaginative response Boring might have to the comics he reads. As a further, and thoroughly artificial, elaboration of this distanciation-formula, late in the story Boring's mother tears his comics into pieces, so that all that Boring can reflect on are isolated panels, disconnected from any linking narrative. This too is no more than a play to the prejudices of readers who can't tell art from artsty-fartsy.


I may as well add that the only reason this superficial pseudo-artist has become so celebrated is that he possesses a formidable skill at staging visual scenes in comics narrative. For elitists who have been brought up to venerate Alfred Hitchcock's mastery of cinematic storytelling, Clowes offers the closest parallel within the medium of comic books. But in his chosen material Clowes resembles Hitchcock less than Woody Allen at his most insular and indulgent-- making him the perfect choice for the face of elitist comics-art.

ADDENDUM: I may as well add that Clowes' entire orientation, here and elsewhere, depends upon the process of "overthinking the overthought," as I explained here-- to the extent that his ironic renditions misrepresent even the simple narratives of commerical comics. This stands in marked contrast to my "good myth" counter-example of Kurtzman's 'Superduperman," which seeks to read beneath the surface of a particular text and then critique it-- but in an imaginative way, rather than in a manner designed to please dull-witted elitists.

THE DOMAIN GAME PT. 1

DOMAIN—“the territory over which dominion is exerted; hence, sphere of influence, hence, sphere of action, thought, influence, etc.”—secondary definition from Webster’s College Dictionary.

 In my father's house there are many mansions.—John 14.2, King James Version.

In this essay I specified my use of the term “domains” as my concrete approximation for such abstractions as my “three phenomenalities.” I may not have been clear in stating that the term could be equally efficacious for most, if not all, of the various dualities, trinities, and quaternities I’ve explored on this blog, which is part of the subject of this post.

Since I was focused only on the visual applications of the word, I didn’t give much thought as to its etymology. But the above definition indicates, even to a non-etymologist like myself, that the root-concept connoted not just places where people might live—not just “domain,” but also “domicile”—but also where certain persons, particularly the lord of the domain, can exert “dominion,” or even “dominance.” A close reading of certain of my blog-posts—particularly DOMINANCE, SUBMISSION and JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY—should make clear that from the blog’s inception I’ve been engaged in sussing out, largely with relation to literature, what principles in literary works have “dominance” over other principles, whether those principles function *in posse * or *in esse. *

This dominance-identification does not serve the same purpose in the hands of a pluralist critic as in those of an elitist one. Though not all elitists venerate the same literary principles, they subscribe to the same agenda: to demonstrate that some set of principles are inherently “better” than any others. In each of their respective domains, there can only be one lord, one ruling set of principles, one mansion— and when they find some work that celebrates that lord, they use it to perform a “superiority dance” over their rivals, A recent example can be found in this idiotic JOURNAL essay, whose author's purpose is not just to extol the supposed virtues of Dan Clowes, but also Clowes' idea of:a “reality principle” that supersedes the “pleasure principle” of superhero fight-scenes.

This attitude stands in contrast to that of the pluralist, who dwells in a house of many mansions. In such a dwelling, every mansion has its own ruler, or ruling principle if one likes. Yet, perversely enough, the walls of the mansions are as permeable as the walls of living cells, so that influences from other mansions are continually “crossing over” to their own sphere of influence to others. That’s why, for instance, it’s not impossible to find valid aspects of “reality thinking” within works of a metaphenomenal nature—but that does not mean that the realistic content determines everything about the fantastic content.

More on these matters in Part 2.

LET FREEDOM RIDE PT. 3

Are men free to choose this or that form of society? By no means.-- Marx and Engels.

Almost a full year ago I noted the following quote as potentially useful for "analyzing the concept of freedom:"

"The subject's fundamental nature is to overturn all external constraints, and then to realize that this is a futile and irrational activity."-- HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT: AN INTRODUCTION, Larry Krasnoff, p. 65.

 I find Hegel so very nearly unreadable that I cannot say whether or not Larry Krasnoff's interpretation of Hegel is accurate or not.  But even if it is not, Hegel may be the philosopher's "Rorschach Test," in which "the left" and "the right" can read whatever they want.  In THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, Frank Fukuyama simply stated that, in following Alexandre Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel, he might not be accurate to Hegel in every regard, but he was at least accurate in following a construct he called "Kojeve-Hegel." 

Off the top of my head, I would say that Krasnoff's summation of Hegel sounds overly pessimistic as to the futility of the subject's "overturning all external constraints."  However, even if Krasnoff is not accurate to Hegel, his view is tenable, and is somewhat mirrored by a similar statement by Leslie Fiedler.  I have not been able to locate the precise quote, but the sense of it is that at all times the human spirit will seek to overturn every form of "law" that human culture can devise, no matter how well conceived that law may be.

Certainly the man most associated with overturning Hegel, Karl Marx, did not subscribe to Krasnoff's pessimism.  For the founder of economic determinism, the logic of societal evolution would eventuate in a society of equals.  I doubt that Marx believed that this society would be immune to rebellion by those who disagreed with its parameters.  But he certainly did not believe that their ability to rebel was a key aspect of the human will, for human beings did not possess "free will" as such. 

Krasnoff and Fiedler, albeit in very different ways, advocate a form of agency in the human subject; an ability to choose, even when one makes the wrong choice in a given situation.  For Marx the wrong choice no more connotes freedom than the right choice, but the right choice is validated by the impersonal forces of economics and history.

Literary elitism, as I've observed before, depends on a similar view.  We may never be truly free, but those who know that they are not free have reached a superior level of cognition to those who are unaware of the fact.  In canonical literature one sees this dichotomy in a work like Nathaniel West's 1939 DAY OF THE LOCUST, where protagonist Tod Hackett, no matter how tormented by his self-awareness, is esteemed above the rioting crowds of the dream-hungry mob.  In artcomics we see it as the distinctions Daniel Clowes makes in GHOST WORLD between Rebecca, who eventually becomes part of the unthinking mob, and Enid, who retains her alienation from culture.

In Part 4 I will address pluralism's vision of freedom.

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE, AND MAYBE THE NEGATIVE TOO

Toward the end of old PU, FJ gives readers a lengthy quote from Paul Ricoeur, of which I'll copy only the essential bits:

"At one pole, hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message... according to the other pole, it is understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion... Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen..."

In the next paragraph Jameson cavils at the religious rhetoric of Ricoeur (which I've left out, and which gives me some problems as well, though they're not the same as Jameson's). Jameson asserts that because Ricoeur's "conception of 'positive' meaning" is "modeled on the act of communication between individual subjects," it's useless to the anti-individualistic Political Unconscious except as a rough model from which to conceive some sort of "positive hermeneutic" that *does* fall in line with Marxist dialectic (which conception Jameson doesn't pull off, IMO).

Not surprisingly, all this talk about positive and negative hermeneutics (last mention for that fifty-dollar word) brings to mind what I quoted from David Sandner here, on the different perspectives of fantasy-world creation as practiced by Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien. Sandner called these artistic approaches "emptiness" and "fullness" respectively, but he could just as well have spoken of "absence" and "presence" as Jameson does in his critique of Frye.

Archaic myth, even more than literature, concerns the presence of the phenomena early man witnessed, as well as accounting for the absence of things early man could only imagine (a time when mankind was not subject to death, for example). The former schema may well be seen as a "positive" conception of phenomena-- "this river is here because God X did thus and so"-- while the latter schema is negative in its structure; "man is no longer immortal because God X didn't do what he was supposed to do." Literature doesn't approach questions of presence and absence in the same fashion as myth does, but the Sandner example suggests considerable overlap between the two forms.

Underlying both of these schemas are emotional *dynamizations.* Human beings are perhaps just as equally dynamized by breaking things down as by building them up: of showing the will to suspect as much (or more) than the will to listen. I hinted at the dichotomy here:

"...if one looks one can find both tendencies in the works of both authors, as I'm sure Sandner knew. I think Sandner's correct in seeing that both authors tended to dwell on one tendency more than the other, and it may be that much of what any reader favors tends more toward one tendency than the other-- be it the Beatles vs. the Stones or (to name a personal preference) the Hernandez Brothers vs. Daniel Clowes."

To illustrate how these distinct dynamizations play out with comics-authors as distinct in their ways as were Carroll and Tolkien, here's how Daniel Clowes views the topic of nostalgia in this 1999 interview with the online magazine HERMENAUT:

'Actually, although I think about stuff from my own childhood a lot, things I haven't seen in years, all I have to do is see the thing once and I'm cured of it. I've recently bought video tapes of cartoons I hadn't seen since I was four or five years old, and I'm enthralled by them exactly one time, by this feeling of "Wow, this is what I was so interested in?" My memory had turned them into something much more fascinating than they actually were.'

The dynamization here, of being "cured" of a nostalgic impulse, falls in line with the schema suggesting absence: the remembered thing is shown to be emptier than one thought, and it may be that there is a certain dynamization gleaned from this "is that all there is" reaction.

Contrast this to a nostalgic reverie from the three Brothers Hernandez v.2, #10 (2004), wherein Jaime, Mario and Gilbert all celebrate the fullness of their recollections of the trash and treasures of their early comics-collecting days. Remarks include:

JAIME on ZAP COMICS 0: ""Crumb covered every form of comic storytelling in one issue."

GILBERT on Elias' BLACK CAT: "sexy superheroics from a student of the Caniff school."

MARIO on LOIS LANE #48: "A book-length masterpiece."

Plainly, whatever flaws the Hernandezes (probably) see in these mementoes of their childhoods, the works don't lose the dynamizing qualities they formerly possessed, as Clowes' mementoes apparently do for him.

Neither POV is "wrong," naturally. Tastes are what they are, and as the Ricoeur quote asserts, human beings do need both mental approaches at varying times in both life and literary criticism.

The eternal problem, of course, is knowing--

Which times are the right times for suspicion--

And which are the right ones for listening.