AN URSULINE ELITIST

Years ago, during one of my many forum-arguments, I made some comments about the elitist mentality, and an opponent demurred at the use of the term, claiming that the word I ought to have used was “snob.” I countered by saying the word “snob” was too imprecise. After all, though snobbery is more often associated with elitism than with its conceptual opposite “populism,” I’ve encountered my share of “populist snobs,” by which I mean persons who are validated only by their association with works that have proven themselves popular in the marketplace.

“Elite” stems from a Latin word meaning “choice,” the usual connotations being that to be of “the elite” is either that one is “chosen,” or that one has such developed good taste that he/she can make better choices about what is good than can the average consumer.

Many of the essays in Ursula LeGuin's LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT are full of fulminations against hackwork in many genres, though she seems to have taken particular pleasure in assailing the then-popular sword-ands-sorcery genre. Yet, unlike many elitists of her time, she also takes aim at authors whom she considers “earnest snobs,” which would seem to indicate that LeGuin did not consider herself guilty of snobbery.

Who were these “earnest snobs?” LeGuin never specifies, either in the essay where the phrase occurs, the aforementioned “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction,” or in any other part of LOTN. In "Archetypes," LeGuin responds to the question of whether science fiction can be a “modern mythology,” and her response is framed in terms that are, if not snobbish, are certainly elitist. After defining all the tropes in science fiction that she doesn’t like as “Submyths,” she resolutely excludes all of them from even deserving to be called science fiction:

The artist who deliberately submits his work to [the Submyths] has forfeited the right to call his work science fiction; he’s just a popcultist cashing in.

In other words, to submit to the Submyths is the modern equivalent of prostrating oneself to the modern devil known as Commercial Hackery. Thus, by a rather accomplished sleight-of-hand, LeGuin affirms the idea of calling science fiction “modern mythology,” but only if it fits her elitist vision of the way true art works. 

However, at the time LeGuin wrote this essay, there were stirrings of pluralism even within intellectual circles, in which some artists and critics asserted that even popular art contained “myths” worth studying. LeGuin rejected this viewpoint by claiming that such persons were not aware of the true breadth and depth of mythic meaning: “they mistake symbol (living meaning} for allegory (dead equivalence). So they use mythology in an arrogant fashion, rationalizing it, condescending to it.”

To be sure, it’s hard to keep track of what “they” LeGuin refers to, since in the previous paragraph she starts talking about would-be writers learning the wrong lessons from uninspired academics. Her basic point is certainly undeniable: writers and critics who over-rationalize myth do exist. However, LeGuin weakens her case by conveniently not naming any of these offenders against true myth, and so these unnamed academics are treated the same as the nameless hacks: infidels who whore after the wrong gods.

The closest she comes to naming an offender of sorts, at least in the “Archetypes” essay, comes toward the end, when she proposes  this odd equnivalence:

There are never very many artists around. No doubt we’ll continue most of the time to get rewarmed leftovers from Babylon and Northrop Frye served up by earnest snobs, and hordes of brawny Gerbilmen ground out by hacks.

The sudden and unjustified mention of Frye in this context raises some interesting flags. It’s true that Frye’s fame had endured for the past twenty years, since he published 1955’s ANATOMY OF CRITICISM. But though he had a degree of influence in academia, I find it very hard to believe that any “earnest snobs” sought to find rationalizations of mythology in the ANATOMY, or in any other Frye work. Frye was at heart a pluralist, able to appreciate many different genres (certainly more than LeGuin), and he even gives SF an approving nod once or twice in the ANATOMY. It’s true that LeGuin doesn’t call Frye an “earnest snob,” but her loose association implies that there’s something in his work that would appeal to rationalizers. Or—is it just that Frye doesn’t insist on the type of high-toned myth that LeGuin prefers?

This hypothesis finds confirmation in one other LOTN essay, “Escape Routes.”  Prior to the essay proper, LeGuin identifies the piece as “an amalgamation and summation of several talks” that she gave to “teachers of SF.” In keeping with its name, “Routes” goes in more than one direction, lacking the focus of LeGuin’s more organized essays. But only one passage concerns me here: her slam, again unjustified, at another critic known for defending popular culture.

…outside the [SF] ghetto, there are critics who like to stand above SF, looking down upon it, and therefore want it to be junky, popcult, contemptible… and it’s one of the many games Leslie Fiedler plays.

As with Frye, there’s no telling what critical crime LeGuin thinks Fiedler committed, nor any attempt to clarify what he said or why it affronted the author. As I’ve read most of Fiedler’s writings, I would say that any “contempt” she thought she perceived existed in LeGuin’s own imagination. Fiedler was as much a pluralist as Frye, even though the two critics followed extremely divergent methodologies, and Fiedler devoted far more attention than did Frye to defending popular culture. That said, I don’t see in Fielder any of the “ha, ha, this is so bad it’s good” attitude that one can find, for instance, in Jules Feiffer. Fiedler is usually careful to map out the intellectual qualities that distinguish canonical “art” from pop art—but apparently, that wasn’t enough for LeGuin.

In the “Archetypes” essay, LeGuin accuses the rationalizers of myth as “arrogant.” The real truth of the matter, though, may be that LeGuin didn’t like Fiedler or Frye because, by offering even mild apologias for popular fiction, they didn’t validate her screeds against what she deemed as “bad art.” Thus she comes across as being not as a wise soul who wanted the best in art and literature, but as an arrogant elitist snob able to appreciate myths only if they shared her own high-toned themes.

WHEN GARY MET FEIFFER

Although in the preceding essay I pronounced Jules Feiffer the first pluralist comics-critic by virtue of his remarks in THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES, I also critiqued him for being overly dependent upon the crude hermeneutic tools of Sigmund Freud. But perhaps his greatest fault is this:

Arch-elitist Gary Groth liked his work.

Therefore, how good could it be?

I'm being somewhat facetious here, but not entirely. Marxist critics are well acquainted with the process by which a hypothetical "dominant" can suborn and adapt elements of revolutionary concepts and feed them back to the proletariat as a means of controlling the masses. For example, if the hippie subculture of the 1960s attempts to rebel against The Man, The Man gets his TV station to put out THE MOD SQUAD.

Of course, Marxist rhetoriticians took hold of this same process of deliberate misprision and used it for their own purposes. Thus, even though Feiffer's project is to invalidate the elitism of Frederic Wertham (not that he Feiffer calls it that), Gary Groth's 2002 introduction to Fantagraphics' reprint of TGCBH ignores this and uses Feiffer's nostalgic reminiscences as a club for attacking a different species of pluralists.

"...in 1965 no one wrote about comic books, much less superhero comics. Today our budding academicians subject superheroes to Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridaean philosophical speculation. Thankfully, Feiffer knew better than to apply ponderous theoretical models to the superhero comics he enjoyed in his youth... And when he theorizes, when he describes the anti-social virtues of junk, for instance, it's eminently rooted in human experience-- his experience."

I'm not quite sure why Groth would Feiffer say "knew better" than to apply ponderous theories to superhero comics: if no one was doing it, why would one "know better" than to do what no one else was doing? But Groth's wrong to say that there were no "ponderous theories" before the academicians. I don't know precisely by what logic Groth disincluded both Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman, both of whose works I'm sure Groth knew about in 2002, and whose theories (which *I* would certainly deem "ponderous") had not by any stretch been utterly forgotten in '65. I tend to think that the real reason that Groth leaves out reference to either writer-- one of whom, Wertham, was specifically refuted in TGCBH-- was because he felt far more threatenened by modern academicians than by the now-mostly-defunct projects of Wertham and Legman.

I've seen and heard my share of bad theorizing about comic books, superhero and otherwise. But I suspect Groth's real problem with them pointy-headed academicians is that their analyses, good or bad, might be seen as validation of junky comics.

That's why, in my previous essay, I find fault with Feiffer's unwillingness to analyze superhero comics in much depth. Once Feiffer has defined said junk-comics as being totally defined by the "pleasure principle," he doesn't devote any further thought to what they are or what makes them appealing. That's somewhat excuseable in Feiffer, whose only project in TGCBH is to write an apologia for his nostalgia. But Groth has never had Feiffer's interest in theorizing about the "anti-social virtues of junk," and has generally spoken of the comic-related passions of his youth with intellectual disdain. That's his privilege, but the wise reader should be aware of Groth's position as an "advocacy" (his term) critic, and how deftly he tries to turn Feiffer's somewhat-simplistic but inescapably pluralist theory into Yet Another Defense for (wait for it)...

BLOODY COMIC BOOK ELITISMMMMMMM!

FINE-TUNING FEIFFER

"The strawberry grows underneath the nettle

And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best

Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality"--

HENRY V, Act 1, Sc. 1, lines 60-62.

The churchman Ely makes the above statement as explanation to his fellows (as well as to the play's audience) as to why newly-crowned King Henry V has transformed himself from a royal reprobate, given to hanging out with lowlifes ("fruit of baser quality"),into a wise and "wholesome" ruler of his people. We do not know if Shakespeare believed this sentiment about the felicitous association between what I'll call "the base" and "the noble;" he may have merely thought it an appropriate allusion to come from the mouth of a learned pedant. In any case the Bard of Avon reverses the horticultural metaphor employed much later by Frederic Wertham at the start of SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, where a well-protected child is made analogous to a well-kept (if overly antiseptic) garden. Shakespeare doesn't tell why nobility might benefit from contact with "baser quality," for the metaphor isn't pursed in the play, but it seems a rough evocation of the idea of "hybrid vigor," even though said vigor is achieved through sheer propinquity rather than some more mundane interaction.

A parallel to this notion of felicitous interactions between noble and base-- albeit one focused entirely on literature-- can be seen in GATE OF THE GODS 1, wherein I quote Northrop Frye's early elitist-sounding pronouncement on the "babbling chaos" of popular fiction, which he viewed as worthless in itself though it did sometimes give rise to the orderly arrangements of Great Art. BREAKING OPEN MOULDY TALES notes how in later years Frye refined this early position into a more pluralist stance that recognized the validity of conventionalized fictions for their own sake, rather than validating them in terms of some superior art to which they contributed.

Though I'm a pluralist, I confess that a part of me does find some appeal in the image of popular fiction as a reservoir of pure expressive power from which Great Art draws a "vigor" that it loses when it becomes too stuffed with pretentious maunderings. Nevertheless, I do have to reject this concept as another form of elitism, one which I do find loosely suggested in Jules Feiffer's GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES essay (yes, I'm getting to him).

At present, I recognize two forms of elitism: "content-centered elitism" and "style-centered elitism."

"Content elitism" takes the view that popular art's base content-- usually appeals to kinetic effects like sex and violence, though not only those-- utterly distances it from Great Art. This position has been asserted in one context or another not only by Frederic Wertham but also by moderns like Gary Groth and Dirk Deppey. Priorities, of course, differ according to period and culture. Wertham objected to letting children be exposed to bad popular art, but was allegedly willing to allow what he termed "crime comics" to be perused by juveniles over 15. Dirk Deppey takes a roughly opposite tack: the superhero comic is inherently juvenile and so cannot bear the weight of any attempts to render it in a more "mature" mode, and fans who stick with the genre are merely revealing their own inherent childishness. Deppey is less militant than Wertham, but in essence their approaches take the same "let's consign this stuff to the outer darkness" attitude.

"Style elitism" is closer to Northrop Frye's early elitist phase. This position argues that popular fiction has no value in itself, but that it can formulate crude ideas that real artists can reformulate (or even just steal), yet transform through attention to literary style and theme. Thus a "Race Williams" detective tale by Carroll John Daly is of no value in itself, but a Dashiell Hammett detective story transforms the same basic material into something finer and more meritorious. In SPIRIT A LA MODE I noted how Mickey Spillane's trashy detective novel KISS ME DEADLY was rendered into a film by Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezerides, which film was then celebrated by assorted critics as superior to the original novel. I argued that both forms were good for the type of work each was, but two of my respondents argued the position of the "style elitist:" that KMD was not a worthwhile work in itself but that Mickey Spillane was "lucky" to have the privilege of seeing his tough action-opus travestied and converted into a tony satire.

Jules Feiffer was, as I've said earlier, far more in line with pluralist rather than elitist thought by virtue of his arguing that the popular works of the comics-medium-- which he labeled as "junk"-- had its own valid purpose within human culture. He certainly did not argue that it had no relevance, as does the "content elitist," for he asserted that its very value was being able to "say or do anything" and to be "the least middle-class of all the mass media." And he did not argue that greater works were spawned thanks to great artists having crummy pop art to use as a chaotic reservor of ideas from which to swipe and/or reformulate.



Where Feiffer's pluralism needs some fine-tuning, though, is that he subscribed a little too uncritically to the Freudian "pleasure principle/reality principle" dichotomy. I've used said dichotomy myself here and there for the purposes of broad illustration, though I'd disagree in more specific terms as to how Freud characterizes both "pleasure" and "reality." In Feiffer's characterization, though, "junk comics" serve the sole purpose of being a retreat from pressures and responsibilities for most readers, particularly juveniles: "a place to hide where he cannot be got at by grownups." Because Feiffer's only subject is the comic books of his childhood, he doesn't address other questions about those "mass media" not solely directed at children. It should be evident that when Mickey Spillane (a onetime comics writer) broke into the adult market with KISS ME DEADLY, he was offering adults a similar retreat from pressures and responsibilities.



But is "escape" all there is to "the pleasure principle?" As one influenced more by Jung than by Freud, I have to take a different position, albeit one that subsumes aspects of Feiffer's Freudian stance.



In my earliest piece on Feiffer I quoted his definition of "junk" as being "there to entertain on the basest, most compromised of levels." I do not differ with Feiffer on this. Popular art is what Joyce calls "improper art" because it functions only the kinetic level, evoking responses of pure attraction or repulsion (even if the two are sometimes mixed, a matter Joyce didn't explore).



However, I disagree with Feiffer's next sentence, which I neglected to quote earlier:


"[Junk] finds the lowest fantasmal common denominator and proceeds from there."


"Fantasmal" is an odd choice of words, particularly in that it's not a much-used word, and its context isn't clear in HEROES. The word derives from "phantasm," meaning a ghost or spectre, but the dominant definitions of "phantasmal" stress that it means "delusory" or "illusive."

Did Feiffer mean that of all the escapist power-fantasies one might have, those presented by the likes of Superman and Batman are the closest to this "lowest common denominator" taking in, one presumes, everything from Nick Carter (whom Feiffer does mention, if obliquely) to Mike Hammer (whom Feiffer doesn't reference). I suspect that was his meaning, but if so, that position flirts with the position of "style elitism." I enjoy, on a purely kinetic level, both Mike Hammer and his distant ancestors (including not only Race Williams but also Siegel and Schuster's "Slam Bradley"). But I don't see Hammer as being less escapist/illusive than Slam Bradley. The only thing that seems to separate Mickey Spillane from Jerry Siegel is superior hardboiled style, although both men are a long way from being "up there" with Dashiell Hammett.

Interestingly, Wiktionary lists a tertiary definition for "phantasmal:" "expresses qualities of or produced from fantasy." This meaning was probably not on Feiffer's mind but it fits about as well as the "illusive" usage. But how would one judge whether or not one escapist concept was a better fantasy than another?


As noted earlier, I favor a Jungian approach to such matters over a Freudian one, but the precise system is not as important as asking the question, "By what method could one judge one fantasy as better than another?" It's a question that Jules Feiffer doesn't really answer even though he raises the topic of "low vs. high" in this indirect manner.


Is Mike Hammer a better fantasy than Slam Bradley, I ask? Probably.


Is Mike Hammer a better fantasy than Superman, Batman, or the Spirit?


Let's just say that even to try answering the question would require tools more finely-tuned than the blunt instruments Feiffer inherits from Big Sigmund Freud...

OUR BODIES, OUR NONBODIES PART 3

Before Jules Feiffer wrote THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES, American cultural criticism had seen (outside the ranks of comics fandom itself) a few minor pluralistic commentaries on this or that aspect of the comic-book medium. Usually such commentaries appeared within books that were primarily about comic strips, or, more rarely, as solo essays by critics like Robert Warshow, Marshall McLuhan and Leslie Fiedler. But Feiffer's HEROES was, as Gary Groth says in his introduction to the 2003 edition, "probably the first sustained essay on comic books of the '40s and '50s." In addition, it seems to have been the first organized theoretical challenge to Frederic Wertham's attack, which presupposed that "such trivia as comic books" played no more part in the formation of a healthy individual than an aphid played in the maintenance of a healthy garden.

In brief, Feiffer defends the social purpose of junk. which included most if not all comic books at the time: "Junk is there to entertain on the basest, most compromised of levels... Junk, like the drunk at the wedding, can get away with doing or saying anything because, by its very appearance, it is already in disgrace... Its values are the least middle-class of all the mass media. That's why it is needed so."

Insofar as Feiffer recognizes this "separate but equal" status of junk, I term him a "pluralist."

Which does not mean that I necessarily agree with everything he says, any more than I necessarily disagree with everything an elitist might say. But I do agree with Feiffer's methodology more than that of (obviously) Wertham, Gerson Legman or Gary Groth.

I noted *here* that Feiffer seems to have been among the first critics to start psychoanalyzing the triad of Superman, Clark Kent and Lois Lane, as in statements like this one from HEROES:


"Did Superman become Clark Kent in order to lead a normal life, have friends, be known as a nice guy, meet girls? Hardly. There's too much of the hair shirt in the role, too much devotion to the imprimatur of impotence-- an insight, perhaps, into the fantasy life of the Man of Steel. Superman as a secret masochist? Field for study there."

Of course Feiffer isn't entirely serious about this "insight," for by the next paragraph he's claiming that the real motivation for the "hair shirt" is a non-diegetic one, a play for reader identification:
"[Clark] is Superman's opinion of the rest of us, a pointed caricature of what we, the noncriminal element, were really like. His fake identity was our real one. That's why we loved him so."


Now, in calling attention to the "real," non-diegetic reasons as to why an author does whatever he does, Feiffer is participating in the hermeneutics of deceit, albeit in a much more genteel way than Frederic Wertham. Never mind what the text says: here's what it's *really* about. And it should be noted that most of Feiffer's works generally, as well as HEROES specifically, stand in the considerable shadow of Sigmund Freud, although I imagine that Feiffer, like Wertham, had many points of disagreement with the Father of Psychology. Feiffer was in essence a poet of anxiety, which put him in Freud's bailiwick right off. One can hardly imagine Feiffer staring into a Jungian mandala-painting in search of enlightenment. For Feiffer enlightenment comes from humor birthed by the irresolvable conflict of the pleasure principle and the reality principle-- which is apparent in his analysis of the "real" reason for Clark Kent's existence.

I don't think Feiffer would have been much of an ally for queer theory, however. He rejects (albeit lightly) Wertham's conjectures about the hidden meaning of the Batman-and-Robin relationship, satirically observing that most of BATMAN's young readers could also be seen as "more or less queer" just by virtue of hanging out together and playing contact sports. He does observe that in BATMAN, though, a "misanthropic maleness" parallel to what he finds in SUPERMAN:

"The ideal of masculine strength... was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls. Except to help them. And then get the hell out. Real rapport was not for women. It was for villains. That's why they got hit so hard."

A proponent of queer theory would presumably say, "Well, I got your 'real rapport' right here, and it's either suppressed gayness or gay-curiosity." Given Feiffer's refutation of Wertham, I don't think he'd buy into that, though by itself the quote suggests that he was aware of other writers (possibly Leslie Fiedler) who had asserted that "misanthropic maleness" was, if not actually homosexual in nature, at least skewed to the "homosocial:" to relations between men that excluded the world of women and domesticity. But it should be noted that this kind of Fiedlerian homosociality is no more open to homosexual than to heterosexual activity: it depends on what HOUSE OF SIN's A. Sherman Barros correctly called an "ascetic" attitude. In other words, once you've got Bruce and Dick *really* sharing a bed with all that entails, then what you've got is just another bloody domestic relationship-- which is in essence the same kind of restrictive "marriage" that makes men (and some women) go out fighting crime in the first place.

Similarly, I assume that when Feiffer says, "That's why [the villains] got hit so hard," he's not seriously advocating that every black eye and busted jaw is a love-note from Hero to Villain. To be sure, there's a sort of passion present in the eyes of the protagonist as he (or she) clobbers an opponent, and I assume that it's there because the same passion for vengeance is present in the eyes of the readers. But I take it to be a passion for a form of dynamization that may be more fundamental than Eros: the passion to win. Francis Fukuyama calls it *megalothymia* and Jerry Seinfeld calls it "getting [the upper] hand," but it may have a lot more to do with what makes a superhero tick than any number of Freudian readings.