Explore Madusha Gunarathne's board 'H E R G E| T I N T I N' on Pinterest.| See more. Rather funny, this being the first pin on my 'Comics' board!
Info: Release Date: 21 December 2011 Genre: Animation Action Adventure Stars: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis and Daniel Craig Quality: Bluray and DVDrip Subtitle: Sinopsis: Having bought a model ship,the Unicorn,for a pound off a market stall Tintin is initially puzzled that the sinister Mr. Sakharine should be so eager to buy it from him,resorting to murder and kidnapping Tintin – accompanied by his marvellous dog Snowy – to join him and his gang as they sail to Morocco on an old cargo ship. Sakharine has bribed the crew to revolt against the ship’s master,drunken Captain Haddock,but Tintin,Snowy and Haddock escape,arriving in Morocco at the court of a sheikh,who also has a model of the Unicorn.
Haddock tells Tintin that over three hundred years earlier his ancestor Sir Francis Haddock was forced to scuttle the original Unicorn when attacked by a piratical forebear of Sakharine but he managed to save his treasure and provide clue.
“What unites Noah Berlatsky, Ng Suat Tong and Caroline Small is that they have a very narrow minded view of criticism. Criticism, they think, is only the type of writing they do. ” ButSuat does actually do writing very much like that in the book. He does historical overviews and close readings for the most part. And we all participate in comments threads! (Though not on Amazon, so perhaps that disqualifies us.) I guess it’s supposed to be some sort of critical point to compare the writers in BACC to James Baldwin and Shaw and Kaelbut, I mean, are you serious? Those writers are strongly polemical and determined to relate art to social and political issues.
Where is that kind of writing in BACC, Jeet? Sarah Boxer’s Herriman essay talks about race, but hardly with the polemical or personal edge of Baldwin. Donald Phelps’ airy treatment of Ditko’s Mr. A may be much praised by some, but it hardly wrestles with the political issues involved in a way that would surely be at the heart of a Shaw review. Fiore’s Sept.
11 piece is more in line with Shaw’s work perhaps, but it’s definitely the exception in the book.) And Kael, who is not a favorite of mine, was nonetheless famous for her counterintuitive assessments. Is there an essay here that does the equivalent of praising the Exorcist 2? The only way that most of the writers in BACC can be said to be working in the same tradition as Baldwin, Shaw, and Kael is that they all write in prose.
I should say that I admire your chutzpah in accusing me of self-promotion and then spending a significant portion of your short response singing the praises of your own anthology. Good show, sir. Oh, and your erstwhile pedantry is, as always, appreciated — especially when it serves as an excuse for you to unleash some grunting and hooting. Hi Jeet — I’m glad my “habit of conflating intellectual writing with academic writing” disconcerts you. I think a little disconcernment could go a long way. But you should read the comments on my essay in this roundtable (and Noah’s) because they dig into this issue vis-a-vis the New Wave cinema a little bit and I think that might make it clearer for you: it’s not “academic” writing that I want.
It’s for critics to bring their A-game to the table with regards to ideas. You mentioned critics like Kael and Baldwin but you did not talk about Diana and Lionel Trilling or the Cahiers Group. It is not my intent to exclude writing like Kael’s or Baldwin’s from the class of “criticism” (I didn’t see a whole lot of that kind of writing in the book) but I think it’s easy to defend the argument that Lionel Trilling was “more” of an intellectual than Pauline Kael.
Do you disagree? “Degrees of intellectualism” aside: the critics you cite all were part of artistic and critical communities that made a much less sharp distinction than you do between academic and non-academic “intellectualism.” That distinction contributes to the general lack of big ideas in comics criticism, and the fact that there is a separate book of academic comics criticism merely is an example of the problem, not a solution to it. What you see as “conflation” on my part is intended to push back against the strict demarcation of the two and the damage it does to the conversation overall: I’ll work harder to make that clearer in future writing. To state it baldly since you didn’t get it: my issue is not that criticism is not written like academic writing. That would be a mistake of audience, as Ken Parille pointed out yesterday.
My issue is that what passes for criticism now is not particularly intellectually challenging or even stimulating, with the most challenging work ghettoized into the academy, wrapped in jargon, and often locked behind paywalls (or targeted anthologies), while the game of public criticism is marketing and education. A more determinedly pro-intellectual perspective is a good corrective to all of that. Making excuses for how other kinds of “intellectualism” are good enough is a cop out. For the record, if you actually made critiques of academic thoughts or writing, I’d probably agree with you.
I’d welcome those critiques from people like you who are in the academy and spend time writing for the public as well — I think the academy needs to hear them. I did, after all, leave the academy to no small extent because I so strongly object to its overprofessionalization and the lack of rewards for meaningful public engagement through any other mechanism but pedagogy.
But you and many others who share your position generally don’t critique the academy in your writing; you just reject it (at least rhetorically, since you work as academics in other contexts). You dismiss it in blunt, generalized statements that show more bias against the idea of the academy than they do genuine engagement and critique with the ideas the academy brings to the table. What this translates to is a stratification of ideas: academics have access, locked behind paywalls and jargon, to the most ambitious big-ticket ideas, while non-academics — no matter how bright — get dumbed-down journalism for a “mass” audience that is merely one step above entertainment. The academic criticism gets more oblique and less relevant as a result, and non-academic criticism gets dumber and dumber. That’s either letting the market dictate the level of ideas you are willing to put into public discourse, or it’s the worst kind of elitism. I’m more than happy to go on record as objecting to both. Kent’s right that I did make a bunch of blunt, generalized statements.
Part of it is responding in kind, but I’m willing to make them more targeted for anybody who actually wants to talk about it. Jeet just usually doesn’t so there’s not much point.
At the rate we’re going, he and I will likely still be hurling blunt, generalized statements into each others’ earhorns in the Shady Panels Home for Moribund Comics Critics 50 years from now. Kent, you might want to check out my related conversations in comments on other posts, in particular the ones with Ken Parille. Or, as Noah says, you could make your point here and I’ll keep an eye out.
Hey Jeet, Read the book a month ago and really enjoyed it. I thought it could have used a bit more swearing but that’s just me. Ben and all involved delivered the goods. There was even a joke that I want to have printed on t-shirts and hand out to fellow pros: “If cartoonists are the new literati, what must their critics look like?” I would have asked “what the fuck do their critics look like” but I am no Drew Friedman. It is a book I plan on rereading many times in my life. Hell, it is already on my coffee table. For obvious reasons (see my most recent tcj post) I haven’t seen the BACC book, and can’t really offer an opinion about it.
Gary promised me a free copy (in exchange for transcribing the Lethem-Clowes exchange) but it hadn’t arrived by the time I left the country. He may have forgotten his promise. Here are a few phrases from Caro’s piece that struck me as a bit sweeping – “people like you who are in the academy and spend time writing for the public as well” is there anyone in comics criticism who has Jeet’s kind of public intellectual profile?
Kent: I’ll try to answer your questions. is there anyone in comics criticism who has Jeet’s kind of public intellectual profile? In other words, there are no “people like you” when it comes to Jeet I’ve never heard anybody mention Jeet outside of the comics world, so he has no “public intellectual” profile to me. A public intellectual to me is someone like Umberto Eco. The comics critics I had heard of from general sources prior to writing for HU were Groth, Groensteen, Bart Beaty (entirely because he translated Groensteen) and Doug Wolk.
I did not mean that statement necessarily to be limited to people in comics, however; I’d welcome those critiques from academics who do public writing in any discipline. I am, however, primarily interested in an familiar with humanities academia as it is most relevant for me and my interests. If things are different in the social sciences I’m happy to hear it. “you and many others who share your position generally don’t critique the academy in your writing; you just reject it (at least rhetorically, since you work as academics in other contexts” who are these “many others”? Show me one example of Jeet’s work as an academic that isn’t also written for a broader audience I’m not sure what Jeet’s academic work has to do with that point The “many others” refers to the ongoing debate Jeet and Noah and I have been having about this anti-academy business, starting with his claim that you can learn more from listening to Art Spiegelman talk than reading an entire shelf of academic books.
It’s had more words than I’m sure you care to read spilled over it, none of which as yet constitute an actual critique of any actual academic writing or thought. What are the “ideas that the academy brings to the table” anyway?
What does “the academy” mean in this context? Are there particular thinkers, schools of thought, paradigms or whatever that Caro has in mind? My own discipline, political science, sure doesn’t bring a lot to this table, even though the comics-politics nexus is full of juicy possibilities. Well, there are at least a half dozen academic journals focusing on comics in English alone, and the academics who write in them have perspectives that they bring to the table from a wide range of disciplines. That’s not a “generalization;” it’s just an equivalency. I didn’t specify them because they’re all equally relevant since my point was that there had been no critiques of any of them despite the repeated refrain that they don’t have much to offer. But to answer more generally: regardless of what people have already done although there’s a good bit being done, any interpretive structure from literature or art history could be relevant to comics in the hands of the right critic, as well as anything from Continental Philosophy since the 1920s at the latest.
“he tried to friend me on Facebook. We’ve never met (as far as I’m aware), and we certainly aren’t friends. What the hell was he thinking??” Um I was thinking that you knew that facebook “friends” aren’t actually real life friends? I don’t bear you any animosity; I’m interested in comics criticism, you write comics criticism; I figured you might be doing updates about things I’d be interested in. I didn’t realize you were pursuing the he-didn’t-like-something-I-wrote-so-I-must-hate-him-forever model of interpersonal interaction. But that’s cool. Your facebook page should be a genuine expression of who you are, and don’t ever let anyone tell you different.
“people like you who are in the academy and spend time writing for the public as well” is there anyone in comics criticism who has Jeet’s kind of public intellectual profile? In other words, there are no “people like you” when it comes to Jeet” I’m sure Jeet is as individual as a snowflake, but nevertheless, there are in fact a number of people like him in the sense that Caro is referring to here, which is to say, they are in the academy and write for the public as well. “my own discipline, political science, sure doesn’t bring a lot to this table, even though the comics-politics nexus is full of juicy possibilities.” I’m not sure I understand this. You feel that political science has nothing to offer comics criticism, is that right?
There are no theories that are transferable? Do you mean that nobody has made those connections, or that they actually can’t be made? If it’s the first, it seems like the person to make them would be youand if it’s the second, I guess I just find it a little hard to believe. There are no insights from your discipline that would illuminate, say, Joe Sacco’s work? Or Art Spiegleman’s or Satrapi’s or any number of other explicitly politically engaged cartoonists?
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Is your work just really quantitative or something? Does political science not really think about Marx or other political theorists any more? I use academic theories or ideas for criticism with some frequency. I use gender theory and queer theory a good bit; I’ve used ideas from philosophy and theology I don’t know, it seems like there are a lot of possibilities.
Is there any point in my responding to these comments? Is this a debate worth having? Is anyone learning anything from these exchanges? What do others think? My impression is that whatever I write, NB and Caro will respond with more verbiage than I can possibly bring to the table. I will say one thing – Jeet is not a public intellectual in the US context, but in the Canadian context. He regularly appears on radio, television, and in newspapers and magazines.
Not so long ago, he debated David Frum on Israel/Palestine in the pages of a major daily. He has become a genuine public figure in Canada. Perhaps that strikes NB and Caro as funny, I dunno. And yes, since I brought up the facebook thing, I found it a bit stalker-y to trash someone in public and then try to friend them on facebook.
Not super-stalker-y, mind you. Just tone-deaf, like much of his cultural criticism.
@Caro: “I think it’s easy to defend the argument that Lionel Trilling was ‘more’ of an intellectual than Pauline Kael.” Um, no, actually I don’t agree with that. I’ve read a fair bit of both Kael and Trilling, and I have to say, Kael was a much more intelligent, writerly, flexible and responsive critic than Trilling was.
So I actually don’t understand why it should be taken for granted that Trilling was more “intellectual” than Kael. For me, the last word on Trilling was Roger Sale’s 1973 essay on Trilling, which can be found in Sale’s book “On Not Being Good Enough” (Oxford University Press, 1979). Thanks, Jeet. Hopefully more people than me will read it: the library had JSTOR so I fortunately got a copy direct from the Hudson Review. Having now read it though I’m a little unclear how it represents an argument that Trilling is anything other than a full-on intellectual.
Most of the criticisms seem to be criticisms of too much intellectualism, intellectualism to the point of academics, the sorts of things you’d write about any aging academic who got set in his ways and didn’t keep pace with the mood of the times. And Sale’s perspective is very clearly that of the late ’60s intellectuals, trying to incorporate the lessons of their historical moment into their critical practice. (There’s a wonderful documentary called “Arguing the World: the New York Intellectuals in their Own Words” that has a number of good interviews with ’60s intellectuals who were taught by the NYIs and moved in precisely the direction Sale takes to set themselves apart from them.) I think you could put the Partisan Review panel I cited in my original piece as a third point marking yet another shift in America’s intellectual climate. Let me posit that the range of intellectualism runs on a spectrum from non-intellectual divertissement through the most ambitious, purely intellectual thought-experiment academic projects, with Kael and Trilling both at a point in the general vicinity of the middle. I know you have trouble with a conflation of intellectualism and the academy, but it seems here like you’re implying that it’s possible to be “so academic that one is no longer intellectual.” I would say instead that the adjective “academic” can connote a kind of “extreme intellectualism” that at its most extreme has lost touch with other values, rather than being something separate, either opposed to or conflated with intellectualism.
It’s not Kael’s intellectualism that makes her brilliant – it’s her spirit. Trilling, having less spirit, relies more on his intellectualism. Part of Sale’s critique is that Trilling’s prose is his own worst enemy, but if that disqualifies one as an intellectual we’d surely lose Zizek and Eco and even much of Chomsky! It is an extremely difficult task to write complex ideas in good prose, so the more complex the ideas the more likely it is that the prose will go awry in places. It just happens: it’s not an excuse and I’m all for a hue and clamour for better writing, but being a less than perfect writer is not a sign that someone isn’t an intellectual.
I’d say the opposite: it’s often a sign that the idea was bigger than the grasp. The quality of the outcome does not always entirely correspond to the intensity or value of the effort. Another part of the critique is that he “relaxes just when he should have been more cautious and vigilent” — I can see a standard that says that if he were a perfect academic he would have been cautious and vigilent throughout the entirety of his sustained argument, but Kael certainly was rarely cautious and vigilent, so that can’t be the milestone you’re using for intellectualism. I see greater intellectualism in Trilling in the attempt to make a sustained argument about the role of sincerity and authenticity in the literary trajectory he examines: Kael simply didn’t set herself projects like that.
She made very few sustained arguments: her career can be viewed as a sustained argument, but she didn’t articulate sustained arguments often herself. Her lack of caution is part of her charm.
Sale’s essay seems to me to support the first half of a “thesis” that Trilling’s strengths and weaknesses are those of the intellectual/critic, whereas Kael’s strengths and weaknesses as those of the journalist/critic. I mean neither as an insult. Not being “flexible and responsive” pretty much is an intellectual shortcoming, in the same way that not being particularly dextrous with cerebral abstractions is a journalistic one. And today, in my opinion, the weakenesses of Trilling’s flavor of intellectualism have become more common in the academy and the weaknesses of Kael’s more common in journalism, while their greatest strengths have diminished in both. What this boils down to is that at this point I don’t think the Sale by itself is a stand-in for the argument you’re trying to make on behalf of Kael’s intellectualism relative to Trilling’s: can you say more? Caroline: “Part of Sale’s critique is that Trilling’s prose is his own worst enemy, but if that disqualifies one as an intellectual we’d surely lose Zizek and Eco and even much of Chomsky!” I’ve never read Zizek; as applied the the essays I’ve read by Eco I can’t agree, I’ve read close to everything Chomsky has ever written, and find remarkable clarity in the way he explains complex ideas. It has always been my assumption that Chomsky explains things so well because he is one of the few people who fully understands many of the complex political issues he deals with.
When I say Chomsky understands any of the various issues he will speak to I’m not speaking of his opinions, or conclusions, but rather his factual knowledge of the issue. This is even more apparent when seeing him debate or take questions. He knows his “opponents arguments better than they do.”.
Hi Pat — Zizek’s prose is really convoluted. And Chomsky’s prose seems to me to oversimplify ideas much of the time, to limit the scope of what he’s writing about so he can wrap his hands around it in his prose. Limiting the scope leaves some things begged, other things hanging. When he doesn’t do that, when he really reaches, sometimes it gets away from him: I’ll see if I can find some examples. That’s no real criticism of him, though; I think it happens to everybody. I like Eco so much, though, I’ll just concede that point to you. The fiction kind of embraces turgidity.
But Travels in Hyperreality is phenomenal. So yeah, he’s great. How ’bout Vidal and Mailer as examples? Okay, this is kind hard to articulate but here goes. At the heart of Sale’s critique of Trilling is the argument that Trilling doesn’t sufficiently engage with the writers he dealing with.
I think Sale is completely write about this. Kael, by contrast, always dealt carefully with the movies she wrote about, even (or especially) if they were Hollywood B-movies.
Whether you agree with her specific opinions or not, everywhere in Kael’s writing you get a sense of a mind that is engaged with the art she’s writing about, trying to make carefull observations about it. Trilling, by contrast, often glides over his subjects in an airy way. Given this difference, I get a lot more intellectual excitement from Kael’s writing than from Trilling’s writing.
Kael does really seem have been constantly alert to experience and art in way that Trilling rarely was. The fact that Kael wrote about popular movies and Trilling wrote about high culture isn’t, to me, relevant, since I’m not judging them by their subject matter but rather by the quality of mind they display in their essays.
Kael sparks me to think. Trilling sometimes does that too, but less often. His writing, as Sale says, is padded with excess verbage. Does that make sense. I agree with the point about Chomsky.
“I should add that perhaps a useful way to think about all this is not to ask who was more intellectual, Kael or Trilling? (Which seems too close to the question who is stronger, Superman or Thor?)” But the Superman/Thor analogy is wrong. Being stronger is better; being more intellectual isn’t necessarily better. Caro’s arguing that there’s a continuum and that the poles each have different strengths.
I think it’s an important distinction because then the question becomes not who is better to emulate, but rather what can be taken from each — or even, which might be better to emulate in a particular project or for particular reasons. “everywhere in Kael’s writing you get a sense of a mind that is engaged with the art she’s writing about, trying to make carefull observations about it. ” I don’t think that’s right — or at least that’s not the sense I get from her. As Caro noted, Kael isn’t especially careful.
She’s brilliant and vivid, but that’s not exactly the same thing. And she’s really polemical — as much about using the films to make particular (not systematic, but still) points as about making careful observations.
Your description sort of turns her into Ken Parille, Jeet (or at least the Ken Parille of the Clowes essay in BACC.) I actually much prefer that Clowes essay to anything I’ve read by Kael — but better or worse, they’re really different approaches to criticism. The complexity of political issues is in the details. Who are people involved, what is their long, and near term political history, what are the statistics. Chomsky knows not only who all the players are, but who their predecessors were, and who their current rivals are. One interesting thing Chomsky does is he almost always uses government documents for citation. Chomsky might mention in passing a perhaps inflated statistic, but will use the “official” numbers to build his argument.
It is true that Chomsky has a simple straightforward nexus. Chomsky approaches issues from a clear moral position. Anyone who has read him knows he is very consistent in his approach. He is primarily a critic of US foreign policy rather than being in either political camp. He would likely be one those people Robert Gates suggested should be “drug tested” because of their detachment from reality. Vidal is a fine writer.
His regal air of resigned detachment is almost reassuring, he’s to far removed to convey any genuine fear. I like his essays and will seek them out, mainly because I enjoy his writing. I read “The Executioner’s Song.” Is he a bourgeois version of Vidal? Or is his detachment more of the world weary Sam Spade variety he projected in “Tough Guys Don’t Dance?”. Jeet: sorry for taking so long to respond to you. The Sale essay is really good; I’ve read it a few more times. I see a few more things in his argument: it seems to me not that Trilling never sufficiently engages with the works at hand but that he is at his weakest when he glosses over texts in order to address general subjects that have little to do with the texts.
The point is not one of absolute evaluation but of distinction. Sale comments: if Trilling cannot settle subjects, be truly decisive with individual works, he can almost always be counted on to ask good questions, to open something up: the essays on Emma et al. give Trilling a subject where his penchant for generalizing is called for, and he is a careful and fine critic. Briefly: that’s a very good reading of Sale’s essay. I think you’re right that “centrality” is the key term in Sale’s essay.
What strikes me as absolutely right about Sale’s critique is the idea that Trilling is assuming that he’s speaking from a position of centrality and authority, but that this assumption is no longer warranted, since there is no longer any center. Cultural authority, even in Trilling’s lifetime, was becoming much more dispersed. So it’s more honest, and also more useful and fruitful, to speak as a quirky, individual voice, which is the way Kael spoke, rather than speaking from a lectern assuming that you and the audience share a common idea of what the great writers and great issues are.
Because Kael was aware that cultural authority had dispersed, her writing seems smarter, somehow, than Trilling, who seemed like he was trapped in a Matthew Arnold hierarchical view of culture that was going out of fashion even when Trilling was young. Intelligence means knowing what is going on around you. In that sense, Kael was a very, very intelligent writer, one of the smartest critics in any field that America has produced. By comparison, Trilling, for all his knowledge and despite the many fine essays he wrote, remains a less interesting and figure. As for who is writing comics criticism at the level of Roger Sale?
Perhaps no one, but there are some who come close. I’m thinking of Charles Hatfield (in his book on Alternative Comics and perhaps his much-anticipated Kirby book) as well as some of the essays in The Comics of Chris Ware book (I’m thinking of David M. Ball’s essay). I also think some of Gary Groth’s best essays, like the one on Eisner, or R. Fiore’s best essays, like his overview of Crumb’s career, show what comics criticism is capable of. Hi Jeet: I think it’s worth making a distinction between ideas and the voice that’s used to express them, as well as between intelligence and intellectualism.
If I said that Trilling was smarter than Kael I didn’t mean to: I don’t have any way of knowing that really and I definitely don’t see that in their work. “Intellectualism” is an approach to thought, not a measure of its quality. Let’s maybe leave Trilling out of the equation: Kael also doesn’t generally craft the type of essay that Sale wrote and called for either; she rarely “quotes” from the movies she’s writing about and her reviews are full of observations and history. But she does not get to the point — I’m sure intentionally, given that she is writing primarily reviews — where she’s presenting both a reading of the movie and some big thesis about the context, the way Sale did in his essay on Trilling.
Sale is more like Trilling than Kael: I called this “more intellectual” earlier and that still seems right to me, not more intelligent, but more intellectual. More concerned with big ideas, transferrable ideas, less concerned with readings and reviews. Not unconcerned but less concerned. In light of your post I feel like I should say I don’t think Sale is more academic than Kael. Trilling is more academic than Kael. But Sale really isn’t (at least in that essay): that’s an immensely readable essay from a periodical, not a “journal.” And yet it has a conceptual bite to it that Kael lacks: she bites, of course, but she bites in a very reactive, passionate way, not the “calm and measured” way that intellectuals tend to use. (Sale uses those words, I believe, to describe Trilling at his best.) This is the stratification I’m talking about: Charles Hatfield’s essays are not impenetrable piles of academic jargon.
The Craig Fischer essay that Noah linked to is also not “academic” in any perjorative or exclusionary sense. But those types of essays were not included in BACC, because there is a strong preference for a type of primarily “journalistic” writing, whether the models are Kael or the volumes Ben mentioned in his Comics Reporter interview, that rarely attempts, for example, to deploy a metaphor the way Sale used “centrality”, or to work out the trajectory of a concept like Trilling did for authenticity. That doesn’t make the works of cultural journalism that are included “bad criticism.” (They might or might not be, but not for that reason.) It makes the diversity of writing in BACC limited. I think that limitation has to do with the limited embrace of (non-academic) intellectualism among critics. Some critics embrace academia. Other critics embrace whatever we want to end up calling Kael: “intelligent journalism” maybe? But very few people work in a synthetic mode.
Picking Kael over Trilling in all instances and for all purposes is narrow; there are more ways to recognize Trilling’s limitations and avoid them than to create a class of “academics” that sweeps up everybody who won’t say that spirit matters more than ideas. We can debate the semantics, but the suspicion of academic writing tends to sweep up “academics” who do in fact write like “critics” and who are not guilty of the excesses of Trilling, but who are more conceptually ambitious in their thinking and writing than people whose priorities are more journalistic.
It seems wrong that they should be excluded, but at the very least, it seems like we should expect to understand the reasons for their exclusion as something more than subjective caprice. Gary’s writing less on comics is a tremendous loss. (His piece on Strangers on a Train for tcj.com is worth a read, though, if you haven’t.) Maybe he’ll get less busy and write on film more for us. So sure, he and the critical writing he cultivated at the journal set up an amazing critical foundation. (I’m a bigger Harvey fan than Fiore; his piece on Monument Valley is my favorite thing I’ve read since I started paying attention.) But I’m uncomfortable with saying that the existing work shows “what comics criticism is capable of.” Kill your idols a little bit here; can’t we really not pick up where those guys have left off and do even better? Isn’t that sort of what Sale is doing that makes that piece so great?
As a general rule, critics tend to take themselves more seriously than the rest of the world does. That’s no sin: everyone does it, regardless of their hobby horse: if the hobby horse rider doesn’t take himself seriously, who will? But, seriously, a critic does what he does for what is a very shallow reason. When I first set out to make a living in the world, I did it by teaching English in high school. Years later, one of my former students wrote and asked me why I chose teaching English as a profession. I thought about it and realized that I had no messianic purpose.
I liked literature and I liked talking about it with others who liked literature and liked talking about it. I taught literature because that was a way of creating others who could talk about it in ways that were congenial with my own passion. It was a way of creating a conversation I enjoyed. Ditto, in some fashion, comics criticism.
I enjoy comics and I enjoy writing. Writing about comics combines both enjoyments. What I write is half a conversation that readers, in effect, overhear. And maybe they supply the other half of the conversation; most of the time, I don’t know if they do. But sometimes, I find others who enjoy comics and enjoy talking about the art form. And conversation ensues. Sometimes my half of the conversation is simply: “I just read a good graphic novel, or a comic strip, or a comic book that I enjoyed and thought you might enjoy it, too.
And here’s why.” So much for high purpose in comics criticism. It would also be nice, and highly beneficial to mankind and civilization as a whole, if everyone would do exactly as I tell them—if cartoonists reformed and perfected their practices in accordance with my prescriptions, if other so-called critics started talking about comics as a visual art form as well as a narrative one, and if the Grumpy Old Pachyderm became the GOP of “Yes.” But—well, I, like most critics, may be self-absorbed, but I’m not delusional.
I doubt I know any comics critics who think they’re changing the world, or even interesting the world very much. On the other handwhy people do or don’t enjoy art can be tied up with a lot of things that have more resonance than just, “well I happen to like this or that.” Liking (or disliking) art has something to do with values, something to do with communication, something to do with desire.
The way that personal, subjective interests are often, in the end, not so personal is what I find interesting about art, and about writing about art (and about creating art, when I occasionally get to do that.) Even you’re argument about art and shallowness and delusion — that’s an argument with a long pedigree, embedded in conversations about what art should be and how people should treat itand, by implication, about how people should treat each other, and why. Maybe those conversations don’t much matter in the scheme of things.but if they didn’t matter to somebody a little (and occasionally, potentially, more than a little), nobody would bother with them. The thing about that definition, Mr Harvey, is that pretty much all criticism can be seen as doing that depending on the audience. It takes something different to enhance my appreciation of a comic than it does for a high-school student, or a painter, or a Methodist minister, or a Kenyan businessman, or my mother, or a life-long comics fan, and different kinds of criticism enhance appreciation in different ways. There are as many different approaches to enhancing appreciation as there are minds in the universe.
Even what you describe as the critic’s self-indulgence is a variation on enhancing appreciation. The act of writing criticism enhances any critic’s appreciation, sometimes of the work at hand, and sometimes just of art or the artform in general. I agree that’s enjoyment, but it’s not mere diversion. It’s pleasure, a particularly human pleasure, and I think the pleasure of art is a high-enough purpose. It’s not the fight against human trafficking, but it’s also not entirely indulgent.
It seems to me that there are simple pleasures and luxurious pleasures, and art (and criticism) are luxurious, complicated pleasures, with many facets and permutations and possibilities. So are our options here really limited to Things that are Matters of Life and Death and pure self-indulgent diversion?
Not that you meant that. It’s just that there’s a real danger in using the term “enjoyment” to describe the work of the thoughtful critic, regardless of approach, who takes the time to engage in that conversation you describe. It can too easily be equated with the passive, simple “enjoyment” of someone who pays their $10 to sit in the theater and watch a slapstick comedy. Thinking of criticism like that really seems like the wrong way to go. “I suggest that enhancing appreciation is the only legitimate function of criticism ” Hey R.C. So, does that mean that there’s no legitimate place for negative criticism? (You occasionally write negative criticism yourself, so I don’t think this can be what you mean, so I must be misunderstanding.) I also wonderwhat in your view is the legitimate purpose of art?
And if art can do things other than enhance appreciation of other art, why shouldn’t criticism be able to do those other things as well? Or do you also feel that art is primarily self-indulgence, and therefore should not be taken all that seriously (though that doesn’t seem right if you think that we should be enhancing appreciation of art.).
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