Comic Book Conservatism
“Cultural Insurgents” coda: the progressive comics that weren’t.
On an old blog of mine, I wrote the following about David Mazzucchelli’s beautiful Asterios Polyp:
Although Asterios comments on the World Trade Center (“The brilliance of it is that there are two of them”), Asterios Polyp (2009) does not acknowledge 9/11. It is an absent event in the graphic novel. There is something haunted in, or subtracted from, Asterios’s view of transparent, functional architecture. He would lead you to believe that this absence is the death of his twin, and his aesthetic a form of survivor’s guilt. But his definite, idealistic aesthetic is also reactionary: drawing up precise borders, seeing things dualistically (i.e. war on evil), and shoring up meaning for himself, instead of democratizing it, or making it participatory and multiple (which is composer Kalvin Kohoutek’s view). Asterios is authoritarian, closed off, detached, and excessively confident. He’s an allegory for a post-9/11 United States.
The Wise Others and Marginal Voices that Asterios encounters and learns from on his journey open and redraw the borders, and their liberal commitments offer a counter-script to the official, national script: feminism, vegetarianism, New Age, Native rights, communism, and even alternative energy (solar power). Ursula supplies one such counter-narrative during the local Independence Day parade.
Remember Hana’s lesson: for two to have meaning, a three has to be omitted. You have to train yourself to see the unrepresented, invisible, and negatively-defined third tower.
I stand by this assessment. The unbridled experimentation and aesthetic control are kept in check by a 1950's-era imperiled masculinity. That Mazzucchelli, after a long silence, uses the book to show off his chops as a cartoonist’s cartoonist also circumscribes how the book can be discussed and perpetuates the power of the male auteur: even when he was doing commercial work, the interpretation goes, Mazzucchelli was thinking outside the box, what a genius, it was all leading to this, his masterpiece, and so on, and so forth.
In sum, it’s never just form (radical) v. content (odyssey/redemption). Rather, it’s form (deliberate, precise) v. implicit content (a privileged elite experiences reality with a little help from the non-architects of the world), and it’s also explicit content (subject matter, themes, and some tropes) v. implicit content (a.k.a. ideology and other unconscious tropes).
One month after Amity Shlaes published a cartoon manifesto, Adam Bellow (son of Saul) published a literary manifesto. Both writers mourn the absence of a robust conservative canon. In Tablet, Adam Kirsch finely responds to Bellow by saying, essentially, “Conservatism is everywhere in literature, but only if you look for implicit, not explicit, content.” First, however, you must see conservatism not as a party platform (NO NEW TAXES) but as a “temperament”: a deep love of the family, a deep respect for the past. In Kirsch’s own words:
Genuine conservatism is something much broader and deeper than a political orientation; it is a temperament, one that looks to the past with reverence and the future with trepidation, and which believes that human nature is not easily changed or improved. Defined in this way, conservatism is in fact a major strain in contemporary American literature.
The argument that conservatism is “a major strain in contemporary American literature” means that there is much work to be done. (Side-note: I hate that formulation, which is the counterpart to “ideology at work.” Marxists should always specify who is doing the work.) The challenge, then, is not only to link radical form with radical implicit content, but also to take to task that which purports to be radical in only form or explicit content.
My test case will be the Canadian cartoonist Seth, who makes men-in-grey-suits comics, stories about the dignified fossils of TV news and department stores. Surely Seth meets the criteria for explicit conservative content: his are comics about commodities, markets, institutions, and brotherhoods. He has a longstanding interest in tradition—in the look, mood, men, and objects of the past. Judging from his long essay on Canadian insignia in The Devil’s Artisan, I see that Seth is even a sort of royalist or loyalist. He’s clearly critical of these earlier eras, too, and thankfully he is nowhere didactic about the past’s superiority to the present.
So now what can I say about the implicit content in Seth’s comics? What does he take for granted and assume is natural?
To be continued.
