The Introduction by the editors cites the “long but often
marginal history at the periphery of scholarly and intellectual worlds” of
comics studies, but reports that in recent years it has become “a lively field
of inquiry.” The growth in scholarly writing and publications on comics, the
explosion of reprint projects, the formation of substantial research archives,
and a general awareness of comics in the culture at large, the editors assert,
have all “helped to legitimize comics studies.” Oddly, there is no specific
mention of the onslaught of blockbuster films based on comic book properties, the
most obvious cultural trend accompanying the social climb of comics studies
over the past two decades. In this period in particular, the editors claim, comics
scholars have “had the advantage of greater resources, numbers, and academic
respectability” than that enjoyed by the pioneering generation of comics scholars
of the 1960s and 1970s.
The editors are cautious in their triumphalism, however. “The
emergence of a research-driven scholarly corpus … is a relatively recent
occurrence,” they note, but “the energy and ferment of contemporary writing on
comics” presents “an ideal moment to step back and survey the terrain.” They hope
that their interdisciplinary anthology of “twenty-eight noteworthy
contributions” will serve “as a starting point for defining comics studies as
well as a springboard for further investigation.” The editors pause only
briefly to cast an envious eye toward film, which they remark is “a younger art
form” than comics (a debatable assertion) with a comparatively “larger, more
systematic, and more culturally respectable” literature.
The first text in their anthology is entitled “Why Are
Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” by Thierry Groensteen.
Given the generally upbeat tenor of the Introduction, it is a puzzling choice
to lead off such an anthology of comics studies, since it contravenes nearly
every assertion the editors have just made. Written in 2000, and therefore prior
the presumed scholarly and artistic achievements of the subsequent decade, Groensteen
complains that comics still “suffer from a considerable lack of legitimacy.”
While he avers that what he is describing may be unique to France and not
necessarily applicable to “other national situations,” he claims that comics
are regarded as “infantile, vulgar, or insignificant” by “legitimizing
authorities (universities, museums, the media)” in the Francophone world. In
Groensteen’s view, comics history is still “widely misunderstood,” its study
“retarded” due to “a complete absence of critical, archivistic, and academic
attention.” A chief source of official opprobrium are educators, who view the
medium as childish, in particular the curious mixture of word and pictures that
achieves its apotheosis in the word balloon.
To illustrate what Groensteen perceives as the unfair persecution of comics, he quotes from a 1964 French dictionary, an art historian, a novelist, and a former curator of prints at the Bibliothèque Nationale, among a few other select publications, averaging only one quotation per decade from the 1950s to the 1990s. However, these ostensible condemnations of comics are often more insightful than the author’s own remarks on the medium, which tend toward the cliché, the trite, and the shopworn. For example, the curator attributes comics’ failure to achieve a sufficient literary and artistic density that would merit serious attention to the hybridity of the form itself, and to the overriding imperative for legibility that induces creators to simplify their material and presentation at all costs or else risk the confusion and alienation of potential readers. To this practicing cartoonist, at least, this strikes me as a fascinating and perfectly apt observation.
But rather than a productive engagement with this remark,
Groensteen declares it “difficult to refute,” owing to the different aesthetic
criteria applicable to cartoon drawings and “art drawings,” and moves on.
Similarly, he scoffs at “great French writers” in scare quotes, but declines to
engage in the fairly thoughtful observation of one novelist who observes that
the blending of words and pictures is fraught with the prospect of the two
channels canceling one another out, confounding the average adult literate
mind. Rather than inquiring as to why this should be the case, Groensteen insists
that comic book readers, and perhaps other world cultures, don’t seem to have
this particular problem. The upshot is that critics of comics are stuffy,
hidebound, and not hip to the at once vernacular and avant-garde form
represented by comics. Needless to say, this argument would be more convincing
if large numbers of people were making similar statements in 2000, at the time
Groensteen is writing; the fact that he must survey half a century or more to
locate a handful of benign dismissals makes one question what is really
bothering the author, and why the editors find this issue so urgent as to place
it at the beginning of their anthology.
Further, it is by no means clear, either in the editors’
Introduction or Groensteen’s text, what constitutes cultural legitimation, or
for whom the legitimation is being sought: comics creators or comics scholars.
More to the point, it is unclear how either the enjoyment of comics or their
scholarly study has been hampered by this perceived lack, or how something
described as cultural legitimacy would be of material benefit to creators or
scholars. Apparently, some art forms enjoy cultural legitimacy as if by nature,
and it is felt that comics deserve the same respect. Clearly, it pains
Groensteen that the work of cartoonists like Hergé, Crumb, and Moebius do not
enjoy “a wider diffusion” and appreciation, and that the keepers of official culture
cannot discern this work from the run of average material. But it seems
unlikely that these creators in particular, who enjoyed enormous success and
near-celebrity status during their careers, were ever particularly harmed by
never having been accorded cultural legitimacy. Indeed, Groensteen never makes
this assertion, adding to the suspicion that the only legitimacy he is
concerned with is his own. Had these creators desired cultural legitimacy,
whatever that entails, they certainly had the talent to pursue other avenues to
achieve that end. Rather, it seems that the imagined plight of cartoonists is
invoked only as a proxy for and to be conflated with the social and academic
anxieties of comics scholars, the gains set forth in the Introduction notwithstanding
.
Whether poorly written, poorly translated, or poorly
excerpted, Groensteen’s text is unconvincing, and reads as if he is merely preaching
to the converted. Against the paltry and rather benign (and perhaps even
constructive) criticisms he has dredged up, Groensteen offers no serious
argumentation, but provides the usual litany of bland generalizations. Critics
of comics, he asserts, unfairly tar the medium with the brush of childhood
entertainment, and, imbued with modernism’s mandate for specificity, simply fail
to understand the unique hybridity of the comics form. Never mind that
Groensteen ends the article by laying claim to his inner child (although he
does not employ that term), or that he makes the completely modernist assertion
that “Comic art is an autonomous and original medium,” i.e., that comics can
pass the same modernist test of specificity he has just denounced. In short,
one gets the impression not so much of a widespread, culturally-ingrained
discrimination towards comics as a comic book fan with a persecution complex
looking to manufacture rejection from the most obscure and forgotten
denunciations he can cobble together.
In any case it is abundantly clear from the positioning of
Groensteen’s text immediately following the Introduction that cultural legitimation
is a preoccupation of comics scholars or at least the editors of A Comics Studies Reader, the attainment
of which is seen as a primary goal of comics studies. “How are we to defend
comic art,” Groensteen pleads, from those who would rashly disqualify it as an art?
One strategy, one is tempted to respond, might be to simply ignore or forget
the scattered denunciations that Groensteen has labored so mightily to unearth.
Better still, to seriously address the sticking points that these critics have
so helpfully pointed out, rather than to petulantly dismiss them.
For all I know, Groensteen’s is an apt summation of the
situation in France at the end of the 1990s (and as far as that goes, belies
the cherished myth Americans have that comics are taken more seriously in
Europe), but devoting eight pages of precious space to these neurotic musings
in an English-language anthology in 2009 is more than questionable and worse
than unfortunate. Certainly, the critical reception of comics over time is of
historiographic interest, but Groensteen’s text is not presented
historiographically, but rather as if still reflecting current concerns in the
field. If the intent was rhetorical, to show that as recently as a decade earlier
scholars were still ruminating about cultural legitimacy but now things look
brighter, this might have been dealt with more efficiently in a citation in the
editors’ Introduction, before reporting on the substantial gains in the
fortunes of comics and comics scholarship in the interim. More to the point, I
know of no scholarly field that foregrounds the question cultural legitimacy of
its objects of study to such an extent as comics studies. Of course, scholarly
activism in nothing new in the humanities, but it is generally on behalf of some
social cause, political issue, or exploited group, never an art form. The
appeal being made on behalf of comics is not being made on behalf of any
ethnic, gender, or identity group, but rather an expressive form, which, by the
editors’ own account, is finally receiving its due. Besides, most scholars
assume that their objects of scholarly study are worth scholarly attention by
virtue of the fact that they are bothering to study it, at the very least that
cultural legitimacy is bestowed by their act of investigation. Why isn’t this
the case in comics?
From the viewpoint of tradition, the anxieties expressed by
Groensteen and the editors concerning the cultural legitimacy of comics are
little more than the continuation of an entrenched tradition in comics scholarship:
comics studies as the academic expression of comics fans seeking validation for
their juvenile enthusiasms, avid enthusiasts who have never gotten over some
early rejection by relatives or some potential object of affection, even years
after they have made a success of it. By including Groensteen’s text, however,
the editors have elevated their deep-seated anxieties concerning the cultural
legitimacy of comics or comics studies to the level of a social cause, risking
ridicule for the entire field, and worse, perpetuating the worst tendencies of
twentieth-century fandom into the twenty-first century. While not completely
ruling out the use of A Comics Studies
Reader for classroom use, the inclusion of “Why Are Comics Still in Search
of Cultural Legitimization?” should give any comics scholar or educator pause.
Why indeed. Do we really want to visit the neuroses and prejudices of the past
on the college students of today, who see only an artistically viable and valid
art form, capable of great depth and range of expression? Perhaps if comics and
comics studies acted as if they already had cultural legitimacy, they would
find it.
The Groensteen's article left you dubitative, Donald. I have not read it and it's not easy to explain something with my bad english, but, maybe I can bring some lights. This article seems like an outline of a book Groensteen wrote in 2006, "Un objet culturel non identifié" (an unindentified cultural object — looks like an U.F.O., same pun in french). A very original essay about the bande dessinée because nobody else than Groensteen could have written it : the arguments came from Groensteen personal life, and he's a specialist of comics who tries to legitimate comics in the intellectual world since thirty years. He is certainly the one who succeeded the most to do that in France. He directed the main review of study ("Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée", the equivalent of "Les Cahiers du cinéma" for comics), the first real museum (in Angoulême), he organized a huge exhibition in the Bibliothèque nationale, defended an university thesis (later published by Les Presses universitaires de France), he taught comics to students, wrote critics in "Le Monde" (the most serious daily newspaper)... If someone in France can say the commonplace "in the past, comics were scorned by the intelligentsia but today things have changed", it's him, and it would be a way to autocongratulate what he did. Yet, in his book (I don't know in the article), he does the opposite. His report is not enthousiastic. He gives examples, taken from its own life, that even if the bande dessinée is now in museums and universities, it is considered with condescension, it is still considered as a frivolous subject. Again, I don't know if his article is "whether poorly written" (this, I doubt), "poorly translated, or poorly excerpted", but what Groensteen says is very clear and convincing in his book. I hope the summary of one may clear up the other...
ReplyDeleteYes, perhaps I'm being a bit unfair to Monsieur Groensteen. As I wrote, for all I know his remarks vis a vis France may have been apropos in 2000. However, it is incumbent upon the editors of an English-language text purportedly for classroom use to provide the proper context, and that is not given in this case. From what I understand, France has a much more entrenched, rigid, and bureaucratic cultural administration, whereas the U.S. has no state apparatus legitimating culture whatsoever, so for us it is a question largely of taking ourselves seriously rather than one of convincing legitimating authorities, in my view. In the humanities, everyone is condescending about everyone else's research area anyway; one needs to have thick skin.
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