Abstract
Christopher Pizzino’s essay asks how print novels deal with comics given the latter’s persistently low status, which still prompts readers and critics to ask whether the graphic novel, so-called, can achieve the substantiality of print fiction. Ignoring usual questions of adaptation (the same narrative/content in different media), Pizzino investigates how the novel, as modern genre and print medium, “reads” or “sees” a medium unlike, and less legitimate than, itself. Discussing three examples—Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—he identifies a spectrum of ways for the novel to approach questions of medium specificity and cultural status that cluster around comics. What this spectrum reveals, surprisingly, is that novelists with strong personal and vocational commitments to comics, such as Chabon, can still approach the medium with condescension in their role as novelists. Contemporary US fiction now possesses legitimacy as, in the Lukáscian sense, a formal property—of which it can only divest itself through radical labor of the kind Díaz’s novel exemplifies.
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Notes
- 1.
Contemporary fiction does, of course, make routine use of pictorial illustration in various minor roles, including cover images. This decorative and/or epigraphic use does not, I would argue, displace the centrality of the print text.
- 2.
For Mitchell’s thoughts on power relations in ekphrasis, see “Ekphrasis and the Other.” For a broader sense of Mitchell’s approach to word-image relations, see “The Politics of Genre.”
- 3.
On the subject of comics as stepping-stone to print literacy, see Pizzino (2016): 27–29, 200–201, notes 10 and 11.
- 4.
McCloud’s thoughts on the sound effect can be found in Understanding Comics’s famous pictorial vocabulary diagram, where examples of sound effects are deliberately positioned between pictorial and verbal groupings; see (1993): 58.
- 5.
- 6.
On the current status of comics in US culture, see Pizzino (2016) chapter 1.
- 7.
A further development is the comics miniseries The Escapists created by Brian K. Vaughan and various illustrators and first published by Dark Horse in 2006. This metafictional story concerns a revival of the original Escapist comics by an aspiring group of creators in the present day.
- 8.
See Barthes, “The Reality Effect.”
- 9.
For a more positive reading of Chabon’s novelistic assimilation of comics form, see Singer (2008): 282–287.
- 10.
Unlike Abraham, Lethem attempts quite a public accounting, and tries to document fault lines in culture where social and political tensions manifest strongly. Arguably, the novel’s most central topic is the relationship of popular music to racial division. This topic is manifested in the struggles of Dylan, one of the few white boys in his mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood, to understand his connection to the culture around him and to find a place in it while he is living there—not least in his friendship to Mingus, a black boy—and an adequate relation to it after he departs. Lethem constructs Dylan, lead protagonist and occasional first person narrator, as someone who struggles to maintain a complex stance toward the realities of race while, at the same time, feeling a strong desire to relate to cultural concepts of blackness. As an adult, Dylan becomes a music journalist, and one of his central projects is to write a liner note for an anthology of Barrett Rude Jr.’s music. In the note, the text of which Lethem presents in its own chapter, and in the debate Dylan has with his employer about it, Lethem is careful to show not only the sensitivity and respect Dylan brings to this project but also the possessiveness and critical overreach that mar his efforts. The liner note is, in miniature, an image of Lethem’s struggle both to adjudicate complex racial and cultural realities and to be critical of the potential hubris of such adjudication.
- 11.
Like Marc Singer, I believe The Fortress of Solitude ultimately marks the metaphorics of superhero comics as naïve and weak in the face of adult realities (2008): 274–275. However, Singer argues that the novel leaves open the possibility of other ways of exploring comics: “Lethem’s association of comic books with the earnestness that precedes irony and figuration also implies that comics can operate through modes of representation other than his own exhausted metaphors” (278). I am more pessimistic as to whether Lethem sees further potential in comics’ naïveté—particularly because Lethem applies such a different standard of judgment to comics than he does to other art forms and media.
- 12.
On the subject of Díaz’s use of narratives from nerd culture, see also Bautista (2010), Miller (2011), and Gonzalez (2015) chapter 2. Miller lays a special emphasis on the place of science fiction in Oscar Wao, a claim I find persuasive as regards the novel’s content. As regards Díaz’s formal intentions, however, I find the role of comics, regardless of genre, to be even more important.
- 13.
On Díaz’s engagement with Watchmen, see Hoberek (2014).
- 14.
The Palomar stories, together with other comics by Gilbert and the comics of Jaime and Mario Hernandez, are most readily available in the Love and Rockets Library collected volumes by Fantagraphics; publication is ongoing.
- 15.
Díaz’s testimony concerning the influence of Luba on Beli is most fully documented by Glaser (2013).
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Pizzino, C. (2020). Can a Novel Contain a Comic? Graphic Nerd Ecology in Contemporary US Fiction. In: Lanzendörfer, T., Norrick-Rühl, C. (eds) The Novel as Network. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_6
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