About John Holbo
John Holbo is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. He works on philosophy of literature and literary theory; Wittgenstein and Nietzsche; also, science fiction, fantasy, film, comics; also, more highbrow literary stuff. He blogs at Crooked Timber and John & Belle Have A Blog. Some of his writings are here. The Valve is pretty much his baby, and he's pretty much Editor-in-Chief.
Email Address: jholbo@mac.com
Website: http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/
Posts by John Holbo
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Reading Wordless Books
Here’s a postscript of sorts to my ‘is comics a language?’ post.
I just settled down to read a new book, Wordless Books, the Original Graphic Novels
It’s a handsome volume, 11 chapters, most of them devoted to individual author/artists - eight in all, plus a chapter on 3 ‘cartoon book’ artists, a general historical background chapter and conclusion. Each chapter gives you generous samples, plus pertinent bio and intelligent commentary on influences, style and technique. So it’s a good introduction. It “represents the major woodcut novels and wordless books, from 1918 to 1951” minus a handful of titles that are listed at the start. So a real effort has been made to achieve comprehensive coverage.
As I happen to own several of these works already, in nice enough editions, it’s a bit redundant on my shelf. But that’s how it goes.
Anyway, here’s the opening of Peter Kuper’s introduction, which seems relevant to the whole ‘comics a language?’ question.
It may seem a little contrary to write about a wordless art form, but a blank sheet of paper doens’t carry much in the way of insight, so bear with me.
In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, humanity has developed one unifying language and comes together to build a stairway to heaven. God, as was His wont, destroys the structure and as an added bonus undoes people’s ability to communicate through a single language for all time.
Apparently he overlooked Lund Ward’s picture story God’s Man.
Ward, like Frans Masereel, Otto Nückel, and the other artists included in this collection, discovered a way to sidestep our language barriers and create complex political, emotional, and humorous stories that can be universally understood.
We humans have been using drawings to tell stories as far back as when our ancestors called caves home. Pictures were used to describe their actions - say hunting a wooly mammoth - and the very traces of human existence remain thanks to the artists who scrawled on those cavernous walls.
Throughout human history, image functioned as language - including the Sumerians’ cuneiform pictograms carved on clay tablets, the expressive symbols painted on the tombs in Egypt, and chinese scrolls with silent illustrated epics that unrolled before the reader’s eyes ...
Here we find the same ambiguity. Is it a language? Or does it function as language (but perhaps it isn’t a language)? Is it universal because it’s a universal language or because it’s not a language at all? It’s worth noting that one of the main reasons we are tempted to say ‘comics’ - or sequential images telling stories - is a language is that we read comics. What else would you read except for language? But this is a bit arbitrary. We call it ‘reading’ because these are books. What else would you do with a book except read it? But we wouldn’t be so presuming about, say, the Bayeux Tapestry or cave art. The verb ‘to read’ tends to tag along with certain sorts of artifacts associated with writing. But that is not to say that everything you do with artifacts of that sort must be ‘linguistic’, per se. Also, it’s a bit peculiar that ‘reading’ comes to seem such an important word in these discussions. The essence of the novel is that it is a thing you read. So if these are novels, you must read them. But this isn’t even true. Illiterate people can listen to audiobooks.
Obviously the interest of the question does not lie in beating our ordinary words to death - ‘language’, ‘read’.
I’m not going to try to write this out here, but an idea I’m toying with is this: a lot of theory of interpretation - hermeneutics stuff - is skewed to the assumption that if you are interpreting it, it must be language-like. The fact that you can even have ‘wordless novels’ is a counter-example to a lot of accounts, then. And this isn’t just a case of the accounts neglecting this somewhat forgotten, perhaps marginal class of works. Rather, the fact that a theory of interpretation must work for wordless novels suggests that most theories of interpretation of literary works are barking up the wrong tree. They are treating interpretation of works as a theory of interpretation of words. But, since images aren’t words, that’s not right. Just a thought.
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Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Katherine Farmar’s contribution to our “Reading Comics” event: Belgian Style Waffles?
Her post is up here. She likes the book but makes one criticism. Wolk’s exclusive focus on American comics - while justified - risks missing things one sees if one steps back to take in non-American comics styles and forms.
What do I think of this? In a sense criticisms of this sort are always correct. Focusing in makes you miss the big picture. Stepping back for the big picture loses the details. So the value of this criticism depends on what one actually makes of it. What does Katherine make of it?
The distinctness of the visual and narrative techniques used by Franco-Belgian comics creators is less obvious, but as I discovered after a longish period of reading nothing but Franco-Belgian comics, they, too, have their own language which is subtly different from that used by American creators. And again, the differences are structural and cultural, resulting from different publishing models and from the creators being raised and immersed in a different way of looking at the world.
And:
It’s certainly true that manga does operate by “a slightly different set of rules”. Actually, that is if anything an understatement: manga’s quasi-abstract emotional iconography, splashy panel layouts combined with the use of visual cues in the art to direct the reader’s eye, emotional expressionism, convoluted plots and premises, speech bubble placement, distinctive story pacing… and so on and so forth… amount to not just “a slightly different set of rules” but effectively a different visual and narrative language.
I have a good joke about this one in the archives somewhere. Ah, here it is.
Belgian-style:
Learning manga-style:
(That’s from an old boucx comic that appeared in Heavy Metal, by the by.)
Right. Now I quite agree that looking outside American comics - looking to the way other comics traditions do it: - teaches us about American comics by really showing how much they all have in common. (Katherine is suggesting Wolk may suffer from slight narcissism of small differences, in dividing up the American tradition. This is the critical burden of the point.) But is it really right to say these differences amount to a ‘different visual and narrative language’? There’s a bit of a waffle between ‘the Belgian-style works by its own rules’ and ‘the Belgian-style constitutes its own language’. Certainly there are rules for drawing manga. Belgian-style punches don’t look like manga-style punches. The sensei wanders around: “make sure your direction lines don’t get mixed up.”
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Monday, July 07, 2008
Reading Comics: First Round Round-Up
Tim Burke has his post up. And Kip Manley does, too.
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Let the Reading Comics Readings Begin!
Our Doug Wolk Reading Comics book event is now officially open.
I know that Tim Burke has something lined up and ready to go. And Lawrence White has something as well. So I’m going to let them start things off - either today or tomorrow. We have a lot of participants and I’m very excited. (Alas, I am also very busy with other thngs. But I’ll be contributing myself in just a few days.)
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Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Reading Comics
I’m organizing a book event for Doug Wolk’s Reading Comics
In other news: I’ve really been enjoying a lot of music by people named Finn. The two albums currently on heavy rotation are The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive (lead singer Craig Finn) and Liam Finn’s “I’ll Be Lightning”. A couple YouTube links: Liam Finn’s “Second Chance" and The Hold Steady’s “Little Hoodrat Friend" and “The Swish". But the one you really need to listen to and watch is “Stuck Between Stations". Bruce Springsteen wishes he was as awesome as vaguely Randy Newmanesque Craig Finn. Who is apparently starved for groupies. I’m not really eligible myself.
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Locus Winners
Some good reads. The Locus Award winners have been announced.
Michael Chabon won for Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I thought it was ok - fun - a bit of a disappointment after Kavalier and Clay. What did you think? OK, I’ll write a short review to finish this post out. Now, on down the list.
Terry Pratchett, Making Money. Very funny, as usual, but sort of by-the-numbers.
I haven’t read Miéville’s Un Lun Dun or Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box. (Put them on the to-read list.)
Cory Doctorow’s “After The Siege” is magnificent. It’s a harrowing tale. It will definitely give you that ghastly, crazy, infowar siege of neverland feeling. I listened to it as a podcast, read by the author himself. I see that someone else has re-recorded it. Throw it on the iPod.
“Witch’s Headstone”, by Neil Gaiman. Haven’t read it.
“A Small Room in Koboldtown”, by Michael Swanwick. You can download it as a free PDF. (And a podcast.) I guess I’m a bit surprised it won. It’s a funny genre mash-up. Hardboiled detective fiction, locked-room murder mystery, meets ... well, I’ll quote the first paragraph:
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Ian Hunter, “Talking About My Generation”
I owe a follow-up to my Jameson post. Some discussion of the Ian Hunter response to Jameson’s piece. This is it - at least a stab at it. The Jameson/Hunter exchange, a response to an earlier Hunter essay, is to be found in Critical Inquiry 34 (Spring 2008), for those with subscription access. Hunter’s contribution is “Talking About My Generation”.
As Rob noted in comments, the Hunter response is quite good. Better than his original essay. I agree. I fear that I have somewhat dragged it, by association, through the mire of my traditional comment box sparring stylings. So I thought I would just quote a few substantial chunks, let them stand on their own, to make clear that Hunter is not, per se, Holbo, nor vice versa.
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Saturday, June 14, 2008
Jameson On Hunter: How Not to Criticize the Historicization of Theory
I’m reading a Critical Inquiry critical exchange between Ian Hunter and Frederic Jameson - a response to Hunter’s “History of Theory” piece from CI in 2006. Here’s an old post in which Sean McCann discussed it. I did, too, somewhere or other. And this Long Sunday thread sure got all hot and bothered.
Actually, I haven’t gotten to the Hunter yet. But consider this passage from Jameson’s “How Not To Historicize Theory”:
it is the depth model in general and all manner of hermeneutic practices that are Hunter’s targets here—the reduction, in other words, of facts and historical realities to concepts that have no empirical object, like society, culture, revolution, class, language, history, capitalism, and so on. This particular line of attack is enough to link Hunter to the traditional Anglo-American empiricism that theory set out to demolish in the first place, and indeed the words positive, empirical, and research are here everywhere valorized and emphasized. (566)
It took me three passes before it even occurred to me what Jameson is really saying here: namely, that society, culture, revolution, class, language, history and capitalism are clear examples of subjects that can’t be studied empirically. You can’t do ‘research’ on these subjects. Ergo, Hunter - who is interested in doing empirical research - must not be interested in these things. But obviously these are important things. Therefore, Hunter’s approach is wrong.
What clued me in was a line on the next page: “To such famous nominalistic pronouncements as “there is no such thing as society” and “the Palestinians don’t exist,” we should now presumably add the proposition that capitalism doesn’t exist either.” All this charged to Hunter’s account. But surely it is reasonable to draw a distinction between Tories and nominalists. Jameson is arguing that if you are an empiricist, let alone a positivist, you can’t believe in society. I imagine that would come as a surprise to Auguste Comte, who is generally considered the father of positivism and sociology. (There’s also the difficulty that Hunter isn’t a positivist, but that’s fairly small potatoes.)
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Friday, May 16, 2008
Percy Gloom and Hieronymus B.
I haven’t been doing enough comics blogging. But I just read a couple titles that seem to go together:
Percy Gloom
... And
Hieronymus B.
I really liked them both while feeling that both could be better. It’s a bit hard to put my finger on it.
Let start with the visual basics. We have two somewhat hapless protagonists - characters to whom things happen, mostly, rather than characters who do things. They are both prematurely aged children/innocently child-like old men. They both have big round heads and little bodies. I’m starting to think that Charlie Brown is an archetype. The bald-headed kid who gets the football yanked, but who somehow salvages some degree of philosophic dignity. Maybe there is something Charlie Brownish inherent in the comics medium. A simple circle face on a stick body. It really doesn’t get more iconically economical than that. Chris Ware, anyone?
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French Theory
I’m reading French Theory
It’s been given one of those very American subtitles characteristic of commodity histories. (’how the smelt saved Western Civilization’. That sort of thing.) In this case; ‘how Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & co. transformed the intellectual life of the United States.’ Rather an ironic commentary on the commodification of Theory, I suppose. (In French it was ’et les mutations de la vie intellectuale aux Etats-Unis.)
The book has been praised by Stanley Fish. (As linked here by Bill B.) And it has an effusive blurb from Derrida. (It was originally published in 2003, so he had a chance to read it before he died, I presume.)
“In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference for both sides of the Atlantic.”
The book appears to be selling quite well. It’s ranked an astonishing 6,000 on Amazon at the moment. That’s really good for a book on this sort of subject.
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Thursday, May 08, 2008
Talking Pathetic Fallacy Blues, a.k.a. Gary
And here I was, so sure Lawrence’s post would be about that scene in Willingham’s Jack of Fables in which Jack meets the Pathetic Fallacy, a morose, balding entity capable of bringing things to anthropomorphic life - who wants to be known as ‘Gary’, or possibly ‘Lance’.
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Sunday, May 04, 2008
I Remember The Way That You Smiled
Y’know, they just down make callow, ironic folk-hop for 20-something white hipsters like they used to. At least that’s one theory. From a Pitchfork review of the Deluxe reissue of Beck’s Odelay:
From the nervy opening chords of “Devil’s Haircut” (based on the garage-rock classic “I Can Only Give You Everything") to the signature sax riff of “The New Pollution” (lovingly pilfered from forgotten tenor player Joe Thomas’s “Venus"), Odelay is the album every record-diving MPC-phile wants to make. Though the LP was a huge commercial success, its sound was never successfully equaled by savvy opportunists. Chalk it up to the increasingly complicated legalities of sampling, as Beck explained in a 2005 interview: “Back [on Odelay] it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70% of the song and $50,000.” And, of course, it’s the little lifts - the sex-ed dialogue on “Where It’s At”, the snippet of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony #8 in B Minor” on “High 5”, the dozens (hundreds?) of unique drum hits and perfectly placed sonic scribbles - that makes Odelay such a deep and engaging listen even after all the headphone sessions and Best Album of the 90s accolades. Tellingly, when Beck and the Dust Brothers tried to recreate their signature style on 2005’s Guero they couldn’t pull it off, inadvertently reinforcing Odelay’s lasting appeal in the process.
This is interesting. Could it really be true that lawyers killed that signature mid-90’s alt-sampling sound? Or is Beck making excuses for the fact that Guero was so-so? If so, chalk up another loss in the IP wars. And, once again, it would seem to be economically self-defeating for the greedy rent-seekers. It’s obviously stupid to insist on pricing your half-second horn blares right out of the market.
I happen to have been listening to Odelay on the nice headphones, noodling around with Photoshop. That’s a satisfying combination.
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Monday, April 28, 2008
Edward Champion on Sven Birkerts and the Frightening Fitzroya
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Friday, April 25, 2008
The End of Argument
This is a follow up to last week’s Against Argument post - in which I suggest that humanists, perhaps especially in literary studies, tend to deploy a somewhat misleading rhetoric of rigorous argumentation, when what they are doing would be better described in other terms. Rohan Maitzen provided a passage from Leslie Stephen that nicely expresses what I am getting at:
He shows us certain facts as they appear to him. If we are so constituted as to be unable to see what he sees, he can go no further. He cannot proceed to argue and analyse, and apply an elaborate logical apparatus. There is the truth, and we must make what we can of it. But, on the other hand, so far as we are in sympathy with him, the proof - if it be a proof - has all the cogency of direct vision. He has couched our dull eyes, drawn back the veil which hid from us the certain aspect of the world, and henceforward our views of life and the world will be more or less changed, because the bare scaffolding of fact which we previously saw will now be seen in the light of keener perceptions than our own.
Adam Kotsko objected that, even though this is what I am saying, and even though this is plausible, still what I am saying is highly implausible. The logic evades me, and the very most I can make of the complaint is the following: if this - i.e. the Stephen thing - is what humanists call ‘argument’, then they are not deluded about, or falsely advertising their ‘argumentative’ practices. They are using ‘argument’ in a broader sense. I guess this is a coherent supposition about how humanists use the word ‘argument’. Certainly it does happen. I have a new book from Princeton Architectural Press called Proof (amazon
But obviously this is not what I am talking about when I say that, often, humanists pretend to be arguing when really they are not. Let me just provide an example. (I would have thought this was pretty obvious, but Adam K insists that he would be very surprised if it really happens. So there is nothing for it but to offer proof.)
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Friday, April 18, 2008
Against Argument?
Stephen Burt has an interesting post at the Columbia UP blog: “Against Argument”.
The academy thrives on argument, at least in the traditional humanities: arguments get us noticed. Travel guides and scientific discoveries may both sell books, but to get attention within the realms of the arts and the humanities now, one almost has to make an extended argument: to take issue with some dominant view, to explain why what we already knew was wrong, or (especially in literary studies) to demonstrate some big connection between features within some literature, and features of history or (more rarely) philosophy or natural science outside it.
There’s nothing wrong with making extended arguments, of course, and I spend much of my time (at least during the school year) teaching our students how to do just that. Yet our sustained interest in arguments might be making us keep at arm’s length, or under a cloud, the reasons why we care for the arts at all, the smaller-scale features that distinguish works of art from one another, the features which help us explain (if it can be explained—can it?) why we care for this one, not that one.
...
Ten years ago twentysomethings in top graduate programs were being taught (wrongly) to look down on an influential book called Understanding Poetry even as they were reading, and recommending (rightly), a then-new book called Understanding Comics, a book (itself in comics form) that remains the foundation for the arguments about that art form advanced by groups like the Michigan Comix Collective.
Yes, if you admire McCloud it is quite pointless to turn around and snub Brooks - at least on the usual kick-the-New Criticism-even-though-it’s-been-down-for-50-years methodological grounds. But I don’t quite agree with the first bit. You might think I am going to balk at ‘against argument’. But actually, in these sorts of contexts - yeah, ok. The problem I have is really twofold: first, I don’t buy Burt’s opposition between ‘argument’ and ‘description’. What you want is: discernment, insight. He and I might compromise on ‘good close reading’. (I don’t think I’m actually disagreeing with what he is getting at.) This is a small bone to pick, then. But there is a point to picking it. Because ‘being insightful’ isn’t really a method. ‘Noticing interesting things’ is not really a method. And yet it is teachable, to some degree. And is, to a very considerable degree, the thing we really want to teach. This brings me to my second point. I do not at all agree that the humanities ‘thrives on argument’. Probably this is my philosophy department bias showing through. But I think it would be more accurate to complain that humanists always say they are arguing, but often they are doing, instead, precisely that thing Burt says they should be doing instead of arguing - being insightful, describing, close reading (call it what you will). I think this tends to be an expression of discipline envy. Someone asks you what you are doing. You say ‘I am trying to construct a rigorous argument’. That sounds better than ‘I am trying to be insightful’, or ‘I’m reading carefully’. But, actually, the latter would be truer. And, on the whole, insights tend to be more insightful if they are not cluttered up by erroneous advertisements about their argumentative status. So I would say: let’s be ‘against saying you are arguing when you are not’.
In a way, it was precisely this problem that doomed the New Criticism to its bad reputation. Brooks and others were careful readers, but they - rather defensively - felt obliged to pretend that there were strong arguments warranting their practices, i.e. their hermetic attitude towards individual texts. In fact, the arguments were all pretty terrible. Still, Brooks really understood poetry.
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