"When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” This infamous
statement of Nazi sentiment is not limited to Fascists: many critics become
combative when discussing culture. They prefer to patrol boundaries rather
than venture into the no-man’s-land of hybridity. In the 1950s, for example,
C. P. Snow posited a hostile stand-off between the “Two Cultures” of the
arts and sciences, ignoring important qualifications to his stark antithesis
– including over a century’s worth of science fiction since Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. Similarly, recent discussions of “culture wars” and the “clash
of civilizations” have a martial tone and apparently clear parameters. On
closer inspection, however, the combatants wear a variety of uniforms. If
culture is often war by other means, we are finally witnessing a truce in
one longstanding conflict: that between so-called elite and mass cultures.
Skirmishes do continue. Like Japanese soldiers fighting the Second World War
long after it ended, some still draw a cordon sanitaire around “literature”
to protect it from “genre”, regardless of how closely the two commingle.
Jeanette Winterson proclaims “I hate science fiction”, even though her
recent The Stone Gods includes robots and a post-apocalyptic future. Certain
critics still insist that Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize primarily for
The Golden Notebook (1962), even though this Guest of Honor at the 1987
World Science Fiction Convention considers her futurist “Canopus in Argus”
novels “to be some of my best work”. (David Langford gleefully tracks
anti-genre comments at http://news.ansible.co.uk)
But critics of genre are increasingly counter-balanced by prominent proponents
and practitioners, including Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, Joyce Carol
Oates, Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz. The Library of America has published
elegant editions of authors who only two generations ago gave libraries
across America pause, H. P. Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick. Genre films and
books are no longer a minority interest. They top the bestseller lists and
popularity polls: we are all geeks now. The establishment’s disdain for
genre, and the populists’ suspicion of experimental techniques, are largely
things of the past. Generations weaned on cultures “high” and “low” have
become the producers and arbiters of the arts, enabled by the expansion of
the internet since the early 1990s. (Even the “establishment” is being
overtaken by the less euphonious but more democratic “blogosphere”.) Two
eminent figures in the effort to reconcile mass entertainment with
intellectual respectability, the music critic David Hajdu and the novelist
Michael Chabon, have taken stock of the irrational intolerance faced by
genre artists in the past. Neither overtly celebrates today’s relative
catholicity of taste – battles remain to be fought – but the simultaneous
publication of their works reflects a broader cultural turning point.
Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague is a thoroughly researched, engagingly written
account of a modern witch-hunt: the public hysteria over horror and crime
comics in the United States during the early 1950s. Many of these were
excessive in their gratuitous depictions of violence, as Hajdu admits, but
the reaction to them was even more extreme. Schools and churches organized
public burnings of comics, when Nazi book-burnings were still a recent
memory; laws were passed to prohibit sales; publishers were forced out of
business and artists lost their livelihood. The industry responded to the
outcry by creating a self-censoring body whose code was so restrictive that
comics lost their vitality and much of their audience.
At first glance, this sad episode of censorship and paranoia seems to coincide
with the chilling climate fostered by McCarthyism. There were clear
overlaps: the panic was promoted by Dr Fredric Wertham who, like Joseph
McCarthy, found a cause that would bring him the national attention he
craved. Wertham’s scientific credentials in psychiatry seemed to legitimate
his specious claim that comic books caused juvenile delinquency, and made
oracular his pronouncement that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic
book industry”. His Seduction of the Innocent (1954) led parents to believe
that Superman promoted Fascism, Batman and Robin homosexuality, and Wonder
Woman sadomasochism. (Wertham wasn’t entirely wrong about the last: Wonder
Woman enjoyed using her “golden lasso” and “bracelets of submission” on
villains; her creator, William Moulton Marston, claimed she “satisfies the
subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a
woman who loves them”.) Politicians, such as Senator Estes Kefauver, joined
Wertham in order to advance their careers.
Hajdu notes these similarities, but argues that while McCarthyism represented
anti-elitism, the crusade against comics was “anti-anti-elitism, a campaign
by protectors of rarefied ideals of literacy, sophistication, and virtue to
rein in the practitioners of a wild, homegrown form of vernacular American
expression”. American elites had deemed comics a debased form of expression
since the emergence of newspaper comic-strips in the late nineteenth
century. This new art, created largely for and about immigrants, engaged in
deliberate self-parody that baffled establishment critics. Charges of
illiteracy and bad taste continued to be levelled at the nascent comic book
industry of the 1930s, as it employed outsiders – immigrants, women,
minorities and iconoclasts. Comics were largely created by “cultural
insurgents” who exploited the creative licence of a new art form with few
rules and little critical oversight.
Because comics were intended for children, it was easy for critics to mock the
medium’s lack of literary sophistication. What many of them missed was the
visual sophistication of such pioneering artists as Will Eisner, Jack Cole
and Jack Kirby, or the brilliant stable of artists at EC Comics, which
popularized horror comics in the 1950s. (Hajdu’s book can be faulted for
having too few illustrations.) Critics also missed the singular aesthetic
pleasure that comes from the sequential narration of words and images
working together. And while they insisted that comics were dangerous because
they promoted juvenile delinquency – a catch-all complaint – they were often
oblivious to the genuinely subversive content of some. For example, romance
comics challenged gender norms by portraying young women as active agents in
stories like “My Mother Was My Rival” and “I Joined a Teen-Age Sex Club”.
A generational divide exacerbated this cultural conflict over issues of class
and taste. By the 1950s, a youth culture was emerging, with its own codes of
expression, dress and music. Hajdu maintains that the battle between adults
and adolescents over horror comics was the first step in the creation of
post-war popular culture, soon to be followed by rock ’n’ roll. EC Comics
transformed their satirical comic Mad into a magazine to escape the
straitjacket of the comics’ code; it and the pre-code comics were to be
seminal influences on the creators of the uninhibited underground comics of
the 1960s. The Ten-Cent Plague is a compelling story of the pride,
prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in
the first half of the century, and a cautionary reminder of how easily art
can be demonized during insecure times.
Hajdu focuses on comics and the triumph of youth culture, but the medium is no
longer child’s play: today’s comic books are pitched well above the heads
and purchasing power of most children. Following Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer
Prizewinning account of the Holocaust, Maus (1992), “graphic novel” has
become the preferred term for many of the medium’s most exciting and
original works. A castaway art form that began in the “funny papers” now
finds a welcome berth in the New Yorker, while Chris Ware’s challenging
Jimmy Corrigan won the 2001 Guardian First Book Award. Fredric Wertham must
be turning in his grave (no doubt in horror-comic fashion), but as Michael
Chabon declares in Maps and Legends, “the battle has now, in fact, been won.
Not only are comics appealing to a wider and older audience than ever
before, but the idea of comics as a valid art form . . . is widely if not
quite universally accepted”.
Chabon’s first non-fiction essay collection charts the struggles of mass
culture to attain respectability, and displays the nuanced perceptions we
have come to expect from his fiction. Success, he knows, has its costs; in
the case of comics, their creators have abandoned the children’s market,
depriving a new generation of the pleasures that Chabon recalls from his own
youth. He proposes solutions, for “we who make comics today have a solemn
debt to pass it on”. These essays present aesthetic creativity as a
discharge of debts, the grateful response of the artist to the sense of
wonder sparked by all forms of culture. Not only is this the central refrain
of the collection, it is also the key to Chabon’s intertextual fiction: “All
novels are sequels; influence is bliss”.
Several essays are autobiographical, providing a portrait of the artist as a
young littérateur wrestling with his inner geek. Chabon grew up a passionate
reader of genre fiction; from an early age he dreamed of emulating his
literary heroes. But as a student who also responded to “literature”, he was
aware that writing genre books would probably end his career as a serious
artist before it had even begun: “A detective novelist or a horror writer
who made claims to artistry sat in the same chair at the table of literature
as did a transvestite cousin at a family Thanksgiving”. He resolved his
dilemma by setting aside plans to write a science-fiction novel, producing
instead a realist, coming-of-age work, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988),
which established his career at the age of twenty-five. He also abandoned
Judaism and married a non-Jewish woman. “I guess I was trying to fit in.”
After his first success, Chabon spent five years writing drafts of a
1,500-page novel that went nowhere; his first marriage collapsed. He
gradually regained his own voice by returning to his roots in genre fiction
and Judaism. A sense of equanimity is reflected in the later essays, which
are less strident than the initial pieces about the misguided vilification
of mass culture. The path he ultimately chose has met with critical and
popular approval, and has contributed to a wider acceptance of his own view
that there are no necessary distinctions between genre and literature – that
each work must be taken on its own terms. However, his earlier, more
polemical essays do make important points about the promises and limitations
of mass entertainment.
Like Hajdu, Chabon defends mass entertainment against the accusation that it
is merely a formulaic product. At times it is; yet commercial culture’s
focus on deadlines and profits can also act as a “quickening force” on an
artist’s imagination. He demonstrates this with discerning essays on Arthur
Conan Doyle, Will Eisner and Howard Chaykin, all of whom, like Chabon
himself, attained the ultimate goal of the “pop artisan”: a delicate balance
between “the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic”. He disagrees
with those who equate literary entertainment with mindless escapism, passive
consumption or unproductive activity (“guilty pleasures” is “a phrase I
loathe”). Instead, he finds that different forms of writing offer distinct
satisfactions to an alert reader. There is no single standard for literary
merit; Chabon’s personal list of pleasurable encounters includes “the
engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose
style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls
of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely
packed argument about the structures of power as embodied in
nineteenth-century prison architecture”.
Other essays explore how innovative artists roam the aesthetic borderlands,
playing with conventions and deriving inspiration from numerous sources. He
has intelligent (and usually mellifluous) things to say about M. R. James,
Cormac McCarthy, Philip Pullman, Norse Myths and the comic strips of Ben
Katchor. For Chabon, artists such as these disprove Harold Bloom’s concept
of the “anxiety of influence”. Rather than trying to outdo and replace their
forebears, they honour those who inspired them, drawing sustenance from the
entire spectrum of culture. Munificent artists can’t be contained within the
arbitrary distinctions between literature and genre, the “serious” and the
“entertaining”. Chabon doesn’t need to reach for his gun to dispatch such
distinctions. He simply redefines them: “All literature, highbrow or low,
from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction”.
David Hajdu
THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE
The great comic-book scare and how it changed America
434pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. £17.99 (US $26).
978 0 374 18767 5
Michael Chabon
MAPS AND LEGENDS
Reading and writing along the Borderlands
222pp. McSweeney’s Books. $24.
978 1 932416 89 3
Michael Saler is the author of The Avant-Garde in Interwar England,
1999. The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular magic in a rational age,
co-edited with Joshua Landy, is forthcoming.
