I guess I believe the superhero story more capable of dealing with issues like alienation than you. I don't see Spidey's giving into simplistic wishfulfillment as being an excuse for its failing at exploring an issue that it features as a signfiicant portion of its narrative. Your brand of relativism can only lead us down the wrong path: bad works are their own idiom and can't be judged by the idiom of good works. Yeah, right.

That's not my take on what's wrong with what you've said, rather: (1) It's unimportant to the evaluation of how some work has dealt with a theme if that work "did the best that it could given its target audience." This is precisely opposed to your excusing Spidey's approach to alientation because it works within a less-sophisticated idiom. (2) Symbolic complexity can accrue to bad works as well as good, so simply chanting it as a mantra doesn't address anything I've said about the particular qualities of some work. What is the complexity? Where does it come from? Is it rightly complex or wrongly complex? Etc..

Autobio is story-telling. I think creators should bend their talents to whatever they want to do. As for MacDonald's piece, I found it to be a lot rubbish.

"bad works are their own idiom and can't be judged by the idiom of good works. Yeah, right."

Now I know we're reaching the end. It's not that you don't misrepresent stuff at earlier points in our assorted arguments, but it's when we're headed for the last roundup that your misrepresentations get really sloppy.

'It's unimportant to the evaluation of how some work has dealt with a theme if that work "did the best that it could given its target audience."'

Given your propensity to misrepresent, I assume that's just you boiling down something you think I said, and not the quote for which I asked. On the unlikely chance that I said something like that lo many moons ago, I would change it by saying that I don't think that something like Goodwin's IRON MAN (GIM for short) is simply "the best it could be given the target audience." GIM's level of goodness would be appropriate to what it was trying to do-- i.e., reasonably-coherent formula adventure-tales-- and that it can't be profitably judged by comparing it to Chris Ware. You might get some profit out of comparing it to the Lee-Ditko-Romita SPIDEY, but even so, a careful analysis would show that GIM shares many of the positive storytelling attributes of SPIDEY. Therefore, rather than indulging in the usual Sturgeonesque b.s., you'd have to show what it was that SPIDEY had going for it that GIM did not, since it wouldn't be enough to say, "Everything not on Level X is just shit," again a la Sturgeon.

I don't have any contempt for "target audiences," unlike some people I might mention. I think readerly audiences of all kinds buy a lot of things I personally consider shit, but I find it profitable to figure out what about the supposed shit moves them, rather than pontificating that they're being sold a bill of goods on something they really don't need/want. If the audience wants an exciting tale that tells them whether or not the hero gets hit by a truck, rather than what happens to his view of life if he survives getting hit, then that's what they want, period.

"Symbolic complexity can accrue to bad works as well as good"

Except that if they have it, their badness is qualified, and then they aren't pure "bad" works any more. But we've covered this more thoroughly on the "trademarked" thread.

"I think creators should bend their talents to whatever they want to do."

But should they never be encouraged to stretch and do something they haven't done before? I seem to remember some fans liked Dan Clowes doing some sort of superhero thing-- presumably an ironic one, though I've not seen it. Gilbert Hernandez proved he should never do a straightforward superhero book with BIRDS OF PREY, but someone else might work wonders a la Ditko.

I paraphrased Gene's position with:

"bad works are their own idiom and can't be judged by the idiom of good works"

and

"the best it could be given the target audience" excuses bad or mediocre work.

Gene denies this accurately reflects his position but writes:

I rest my case on that.

Yeah, that sounds like the way Gene approaches the work of Clowes, alright.

Their badness might be understood, but it doesn't cease to be any less bad. Again, that's the difference between understanding and excusing.

'I agree with you that [SPIDER-MAN] doesn't fail because it's not "a realistic study of alienation," but fails for the reasons we both give.'

I still have no idea where you got the notion expressed here: that anything I said about the Lee-Ditko SPIDEY could be construed as saying that it "fails." I have said that it's not worthwhile to compare it to the novels of Nabokov, except maybe as a rhetorical gesture, but I don't think I've said SPIDEY fails. As a superhero serial the work has certain boundaries beyond which it won't go, but those boundaries ("hero must win, or come close to winning, the battle in the story's final act) are what define the readerly form, not "truisms" as Lem would have it.

In fact, the origin-story of SPIDEY is much like the sort of whimsical tale for which Coleridge expressed admiration in the quote I gave earlier. It's easy to see how the story of Parker could easily have been written as a hubristic horror-story. Make Parker a creepy loser instead of a handsome fellow. Then the plot about losing his father-figure because of his symbolic "deal with the devil" for power and popularity becomes a deserved punishment for hubris, at least in the modern sense of the word.
And in a sense the punishment does go on, even in a serial context, becoming fused with the wish-fulfillment until one can hardly tell one from the other.

Someone commented on the Colerdige passage much as you did on an earlier page when I brought up the "thematic realism" of the high-toned genre practitioners. The gist of the comment was that even Coleridge's example of the Arabian tale-- in which a wayfarer stands in peril for the absurd reason of having put out the eye of a genie-- isn't totally bereft of any kind of reference to human concerns. And this is true, just as I agreed with respect to those examples of genre-writers that I consider "thematically unrealistic." However, Coleridge was essentially right in seeing that there was a valid idiom expressed in the inconsequential-seeming genie-tale. He may not have seriously wished to have done away with all the overdetermined symbolisms of THE ANCIENT MARINER but I'd say he could appreciate what Durgnat called "simpler textures" on their own terms. And that's how I think SPIDER-MAN should be appreciated.

Side-note: I'm not sure how you considered a comparison to REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE thought-provoking, but go ahead and show me somethin'.

You can pass on a comparison with VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS, though.

"Gene denies this [about the target audience] accurately reflects his position but writes:


quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GIM's level of goodness would be appropriate to what it was trying to do-- i.e., reasonably-coherent formula adventure-tales--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I rest my case on that."

The case for GIM is much the same as the one for SPIDEY above, though maybe a bit more formalist. My argument hasn't got anything to do with seeing the target audience as somehow limited; rather, as I said before, there are perfectly good reasons for why one might want a basic story rather than a sophisticated one.

"Yeah, that sounds like the way Gene approaches the work of Clowes, alright."

I told Ken earlier on the thread that I didn't think he was faking his enjoyment of Clowes. I don't think Clowes is as good as, say, Godard, but I haven't argued that his fans don't really want what they want from his work.

"Their badness might be understood, but it doesn't cease to be any less bad"

This is 180 degrees away from the point I made about differing criteria of badness. What else is new?

Earlier in the thread Charles used the term "genre politics," which phrase may be, for all I know, original with him. I assume that whoever created it spun it off from the better-known phrase "gender politics." A brief search didn't reveal who first coined the latter phrase, but I wanted to find at least a general historical definition of the latter, so that I could inquire as to whether CR is using his phrase in a parallel manner. (Actually, I'm pretty sure that Charles' "genre politics" is meant caustically, unlike the serious-minded definition below, but I think that the logic behind the definition of "gender politics" below bears no small relevance to the history of what CR has called "genre politics."

"Until recently, the study of politics did not deal with gender. Politics was described and analyzed by social scientists and other "experts" who were virtually all male, and presented as objective (scientific), value-free, and gender-neutral. However, as women's & gender studies began to proliferate, and as more women have entered such fields as political science and sociology, as well as politics itself, they began to question the absence of "gender" as a factor in the study of politics.
Feminist scholars, in particular, have pointed out and documented that gender acts as a lens or filter through which people view, understand, analyze and critique the world and thus both the absence and presence of women and men in politics itself and the study of politics is a very important aspect of consideration."

http://www.iastate.edu/~iwise/iwise/lectures/08Nov2001.htm

It wouldn't surprise me if someone else has used 'genre politics,' but I thought of it myself. Yeah, it does look and sound similar to 'gender politics.' Funny that.

The reasons we both give are listed here:

One doesn't have to bring in Camus to demonstrate the problems of how alienation is dealt with in Spidey, one has but to look at DEATH RAY or real world examples. Would putting a bunch of powers into the hands of an alienated loser give you the life of Spidey, or maybe something like Columbine? I know you're not arguing that Spidey fails at saying anything relevant about alienation, but you give good reasons for why it does. Any "adult" theme one can name that is brushed over in Spidey will inevitably fail to live up to more complex works in novels or comics. Surely, it couldn't have escaped your notice that alienation is one such theme given by adults when arguing for the signficance of reading this type of superhero comic and why it's aesthetically important. Contariwise, I say acknowledge the obvious "failures," and appreciate the individual strangeness of Lee and Ditko. There's nothing else quite like it. It doesn't have to be as significant as Nabokov to be worth looking at. My issue here is not being able to tell the difference, or being unwilling to, not seeing something of worth.

As for being a "failure," Spidey (or any 60s superhero comic) wasn't intended to be placed in some canon of great art, and it succeeds. So I don't consider it a real failure, only a "failure" when someone tries to inflate its signficance as art. It's at that point that someone else has to point to the level of writing and ideas that had become even commonplace in novels or art or film at the time of Spidey's creation. If you're only argument is that something like Iron Man succeeds at being a reasonably formulaic adventure tale, you'd get no argument from me (I remember it not even being that good, but I don't wish to reexperience it, so I'll just grant you your argument). But when you start arguing that it touches on something deep in humanity, the way one of our greatest writers do -- only a different aspect of our humanity -- then I have a reason for pointing out obvious deficiencies in that respect. We both agree that Spiderman has been better than Iron Man, and that Iron Man's been mediocre at best, so what? The problem comes in when someone would want to argue over the probability that in terms of Godard's justified relevance to cinema, what comics likely hold a similar aesthetic relevance: Lee and Ditko's Spiderman, or Clowes' Eightball? One might not like Godard's films, but one looks like a dimwit to simply call them shit. The parallel holds true with Eightball. You can't legitimately ignore it if you're thinking about the aesethetic worth of comics as an artform. The same isn't true of Spiderman.

And none of this is because of the intrinsic limitations of a genre. You want to argue about the deserved significance of Alan Moore vis a vis Dan Clowes, I'm right there with you.

"It wouldn't surprise me if someone else has used 'genre politics,' but I thought of it myself. Yeah, it does look and sound similar to 'gender politics.' Funny that."

Then I'm sure that an unintended parallel on your part would be the one to the "gender politics" definition I cited:

"However, as women's & gender studies began to proliferate, and as more women have entered such fields as political science and sociology, as well as politics itself, they began to question the absence of "gender" as a factor in the study of politics."

The same basic course has been followed with genre studies. Prior to the opening of new discourses, political discourse had a number of blind spots as a result of being confined to males of the species. Academic literary discourse showed similar blind spots whenever its pundits argued hat all canonical literature was great and all genre-fiction was crap. In both cases, those unitary approaches to discourse were in time broken down as logic showed their fallacies.

Your fallacy, Charles, is that you've simply put old wine in new bottles. You claim that you don't have a problem with genre literature being equal to so-called "nongenre" literature-- that your only criterion is "quality"-- but your defintions of quality are still largely drawn from the unitary standards of the pundits of yesteryear, who might claim that 1984 wasn't science fiction because it was too good to be science fiction.

For instance, you write:

"I know you're not arguing that Spidey fails at saying anything relevant about alienation, but you give good reasons for why it does. Any "adult" theme one can name that is brushed over in Spidey will inevitably fail to live up to more complex works in novels or comics."

Here you are taking it for granted that a work with an expressly "adult" theme is automatically superior to a work that does not attempt such a theme. It's your right to prefer the former to the latter in terms of taste, but there are logical arguments, as in the Coleridge citation, that assert that the work that appeals to the intellect is not automatically preferable. That would be a prime example of what I have called a "unitary standard."

Thus, as I said earlier, SPIDER-MAN stands on its own terms as a wish-fulfillment tale, more or less kindred with Coleridge's tale of the genie. It's understandable that a lot of intellectual critics can't help seeing some of the POTENTIAL for intellectual expression of some sort-- I guess along the lines of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, which is more forthright about exploring a "social problem." But I think that's a misapprehension, and part of my reason for introducting a myth/folklore approach to pop-culture is to correct this misapprehension.

BTW, though I don't think SPIDEY and RWAC are very comparable, I do think SPIDEY's a better example of its type of thing than RWAC is for its type. There are some Oedipal themes in both, but in SPIDEY they're purer and less intellectualized than in RWAC, and strike me as more honest and less drawn from some Sunday-supplement reading of Freud or Philip Wylie.

"You can't legitimately ignore it if you're thinking about the aesethetic worth of comics as an artform. The same isn't true of Spiderman."

It's not even really legitimate to ignore the basic storytelling quality of GIM, but I imagine you've convinced yourself that it is, so we can let that one rest.

If this were a discussion of gender politics, you'd be the one arguing that I'm ignoring gender because of neglecting the "fact" that women are more emotional than men.

How much plainer can I make it: "[N]one of this is because of the intrinsic limitations of a genre. You want to argue about the deserved significance of Alan Moore vis a vis Dan Clowes, I'm right there with you."

Some great works of propaganda stand on their own, too, but so what? I've no problem with the appearance of ideology in art, but good art that deals with it critically (not meaning just negatively or positively) is going to be better than good art that only presents it.

Early Spiderman attempted to deal with alienation, but it didn't do it as well as REBEL, but maybe it did it as well as VILLAGE. It's goals and feel are closer to the latter.

'If this were a discussion of gender politics, you'd be the one arguing that I'm ignoring gender because of neglecting the "fact" that women are more emotional than men.'

That's an argument for supporting whatever power is already entrenched, right? Then by logical extension it's *your* argument, since you're the one claiming that unitary standards of goodness are the only standards that need be applied, the same way that the above bromide is meant to defend the necessity of men remaining in power.

The only way you could do your twisty-turny thing on the bromide-statement is if we had been discussing the dispensation of power in the marketplace, and you were claiming (as you perhaps have already) that I was supporting the entrenched power of those publishers who appeal largely or wholly to readerly tastes. I expect that's the way you'll go next, but the thrust of this discourse has never been about the fair/unfair nature of the marketplace, but aesthetics. You've asserted that you judge good genre work in terms of "quality," and I say that your parameters for quality are aesthetically wrongheaded.

Remember what I said re: my interpretation of Myers-- how you can't run until you walk? That's basically what you're saying when you downgrade the role of straightforward storytelling. You're imagining that Alan Moore ran to his level of excellence w/o taking anything substantial from works that are currently seen (correctly or not) as "lesser."

Of course, the history of criticism has been rife with critics who basically wanted to believe that whatever works they deemed excellent grew like Topsy, transcending their sociocultural matrix (except, maybe, for influence by other "high-toned" artists). Aristotle was perhaps the first "literary critic" who theorized that the tragedies of his day had sprung from the ruder "goat songs" of primitive Dionysian theater, but not a lot of critics have been willing to follow his logic to its modern-day conclusion.

It's funny, because nothing I've said here diminshes the accomplishments of the people working in the "writerly" modes. Praising Archie Goodwin for being able to craft basic, well-constructed tales doesn't take anything away from the Brothers Hernandez. And condemning him as "mediocre" (not something I said) doesn't help them, either.