The Use and Abuse of Literature (13 page)

“Trashcan stuff” is very like what the detractors of Renaissance drama had to say about the literary merit of the entire genre in Shakespeare’s time, and of course
Macbeth
as a play
is
violent, bloody, and based on true accounts. That has long been part of its appeal to audiences—in addition to, or sometimes despite, Shakespeare’s language. But it’s the novelization aspect, the transformation of the play into another form and other words, that the drama critic finds most offensive.

Such translations of the plays into a form that might appeal to children have been popular at least since Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807
Tales from Shakespeare
, although the Lambs stay much closer to Shakespeare’s language: in their tale of
Macbeth
, we read that “she took his dagger, with purpose to stain the cheeks of the grooms with blood, to make it seem their guilt,” and that “the proofs against the grooms (the dagger being produced against them and their faces smeared with blood) were sufficiently strong.”
³
) For Wertham, a psychiatrist who served as an expert witness in numerous medico-legal cases, the chief issue is the danger he thought sex and sensationalism posed for children—or, as the title of his book declared, the seduction of the innocent. In the classic comic version of
Macbeth
, described by its publisher as “a dark tragedy of jealousy, intrigue and violence adapted for easy and enjoyable reading,” he found that “Shakespeare and the child are corrupted at the same time.”
⁴

Graphic novels, which trace their forebears not only to comic books and comic strips but also to the medieval woodcut, have been published in the U.S. and in Europe since the 1930s. The term
graphic novel
has been in use at least since the 1960s and became popular with Will Eisner’s
A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories
(1978), in which the word
graphic
was intended to distinguish it not only from what we might call, in a back-formation, the
verbal novel
, but also from other kinds of graphic illustration, like—of course—comic books. These works were thus both
graphic
novels and graphic
novels
, depending upon what the selected comparison (or contrast) group might be. “The American graphic novel considers itself a literary genre,” wrote one scholar of the field, “a novel, not made by words, but by images, balloons, and captions,” so that “in ‘graphic novel,’ the important word is ‘novel,’ not
graphic.”
⁵
By contrast, he suggested, in the French-speaking parts of Europe, the emphasis is put much more on the word
graphic
, and the genre as a whole is regarded as a new kind of storytelling where a visual logic motivates both the plot and the narration. But as the form itself has internationalized, these distinctions may be seen to be breaking down.

Some authors of highly regarded graphic novels, like Art Spiegelman, the creator of
Maus
, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, also teach and write about the history of comics—or, as Spiegelman prefers to call them, comix.
Maus
, published in two volumes (
Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale
and
Maus II: My Father Bleeds History
) won Spiegelman a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and was the topic of an exhibition. Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the World Trade Center bombing on 9/11,
In the Shadow of No Towers
, was published in 2004.

That
Maus
is a work of literature, whatever literature is thought to be today, is inarguable (though this will doubtless lead someone to argue it). Charles McGrath, in his account of the graphic-novel phenomenon, notes that the genre really took off in the 1990s. Books like Chris Ware’s
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
and Daniel Clowes’s
David Boring
have, says McGrath, achieved cult status on many campuses. “These are the graphic novels—the equivalent of ‘literary novels’ in the mainstream publishing world—and they are beginning to be taken seriously by the critical establishment.
Jimmy Corrigan
even won the 2001 Guardian Prize for best first book, a prize that in other years has gone to authors like Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Philip Gourevitch.”
⁶
Such novels are, he thinks, especially suited for portraying “blankness and anomie,” “spookiness and paranoia,” and “cartoonish” exaggeration and caricature. “How good are graphic novels, really?” McGrath asks. “Are these truly what our great-grandchildren will be reading, instead of books without pictures? Hard to say.” But the genre has gained enormous respect and corresponding review attention.

In a pun that comics and graphic novel writers were quick to exploit, the word
gutter
, a technical term for the space between the panels of a comic strip (as well as for the blank space between two facing pages in a printed book), came to emblematize both the supposed low origins of the genre and its defining formal characteristic. The graphic novel is a
growth stock in both the publishing and the academic worlds, the topic of much discussion and of several critical anthologies. The trade paperback version of the collected
Watchmen
comics written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons was marketed as a graphic novel and appeared on
Time
magazine’s “All-TIME 100 Novels list” of the “best English-language novels from 1923 to the present,” together with works like
All the King’s Men, To the Lighthouse, Midnight’s Children, The Catcher in the Rye
, and
Gravity’s Rainbow.
⁷
Increasingly, book awards are being added or expanded to recognize the growth in number and in quality of collaborative graphic fiction. Neil Gaiman’s comic book series
The Sandman
included a stand-alone issue, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1991.
The Watchmen
was awarded a special Hugo Award in 1988 by the World Science Fiction Society, and a new Hugo category, called Best Graphic Story, was added in 2009 to accommodate and honor the increasing number of graphic works in science fiction or fantasy form.

An enthusiastic front-page review in the weekend arts section of
The New York Times
(
A SUPERHERO IN A PRISM, ANTIHEROES IN DEEP FOCUS
) spoke glowingly of three new graphic novels that “display the ambition behind an evolving format,” and was accompanied by extensive illustrations.
⁸
Wertham had considered the popularity of the comic book a sign of the loss of interest in reading. He quoted a publisher who, asked about the spread of the comic style to regular publications, answered, “We are retooling for illiteracy,” then said flatly, “Comic books are death on reading.”
⁹
He was speaking of children’s reading habits. But in a more visual age, and with extraordinary graphics, the comic book has come of age.

As for the term
well-made play
, who uses it today as a term of praise? Yet in the nineteenth century, the well-made play was an extraordinarily successful mode of tight construction, developed by the French dramatists Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou, influencing even those who professed to scorn it. In Scribe’s typical formula, a plot complication—like letters or documents coming suddenly to light or to hand—brings about a reversal of fortune, sometimes revealing a major character to be
a fraud or impostor, which in turn leads to a denouement in which there is at least a semblance of return to order. Dismissed by George Bernard Shaw as “sardoodleism” or “sardoodledom,” a contrived plot structure with stereotyped characters, the well-made play (
pièce bien faite
) nonetheless had its effect upon Shaw’s plays, as well as those of Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and other dramatists. (Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
is a deliberate send-up of the genre that profits both from following and from exploding its by then familiar conventions.) Many of these responses to the well-made play are enrolled in the canons of literature, but the genre, though dutifully taught in courses on the history of the drama, has pretty much disappeared from view. By contrast, this genre’s near historical neighbor, melodrama, has enjoyed a recent revival, spurred by film studies but extending back into studies of the Victorian stage and emerging side by side with the sensation novel as an area of intense interest for scholars, audiences, and readers.
Sweeney Todd, The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret
—none of these was literature when first written, published, or performed. All are now regularly taught in college and university courses, and feature centrally in well-regarded scholarly books.

While
melodramatic
retains its negative force as an adjective, courses in Hollywood melodrama, American melodrama, melodrama and modernity, melodrama and race, etc., attract both students and teachers. (One indicative text would be
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, an instant best seller when it was published in 1852, having first appeared in serial form in an abolitionist magazine.)

Recent years have witnessed the migration of things that once weren’t considered literature into the privileged fold, ranging from essays (Montaigne, Bacon, Addison and Steele, Barthes, Sontag) to what was once called intellectual prose (philosophy, politics, economics, via—for example—Francis Bacon again, or John Milton, or Edmund Burke) to the graphic novel (scion of the humble comic book). This period has seen the emigration of things that once were literature into the discard pile, which has been the fate of not only the well-made play, but also of the long didactic poem. These entities are still arguably literature, or at least literary, if we use those terms in the broadest sense. But they are
out of favor at present: a circumstance almost guaranteeing that at some time or another, each will make a triumphant return.

Some genres that have become central to a contemporary understanding of literature, like the novel, were down-market upstarts until fairly recently in modern Western history. The word
novel
began to appear consistently in the 1680s, replacing or competing with
romance;
both terms are used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as what had once been trivial became literature, an instrument of national pride, identification, and cultural advocacy. The study of literature, together with that of the sciences, gained an important place in public culture, and fictions of the self, the individual, and the bildungsroman or novel of personal development, became an influential, as well as a well-regarded, mode of literary writing. This kind of prose fiction differed from the old ideal of the national epic in verse, though—as many critics have noted—it shared some of its goals and techniques. Much more could be said on this topic, about which there exists an extensive and informative body of critical history.
¹⁰

But the point here is straightforward: with the novel, as with the drama, the lyric poem, the satire—indeed, just about every genre we think of as foundational to the notion of literature—we are dealing with a form that has evolved over time, that had some antecedents that were distinctly low, popular, and unrespectable, and in short,
became
literature, for reasons variously aesthetic, political, situational, and cultural. The establishment of a literary canon requires both the forgetting and the selective remembering of these sometimes low origins.

It’s not a surprise that texts first regarded as extra-literary should be brought, after the fact, into the canonical fold. Ben Jonson scandalized some of his contemporaries by publishing his plays in folio form in 1612. The publication of Shakespeare’s plays in folio eleven years later was a similar act of confidence, or bravery, on the part of his friends. Playbooks were not works, a term of honor reserved for sermons, didactic writings,
and other serious endeavors. And the large folio format was reserved for writings of enduring importance, the opposite of stage plays. Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of Oxford’s Bodleian library, instructed his librarian not to include any plays, which he called “riffe raffes” and “baggage bookes.”
¹¹
Such things could create a scandal. In any case, plays were comparable, he thought, to items like almanacs and proclamations, useful written objects that, once used, could be thrown away.

The technical term for throwaways of this kind is
ephemera
, from a word meaning “lasting only a day.” In general, the word refers to items like posters, greeting cards, seed packets, advertising mailers, air transport labels, printed handouts, and probably everything we now call second-class mail. Perhaps inevitably, ephemera have now become collectibles, highly valued by museums, galleries, auction houses, and libraries. What was once discarded is now purchased, donated, preserved, cataloged, and exhibited. The Ephemera Society of America, formed in 1980, encourages “interest in ephemera and the history identified with it” and publishes
The Ephemera Journal;
a recent issue contained articles on “an important collection of paper ephemera with Shakespearean themes” at the Folger Shakespeare Library; a collection of antiquarian playing cards from the Netherlands that had second lives as “promissory notes, clothing reinforcement, and even heart-wrenching notes from destitute mothers forced to abandon their infants”; and nineteenth-century scrapbooks.
¹²
There are ephemera collections at the British Library and the National Library of Australia, and an Ephemera Society in New Zealand, as well as archives of video and audio ephemera. Bearing in mind Thomas Bodley’s strictures on the ephemerality of playbooks, it is intriguing to note that one especially significant archive today is the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera—located at the Bodleian library, Oxford.

Ephemera also includes specimens of oral art, like ballads, which need to be collected lest they disappear. As the critic Susan Stewart suggests, the justification for the act of collection is the anxiety about disappearance, loss, or contamination, the waning of a supposed authenticity which,
paradoxically, will itself be lost when the artifact, having become a work of literature, is removed from the context of performance and placed in the context of art.
¹³
What this changed status for ephemera means is that items gathered under this rubric are not—if they ever were—ephemeral.