Nostalgia, irony, incest, legitimacy

Last week Salon.com ran an article excerpted from Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk. Wolk hits several themes pertinent to romance culture. What is it about these genres that creates so much "cultural baggage"? And to what extent is the genre’s culture nostalgic? Wolk also touches on genre defensiveness and the wish for "legitimacy".

I know nothing about comic culture and, as expected, a number of Salon commenters disagree with Wolk. Nonetheless, Wolk’s arguments resonate with some of my recent thoughts.

Nostalgia

Wolk characterizes comic book culture as nostalgic. He has some biting things to say about artists’ nostalgia that clings to the familiar instead of keeping comics vibrant. But his description of readers’ nostalgia connects with a thought I've had on romance readership:

The comics collecting market was called the "nostalgia market" at first.... In mainstream comics, nostalgie de la boue manifests itself as stories whose main point is to trigger nostalgic responses in their older readers--forgotten Golden Age characters being trotted out

"Nostalgia" means, literally, a longing to return home. The word was originally a medical term for "physical and emotional upheaval... related to the workings of memory". If nostalgia arises from a sense of longing, then in a sense, much of romance reading is nostalgic. We sometimes read to reexperience a specific feeling--not for a new experience or to learn someone else's story (see comments on male stereotypes and happily ever after).

Character-driven genre fiction is the perfect medium for nostalgic reading: (1) it provides familiar structures or situations that we know will tug at our emotions in particular ways (see Sarah Frantz on reader expectations), and (2) it provides well-developed characters with whom we can identify, increasing our chances of an emotional response—if not by placeholding then by reader identification (see Laura Vivanco on reader response theory).

Incest and shorthand

Not to draw too solid a correlation here, but Wolk's description of an inward-looking comics culture:

It's frustrating to love comics, because there's so much cultural baggage.... A lot of the people... think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship.... That incestuous relationship between audience and medium has been encouraged by the big comics publishers. Mainstream comics pamphlets that are incomprehensible to anyone not already immersed in their culture aren't just the standard now; they're the point.

bears some resemblance to Robin's comments on Smart Bitches and Dear Author on the increasingly telegraphic style of romance novels ("increasing reliance on genre shorthand"):

with page counts shrinking, part of the burden of the novel-writing craft is being shifted... to readers—we have to fill in blanks and flesh out characters or worldbuilding and make critical links between plot points. And because so many Romance readers have read so much Romance, I think this process becomes almost unconscious

Like comics, the romance genre has developed its own stock worlds and character archetypes. For fans with a long history in the genre, certain key phrases resonate like a hypnotist’s trigger word; some story components may be unwritten but culturally available. Interestingly, this seems like a style of active readership that would be natural in comics; the comic reader is required to do a great deal of the interpretive work, akin to the views of Stanley Fish, "who argues that the interpretive strategy of the reader creates the text, there being no text except that which a reader or an interpretive community of readers creates" (Laura Vivanco again).

Most romances are set in realistic worlds; the barrier to entry is low except for a few paranormal romances. Nonetheless, insider shorthand is increasing in romance. In comics, the use of genre shorthand results in overtly referential novels that make for more difficult reading. In romance, the genre shorthand in use generally reduces the books' apparent complexity. If a graphical novel cuts out backstory explaining its complex world, the action could be completely incomprehensible. If a romance novel cuts out backstory explaining its characters, it'll likely be readable--but the characters may seem shallowly drawn and their actions, lacking support, arbitrary; or lacking deflection, predictable.

Legitimacy and irony

One experience shared by romance readers and comic readers is a mingling of love and embarrassment for the genre. We enjoy “bodice rippers” even while we revile and deconstruct them.

Wolk says this awkwardness is about "comics culture's slightly miserable striving for ‘acknowledgment’ and ‘respect’...." That could be said of portions of the romance community (witness the hostilities between authors Jennifer Weiner and Curtis Sittenfeld over the status of chick lit; Janet's response to Salon's summer book list; and Kassia Krozser and Diana Peterfreund on reviewing). Certainly it's easier to strike an ironic attitude toward romance or comics because they're in the "not serious literature" ghetto. As Erica Jong said recently, "War matters; love does not. Women are destined to be undervalued as long as we write about love."

Of course, it's not all embarrassment over status. We're in an era that's discomfited by un-ironic praise. Linda Hutcheon writes about the conflation of irony with nostalgia as a characteristically postmodernist mode of discourse. This rings true with the tone of current romance, and romance discourse. We revel and mock simultaneously; we value sweetness but are embarrassed by it.

I'll finish by quoting several of Wolk's points on legitimacy that directly echo current conversations in genre romance:

It's hard to imagine what kind of cultural capital the American comics industry (and its readership) is convinced that it's due and doesn't already have…. demanding (or wishing for) a place at the table of high culture is an admission that you don't have one; the way you get a place at the table of high culture is to pull up a chair and say something interesting....

there's a longing for the medium to get more of something that's usually called "legitimacy." There's an element of comics culture, sometimes called (a little derisively) "Team Comics," that gets excited whenever anything that looks like that acknowledgment or respect… turns up in the outside world -- a college class on the graphic novel, a Hollywood movie based on a graphic novel, a newspaper or magazine article about a cartoonist, somebody reading a comic book on a TV show….

The "Team Comics" culture vultures… are driven by the desire to turn their hobby into some kind of success or validation, whether through affluence or cultural power, and that impulse is directly connected to the class aspirations that afflict the entire medium. A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect -- to show the world that they were right all along.

Tags: books, comics, romance, collecting