Forging the Past

Seth and the Art of Memory

Daniel Marrone

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781496807328
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At once familiar and hard to place, the work of acclaimed Canadian cartoonist Seth evokes a world that no longer exists—and perhaps never existed, except in the panels of long-forgotten comics. Seth's distinctive drawing style strikingly recalls a bygone era of cartooning, an apt vehicle for melancholy, gently ironic narratives that depict the grip of the past on the present. Even when he appears to look to the past, however, Seth (born Gregory Gallant) is constantly pushing the medium of comics forward with sophisticated work that often incorporates metafiction, parody, and formal experimentation. Forging the Past offers a comprehensive account of this work and the complex interventions it makes into the past. Moving beyond common notions of nostalgia, Daniel Marrone explores the various ways in which Seth's comics induce readers to participate in forging histories and memories. Marrone discusses collecting, Canadian identity, New Yorker cartoons, authenticity, artifice, and ambiguity—all within the context of comics' unique structure and texture. Seth's comics are suffused with longing for the past, but on close examination this longing is revealed to be deeply ambivalent, ironic, and self-aware. Marrone undertakes the most thorough, sustained investigation of Seth's work to date, while advancing a broader argument about how comics operate as a literary medium. Included as an appendix is a substantial interview, conducted by the author, in which Seth candidly discusses his work, his peers, and his influences.

1

Style and the Appearance of Authenticity

The most immediately compelling feature of Seth’s work is its appearance, those physical elements that combine to form a strong, instant impression of what may be generally termed “style.” This is hardly unusual in the medium of comics, which conveys so much by visual means; even alongside other contemporary comics, however, Seth’s books often stand out as carefully designed book-objects. It comes as no surprise that he is also a sought-after designer for other people’s books, a parallel profession that has superseded his work as a jobbing magazine illustrator. Much more than just the external package, however, what I refer to in this chapter as style includes page design and panel layout, shading and color scheme, treatment of fictive, diegetic space, and of course the actual drawing itself, which in Seth’s case strongly recalls a bygone era of cartooning. Although he does not attempt to slavishly reproduce the technique of any particular cartoonist from the so-called Golden Age of American comics, Seth conjures a consistent surface that seems uncannily familiar, reassuring, and authentic in its evocation of this visual history. This is not style in the sense of something opposed to substance or meaning but rather, as Susan Sontag predicts, style as a kind of “totality” (Against Interpretation 17). Style is understood to encompass and sometimes even dictate substance.

Still, as Sontag points out, even to invoke the term “style” is to imply something that is somehow separable from what might commonly (and with a pretense of neutrality) be referred to as “content.” Implicit in this chapter is an argument that such a separation may be considered an acceptable and even productive theoretical maneuver, particularly in the analysis of a visual narrative medium like comics. At the same time, however, style in comics is more than just the sum of its parts, more than the choices made by a cartoonist between various interchangeable elements. Style is connected to what Thierry Groensteen calls the “medium-related pleasure” of comics, which he rightly maintains cannot be reduced to a simple combination of narrative and artistic pleasures (“Why” 10). The medium-related pleasure of Seth’s comics is often bound up with a sense of history, craft, and that nearly intangible quality, authenticity. The word “authenticity” accommodates a great deal of connotative slippage, which this chapter attempts to preserve even as it draws out particular meanings. Likewise “appearance.” The discussion of “the appearance of authenticity” represents an effort to parse a sometimes elusive set of concerns: not only what Seth’s style looks like and how it operates, but also the process by which it becomes perceptible to the reader.

The Specter of Authenticity

In her contribution to The Concept of Style (edited by Berel Lang), Svetlana Alpers observes that “style, as engaged in the study of art, has always had a radically historical bias” (137). That is to say, the concept of style has traditionally been an instrument of art historians used to classify and chronologize their object of study. With this in mind, Seth’s relationship to the past already begins to come more into focus: part of the reason his period evocations are so compelling is that he is using style as a historicizing discourse, as art historians do, but in a manner that is at once nonspecific and almost overdetermined. By “nonspecific” I mean the ambiguity of his style—it evokes the past, but not any particular past, a past that exists only on the surface of his page. By “overdetermined” I mean the indiscriminateness of his style—it is applied uniformly to every part of a narrative, regardless of the actual year in which the story takes place.

Alpers’s is one of the less fastidious essays in The Concept of Style, which is a dense and wide-ranging anthology full of careful terminological distinctions and schematic proposals that are often at odds with each other. Can all these schemas really be equally useful? Ultimately, the most intricate theories seem to collapse under the weight of their various taxonomies, typologies, and neologisms; less prescriptive contributions fare better. For instance, Kendall L. Walton asks, “Are styles attributes of objects, or of actions?” (72). She suggests that the two are intimately connected, but favors the latter. Her approach takes into account the way in which a work is made, “the act of creating it,” and draws a sharp distinction between art objects and natural objects (for instance, sunsets) (73–74). This understanding of style as the product of an artist’s process, constituted by actions, dovetails with one of Sontag’s formulations: “If art is the supreme game which the will plays with itself, ‘style’ consists of the set of rules by which this game is played” (Against Interpretation 33).

Simon Grennan sees Seth’s work in terms of such representational constraints or rules, which he claims may be summarized as “nothing un–North American, nothing post-1959” (296, emphasis in original). Arguing for an alternative approach to comics narratology, Grennan uses Clyde Fans to highlight the relation between what Émile Benveniste refers to as histoire, “what is told,” and discours, “the situation in which enunciation is made” (Grennan 296). He persuasively suggests that Seth “uses a history of specific past forms of expression to self-consciously form his own” and that the reader’s experience “parallels this adoption of past forms” (300). Within this framework, however, Seth’s style is understood as the product of an appropriated discours: “We see Seth’s attempts to act within constraint, by adopting a complex discours other than his own, whilst simultaneously recognizing that he is Seth, drawing in the twenty-first century and not a comic strip artist of the 1940s” (313). Why Grennan considers the discours of Seth’s work to be “other than his own” is not entirely clear; arguably, both the histoire and discours are uniquely his own, and uniquely contemporary, even if significantly informed by “past forms of expression.” Although he recognizes the complexity of Seth’s style, Grennan still fixes it to a particular past: “North America, pre-1959” (299). In this way, Grennan’s sophisticated narratological approach may actually risk obscuring one of the fundamental aspects of Seth’s style: that it reflects a longing for a past that never existed.

Especially in Seth’s work, this kind of longing is always haunted by the specter of authenticity. When deployed as a critical term, “authenticity” often refers to a specifically modern literary articulation, a site where aesthetics and ethics tellingly overlap. Sontag asserts that the distinction between aesthetics and ethics is “a trap,” the result of a Western misapprehension (Against Interpretation 23). Indeed, the inseparability of ethics and aesthetics seems to find its epitome in a stylistic quality like authenticity, which pretends to be not stylistic but natural, artless. What is at stake in a style that wants to efface itself? And what continues to make authenticity such an urgent concern in contemporary art and literature? “That the word has become part of the moral slang of our day,” wrote Lionel Trilling in Sincerity and Authenticity, “points to our anxiety over the credibility of existence and of individual existences” (93). Seth’s work reflects and engages with precisely this anxiety, which might be considered the kernel of his style, the most immediately apparent expression of which is an ambivalent nostalgia (what Svetlana Boym would call “reflective nostalgia”).

Whether general or specific, reflective or restorative, nostalgia consistently entails a corresponding concern with what is natural and real, an inclination that becomes particularly visible in literature (and sometimes literally visible in comics). Nostalgic writers seem to strain toward a stable referent: in their texts, the past is “attached to other terms that make it a locus of authenticity” (Doane and Hodges 9). In this sense, Seth is not a nostalgic writer; he is too self-aware, constantly undercutting the credibility of nostalgic impulses. In It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Seth-as-protagonist explicitly voices anxiety about the material degradation he perceives in everyday life—“quality” becomes metonymically linked to authenticity, with the past as the locus of each—but he also second-guesses this nostalgic attitude (43). A more extreme instance of authorial disavowal is found in the satirical depiction of Jonah, Seth’s hysterically nostalgic self-caricature from Wimbledon Green, who takes his longing for the past to absurd ends.

And yet, at a glance, a casual reader might still fairly remark that Seth’s work looks “nostalgic” or “old-fashioned,” or even “handmade,” because to a significant extent it is the evident craft of his books that suggests something from a previous era. As much as Seth may discursively disavow nostalgia, the appearance of his work continues to make a case for the pleasures of longing and the value of an outmoded brand of authenticity. The ethical/aesthetic stakes of authenticity can seem implicit (if not explicit) in every brushstroke and background detail. Moreover, the very surface of the page seems charged with the tension between this authentic imperative and the artifice used to conjure it. Pervasive as it is, the appearance of authenticity is not always at the vanguard of the reader’s attention, and the experienced reader can choose to “tune in” to it (or tune it out) to varying degrees. Nevertheless, this appearance, which is such a large part of Seth’s style, is in many ways unavoidable.

The phrase “the appearance of authenticity” contains a number of closely related meanings, the most obvious being, plainly, “what authenticity looks like.” In Seth’s work, as noted above, authenticity often looks “handmade” or “nostalgic”: muted colors, handwritten lettering, panel frames that are not perfectly straight, a drawing style that evokes the history of cartooning (more on this below). A second principal meaning might be paraphrased as “how authenticity discloses itself to the reader,” the manner in which authenticity actively becomes legible. In comics, as in painting or sculpture, appearance is paradoxically a static becoming (or a network of static becomings) activated by the reader/viewer. This does not mean that the reader must be able to name the cartoonists who have influenced Seth’s approach to the medium, or be intimately acquainted with the minutiae of comic book production. The visual literacy of the contemporary reader is sufficiently high to appreciate the tensions in Seth’s work and be rewarded by his attention to detail.

Such a reader can immediately intuit, for instance, the difference between a mass-market superhero comic and Seth’s work. It is not necessary to know that distribution of labor (into writer, artist, inker, letterer, etc.) is the norm for the mass market in order to appreciate the wager of authenticity made by the cartoonist working independently. To take a specific example: It’s a Good Life operates within the genre of autobiography, one of the most familiar modes of expression in literary comics and likely the one most associated with authentic expression. As Bart Beaty observes in Unpopular Culture: “In the field of contemporary comic book production, autobiography holds a promise to elevate the legitimacy of both the medium and the artist” (144). A general sense of cultural context, even if only gleaned from peripheral exposure to comics, is all a reader needs to understand the tensions between art and pop culture that appear in an autobiographical comic.

The term “appearance” can also have an almost pejorative implication, as when it is set against “reality.” In this sense, “the appearance of authenticity” may suggest a surface that is not credible or that seeks to conceal a decidedly inauthentic reality. Seth’s work, in its ambivalent relation to authenticity, helps to dissolve this familiar hierarchy between appearance and reality. In George Sprott, for example, the credibility of the narration is constantly called into question. The narrator apologizes for gaps in information and, significantly, worries about conveying something “real” about George. The reality that does emerge is not entirely favorable: it gradually becomes apparent that George’s entire career (television show, lecture series, his Institute of Polar Studies) is built around a handful of “expeditions” the actual cultural value of which is highly suspect.

However, this again is ambivalence expressed at the level of plot, and does not address the issues of authenticity and reliability that surround any other aspect of the narrative, namely its physical appearance. Seth’s surface remains seemingly seamless—but does this necessarily mean that it has something to hide? Sontag may be useful here: “Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing”—a definition that suits the purposes of this chapter quite well—“this by no means necessarily entails an opposition between a style that one assumes and one’s ‘true’ being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being” (Against Interpretation 18). Under these circumstances, the critical aim should not be to peer “beyond” appearance, regarding it as a surface below which a more fundamental truth about the work lies hidden. Rather than assuming that appearance conceals or, at best, points toward meaning, it is necessary to recognize the potential for appearance in and of itself to contain meaning.

A great deal of meaning is contained in the surface of Seth’s work, most notably its evocation of the early gag cartoons of the New Yorker—or, more specifically, the work of one of the New Yorker’s most renowned cartoonists: Peter Arno. In the glossary of It’s a Good Life, Seth describes Arno as “possibly the New Yorker’s greatest stylist,” and his sensibility has come to represent an entire era of magazine cartooning. The best scholarly introduction to Arno’s work, and perhaps the best introduction to the cartoons of the New Yorker, is Iain Topliss’s The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg. As the title suggests, the book is a study of four landmark American cartoonists and their relation to the New Yorker, which, Topliss contends, “might be described as the house organ of a key fraction of the American middle class” (4). Topliss ably balances explanations of both the context and content of the New Yorker’s cartoons, often demonstrating the inseparability of the two with careful analyses of individual gags. His approach is distinguished by attention to detail and an easy familiarity with the material, yielding a sturdy investigation that does not shy away from the significance of surfaces.

Topliss begins by situating the cartoon nearly at the center of the New Yorker’s distinctive style. “Cartoons have been a defining element in the New Yorker since Harold Ross founded it in 1925,” Topliss argues, going on to say that “the cartoons, more than anything else in the early years of the magazine, set its tone, established its look, and offered anchorage for readers navigating the vast ocean of its text” (5). And more than any other cartoonist it was Arno, especially in these formative years, who exemplified the prevailing mood of the new magazine: “sophisticated, adult, and antisentimental” (21). Topliss looks closely at this by-now familiar attitude and finds that it is the product of conflicting impulses—to participate and to observe—which resolve themselves into the viewpoint delineated in Arno’s work: “Disengaged intimacy, the hallmark of his humor, was the basis of the New Yorker’s famous sophistwication” (22). In the cartoons of Peter Arno, Topliss traces the “emergence of a mood of rueful discontent with modern life” (15).

Seth reinterprets this mood in It’s a Good Life, offering variations on the theme through his invented cartoonist Kalo, whose work is pres...