Reading 1Q84: The Case for Fiction in a Busy Life

Essays
November 14, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 27 6 min read

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coverWhen I was assigned to review 1Q84 for The Christian Science Monitor it had been four months since I’d read a page of anything. That last book I’d tried to read had also been by Haruki Murakami — The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — and my bookmark was right where I’d left it, on page 52, the day my wife had gone into labor with our second son.

Raising young children poses two challenges for reading fiction. The first is time, and not having much of it. The second, which I find harder to overcome, is that raising kids and reading fiction require somewhat different mindsets: fiction opens you to new possibilities, but once you’ve embarked on an all-consuming activity like raising kids you don’t want to think too much about other possibilities; you just need to put your head down and do it.

I started 1Q84 at 9pm at the end of a long day that had featured a 103 degree fever (my youngest son Wally, age 4 months) and several bathroom accidents (his older brother Jay, age 2 years). As I slumped on the couch with a cup of peppermint tea and my large yellow review copy of 1Q84, I found myself grasping to justify why, outside of the assignment I’d been given, it made sense to spend my only free time of the day reading fiction.

But I did read the book, that night and every night after for a month, and I found that as I read 1Q84 and got deeper into Tengo’s and Aomame’s stories, I stopped questioning the purpose of fiction and instead began to see reading 1Q84 as one of the few necessary things I did all day. The reasons for the change of heart had to do with wonder, with love, and with the way literature provides for the best parts of who we are.

1Q84 is long (nearly 1,000 pages) and wildly imaginative, but at heart it’s a simple love story. Tengo and Aomame, both 30 years old, shared a singular, intense moment as children, disappeared from each other’s lives, and have been trying to recapture that kind of intimacy ever since. As 1Q84 opens they fall into an alternate world which is sinister and illogical, but which gives them the chance to find each other again.

Aomame calls this world 1Q84 (in which the “Q” stands for “question”) and it is most clearly distinguished by the fact that two moons hang in the sky — the familiar moon and, alongside it, a smaller moon, “slightly warped in shape, and green.” The moons preside over Aomame’s “sex feasts,” several murders, Tengo’s surreal trips to see his dying father, and one of the most transfixing nocturnal dream scenes I’ve ever read. The moons are a tangible reminder of the warning delivered to Aomame by her cab driver, just before she steps out of a taxi on a gridlocked Tokyo expressway and inadvertently into the world of 1Q84: “Please remember: things are not what they seem.”

A few days after I started reading 1Q84 I was standing in my Michigan backyard, talking on the phone with my brother, when the unusual brightness of the night caused me to look up at the moon — nearly full, unobstructed by clouds — for the first time in as long as I could remember. For a moment I was so taken by the view that I lost track of my brother, who was continuing to tell me about his weekend.

Afterwards I called Caroline out to the backyard. If it had been a while since I’d looked at the moon, it had been even longer since we’d looked at it together. We don’t have much time to stare up at the sky, and even if we did, the moon is outside our realm of concern. I have to care for my kids, earn a living, be a good husband. What difference is it to me if the moon is waxing or waning, full or crescent? For a few quiet minutes we looked up at it together before retreating inside from the cold.

Several of the most important scenes in 1Q84 take place in a playground atop a slide, where one at a time Aomame and Tengo (and a third character, the surprisingly heartbreaking private investigator Ushikawa) stare up at the sky.

The first time Tengo sits on the slide and notices the moons he thinks to himself, “No matter what happens to me in the future, this view with two moons hanging up there side by side will never — ever — seem ordinary and obvious to me.” The unordinary sight of the moons sets Tengo to wondering. He wonders, “What is going to happen to me from now on?” He also wonders about Aomame. “Someone is after Aomame,” he understands. “She’s hiding like a wounded Cat. I don’t have much time to find her.”

Reading about Tengo and seeing the moon in my backyard, it occurred to me that wonder gives us height, makes us consider new possibilities, motivates us not to linger where we are.

And it seems that reading 1Q84 pollinated my life with wonder in three ways. The first is that when Tengo wondered, I wondered alongside him. “What is going to happen to me from now on?” In a quiet house at night with two boys sleeping it feels like time stands still. Yet of course the drum keeps beating; somehow we move on.

1Q84 also inspires wonder through its beauty. “Her little pink ear pressed against his chest,” Murakami writes. “She was hearing everything that went on in his heart, like a person who can trace a map with his fingertip and conjure up vivid, living scenery.” Many nights I closed 1Q84 feeling hungry to go out and create something beautiful myself.

The last way that 1Q84 inspires wonder is the way that all great art inspires wonder: it mirrors life from a fresh angle. Murakami uses the world of 1Q84 to jog Aomame and Tengo into seeing their lives in a new light, and his novel had the same effect on me. One night, about halfway through 1Q84, my wife and I said goodnight to each other and turned to go to sleep. But before closing my eyes I propped myself back up on my elbow and looked intently at her face lying sideways on her pillow. There she was, old familiar Caroline. But for a moment she appeared as strange and wondrous as two moons in the sky.

1Q84 is not a book about wonder, though. It’s a book about love. For the three weeks I was reading it and all the days since, I’ve found myself thinking more consciously than usual about the importance of love — not as a fact that exists between two people — but as a feeling that puts a floor beneath our feet.

As Aomame and Tengo try to make their way towards each other and out of the world of 1Q84 what they’re really straining for is feeling. In their accustomed world of 1984 they might have gone on with their lonely lives but in the forbidding world of 1Q84, events and changes in their own hearts make stasis untenable.

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life,” Aomame tells her friend Ayumi. And in one particularly riveting scene (that would surely feature prominently in a 1Q84 trailer should the book be made into a movie) Aomame concludes that such encompassing love is not possible for her, so she takes to the side of the highway and puts the barrel of a pistol in her mouth.

1Q84 never drove to me to such depths, but it did help me recognize the difference between feeling and not feeling. The night after I finished the book I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Over the course of a month 1Q84 had become a part of my routine and the activities that had previously occupied my evening hours seemed unappealing in comparison.

So instead of mucking around on the Internet or folding laundry, I went upstairs to my two-year-old son Jay’s room and sat in a chair beside his crib. He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life. As I watched him breath in and out, all the cells in my body flooded with a feeling so grand that it crowded out all possibility of thought.

Later, after I’d left Jay’s room, I realized that while being a parent is tiring and sometimes boring, it also means that all I have to do is walk upstairs to experience a feeling that, like Aomame said, is akin to salvation. I also thought about all the hours I’d spent reading 1Q84, and suddenly it seemed clear why it had been a worthwhile way to spend my time: When life wears us down, great fiction gives us back our human shape.

, a staff writer for The Millions, writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshartnett.

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Essays

The Nobel Prize Winner You’ve Never Heard Of

Essays
April 6, 2018 | 2 books mentioned 4 min read
Agnon dedicated the last two decades of his life to writing about his hometown as a symbol of the world of eastern European Jewry destroyed in the Holocaust. Asked by a literary critic what he was trying to accomplish, he answered simply: “I am building a city.”
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 4 min read
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Essays

Justifying Our Existence: The Antioch Review and the Transgender ‘Debate’

Essays
May 16, 2016 | 2 books mentioned 38 8 min read
Daniel Harris begins "The Sacred Androgen," his Antioch Review essay on “the transgender debate,” with a dutiful recounting of the travails transgender people face today: violence inflicted by others and self, bullying, lack of access to resources, etc. Harris does not condone these trials. He goes on to assure his readers that whatever decisions we transgender people make about ourselves, he still believes in our “humanity.” By the end of the essay, Harris’s readers would be forgiven for doubting this assertion. “The Sacred Androgen” is a mess of unreflective bigotry, incoherent assumptions, and wildly inaccurate conclusions. Harris uses outmoded, offensive, or simply strange terminology, referring to transgender people as “TGs,” trans women as transitioning “from virago to vamp,” or as “Mrs. Doubtfires or Victor Victorias.” Harris’s research methods date him as much as his movie references; most of his anecdata seem to have been collected from AOL chat rooms for macho “studs” and the trans women they fetishize. In the light of this content and the alternately patronizing and hostile tone of the essay, Harris’s opening paragraph reads like an attempt at inoculating himself against the inevitable criticism of what follows. Not surprisingly, the essay has been widely decried. In Medium, Gabrielle Bellot writes that, “pieces like this...crassly marginalise and attack vulnerable communities.” Brynn Tannehill on the Huffpost Queer Voices blog writes that her time living near Antioch College “as an out transgender person was a lonely, soul-crushing hell,” an experience Harris’s essay confirms. A petition denouncing the Antioch Review for publishing the essay has collected more than 4,000 signatures. The Antioch Review, for its part, first punted to Antioch College itself, which issued a typically milquetoast appeal to “free expression.” On realizing the fervor wasn’t going to die down, Antioch Review editor Robert Fogarty wrote that, “I sincerely regret any pain and hurt that the publishing of this piece has caused,” promising to publish responses in future issues. One almost feels sorry for Robert Fogarty, who has been the journal’s editor since 1977, when you didn’t have to worry about transgender people. The Antioch Review has the reputation of being prestigious yet staid (an account of the magazine’s history on their website makes their 2013 transition to digital JSTOR archives sound like a giant leap for mankind). This controversy may bolster their readership, though more likely it will act as a cautionary tale for what happens when a stagnant editorial staff leaves a magazine out of touch. “The Sacred Androgen,” while purporting to say what good liberals won’t, actually operates like a juvenile game of “gotcha.” Harris seems to believe that if he can expose enough supposed inconsistencies in how we trans people talk about ourselves, the house of cards we’ve constructed will fall apart altogether. To that end he accuses transgender people of being subject to a “mass delusion,” the fault lines of which emerge in our discussions of the differences between transgender and transracial identity, the way we talk about fetishes and sexual pleasure, and in our claims to radical embodiment vs. how radical we actually are, to name a few. Each of these gotcha moments requires the creation of a straw man -- typically a straw trans woman, in this case -- who espouses views Harris believes to be hypocritical. Transgender people have long been distancing ourselves from the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative (itself a simplified creation for the benefit of mainstream media), to name just one example, yet Harris takes for granted that we all believe this about ourselves. Because Harris doesn’t source any of his straw people, we don’t know who believes that, for example, “a fetish [is] not a legitimate reason for modifying one’s body.” No doubt some trans people do; yet to assume a monolithic set of beliefs is to radically ignore the nuances in the last decade-plus of conversations on transgender identity. This is not to say that there are no inconsistencies in the ways in which we trans people talk about ourselves, or that there is no room for exploration or growth. Like a toddler sensing a word is “bad” without knowing why, Harris shows a remarkable ability to hone in on the issues that get trans people feeling defensive. Take the Rachel Dolezal controversy, which he brings up with glee: Trans people have yet to come up with a foolproof answer to the question of whether transgender can equate to transracial. This is because the issue, like all questions involving the thorny intersections of identities, is complicated. But here’s the thing: What’s the reason trans people rush to defend the legitimacy of our identities at the first challenge, often at the cost of complexity or rational discussion? It’s because of assholes like Daniel Harris, who prey on the burden of proof transgender people feel we need to justify our existence. As if our lives require the armor of pristine argumentation; as if every inconsistency makes us less real. If this were the case, this article should have made Harris himself disappear into the ether. Unfortunately for his argument, Harris is unable to distinguish the gotcha points that are worth pursuing from the ones that are patently ridiculous. Among the latter includes the suggestion that trans women are failed homosexual men. Not only is this offensive, it doesn’t make sense: many trans women are attracted to other women -- how do they fit into the paradigm of the “homosexual manqué?” Not to mention the many trans women that don’t want to “achieve an hourglass figure with gigantic breast implants,” a demographic that -- like trans men -- Harris doesn’t seem to realize exists. So it’s difficult to take the potentially productive provocations -- such as the equation between transgender rhetoric and positive psychology -- seriously. How can we be expected to, within a framework that says we must be intellectually incontrovertible in order to exist? The real question is why Harris felt the need to write this. His tone suggests his resentments have been building for some time, but why? His familiarity with transgender people in the post-AOL world seems to be limited to knowing the names of Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox. I doubt he knows many transgender people personally (and I feel pretty sorry for the ones he does), nor do I suspect transgender people are constantly demanding onerous accommodations from him. The younger, campus-based faction of the transgender community could have provided Harris with enough material for a mean-spirited mockery (Making up YOUR OWN pronouns? What next?!?), but he doesn’t know enough about transgender culture to be able to take advantage. There are really two questions. Why does Harris claim -- explicitly or implicitly -- that he wanted to write this, and why did he really want to write this? Both questions interest me. Both deserve to be discussed, because the sad truth is that Harris’s feelings aren’t uncommon. Because of my various privileges -- my masculinity, my whiteness, my socio-economic mobility -- I don’t typically encounter animosity like Harris’s. But I hear enough of these views secondhand all the time: in the comment sections of articles, in the accounts trans women give of trying to go about their dating lives or simply daily lives, in the subtext of news reports on hate crimes. Harris’s essay feels like an unburdening, the kind of cut-the-PC-crap that’s popular with -- dare I say it -- the Donald Trump crowd. For all of its pretense at provocation, the essay is often no more than a dressed-up version of a bro on a dating app who messages a trans woman to say, “You can say you are who you say you are, but know that I’ll never see you that way.” “The Sacred Androgen” cloaks malice in the language of concern. Daniel Harris doesn’t want trans people to fail. He wants them to realize that taking hormones won’t solve their problems, that they could be left “as out of sorts with their bodies and their failure to pass as they were before they underwent hormone replacement therapy.” All that trouble, and we still won’t look real. Trans women would do better to come to terms with their limits: “men’s noses are too big, shoulders too broad, jaws too square, voices too deep, brows too beetling, and gait -- at least in heels -- too lumbering” to effect any convincing change. Plus, he’s concerned about the children. Under the sway of the trans-brainwashed media, well-intentioned parents may make an “irreversible decision” in giving their child “hormone therapy.” It’s yet another of the essay’s many inaccuracies: children do not receive hormone therapy in the sense of injecting estrogen or testosterone, they receive hormone blockers that buy them time to make their own decisions. But who cares about factual rigor when you’re playing the oldest trick in the book: mobilizing “innocent” children for culturally conservative ends? If Harris’s rationale for writing the essay really was concern for the self-esteem of transgender people or the futures of children, we could dismiss his arguments as misguided or patronizing. But I know Harris didn’t write his essay out of concern. As much as he’d like us to believe it, he didn’t write the article to open up a conversation he perceives as stifling, either. Let’s look a little closer to find the real reason. It starts with his thoughts on plastic surgery. Harris purports to appeal to a shared ethos when he claims that “the general public almost universally disapproves of plastic surgery.” His source for that wildly sweeping generalization we’ll never know, but what are sources, really, in the face of the ridiculous things that women do? Listen to the pleasure Harris takes in describing the “botched” plastic surgeries of celebrity women: “The obscene trout pout of Donatella Versace, the misshapen nipples and oblong breasts of Tara Reid, the Joker’s grimace of Kim Novak.” Ah yes, it’s always fun when women fail. How harmless, to peruse the clickbait of plastic surgeries “gone wrong” and laugh at the litany of misguided attempts to secure the male gaze. Because these women are silly, aren’t they? Their breasts, their ambitions: they are all too much. Cisgender women often undergo plastic surgeries because they want to be women in excess. This hostility towards excessive femininity underlies Harris’s criticism of trans women: “Their mimicry of women extended only to the most superficial aspects of femininity, the reproductive and secondary sex characteristics, from vaginas to curvaceous hips -- in short, a man’s interpretation of what it means to be a woman.” Daniel Harris isn’t about to go beat up trans women -- he does claim to want them to have “full protection under the law" -- but his rhetoric has more in common with those who do than he’ll admit. Take Zella Ziona, murdered by her boyfriend, Rico LeBlond, in Maryland last year. According to CBS, Ziona “began acting flamboyantly towards LeBlond and greatly embarrassed LeBlond in front of his peers.” What was the source of LeBlond’s embarrassment? Was it perhaps the same failure that Harris wants to spare her, the failure to be woman enough through, paradoxically, wanting womanhood in excess? Or James Dixon, who beat Islan Nettles to death in 2013. Dixon had a chip on his shoulder. “A couple of days before this incident, I got fooled by a transgender and this could have led to this incident, [this] blind fury,” Dixon testified. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and I kill you. We’re a nation of dupes, according to Harris, and transgender people are taking advantage of us when we “insist that we not only call them 'he' or 'she' but that we treat them as if they were indeed men or women.” I’d like to say that transgender people don’t care what Daniel Harris thinks. And in a purely theoretical sense, we don’t. So what if he doesn’t like someone’s nose job, so what if he thinks someone is too fat or too concerned with her breasts or has too strong of a jaw line. Believe me, I’m not crying myself to sleep every night because Daniel Harris doesn’t think I’m a real man. I may not even want to be a real man -- and here, too, is something that Harris doesn’t consider: that some of us are happy in the middle. That some of us are happy failing at gender. Because all of us fail gender in some way. The woman who talks too loud; the man who takes to the dance floor without sufficient irony. But that’s the thing: gender is so much more complicated, so much more of a dialectical exchange between real and ideal, than Harris could ever know. In end, however, it doesn’t matter how little we care about what Daniel Harris thinks about our genders, because words like his carry consequences. If you really believe that transgender people fail at their genders and you make it a business to say so publicly, you should know that your words resonate far off the page. If your supposed concern for transgender people masks plain old misogyny, a vitriolic relationship to femininity so deep it saturates the pores of even your most innocuous words, then you are complicit in violence. You highlight the path that leads from your vacuous think piece to some other man’s fists.
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 38 8 min read

27 comments:

  1. Pingback: Reading fiction, raising kids | Growing Sideways

  2. Lovely reminder. Fiction feeds us. Your reflection reminds me of Agatha Christie’s lament that “if I sit down and read a novel after breakfast I have a feeling of guilt.” But your essay says go ahead. Read a novel after breakfast. Or late at night. Or whenever. The main thing? Read. Thank you.

  3. You’ve captured this beautifully. I’m about 1/3 of the way through 1Q84, reading it in small doses each night as the house settles down and goes quiet, and, for the first time in a long while, feel as if I’m as on the trail of something BIG as Tengo and Aomame…

  4. Thank you for this beautiful review, this is how Murakami makes me feel too. My husband bought me a copy of IQ84, knowing I love the writer and it has sat expectantly on by bedside waiting to be read for a couple of weeks now while life keeps me busy… After your review, I am determined to settle in with it as soon as I get home tonight.

  5. I haven´t read this Murakami´s book yet, but reading your essay filled me with such a joy… I fully get your point – you have expressed the feeling of a passionate reader when reading a great book – thank you for that.

  6. Pingback: On how great fiction makes us more human « wish i were somewhere else

  7. Have been reading the book (Traditional Chinese translation) since more than half a year ago but the thirst to know what would actually happen kept me reading on. 1/3 more to go and I shall finish it before 2011 does! Murakami never fails to trigger the reader to think about what is racing through the minds of the characters he portrayed, offering new perspectives to us at the same time. 1Q84 really pushed this limit to the maximum with the somewhat bizzare storyline.

  8. Pingback: Review: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami « Roaming Olivia

  9. Kevin, this piece of writing is gorgeous, with fantastic insights into the book, and fiction-reading generally.

    I finished 1Q84 4 days ago. I was deflated after reading Janet Maslin’s review of it in the New York Times. It seemed to me she was sneering at bits and pieces of the book she found confounding, and made no attempt to understand that the beauty of the book is its theme of love’s power to shift one’s world right off its axis. You capture Tengo and Aomame’s world-shifting love very well. So, thanks and admiration. Are you on Twitter?!

    And by the way, no spoilers but I found the end of the book VERY satisfying, which after 925 pages, I was grateful for!

  10. Thank you so much, Barbara, and all the other commenters for the kind words! And I am on Twitter (@kshartnett).

  11. Thank you for the beautiful review and the evocation of that intense and mysterious experience of being-in-a-book.

  12. “He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life.”

    This is absolutely beautiful. In these two sentences, I get a real glimpse of what parenthood must be like.

    And, overall, a great essay! I never quite understand why I spend so much time reading fiction until I do it and realize that it’s the most important thing in the world.

  13. very lovely article, sir. i am so glad you shared with us your feeling about reading the book and the connection it brought out between you and your family.

  14. This is a wonderful essay, which brought back fond memories of what it was like to be engulfed and swept away by John Williams’ “Stoner” after reading a review (I think the New York Times) declaring it was a “perfect novel” (and pretty much agreeing with that sentiment). The best books truly allow you to live in and be alive inside them … and once read, they live inside of you. But as the father of a 2-and-a-half year old … well, do I need to say more?

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  19. Really inspiring review. I’ve read a number of1Q84 reviews and this review really hits the spot in terms of what the reader comes away with during, and after the read. Many readers don’t want to read a blow by blow plot summary. I appreciate understanding the complexity of the yearnings of the heart, empathy (as well as the existential ‘atlas shrugged’ nature of mankind) and all the lessons one takes away from having experienced a piece of fiction as part of their own lives.

  20. Literature is an island of sanity. We can’t be who we really are without it.

    103 is a temperature to weep over. Hope the baby is having a happy day today.

  21. You make a great case for fiction and argue its necessity so eloquently. 1Q84 is a tome and no small feat (not unlike Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which I have bookmarked 10 pages from the end). However, the hardcover is gorgeously designed and that alone makes me want to purchase a copy. I’m not a fan of Murakami, but your review encourages me to take a second look and grab a copy of 1Q84. Who can resist a love story, after all? Especially one with such day-to-day resonance!

  22. Pingback: Monday Snax « Little Stories

  23. “He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life.”

    “Then he farted”

    If your life is anything like mine, which I suspect it isn’t.

    Seriously though, what a lovely review. Many thanks.

  25. Pingback: reading to fulfill « Book of The Sacred Rung

  26. I have just finished the book and your essay perfectly captures the feeling I felt while reading it. This was my first Murakami novel so although I expected the fantastical elements I hadn’t expected how he uses them to highlight human emotion and most of all, love. My favourite quote:

    “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

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Essays

What Is Dangerous and What Is Just New: On 25 Years of Drawn & Quarterly

Essays
September 10, 2015 | 2 books mentioned 11 min read
1. My generation of comics fans had a reading list. In grade school, we dug Chris Claremont’s S&M take on the X-Men and reprints of Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four. When we were 12, we picked up Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus, which dealt with the things 12 year olds think of as adult, like fascism, the military industrial complex, and the Holocaust. In either our senior year of high school or freshman year of college, a friend turned us on to Neil Gaiman, Adrian Tomine’s short stories, and, because it’s fun to see Betty Boop actually have sex, reprints of the Tijuana Bibles. A teaching assistant in a public policy class assigned Joe Sacco’s Palestine, which came with a foreword from Edward Said. There were a few other milestones that brought our interests into the literary mainstream, like Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Art Spiegelman’s September 11 New Yorker cover, Fun Home, as well as two novels, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We had always kept copies of Eightball next to our issues of Granta. Now the rest of the world does the same. The roster of Drawn and Quarterly -- Lynda Barry, Kate Beaton, Chester Brown, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Jason Lutes, Joe Matt, Joe Sacco, Seth, James Sturm, Jillian Tamaki, Adrian Tomine, and Chris Ware -- represents at least a quarter of this high-art, high-literary comics renaissance in the Anglophone world. This summer, the Montreal-based independent comics publisher released a 776-page anthology in celebration of its silver anniversary, Drawn and Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels. It’s a fun book, filled with old and new work by the house’s artists and appreciation essays from scholars, fellow travelers, and novelists. [caption id="attachment_78811" align="alignright" width="325"] Credit: Daniel Clowes/Drawn and Quarterly[/caption] A publisher’s anthology of its own work will be a hagiography. That’s okay. There are other places for brutal criticism of comics. The mainstream press is learning to develop a more discerning eye towards the form, to not declare every new graphic novel by a semi-famous artist a groundbreaking innovation. The Internet has many take-down podcasts. D&Q’s anthology reads like a high school yearbook, complete with scrapbook-level photographs. The personal essays describe career changes that are more interesting to their authors than to their readers. With that said, the book also provides an important service. The initial phase of the comics renaissance is over, and the publication of this anthology offers an opportunity for understanding what defined D&Q, what we readers were looking for in comics throughout the past 25 years, and what we are looking for now. [caption id="attachment_78813" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Credit: James Sturm/Drawn and Quarterly[/caption] 2. Chris Oliveros, the founding editor of D&Q, was smart, industrious, and he had an excellent eye for talent, but there were others before him. Fantagraphics had been around for awhile when Oliveros started his project and it published The Comics Journal, an exuberant and angry forum for comics journalism and criticism. Fantagraphics’s premiere artists, Los Bros. Hernandez, were Latino children of the punk scene. Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly edited RAW. Robert Crumb, Peter Bagge, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb edited Weirdo. Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse had homes in the niche gay press. There were places for ferocious comics creators who told stories other people weren’t telling, but those spaces were limited. D&Q was a welcome addition to the comics world. D&Q began in April 1990 as a black-and-white comics anthology. It fit the standard newsstand magazine size at 8.5" x 11". It was 32 pages long. It had a glossy cover. In its first issue, Oliveros, who was then in his early-20s, called for higher standards for the comics medium and lamented the “private boys’ club” that characterized the comics industry. The manifesto set a tone for what the company eventually became. The magazine’s sales were based on the “direct market,” comic-book specialty stores which would buy the magazine on a non-returnable basis. It was the most economically viable option at the time, but it also limited the magazine’s reach. Soon after the first issue of the anthology, Oliveros started publishing single-artist comic books. In a few years, the original anthology magazine went to color and D&Q found inroads into Virgin Megastores (which have disappeared from North America), Tower Records (which are all now gone), and pre-monopoly Amazon. Oliveros started compiling serialized stories in quality paperbacks and hardcovers and published stand-alone graphic novels. Storeowners didn’t quite know what to do with these comics, how to sell them to the people who read literary novels. Peggy Burns, a publicist at DC Comics, came to D&Q in 2003 and in 2005 she negotiated a distribution deal with FSG. The people who published Jonathan Franzen also worked with Adrian Tomine, which was as it should be. The essays here claim D&Q treats its creators well. D&Q allows its artists to do what they want to do, letting some of them design their books in meticulous detail, determining paper type, size, and printer quality. They are book-makers at heart. D&Q’s artists are good to their fans. They get to know them at conventions and spend a long time inscribing their books with cartoons during signings. The audience who reads this anthology has probably also read the major popular comics histories of the last few years and it knows that a comics publisher that allows creators space for their genius, doesn’t force them to hire a lawyer, and doesn’t populate its staff with misogynists is a special publisher. 3. No one agrees why D&Q was so good. The testimonials contradict each other. Jason Lutes, the author of Berlin and Jar of Fools: “They were the kind of comics I was hungry for -- taking a cue from the precedent set by Art Spiegelman’s RAW magazine, but stepping out from under the influence of the American underground, which had overshadowed so much of ‘alternative comics’ up to that point.” TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe on his introduction to D&Q: “From then on I only wanted to read and make ‘underground’ comics, watch and make ‘underground’ films, listen to ‘underground’ music, and basically soak up anything that seemed even a little bit subversive.” Anders Nilsen describes the publisher’s “quiet, understated commitment to quality work.” It’s not always clear who is on the inside and who is on the outside, what is dangerous and what is just new. Those contradictions define D&Q. Let’s start with Kate Beaton, who uses the comic-strip format and her naïve style to take down the myths of Western high culture. In her appreciation essay, Margaret Atwood writes, “Let she who has never drawn arms and a moustache on a picture of the Venus de Milo in her Latin book cast the first rubber eraser.” In one of Beaton’s parodies of The Great Gatsby, our hero complains that the green light gives him seizures. Beaton’s work isn’t that subversive. A hip teacher would hand that strip to her students. She would smile when her students told her the strip is better than the corresponding passage in the book. Atwood goes on, “Of course, in order to burlesque a work of literature or an historic event, you have to know it and, in some sense, love it -- or at least understand its inner workings.” [caption id="attachment_78814" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Credit: Kate Beaton/Drawn and Quarterly[/caption] In the early '90s, Adrian Tomine was a prodigy scribbling away at his grim mini-comics and taking notes from Oliveros by mail. His work has grown more somber and mature through the years and now he is a master of narrative in different permutations of the comics form. Françoise Mouly describes the “handsome, stripped-down aesthetics” of his New Yorker covers, which “form a paean to the poignancy of daily life in the big city.” The moments he captures in these covers are pregnant with ambiguity, and he “finds the humanity of a small town within the big one.” His stories depict human beings who struggle with their own mediocrity. Tomine’s work is even-keeled. The lines are careful. The page layouts and panel organization don’t invite any confusion. He has a gentle, classical style and he can bring you just to the edge of tears. [caption id="attachment_78815" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Credit: Adrian Tomine/Drawn and Quarterly[/caption] Jonathan Lethem describes Chester Brown as a “citizen of the timeless nation of the dissident soul, as much as Dostoevsky’s underground man. At the same time, he’s also a citizen of a nation of one: Chesterbrownton, or Chesterbrownsylvania, a desolate but charged region he seems to have no choice but to inhabit.” Brown’s subjects veer between the respectable and the borderline subversive. His best-known book Louis Riel is now a staple of Canadian public schools. Paying for It is a memoir of his life as a john. The anthology includes “The Zombie Who Liked the Arts,” a tale from 2007 about a zombie’s infatuation with a human female. These are stories about lonely men, a would-be revolutionary who fights madness, and lovers who dislike their own bodies. Brown’s connection to the underground may be less tenuous, but unlike the folks at RAW and Weirdo, unlike Fyodor Dostoevsky for that matter, he doesn’t hide his polish. [caption id="attachment_78816" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Credit: Chester Brown/Drawn and Quarterly[/caption] Are these books threatening? In his 2005 book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Charles Hatfield noted that the appeal of the comix underground in the 1970s required the medium of the traditional comic book itself, and the ironies that involved using a medium associated with the “jejune” to discuss illicit, “adult” topics. “[T]he package was inherently at odds with the sort of material the artists wanted to handle, and this gave the comix books their unique edge.” I don’t know if the packaging still matters in the same way, if the placement of Tomine’s mature, sad stories within the firm pages of a graphic novel causes such a disjuncture. [caption id="attachment_78817" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Credit: Julie Doucet/Drawn and Quarterly[/caption] My special edition of Julie Doucet’s exploration of sexual insanity Lève Ta Jambe Mon, Poisson Est Mort! comes complete with a lithograph of a nude belly dancer on the frontispiece and a rave review from ArtForum on the jacket cover. Sean Rogers describes Doucet’s “beguiling forays into an untrammeled imagination, rich with fantastic displays of menstrual flow, severed unmentionable body parts, and inanimate objects forced into service for pleasure.” Doucet is one of D&Q’s more anarchic writers and it may be true that this finely crafted hardbound edition cannot contain her sexuality. But I don’t know if it’s any more scandalous to read Leaves of Grass or Portnoy’s Complaint in a Library of America edition. The packaging of these books matters for other reasons. Eleanor Davis, the author of How to Be Happy, explains why: Loving a book containing prose is like loving a cup filled with a wonderful drink: the cup and drink are only connected by circumstance. Loving a comic book is different. The content and the form of a comic are connected inextricably. The little autonomous drawings are held tightly in the pages of the book the comic is printed in, and they cannot get away. When you hold the comic book, you hold those worlds. They are yours. Drawn and Quarterly publishes extraordinary comics. And because they are an extraordinary company they know to make extraordinary books for these comics to live in. It’s not irony that makes the fine hardcover editions of Beaton, Tomine, Brown and Doucet so good, it’s the craftsmanship that marries the content comfortably with the medium, a craftsmanship that understands that a small, standard, novel-size hardcover is appropriate for the spare intimate melancholy of Brown’s I Never Liked You, and that a large, flat, Tintin-like edition is appropriate for the grim fantasy of Daniel Clowes’s The Death-Ray. The various forms of packaging in D&Q’s catalogue simply offers an added texture to each of their creators’ distinct voices. After 25 years, the D&Q artists’ formalist methods, their wry sense of humor, their careful delineation of human emotions, their firm grasp of the comic book/graphic novel as a medium have become not just familiar to comics readers but also the standard for quality comics. Their content, for the most part, is not shocking, and even the subversive voices are much less threatening now than they were before. Brown’s discussion of prostitution is no more provocative than Dan Savage’s. Doucet’s frank discussion of female sexuality was more shocking in the early '90s than it will ever be again. These artists were never revolutionaries. They were never reactionaries either. They are Burkean liberals of the comics form. 4. For all its self-congratulation, the anthology does have a sense of humor about itself, the comics industry, and comics celebrity. The book contains a new story from Jillian Tamaki about a D&Q intern who finds fame and fortune after Oliveros fires her for writing a blog post critical of the company. It includes a handwritten note from Spiegelman to Oliveros declining the editor’s request. “I’m a big fan of Julie’s work and I can probably be bullied into giving a quote but would appreciate being left off the hook only because I’ve had to write so many damn blurbs recently. I dunno.” The book begins with a short strip by Chester Brown, “A History of Drawn & Quarterly in Six Panels,” which depicts Oliveros’s advance from youth to middle-age. In the final panel, Oliveros stands alone on a cold, quiet Montreal street. [caption id="attachment_78818" align="aligncenter" width="570"] Credit: Chester Brown/Drawn and Quarterly[/caption] Oliveros is retiring this year. Peggy Burns, the publicist who moved to D&Q from DC Comics, will now head the company. This anthology stands as a monument to Oliveros and what he accomplished. He discovered extraordinary talent, he widened the audience for non-superhero comics, he created a minor Canadian institution, and he published forgotten comics that would otherwise have been left to the archives. (D&Q has a secondary role as an NYRB Classics of comics, publishing reprints of vintage American comics creators like John Stanley and translations of classic foreign artists and writers like the Finnish author Tove Jansson.) With those accomplishments behind him, the message of Brown’s strip is ambiguous, but I take it to be this: The comics industry doesn’t really change anything. Most of the world is indifferent to your work just as most of the world is indifferent to poetry. This art form of comics will not bring you any closer to enlightenment and it will not bring you any great happiness. It won’t bring you any misery either. Comics makers and comics readers will grow older and come a little bit closer to death, the same way they would if they followed another vocation or indulged in another pastime. Some of D&Q’s comics may have educated a few minds, but most of the publisher’s craftsmen embrace their own irrelevance. When I was young, I read Maus, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns because they were about mass death, because they were strange, because they treated violence in a way that I thought was real. I still have them on my shelf and thumb through them now and again, but their appeal has changed. Watchmen, I realize now, is a comedy. The Dark Knight Returns is pretty funny too. Maus is as much about the horrors of the present as it is about the horrors of the past. I read Beaton, Brown, Tomine, and the rest because, in every well-placed line, in every well-told joke, they remind me that monotony has its own pleasures and comics don’t have to be important.
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 11 min read
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