Comics and Literature #3: Literature and Degeneracy

A survey of filthy books

For the purposes of this series, I will tentatively define “the literary” as the cultural-economic field associated most closely with prose fiction and poetry, constituted of prose texts and the institutions which circulate them and place them in a critical context including publishers, reviewers, bookstores and universities – a set of institutions I will refer to as the “literary sphere.” While genre narratives certainly exist on the borders of the literary, and are important to numerous comics creators I study, this is a field that gives pride of place to texts that reject the form and/or the content of popular genres such as crime, romance and science fiction. The literary emphasizes, but consists of more than, the set of texts codified by academia as the canon. As Barbara Hernstein Smith has suggested, the literary sphere suggests not just canonical works but canonical audiences observing under canonical conditions. The literary excludes noncanonical audiences such as children and noncanonical conditions of production such as what Adorno and Horkheimer described as the culture industry (Smith 35-36). These other audiences and conditions are defined as “defective, deficient, or deprived” (Smith 41). Following Smith, I will be using a definition of the literary which treats literary value as always contingent on numerous factors both social and personal.

Many of the creators I study understood this latter element of the literary at least implicitly and longed for the audience and conditions of canonical literature at least as much as its content. Groth, Pekar, Sim, and to a lesser extent Gaiman and Morrison all view literary production as being free of editorial constraint and motivated by inner emotional desires instead of material need. In contrast to comics, literature is seen as a mature art form that is both financially and spiritually rewarding. However, all these definitions cast the literary in terms that are altogether too stable. Literary history is a never-ending struggle over boundaries and prestige, and the definition of the literary is never entirely certain. These struggles within literature are productive and intriguing when read alongside the history of comics, but infrequently recognized.