Comics as a Minor Literature

Transcription

1 Comics as a Minor Literature Erin La Cour Abstract This article offers a reexamination of the term graphic novel, as a term that has been instrumentalized to both ingratiate certain comics into the literary canon and perpetuate the denigration of all others. Adding to previous inquiries into the distinctions made between graphic novels and comics, which have approached the divide from a socio-historical perspective, this article posits a consideration of comics as a minor literature. Rather than calling for an inclusive view of comics within the disciplinary boundaries of literary studies and the academy or for an establishment of comics studies as a discipline in its own right this article proposes a scholarly nomadism of comics that productively works to displace the entire question of the value attributed to cultural objects and fields of study. Keywords comics, graphic novel, minor literature, literary studies IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 79

2 With increasing frequency, certain comics have found footing as part and parcel of the serious study of literature: those comics classifievd as graphic novels, which can be neatly folded into the literary canon by virtue of claims to their elevated content and endowed approval from various cultural institutions. Indeed, it is of little wonder that the trifecta of Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home are the most prevalent on literature syllabi since all not only deal with topics well-suited to postmodern approaches to the study of literature (history, autobiography, representation, identity, memory, etc.), but also have appeared on prominent nonfiction bestseller lists, have been nominated for and won literary prizes, have been translated many times over, and, in the case of the latter two, have been adapted to the screen and stage, respectively. The discourse on the literariness of these works, however, problematically leads to a specific bracketing of comics that not only rejects the study of comics as a medium in its own right, but fractures it into literary and non-literary works, at once elevating graphic novels to the position of literature and perpetuating the denigration of all other comics as mere pop culture entertainment in the process. While content is a significant factor in whether or not a comics work is promoted as literature, so too are publication method, production process, and form. Graphic novels are not only often heralded as literature due to their serious non-fiction storylines, but also to their singularity in being both a complete work packaged in book form and the product of a sole creator. That seriousness is based on taste, non-fiction classification is slippery, and a complete author and/or a complete work are often simply not the case for many comics classified as graphic novels are points that those who promote the term are either unaware of or choose to ignore. 1 Moreover, while advocates for the term acknowledge that graphic novels and comics share a visual form of narration, they differentiate them through claims to the intermediality of graphic novels: they assert that, as a new medium that emerged from the combination of comics and literature, historically speaking, graphic novels may be seen as an art form that has grown out of and subsequently outgrown the comics genre (Tan 31). 2 This formal argument is no less problematic than other distinctions, however, as any claim to the intermediality of the graphic (drawing/comics) novel (writing/literature), only undermines it being one or the other, 3 does not attend to its seeming conflation of literature and fiction, 4 and does not address the pitfalls of literary scholars moonlighting in the visual arts (Mitchell 84). 5 Therefore, in this article I reject the notion of the advent of the graphic novel as either a watershed moment where certain comics became literature by virtue of their content or where the formal elements of comics and literature merged into a new medium. While either of these claims could be seen as avenues 1 Both Maus and Persepolis were originally produced as serials, and Fun Home was serialized in its French translation in Liberation. Furthermore, arguments for both complete works and a complete author are remarkably forgetful of the fact that many now-canonical 19 th century works were originally serialized and produced in collaboration with an illustrator. For a discussion on the complete author, see Baetens 2008b. Intertwined with this discussion are the conventions and financial aspects of the publishing industry. See, for example, Hatfield 2005, Beaty 2007, and Beaty and Woo Will Eisner (2004) is perhaps the most adamant adherent of this argument. His claims have influenced both popular and scholarly ideas about the graphic novel s difference from comics. 3 For a critique of intermedial terminology, see Elleström 2010 and Schröter For a reworking of earlier, more hierarchical schemes of intermediality, see Rajewsky For recent discourse on intermediality and the graphic novel, see Rippl and Etter In his article Graphic Novels: Literature without Text? Jan Baetens notes, the very broadening of the novelistic field, which now can encompass works that are wordless, forces us to rethink our most basic definitions of the meaning of once self-evident notions such as text, novel, and literature, that become more problematic every day (2008a, p. 82). 5 The discussion of where comics stand in relation to art discourse is an interesting and complex discussion, but one that is outside the scope of this article. For a recent discussion on this topic, see Beaty IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 80

3 for establishing comics more broadly as worthy of further academic inquiry within literary studies, and for providing new tools for the study of various works of literature (Baetens, Literature without Text 82), I assert that the political potential of the term graphic novel lies elsewhere. In both folding graphic novels into literature and maintaining the denigration of other comics, the term graphic novel not only refocuses attention on the system of value upon which the literary canon is built and maintained, but in so doing opens the possibility for comics to be considered what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari term minor literature. As I will explicate using the three characteristics of minor literature, rather than calling for an inclusive view of marginalized works, comics as a minor literature offers a critical rethinking of comics that is altogether disinterested in the literary canon. While previous inquiries into the distinctions made between graphic novels and comics have stressed the importance of a socio-historical approach to the problematic denigration of comics within disciplinary boundaries, 6 which could aid in establishing comics studies as a discipline in its own right outside of or in-between art and literature, I assert that comics as a minor literature suggests a scholarly nomadism of comics studies that withdraws from the binaries of graphic novels and comics, the same and the different, and the systems of the major and the minor. I posit that comics as a minor literature thus productively works to displace the entire question of the value attributed to cultural objects and fields of study. The Anti-Ideology of Minor Literature Where minor literature could be seen as an attempt to resist or be liberated from the institutionalized power of major discourses, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, it isn t a question of liberty as against submission, but only a question of a line of escape (6). Thus, as I will elucidate, while minor literature is concerned with institutionalized power structures including educational institutions and the parameters for their disciplines of study and the manner in which these structures work to form subjects of the state, it does not seek to offer a counter-ideology, but rather to break forms, encourage ruptures and new sproutings (28). In order to examine the political impetus of minor literature, and how comics can be productively positioned as such, it is thus important to first distinguish it from other institutional critiques, and specifically Michel Foucault s call for resistance and liberation from the political double bind, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures ( The Subject 785). As I will explain in underscoring the difference between, on the one hand, resistance and liberation, and on the other, escape, positioning comics as a minor literature sets the stage for a complete reconsideration of the problematic denigration of comics that advances socio-historical perspectives on this issue through its rejection of the binary oppositions perpetuated by institutions. As Foucault outlines in The Subject and Power, institutionalized social spaces play an active role in the double formation of the subject, where an individual is subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or a self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to (781). He asserts that in this political double bind the members of society are at once individualized and state ideology is normalized, thus enabling the state 6 For a recent discussion on this topic, see Beaty and Woo IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 81

4 to better control each individual through three interrelated modes of objectification: classifying structures within language; dividing practices that occur due to the subject being internally and/or externally caught in a binary construction of good/bad, healthy/ill, etc.; and active self-subjugation through an internalization of the first two modes (777-78). While Foucault claims that the main objective of [ ] struggles [against objectivity] is to attack not so much such or such an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power (781), he also argues that because the political double bind is created through the network of institutional spaces, their practices must be exposed in order to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state [ ] to promote new forms of subjectivity (785). He asserts: The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them. (Foucault and Chomsky 41) For Foucault each seemingly neutral and independent instance of the network of institutional power including the academic denigration of comics must be exposed and fought against, which, as aforementioned, much comics scholarship has actively been attending to through socio-historical critiques of the production practices and reception of comics. 7 For Deleuze and Guattari, however, what is problematically left unaddressed in Foucault s call is how to move beyond what they see as mere measures of resistance and liberation. They argue that what is needed to address institutional power is neither a structure with formal oppositions and a fully constructed Signifier (7), but rather an awareness of both the network of power and the ways out of it (10, my emphasis). In a reading of Franz Kafka s Letter to the Father, they argue that resistance and liberation work to merely reorder and reinscribe hierarchies through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and thus perpetuate the system they seek to fight. They explain: the too well-formed family triangle is really only a conduit for investments of an entirely different sort that the child endlessly discovers underneath his father, inside his mother, in himself. The judges, commissioners, bureaucrats, and so on, are not substitutes for the father; rather, it is the father who is a condensation of all these forces that he submits to and that he tries to get his son to submit to. (11-12) While their point underlines Foucault s political double bind in that it speaks to the manner in which the individual is an active participant in his own subjugation through his embodiment of the state s imposed ideology, it advances the discourse on power relations through elaborating on the impetus behind participatory subjugation. They argue that what becomes clear in Letter to the Father is that the father demands that his son be submissive to him because he finds himself in a submissive position. Thus, they claim, it s not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neurosis that is, a desire that is already submissive and searching to communicate its own submission that produces Oedipus (10). They propose that in order to break this cycle of desire, there must be an absolute deterritorialization free from reterritorialization (10). As a means to do this, they offer their concept of minor literature, which 7 See, for example, Sabin 1996, Hatfield 2005, Beaty 2007, and Beaty and Woo IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 82

5 works to actively deterritorialize language and disrupt processes of reterritorialization through an inherently political and collective enunciation. What minor literature offers, then, is not necessarily a solution to the political double bind, but that: The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people s concern. (17-18, emphasis in original) While Deleuze and Guattari claim that marginalized writers are most primed to create minor literature, that every writer has the potential to [find] his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert because minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature (17-18, emphasis in original). While these points could seem an attempt to resist the system of the major or be liberated from it, minor literature is neither desirous of communicating its own submission nor is it concerned with establishing itself as a ghettoized minority community. Quite the opposite, minor literature rather creates: An escape for language, for music, for writing. What we call pop pop music, pop philosophy, pop writing [...] to make use of the polylingualism of one s own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play. (26-27) Indeed, in its concern over the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through [institutions] (Foucault and Chomsky 41), minor literature destratifies the workings of dominant systems to provide a veritable escape from the impasse they create. Thus, rather than emancipating comics through the term graphic novel, which upholds the ideology of the literary canon, or through carving out a new discipline within academia, which would emulate the study of other disciplines both of which position comics studies as already submissive and searching to communicate its own submission in claiming comics as a minor literature, the cycle of deterritorialization and reterritorialization can begin to break and comics can find a possible means of escape. Comics as a Minor Literature Comics can be positioned as a minor literature through a consideration of the three interconnected characteristics of minor literature: 1) it is written in a major language, 2) it connects the individual concern to politics, and 3) it is of a collective enunciation. To begin with an elaboration on the first, which forms the foundation for the following two, minor literature is constructed by a minority within a major system and in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization (16). As aforementioned, comics are consistently denigrated by advocates for the term graphic novel, who claim certain comics have achieved literary status by virtue of their content and/or their intermediality. In both cases, comics are already positioned IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 83

6 as a minor within the major system of the literary canon, and as such are primed to deterritorialize it by oppos[ing] the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality (27). In order to enact a deterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari explain, it is important to [proceed] by dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty, pushing deterritorialization to such an extreme that nothing remains but intensities (19). What both sites of the denigration of comics point to is exactly an assumed poverty of comics and a willful impoverishing of comics: in both refusing to examine comics in their own right and using faulty logic to differentiate graphic novels from comics, advocates for the graphic novel emphatically lower comics literary and cultural status. What is interesting is that this lowered status is also advocated for by many comics creators, fans, and even scholars, though for a different purpose. As a ghettoized medium and community, they argue, comics gains (counter-) cultural cachet in its resisting institutional discourse. In Deleuze and Guattari s terms, however, positioning comics thus is merely a reterritorialization; advocating for the elevation of comics as counter to the system of the major only inverts the binary that minor literature is concerned with breaking altogether. Therefore, instead of carving out a new territory for comics within the system of major and minor either as elevated graphic novels or counter-cultural comics their willed poverty needs to be differently evaluated. As stated earlier, graphic novels are granted a position within the literary canon based on claims to their elevated, serious, non-fiction storylines, their packaging in book form, and their being the products of a sole creator, all of which are interesting to explore in positioning comics as a minor literature. Even though many graphic novels were neither originally published in book form nor produced by a single creator, these points continue to haunt comics as prime arguments for their deserved lowly, pop cultural status, regardless of the fact that many works in the literary canon, especially from the 19 th century, were originally serialized, produced in collaboration with an illustrator, and very much intended for the mass-market as pop culture entertainment. As Roland Barthes suggests in his discussion of comics (and the photonovel): I am convinced that these arts, born in the lower depths of high culture, possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the obtuse meaning). [ ] There may thus be a future or a very ancient past truth in these derisory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical forms of consumer subculture. (qtd. in Krauss 200) As noted in the previous section, Deleuze and Guattari explain that it is the minor position of pop that allows language (music, philosophy, writing) to escape; being a minor within the system of the major, comics may be considered derisory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical that is, poor pop culture entertainment but these are the qualifications by which an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play (27). It is this willed poverty of comics, its being pop, that allows it to open new avenues of expression. As opposed to the system of the major and minor of the same and different comics as pop allows for a consideration of difference in and of itself, and thus is primed to discover points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones (27). Arguments for the intermediality of graphic novels further underscore comics being pop. As aforementioned, using intermediality to assert that graphic novels are literature is not only faulty in logic, it IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 84

7 furthermore does not fully attend to the aesthetic and narrative tension between images and text in comics. 8 Indeed, in an interesting maneuver, intermediality is often simultaneously used to perpetuate the denigration of comics and to praise literary narration in visual form. 9 The precedent for the denigration of comics and other image-texts, 10 as literary scholar Richard Terdiman argues, coincided with the advent of lithography in He notes that while the technology made it possible to print images in newspapers, in practice the serious papers considered images to be frivolous and excluded them from their pages (151). Thus, while works like Honoré Daumier s famous Les Poires from 1831, which mocks King Louis-Philippe of France over a series of four sequential images in which the king s face morphs into a pear, offered pointed political messages, they were excluded from the gray blur which [the newspapers ] regular columns and orderly layout maintained (151). This exclusion, however, allowed these early works to open new avenues of expression. As Terdiman argues: As a form immediately distinguishable from the dense flux of printed text, as image, visual representation in the satirical daily could serve distinctively as a representation of the Other: as an alternative to the dominant real, to its discourse, to its characteristic system of expression. Particularly, the image possessed the potential to figure an alternative fully aware, and deeply critical, of the practice of words and of their commercial resonances which surrounded it. (151) These early works were thus already calling attention to their being pop. They not only critically addressed political issues in their humorous content, but more importantly, self-reflexively spoke to the assumed lowly status of the image, thus creating a discourse within their form and thereby a different language, an escape from the dominance of the textual norm. Moreover, they clearly demonstrate the shortsightedness of denigrating an entire medium as certainly Daumier s and many others works are now highly regarded and, at the same time, illuminate the problematic of promoting certain works based on taste. What becomes apparent in taking Daumier as an example is that any work within any medium can achieve cultural elevation through discourse. While this statement appears quite obvious, claims to the intermediality of the graphic novel at once seek to avoid examining comics as a medium in and of itself, and at the same time, avoid clearly defining what it is that is literary in graphic novels (Baetens, Literature without Text 78); in what is an interesting about-face from early discourse that dismissed images as less serious than the straight news, discourse on the graphic novel praises their use of images in a literary manner, both largely disregarding common definitions of literature as based on written or oral verbal communication, as well as the interplay of images and text within these works. In short, claims to the intermediality of graphic novels is concerned with the same and different, and thus misses the difference in and of itself that comics achieves within its form. The tension within comics opens a discussion on what appears to be revealed and obscured by each mode, creating a discourse within the medium itself. For example, a cursory reading of one of the aforementioned comics, Alison Bechdel s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, makes clear how comics use images and text in a productively deconstructive manner. Since its publication in 2006 Fun Home has garnered 8 Of course, comics do not always have text, but many of the works considered graphic novels do, including the examples used in this article. 9 For a discussion on graphic novels as literature, see Baetens 2008a. For a discussion on intermediality, see fn I would contend that Daumier s Les Poires is a comic, but that argument is outside the scope of this article. IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 85

8 much critical attention, due in large part to its sociopolitical content and context. A sort of double comingout story 11 that unfolds over the course of two generations of heteronormative American society, the memoir presents the reader with vignettes of different periods in Bechdel s life in nonlinear time, and juxtaposes them with a retrospective look at how she came to uncover her deceased father s closeted homosexuality a revelation that serves to tie Bechdel and her father together in the time following his death. While the content and context are important aspects of her work, and points I will return to in explicating the second characteristic of minor literature, I will first focus on her formal interplay between images and text. In using different drawing styles for the main storyline and the various documents (letters, diaries, and photographs) she includes as evidence of the past, she points to the different ways in which we read and believe images and text. While in an interview with Hillary Chute, Bechdel claimed that her goal in drawing the photographs more realistically than the images in her main storyline was a way to keep reminding readers, these are real people. This stuff really happened (1009), throughout Fun Home she also counters the believability of what the photographs actually reveal. This is especially clear in the famous two-page spread in Fun Home where we see Bechdel s cartoony 12 hand holding a photograph of her then seventeen-year-old babysitter, Roy, recumbent on a bed in a hotel room, stripped down to his underwear. In her commentary on the image, which ranges from memories of the trip to comments on the aesthetic quality of the photo and her father s efforts to censor the date it was taken, she underlines the rupture between what it is that she is holding a photograph of Roy and what it proves to her that her father was gay, was cheating on her mother, and having an illegal affair with a teenager. In this way, she highlights an assumed difference between images and text; in the juxtaposition of the cartoony hand, the more realistically drawn photograph, and the textual commentary, she underscores how images are subject to retrospective interpretation and text is subject to documentary evidence. 13 Thus, we not only understand that neither images nor text can offer us a complete, objective narrative, but that each mode can work to both support and undermine the others. While Bechdel s work could be considered a remarkable self-reflexive use of comics that supports its being labeled a graphic novel, even the comics that are often used as scapegoats in the delineation between literary works and consumer subculture American superhero comics do much more than simply entertain. While Deleuze and Guattari argue that archetypes are processes of spiritual reterritorialization (6), as has been very well argued, many superhero comics work to destabilize culturally circulated messages of good versus evil, of displacement (the immigrant/minority experience), and of hard work and determination (the idea of American Dream) all of which, necessarily also work to comment on the wide circulation and influence of such comics. Thereby, they break the idea of a fixed archetype and, in a similar manner to 19 th century image-texts, offer both a different perspective on dominant cultural discourse and self-reflexively speak to their cultural status, points I will develop in my discussion on the second characteristic of minor literature. Moreover, the comics trope of using onomatopoeia, frequently seen in superhero comics, offers further commentary on the tension between images and text, and the assumed limitations of each mode. In the same manner as Deleuze and Guattari note that Antonin Artaud does with his use of cries, gasps, through the 11 It is not exactly a double coming-out, as Bechdel outs her father after his death. 12 This is Bechdel s term from the same interview with Chute (2006). 13 In-depth discussions of art historical perspectives on photography and of autobiography studies are outside the scope of this article. IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 86

9 use of onomatopoeia, comics add sound to text, thus making a minor music (26). Deleuze and Guattari explain that because sound is not an affordance of text, the creation of sound in text leads to an active disorganization of expression, and by reaction, of content itself (28). In comics this disorganization is pushed even further. Because onomatopoeia in comics is presented as both image and text, it disrupts the limits of visual representation by adding time to the still image, and the limits of text by visually depicting sound. In this way, it thus deterritorializes both modes through their conflation into a new language. As Deleuze and Guattari note of Kafka s work, this new language: [ ] remains a mixture, a schizophrenic mélange, a Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are played out, blurring what can be said and what can t be said; one function will be played off against the other, all the degrees of territoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out. (6) It is in this schizophrenic mélange that the second characteristic of minor literature emerges: it is always immediately connected to politics. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, in major literatures the social milieu serv[es] as a mere environment or a background (17) to the individual concern, which reterritorializ[es] everything in Oedipus and the family (10). In contrast, they explain, minor literature s cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it (17). Thus, not only is minor literature political in its aforementioned deterritorialization of language, but also in its deterritorialization of discourse; where major literature communicates a submissive desire, minor literature cramp[s] [desire], displac[es] it in time, deterritorializ[es] it, proliferat[es] its connections, link[s] it to other intensities (4). Personal narrative comics like Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home, can quite easily be seen in this light. As retrospective explorations of the Holocaust, the Iranian Revolution, and homosexuality in America, they not only intertwine the individual concern with the social milieu, but also speak to broader, interconnected sociopolitical issues, for example, genocide, religion, and sexuality, to name a few. They thus demonstrate how the family triangle connects to other triangles commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical that determine its values (17). But comics need not be personal narrative to achieve this political function. In returning to American superhero comics, it becomes clear how another one of their tropes can also be seen as bridging the individual concern and the social milieu: the hidden identity of the superhero that works to separate the characters normal lives from their role as superhero. This split identity not only further underlines their breaking of the archetype, but importantly works to speak to a larger political aim within these comics. Rather than being concerned just with the narrative of the superhero world, as comics scholar Marc Singer notes, the superhero is: one of the most powerful and omnipresent figures used to illustrate the dilemmas and experiences of minority identity. The concept has a long pedigree in theories of race, beginning in 1903 with W.E.B. Du Bois s The Souls of Black Folk and his concepts of the veil and double-consciousness. ( ) In addressing the world outside the narrative, superhero comics demonstrate their pointed political IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 87

10 impetus. For example, in Green Lantern #76 Hal Jordan is confronted by an elderly black man who asks him why he has been able to save all the other skins from oppression, but not the black skins. What this question points to is an obvious acknowledgment of the escapist fantasy world of comics in which superheroes, with all their powers, still cannot solve racism. Superheroes post-9/11 have further had to contend with the fact that they cannot solve any real-world crisis. Not only did the entirely black cover for The Amazing Spider-Man #36 speak to this fact by being void of representation, but further, the story itself shows not just Spider-Man, but other heroes and villains alike, just as helpless and mournful in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers as any of their readers. Thus, in presenting what appears to be the archetypal hero who upholds the law and protects its effects, but who is actually actively having to hide his or her superhero identity, trying to pass as a normal citizen, and failing to function in the face of real-world problems, even superhero comics can be seen as working to reveal: where the system is coming from and going to, how it becomes, and what element is going to play the role of heterogeneity, a saturating body that makes the whole assembly flow away and that breaks the symbolic structure, no less than it breaks hermeneutic interpretation, the ordinary association of ideas, and the imaginary archetype. (Deleuze and Guattari 7) The third and final characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value (17). A concluding argument to the first and second characteristics, the third works to tie the three together. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, in minor literature there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that master and that could be separated from a collective enunciation (17). Using examples from both personal narrative comics and superhero comics, I argued that comics, in its many forms, can be seen as breaking the system of the major in terms of both language and discourse. Indeed, not only do comics offer a collective enunciation in their combination of image and text which exposes the assumed limitations and possibilities of each mode, ruptures their borders, and presents a new language but also in their tying the individual intrigue to the social milieu. Moreover, in its self-reflexive concern with difference in and of itself, comics can also be seen as offering a collective enunciation in its dismantling arguments that hierarchically position graphic novels over comics. Deleuze and Guattari claim that: [ ] talent isn t abundant in a minor literature, [ ] [and] scarcity of talent is in fact beneficial and allows the conception of something other than a literature of masters; what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren t in agreement. (17) Thus, it becomes clear that advocates for the graphic novel only bolster the political importance of comics. Comics as a minor literature is not concerned with talent as dictated by the literary canon, the discourse of the same and the different, the term graphic novel, but in a collective enunciation of active solidarity in spite of skepticism (17). Rather than revisiting, resisting, and endeavoring to be liberated from the system of the major, comics as a minor literature suggests a scholarly nomadism that houses the potential to express another possible community and forge the means for another consciousness and sensibility (17). Therefore, while the advent of the term graphic novel has opened this avenue of discovery, the continued use of it to IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 88

11 distinguish graphic novels as different from and better than comics closes off its political function: the term graphic novel marks an impasse in what could otherwise be a line of escape. Works Cited Baetens, Jan. Graphic Novels: Literature without Text? English Language Notes, vol. 46, no. 2, 2008, pp Of Graphic Novels and Minor Cultures: The Fréon Collective. Yale French Studies, vol. 114, 2008, pp Beaty, Bart. Comics Versus Art. Toronto UP, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s. Toronto UP, Beaty, Bart, and Benjamin Woo. The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books. Palgrave Macmillan, Chute, Hillary. An Interview with Alison Bechdel. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 52, no. 4, 2006, pp Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana Polan, Minnesota UP, Eisner, Will. Keynote Address, Will Eisner Symposium. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies vol. 1, no. 1, 2004, n. pag. Elleström, Lars. The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations. Media Borders, Multimodality, and Intermedialuty, edited by Lars Elleström, Palgrave, 2010, pp Foucault, Michel. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982, pp Foucault, Michel, and Noam Chomsky. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate. New Press, Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Mississippi UP, Krauss, Rosalind. Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph. October Files: James Coleman, edited by George Baker, MIT Press, 2003, pp Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago UP, Rajewsky, Irina. Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality. Intermédialités, vol. 6, 2005, pp Rippl, Gabrielle, and Lukas Etter. Intermediality, Transmediality, and Graphic Narrative. From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Nöel Thon, De Gruyter, 2013, pp Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. Phaidon, Schröter, Jens. Discourses and Models of Intermediality. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture vol. 13, no. 3, 2011, n. pag. Singer, Marc. Black Skins and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race. African American Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp Tan, Ed S. The Telling Face in the Comic Strip and Graphic Novels. The Graphic Novel, edited by Jan Baetens. Leuven UP, 2001, pp Terdiman, Richard. Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Cornell UP, IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 89

12 Erin La Cour is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She holds a PhD from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and is the co-founder, with Rik Spanjers, of the independent research consortium Amsterdam Comics ( which promotes comics research in the Netherlands. She acted as project advisor for the 2013 sequential art exhibition Black or White at the Van Abbemuseum, is a former editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art, and is a member of the Nordic Network for Comics Research. Her most recent publications include the co-edited anthology Comics and Power: Representing and Questioning Culture, Subjects, and Communities (Cambridge Scholars 2015) and Social Abstraction: Toward Exhibiting Comics as Comics in Abstraction and Comics (UP Liège, forthcoming 2017). e.l.lacour@uu.nl IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.4 (2016) 90