Watching “Succession” Amid the Fox News Scandals

 

 

By Inkoo Kang

HBO could not have programmed the current season of “Succession” better if it had tried. The weeks-long humiliation of Fox News and the Murdochs during the show’s final ten episodes has supercharged its already potent satire, making even the most minor plot points and throwaway lines feel delightfully loaded. For example, a fleeting callback in the most recent episode to Mark Ravenhead, an anchor on the Roys’ conservative news network ATN, might have ordinarily garnered scant notice, except that the white-nationalist, occasionally bow-tied broadcaster clearly riffs on Tucker Carlson, who was abruptly fired from Fox News two weeks ago. ATN’s uncertain future—as a midsize media property in a business landscape dominated by tech giants, one of which may buy up the network—recalls, too, Fox’s ongoing occupancy in hot water: its struggles as an old-media establishment desperate to stave off competition from upstarts. The narrative onscreen and the headlines stemming from Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox have been remarkably complementary: Season 4 killed off Logan Roy, and, although the character’s inspiration, Rupert Murdoch, is still alive, the real-life mogul is on his heels, his declining influence exposed and the future of his company in question. The looming litigation by Smartmatic, another voting-technology company suing Fox, and the sagging Presidential prospects of Ron DeSantis, reportedly Murdoch’s favored candidate for the 2024 election, have only added to the perception of the nonagenarian under siege.

Foremost among “Succession” ’s many irresistible hooks are its informed conjectures about the inner workings of one of the most powerful media dynasties in the world. Despite past statements by Jesse Armstrong, the series creator, that his characters are an amalgamation of various wealthy clans, the parallels between the Murdochs and the Roys have been harder to ignore with each passing season. One could argue that, for the ink-stained paterfamilias, the comparison to Logan has been fairly flattering. Though the show’s story lines have drawn focus to Murdoch’s health troubles and turbulent love life—not to mention the toxic competition he has engendered among his children to replace him—his onscreen counterpart is a master tactician and political puppet master. Viewers might not attribute to Murdoch the gruffly leonine charisma of Brian Cox, the actor who plays Logan, nor the character’s enigmatic, eviscerating wit. But, if Logan made Murdoch look like a villain, it was one whose ruthlessness you had to admire.

The image of Logan as a Republican kingmaker was solidified in the third season. Previously, the character took credit for planting a California politician—referred to only as “the Raisin”—in the Oval Office, then bristled when an agency in his Administration threatened the expansion of Waystar Royco. But, by the midseason episode “What It Takes,” the Raisin is wilting under bad press from ATN, and we see Logan making a family activity out of choosing the next President, or at least the next Republican Presidential candidate, at a secretive G.O.P. summit, where aspirants to the White House court his endorsement. The “ATN primary,” as the characters call the event, renders one of the news network’s election-coverage-segment titles—“America Decides”—even more deliciously cynical. Channelling Roger Ailes, Logan decides to support the dark-horse candidate Jeryd Mencken, a youngish provocateur who uses pseudoscience to justify his nativism (“People trust people who look like them”), in part because Mencken would “pop” on television. If the wannabe troll-in-chief is light on policy, all the better; Logan and the rest of the G.O.P. élite have plenty of agenda items they expect him to push through, and Mencken demonstrates by the end of the episode that he’s willing to kneel before the throne. Logan’s might—his ability to remake reality in his own image—is affirmed by Tom, who tells Kendall, then in the midst of yet another doomed crusade against his father, “I’ve seen you get fucked a lot, and I’ve never seen Logan get fucked once.”

The episode is a convincing portrait of Murdochian influence, or it was at the time. In an analysis I wrote after its première, I cited one of Kerry’s lines (in the show, it’s about a rumor concerning a Roy foe) as a meta-description of the anti-democratic confab: “It’s one of those things where, even if it isn’t real, there’s a reason it feels like it is.” But the airing of the Murdochs’ dirty laundry has only pointed toward the family’s diminished sway. Fox News is still a behemoth in the conservative movement, but, in arguably the biggest shocker of the Dominion revelations, it turns out that the network isn’t so much telling its viewers what to think (as Fox has often been accused) as chasing its audience’s desires to hear what they already believe. This might mean broadcasting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election which the anchors themselves believe to be ludicrous, or hosting guests who spout untruths on live television despite behind-the-scenes chatter among staff that those guests are “lying.” Fox’s need to cater to its audience has associated the network with ideological stances that even Murdoch himself doesn’t share: anti-immigrant sentiments, COVID minimization, pro-Russia takes on the war in Ukraine, and, most significantly, Trump boosterism for the 2024 election. Fox News can still be described as a propaganda machine, but it’s not just one man’s megaphone—and, if it is, then it’s not necessarily Murdoch’s. American conservatism has become a lot more diffuse (and at odds with itself) in the Internet age, and this means that messaging doesn’t just run top-down. The portrayal of Logan’s iron grip on his party in the world of “Succession” is arguably more believable in the context of the U.K. (Armstrong’s home country), where Murdoch and his peers control the major tabloids, than it is in America.

Sunday’s episode, “Tailgate Party,” takes place at another private gathering where the Roys swan about, flaunting their muscle. On the eve of a Presidential election, Logan’s heirs host “forty of the most important people in America,” ideological allies of their deceased father they hope to impress. Logan is dead, but the memory of his lupine talents is ever present, and it’s impossible not to imagine how he would have avoided the predicaments in which his children find themselves. Unlike Shiv, he wouldn’t have partnered with a man like Matsson, the tech billionaire trying to acquire Waystar Royco, who treats Logan’s lifework like a shiny thing to wave around in order to distract from some dodgy accounting. Unlike Kendall, he wouldn’t have concocted the most faux-epic, Icarus-like plan to counter Matsson. Unlike Roman, he would’ve successfully persuaded Connor to drop out of the race to help bolster the prospects of Mencken, his candidate of choice. (And Logan surely would have landed Connor a better sweetener than an ambassadorship to Oman, even if it is, as Connor says, in an attempt to console Willa, “the Pearl of Arabia.”)

Weeks before the siblings’ disintegrating bond began to reveal itself, the Fox News scandals also reminded me that, whatever pain and grief Logan’s children may grapple with this season, “Succession” has primed us to want all the Roy progeny to fail. The show let us forget that for a few weeks by bumping off their father and immersing us in their grief in real time. Shiv has had to contend with keeping her pregnancy a secret from her estranged husband, Tom, while Roman has been adrift since firing Gerri—until recently the closest thing he’s had to a mentor and a genuine love interest. And, whatever their faults, the junior Roys are practically normal compared to Matsson, a showstopper even in the series’ menagerie of freaks, who listens to podcasts on his headphones during sex and sends one of his employees a half litre of his own blood as a courtship tactic. “Succession,” which could just as readily be categorized as an abuse comedy, is a study of how Logan produced children who are constitutionally incapable of preserving the only thing he truly nurtured. But, even before Kendall’s grandiosity and Roman’s power trips came roaring back last week, the real-life headlines nodded toward the fact that there’s no reason for us to root for the kids. We’ve only ever wanted to see them accidentally set their inheritance on fire. The slow conflagration they’ve already sparked is tragic, but also profoundly satisfying.

In the most recent episode, Shiv alludes to ATN’s “Great Toxification” of America, which we see in fits and starts—“Gender-fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice,’ ” one infamous chyron warns. But the network’s most foregrounded effects are on Kendall’s daughter, who attends a school where her classmates have started an anti-ATN club, and is seemingly perturbed by her father’s role in elevating Mencken. Meanwhile, in real life, the consequences of Fox News’ complicity with the Big Lie are in plain view. A January, 2022, Axios/Momentive poll found that only fifty-five per cent of Americans believe Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential election. The vast majority of the Republican base is convinced that Donald Trump’s many legal woes are the result of a Democratic “witch hunt.” These ramifications of right-wing disinformation bring to mind one of the most frustrating aspects of “Succession” ’s world-building: the show’s reluctance to grapple with the full weight of Logan’s noxious impact on the country. (It’s certainly considerable: in Season 2, Shiv wondered where she would be able to find out what’s actually happening in the world if her father’s empire continued to swell and there were no longer any reliable news sources.) The series’ myopia may be in keeping with the blinkers that the Roys put on: the pain of the masses is only theoretical, like the confused anger on the faces of the employees whom Greg lays off via Zoom, seen only for a few seconds. (A hundred pink slips in three days, he later brags.) It’s only the suffering of the help that the characters really see, if they choose to linger on it—the occasional contractor who gets stiffed by a vindictive Logan, or the boutique newsroom that gets sacrificed in a father-son loyalty test. But the show’s decision to treat the reach of Logan’s true powers with a fuzziness—and to deploy it mainly as a way to contrast his capabilities with those of his children—blunts its class consciousness. “Succession” is, ultimately, most interested in how the point-one-per-centers save their most exquisite tortures for those directly beneath them, like Tom, Cousin Greg, or the cowering C-suite of Gerri, Karl, and Frank. Neither the Roys nor the show sees the proles.

“Succession” has never hid its focus on the family. That’s what has made the show a cultural phenomenon: the miseries that we love to imagine the rich and mighty inflict on themselves, the characters who’ve dedicated themselves to an idea of kinship and legacy but don’t know how to love. The series is, of course, a coherent and self-contained universe that requires no context beyond it. But much of the outsized affection toward the family drama comes from its ability to see our world so well, especially in its media satire—what other show could catch the late-night anarchist Ziwe (who plays a taunting host based on her TV persona) or the actress and dirtbag-left podcaster Dasha Nekrasova (who played a crisis-P.R. rep) during their fifteen minutes of extremely online notoriety? Fox News has unexpectedly proved a more slippery target, but, if “Succession” doesn’t quite nail the network, at least the series is winning at the thing that’s furiously chipping away at the right-wing institution’s standing: the memes. ♦

NEW YORKER

The Unbearable Weight of Levity

 

 
Clarice Lispector; illustration by Harriet Lee-Merrion

In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.

 

Alejandro Chacoff

 

The cronista hunts big game with a pocketknife. A brief description of the old neighborhood soccer team suggests the unrelenting passage of time; a glimpse of a stranger’s arm during a turbulent flight leads to a reflection on life and death. “There’s a right way to start a crônica by using a triviality,” Machado de Assis, one of the first great writers to champion the form, wrote in 1877.

One says: how hot it is! How unwaveringly hot! One says this while shaking the tips of a handkerchief, snorting like a bull, or simply agitating one’s overcoat. Then one slips from the heat to atmospheric occurrences, drawing a few speculations about the sun and the moon, others about yellow fever, sending a sigh to Petrópolis, and la glace est rompue; the crônica has begun.

As with almost everything he wrote, there’s a subtle irony in Machado’s suggestion that an easy step-by-step will lead to the desired outcome. Shorter and more elliptical than an essay, the Brazilian crônica is in fact a maddeningly elusive genre. The difficulty lies not so much in identifying the form’s attachment to the mundane (simple prose, wry personal anecdotes, an eye for the odd detail or fleeting character), but in the specific magic dust that transforms minor observations into prose that’s brimming with pathos. The underground passage from triviality to transcendence is hard to locate, yet you know a true crônica when you read one.

 The ratio of failure to success is
high, but when it works it is indelible.
It is a form that is at once high- risk—
because hard to master—and complacent,
perfect for the talent wasters,
the boozers and sinecure seekers who
can’t always endure enough solitude to
write novels. The genre’s birth, or at
least its first wave of popularity, can
be traced to the expansion of Brazilian
cities, particularly Rio de Janeiro,
and the local press in the nineteenth
century. Once a stylish reprieve from
the urgent news articles it accompanied,
the crônica has seen a severe
decline in influence over the past
decades.* 

*One notable exception is Antonio Prata,
whose crônicas for the newspaper Folha
de S. Paulo not only maintain the artistic
principles that first animated the genre but
also are popular among readers.

There are writers working
today who define themselves as cronis
tas, but in the age of furious tweets
and bloated newsletters, such a subtle
form seems unlikely to regain ground.

Much like the flaneur drifting around
Paris, the cro nis ta is often thought of
as both a product and an observer of
Rio’s chaotic growth—a nocturnal, dipsomaniac
figure who sketches the fleeting
scenes and characters of the city.

Unlike the flaneur, though, the cro nis ta
is no loner; he (almost always a he)
feeds on companionship and cliques.
His paths through the city contain longer
pit stops at bars and restaurants;
he is more idler than wanderer.

An aura of thwarted promise hovers
over even the most celebrated practitioners
of the form. Not because they
failed to achieve worldly success, but
because to be a cronista is to celebrate
what is minor, to show a certain indifference
toward literary greatness. It
was Rubem Braga who came closest
to elevating the crônica to canonical
status. Having worked from the 1930s
through the 1970s, he is now probably
the writer most associated with the
form, and the main representative of
its last great generation. Braga and
his group of friends contributed to
Rio’s bohemian landscape as much
as the bossa nova musicians, writing
about one another and creating a mythology
around themselves that made
them seem elegiac from the outset,
as if they knew that their way of expressing
themselves would one day
be outgrown.

Although she often appears in anthologies
of the genre, Clarice
Lispector occupies a peculiar position
in the history of cronismo. She was a
latecomer, writing her first crônicas
in the last decade of her life, but her
presence in the daily papers gave her
the readership that had long eluded
her as a writer of fiction. The critical
and commercial success of her first
novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943),
published when she was only twentythree,
had been followed by a string
of commercially disappointing novels,
earning her a reputation as an author
who was “hermetic” (an adjective she
hated) and hard to sell. Braga and his
friends, fierce admirers of her fiction,
used their influence to promote her
journalistic career, recommending her
fiction in 1958 to Senhor, an influential
little magazine where she would
become a regular contributor. But it
was her hiring by the Rio daily Jornal
do Brasil in 1967, a few years after she
wrote the book that is now considered
her masterpiece, The Passion According
to G.H. (1964), that brought her to
the attention of a wider public. She
held the job until 1973, four years before
her premature death from cancer.

It was the press that put Lispector on
a first- name basis with the Brazilian
public, like a soccer player, musician,
or politician. “Thanks to the Jornal do
Brasil I’m becoming popular. I get sent
roses,” she wrote in a column in 1967.
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas,
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
and Robin Patterson, is mostly made
up of her pieces for the daily, though
a sprinkling of writings for other publications
is also included. The second
half of the title is misleading. Only
a few pieces in this collection would
fit even the loosest definition of a
crônica—they vary widely and include,
among other miscellany, reflections
on writing; miniprofiles of friends,
artists, and artist friends; cryptic dialogues;
replies to fan mail; a spiky
riposte to a rumor about the author’s
divorce; and one indignant letter, in
the Moses Herzog vein, to the minister
of education. Also, unclassifiable
sentences and paragraphs. Few writers
have ever taken the expression “This is
an open space” quite so literally. Costa
and Patterson’s translation does a fine
job of capturing Lispector’s syntax and
rhythms, a task that isn’t so straightforward
considering the sheer variety
of forms her pieces take.

Tucked away in these nearly 750
pages, like rare flowers among ordinary
grasses, are more purposeful
attempts at writing what one might
call pure crônicas, some of which are
perfectly rendered, and a handful of
which have the unmistakable touch
of the author. These are the ones that
most often appear in anthologies, and
upon which Lispector’s reputation as
a cronista rests.

“When I was very young,” she writes
on June 6, 1970, in “Fear of Eternity,”
“I’d still never tried chewing gum, and
it wasn’t much talked about even in Recife.
I had no idea what it was.” This is
a typical setup for a crônica: a personal
memory or perception—Machado’s
triviality—clearing only the faintest
path to a theme hinted at in the title.
Her sister warns her not to lose the
never- ending candy (“It lasts a whole
lifetime”), alarming little Clarice:
I picked up that small pink pastille
representing the elixir of eternal
pleasure. I examined it, scarcely
able to believe in that miracle. I,
who, like other children, would
sometimes take a still intact
piece of candy out of my mouth
in order to suck it later on and so
make it last longer. And there I
was with that seemingly innocent
pink thing, making possible the
impossible world I had only just
become aware of.

Lispector here nails the form’s paradoxical
mixture of accessibility and
high artistic ambition by conjoining a
childhood memory with the unbearable
weight of eternity. “Suck it and enjoy
the sweetness,” her sister orders. “And
then you can chew for the rest of your
life. Unless you lose it, that is, and I’ve
already lost quite a few.” As the gum
becomes rubbery and gray and tasteless,
Clarice starts to feel panicked;
eventually she spits it onto the sandy
ground at the school gates, pretending
she has lost it. “I felt shamed by her
kindness, ashamed that I had lied,” she
says. “But relieved too. No longer burdened
down by the weight of eternity.”
In Lispector’s most fully achieved
crônicas, the trivial doesn’t so much
segue into the transcendent as become
inextricable from it. A piece of gum
contains the whole space– time continuum;
a mercury droplet represents the
elusive nature of all material things.

This is the same sense of rapture one
hears from her hypersensitive fictional
narrators, to whom no ordinary thing
fails to carry some extraordinary emanation—
an encounter with a cockroach
evokes the vision of a terrible, boundless,
amoral universe, the liquid oozing
out of it a damning nectar containing
the whole secret of human existence.
Often, though, Lispector just seems
to fret about her new day job. “I
know that what I write here cannot
really be called a crônica or a column or
even an article,” she writes on March 9,
1968. That same year, she asks, “Is the
crônica a story? Is it a conversation? Is
it the summation of a state of mind?”

Dwelling on one’s desire, ability,
or lack thereof to master the form—
metacronismo, say—is not unusual.
But there is something wildly incongruous
about Lispector as cronista—
it’s as if J.M. Coetzee had been invited
to write weekly op- eds for the Times,
or Cormac McCarthy hired as a regular
book critic. Where the form privileges
levity, suppleness, storytelling, and a
certain sense of humor, her writing
is often abstract, weary, and wary of
language’s limits, impatient not merely
with narrative but with events in general,
always seeking a fast track to
metaphysical experience. “As a reader,
I prefer the attractive type of book,
because it’s less tiring, less demanding,
requires little real engagement,”
she wrote on February 14, 1970. “But
as a writer, I want to dispense with
everything I can possibly dispense
with: that is what makes the experience
worthwhile.”

Her primordial world of animals,
rocks, plants, and anthropomorphic
rooms doesn’t really jibe with the secular,
street- smart world of odd characters
and sly observations, the gossipy
tone one finds in writers like Braga.
Often, in her weekly pieces, she slips
into a novelistic voice that, one suspects,
reflects the kind of thing she’d
rather be doing. A column published
on October 10, 1970, begins:
It was very dry that spring, and
the radio crackled, picking up
static, our clothes bristled with
static electricity, our hair clung
to the comb as if magnetized:
it was a hard spring. And very
empty. Wherever you happened
to be, you set off into the distance:
never had there been so
many paths. We spoke little; our
bodies heavy with sleep, our eyes
wide and blank. On the balcony,
along with the fish in the aquarium,
we drank a cool drink, gazing
out at the countryside. The dreams
of the goats wafted in from the
fields on the breeze. At the other
table on the balcony sat a solitary
faun. We stared into our drinks and
dreamed static dreams inside the
glass. “What did yu say?” “I didn’t
say anything.”

It’s heady to picture my grandfather
back in vast, isolated Mato Grosso in
the late 1960s, nursing his ulcer and
stirring his ground guarana leaves
while opening his paper and finding
this sort of writing. But readers were
probably not that fazed. Lispector’s
enigmatic style was certainly unique,
but part of the whole point of crônicas
is their unapologetic lack of utilitarian
value, their beautiful pointlessness.

They are a kind of anti- news.
The journalist Flávio Pinheiro—
who did not cross paths with Lispector
at the Jornal do Brasil but worked
there in the late 1970s and then again
in the 1980s and 1990s as the editor of
the famed CadernoB supplement that
she used to write for—recently told
me that the cronista’s role back then
was to “enhance the paper’s vocabulary.”
According to him, cronistas rarely
ever went into the office, and were a
group apart, largely exempt from the
daily routine.

In a preface to the Brazilian edition
of The Complete Crônicas, released by
the publishing house Rocco in 2019, the
writer and journalist Marina Colasanti,
then the young employee who was put
in charge of dealing with Lispector’s
pieces, recalls seeing her only a handful
of times, right after she began as
a contributor. After that, her pieces
would usually come via emissary, in big
brown envelopes, written in a difficult
scrawl—the result of a home fire that
almost killed her in 1966, leaving her
writing hand severely damaged. Very
little editing went on: “I fixed one typo
or another, not more than that,” Colasanti
writes.

In one sense Lispector was a part of
Braga’s gang. According to Benjamin
Moser, the author of Why This World:
A Biography of Clarice Lispector (2009),
it was Otto Lara Resende, another cronista,
who in 1960 first suggested to
the then editor of Jornal do Brasil, Alberto
Dines, that he hire Lispector as
a regular writer. In 1962, a few years
after divorcing her husband, the diplomat
Maury Gurgel Valente, Lispector
had a brief and intense affair with
Paulo Mendes Campos, a well- known
cronista from Braga’s group who was
married at the time. And it was Braga
and Fernando Sabino who published
The Passion According to G.H., through
their own small publishing house.

But these close relationships belie
Lispector’s separateness. The most
glaring difference, of course, was her
gender. Along with Cecília Meireles
and Rachel de Queiroz, Lispector is
among the very few women associated
with a male- dominated genre. The
ideal occupations for cronismo—boozing
and idling, mostly—demand gargantuan
amounts of time, something
that pretty much only men had in the
heyday of the form. Though the income
she received as a diplomat’s wife (first
in Naples, later in Washington) gave
her a certain amount of freedom to
write, Lispector longed for home. Her
second, third, and fourth novels were
all written abroad with difficulty, between
attending diplomatic functions
and taking care of her two boys, and
the cold reception of publishers back
in Brazil depressed her.

Reeling from her divorce, she returned
to Rio in 1959 with her sons
and hardly seemed to have the appetite
to take part in a literary scene built
on barhopping. Moser’s descriptions
of this period give Lispector the air
of a Ferrante character: the female
artist only half- belonging, unraveling
even while being the center of intellectual
admiration, calling friends
up in the middle of the night, taking
sleeping pills and chain- smoking
(hence the fire), using heavier makeup
to shock herself into a new persona,
consumed by her domestic life while
her male counterparts drink, selfmythologize,
and launch new literary
ventures. Mendes Campos, after their
affair, went back to his English wife
and children; Gurgel Valente sent her
$500 every month, but financial anxiety
became an issue.

Jornal do Brasil was not Lispector’s
first experience in journalism. In
1940, a few years before publishing her
first novel, she convinced a government
official and censor to give her
a job as a reporter and editor for the
Agência Nacional, a press agency controlled
by the Department of Press and
Propaganda of the Estado Novo, a dictatorial
regime installed by then president
Getúlio Vargas. Shortly afterward
she worked at the daily A Noite, also
under Vargas’s watch.

In 1952 Braga gave her a women’s advice
column at Comício, an anti- Vargas
weekly he was running at the time.
Lispector gave cosmetics and relationship
advice under the pseudonym
Tereza Quadros, occasionally smuggling
in material that subtly questioned
female stereotypes. After her
divorce she worked as a ghostwriter
for the model and actress Ilka Soares
and was again hired as an advice columnist
by the newspaper Correio da
Manhã, this time using an anglicized
pseudonym, Helen Palmer. Part of her
job was to lure unwitting readers toward
the benefits of Pond’s face cream,
which was never explicitly mentioned
in the pieces.

None of these early writings are
included in Too Much of Life, but

Lispector’s former selves often reappear
in her Jornal do Brasil columns.
In a piece dated April 24, 1971, she describes
the pleasure she finds translating
an Encyclopedia for Women:
Every woman should have one (it
isn’t ready yet), since it covers culture
(the section I’ve been doing up
till now, and I just hope they’ll also
give me the section on makeup) as
well as things that are strictly feminine
like makeup, lifestyle, handicrafts
(I’ve embroidered numerous
tablecloths, but only in flat stitch
or satin stitch—I don’t know how
to do complicated stitches), etc.
Then she says, “For women, our turn
has finally come: we are considered
important enough to be given an
encyclopedia.”

Lispector often shows this kind of
sardonic awareness about the terrible
deal women get. But she also seems
to be a pragmatist at heart, preferring
to navigate the world as it is rather
than confront it too forcefully. (That
the aforementioned ironic comment
ends the column rather than starting
it sums up this attitude.) Politically,
she declares herself a leftist. “I would
like to see a socialist government in
Brazil,” she writes on December 30,
1967. But other discussions about politics
in the columns are sparse and
generic. Whether this is because of
or despite the fact that in 1968 the
military government clamped down
on civil liberties, leading to the most
repressive period of the regime, is a
question that is hard to answer.

Writing a column under her own
name was not something Lispector
undertook lightly at Jornal do Brasil.
In a column dated June 5, 1971, she
writes, “One day I phoned Rubem
Braga, the creator of the crônica,” reminding
us yet again of his stature.

Worrying that her pieces were becoming
“excessively personal,” she asks for
his advice. “It’s impossible not to be
personal in a crônica,” he tells her. She
writes, “But I don’t want to tell anyone
about my life: my life is rich in experiences
and vivid emotions, but I don’t
ever want to publish an autobiography.”

There is a paradox in Lispector’s
fiction: despite her use of the first
person, her narrators often betray little
background. What comes across
is a sense of self- effacement, or of
self- scattering, self- dispersion—the
narrator is so sensitive to the mood,
atmosphere, and objects surrounding
her, pulling her in different directions
and down rabbit holes of abstract reflection,
that the traits usually associated
with a stable character or persona
(psychological details, biographical
facts) seem beside the point.

To this can be added a certain freedom
from the distraction of careerism.
Lispector was not immune to criticism,
but no other Brazilian novelist of the
twentieth century—no other Brazilian
novelist ever, perhaps—seemed
more unselfconscious about what was
going on elsewhere, or more aloof from
what other people were interested in,
utterly free from the usual inferiority
complexes that weigh on artists from a
huge, peripheral country that worries
about being irrelevant. In the archipelago
of postwar Brazilian fiction—precariously
united by a common language
and the ruins of a modernist project—
hers is the most self- sufficient island.

This aloofness infused her fiction
with a peculiar originality. More surprising
than her astonishing debut at
age twenty- three was the speed with
which she discarded gifts other writers
would kill for, moving quickly from
a modernist style to more mystical
writing. Shifting among the points of
view of three characters, Near to the
Wild Heart is an embarrassment of
riches, hinting at the inventive syntax
she later became known for while
also representing acute psychological
portrayals and a deft use of stream
of consciousness. Whereas the more
realist work of the great modernists
is usually deemed more “accessible,”
in Lispector’s case the early modernist
novel plays the role of the “easier”
book. (She was baffled by comparisons
to Joyce, Woolf, and Proust; she
claimed she hadn’t read any of them
before writing her first novel.)
In hindsight, it is not hard to understand
why critics were initially flummoxed:
the trajectory from almost fully
formed modernist to sui generis mystic
isn’t a usual one. By the time of The
Passion According to G.H.—the religious
allusion isn’t ironic—Lispector
was tuned into the unseen, her narrators
all seemingly overcome by a toolong
stare into the Aleph. For those
who don’t get her half the time (I count
myself among them), Near to the Wild
Heart remains the work to be cherished,
more tethered and in touch with
down- to- earth anxieties, like whether
to get married, have a kid, and so on.

“You pick up a thousand waves I
can’t catch,” Braga wrote to her in
1957, referring to her novels. “I feel
like a cheap radio, only getting the station
around the corner, where you get
radar, television, shortwave.” The compliment
sheds light on her unusual position
as cronista—why seek a glimpse
of transcendence when most of the
time you’re in a full- blown trance? If
Complete Crônicas is a misnomer, the
other half of the collection’s title, Too
Much of Life, is apt. The impression
Lispector gives is not that she is uninterested
in the quotidian, but rather
overwhelmed by it, sensorially overcharged
by the smallest occurrences,
needing only the tiniest slice of existence
to feed her fiction.

An ambivalence toward “chasing
after money, work, love, pleasures,
taxis and buses” can be a disadvantage
for reporting. Lispector’s profiles of
artists are laudatory, showing not the
slightest inclination to find fissures
in their public image. Her book and
art reviews read like press releases.
(Among these is a plug for Braga and
Sabino’s second publishing house.) Her
interviews are whimsical but without
the suggestive depth of her fiction. She
asks Pablo Neruda, who is “extremely
nice,” questions like “What is anxiety?”
and “Who is God?” as well as “Where
would you like to live if you didn’t live
in Chile?” and “What, in your opinion,
makes a pretty woman?” When she
asks him to write a poem on the spot,
he demurs. “What is love, Zagallo?”
she asks, apparently in all seriousness,
of the manager of Brazil’s 1970 World
Cup soccer team.

Sometimes she is saved by her subjects,
who indulge her in a way they
probably wouldn’t someone less famous.
Glória Magadan, a Cuban- born
writer of soap operas, answers her
heroine’s occasionally banal questions
with warm candor. “Given the influence
you have with the general public,
couldn’t you raise your level a little?”
Lispector asks, probably without sensing
her own snobbery. “I would lose
my influence then,” Magadan replies.
Yet these shortcomings never grate.
Perhaps we are as starstruck as her
star interviewees. Or more likely it’s
that her attempt to navigate the discomfort
of weekly exposition actually
produces a pure and mundane portrait,
and complicates her immaculate literary
image. In her column of September
18, 1971, she relays a rumor that
disturbs her:

Someone told me that Rubem
Braga said I am only good in books,
and that I don’t write a good column.
Is that true, Rubem? Rubem, I
do what I can. You do it better, but
you shouldn’t require others to do
the same. I write columns humbly,
Rubem. I don’t have any pretensions.
But I receive letters from
readers and they like my columns.
And I like to receive those letters.
I like to receive those letters: there is
something thrilling in this unguarded
tone, which is heard often in the collection.
To one reader, whose letter mixes
“aggression with flattery,” she says:
“You’re quite right to want me, like
Chekhov, to write amusing things. . . .
Don’t worry, Francisco, my moment to
say amusing things will come, I really
am full of highs and lows.” To another,
who speculates on her divorce:
I reckon you’re the wife of a diplomat.
You adopt an air of false
pity. . . . Madam, please keep your
pity to yourself, I don’t need it. And
if you want to know the truth, something
you weren’t expecting, here it
is: when I separated from my husband,
he waited for me to come back
to him for more than seven years.

When a “rather disheveled young
woman” shows up at her house uninvited,
paper in hand, and mentions
that she knows Lispector is an insomniac
because she can see her light
on every night—also saying that she
witnessed “the fire”—she is invited
in. The woman cooks an octopus for
her. Lispector’s editor is not thrilled
about this sort of engagement with
readers—he eventually asks her to
stop dealing so much with fan mail.

This raw sincerity and artlessness is
one of the most appealing aspects of
Too Much of Life. Even more so than in
her fiction, in her crônicas and other
columns Lispector uses the “I” without
the self- conscious, manipulative
care often employed by more autobiographical
writers (Philip Roth, say),
and the impression given is one of
vulnerability. “Fear of Eternity” and
others deserve their place among the
masterful examples of the crônica,
but it is remarkable how infrequently
Lispector tried to write these perfect
set pieces. Maybe the personal charm
and autobiographical self- presentation
demanded by the crônica—and even
by a regular column—was a little too
much for someone whose fiction always
showed a deep hesitation regarding
the idea of a unified, confident self.
The self remains fragmented, inconsistent,
rather comfortable with its
contradictions. .

 

Reviewed:

Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas

by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

 

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 

 

 

 

 

Becoming Enid Coleslaw

 

 

In each dense and delirious issue of Eightball, Daniel Clowes was driven to perfectionism, ricocheting like mad from story to story and foretelling some of the comic medium’s possible futures. 

 Ed Park 

The Complete Eightball:
Issues 1–18
by Daniel Clowes.
Fantagraphics, 528 pp.,

 1.

The comic book really is a perfect consumer item. It’s portable, flexible, cheap enough to be disposable, durable enough to last several lifetimes with proper archival care, lightweight, colorful and simple (no packaging or shrink-wrap required). Think in terms of the entire package, the structural cohesion of every component (from page numbers to indicia, etc.)

—“To the Young Cartoonist,” Modern Cartoonist (1997)

IN 1989 a two- dollar comic book called
Eightball debuted with the aggressive
subtitle “An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance,
Hopelessness, Despair and
Sexual Perversion.” True to the letter,
the five vices suffuse its thirty- two
black- and- white pages. In the surreal
opener, “Like a Velvet Glove Cast in
Iron,” our hero gets blindsided by a
creepy bondage movie, soul- kissed by
a filthy drunk, and arrested by sadistic
cops; he periodically flashes back to
the troubled face of some lost love or
phantom. Then there is “Devil Doll?,”
a takeoff on those tracts drawn by the
evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick that
proselytizers still leave on subway
seats—a campy- cruel three- pager in
which heavy metal, PCP, and D&D lure
a woman to a life of sin. (After getting
a pentagram tattooed on her brow, she
cackles, “I think it looks #@* radical!”)
Next comes a sleazy fable of adultery
and novelty gags (“The Laffin’ Spittin’
Man”), dressed to kill in angular midcentury
fashions and punctuated with
the airborne sweat droplets known in
the comics trade as plewds. The closing
feature is “Young Dan Pussey,” a
warts- and- all take on a superhero
comics mill—a meta- maneuver suggesting
firsthand experience. “Get a
move on, boys! Breakfast is ready!”
cries the taskmaster to his underpaid
team, bunked in the Infinity Comics
compound. “Pages are waiting to be
pencilled, written and inked!”

Varying in tone and ambition, each
of the comics in Eightball’s first issue
fixates on verbal zing and graphic
textures. Faces tend to be grotesque,
and the dialogue is often stylishly
rancid (“Yeah, stop fucking around,
Douche. . . I don’t want our sales to be
affected by this unreadable shit!”), but
the comics’ sheer beauty and mystery
can also knock you out. The opening
panel of the first story is a close- up of
a stunning, raven- haired woman, with
earrings that (on the third or thirteenth
read) turn out to be Thalia and Melpomene,
the classical masks of comedy
and tragedy. Her face is so hypnotic,
you miss what’s hiding in plain sight.
Eightball was published not long
after Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking
memoir Maus (1986) and Alan Moore
and Dave Gibbons’s caped- crusader

 deconstruction Watchmen (1987), when
the mainstream American press briefly
lauded the literary potential of comics,
but its word- drunk selection has little
in common with such monumental
works. It felt like the future, arrived
at through the past. The shading effects
were done cleanly in Zip- A- Tone
(a soon- to- be- discontinued adhesive
sheet), and the peculiar lettering could
look plucked from an earlier era, its
fussiness forcing readers to come
closer, slow down. At two bucks, the
comic was a bargain, dense and delirious.
Maybe too dense. In one story, the
hard- boiled narrator breaks the fourth
wall to grumble about space limits as he
contemplates his dire straits: “A good
question that deserves an answer—unfortunately
I only have 6 pages in this
issue so you’re gonna have to take my
word for it.”

The joke is that he has no one to
blame but himself. Everything in
Eightball was done by the artist Daniel
Clowes. He was twenty- eight and living
in his native Chicago, after a stint
in New York, where he studied at the
Pratt Institute—later lampooned in
“Art School Confidential”—and drew
comics for Cracked. (Unlike misfit penciller
Dan Pussey, he never served time
at a superhero outfit.) For the inaugural
issue, he signed his pieces Daniel
Clowes, D. G. C., and Dan Clowes. Future
issues ran bylines from Dan’l Clowes,
D. Gillespie Clowes, “Tubby” Clowes,
Young Dan Clowes, and more: an industrious
crew of misanthropic ink studs
and true artistes, all easily summoned
with a glance in the mirror. (“I’ve always
felt that I had all these different,
very unrelated parts of my personality,
and I wanted to be able to do stories
with each of these different parts of
my personality in the same book,” he
later said.) Covers and an occasional
feature were printed in color, for him
an almost masochistic feat involving
Mylar film, blue- lining, and the cutting
of transparent Pantone sheets. By issue
10, Clowes had divorced, remarried, and
relocated to Berkeley. The cover price
was fifty cents more.

Other adventurous comics found
their way to store racks in the late
1980s and early 1990s, and you could
detect in Eightball a tinge of the nightmare
logic of Chester Brown’s Yummy
Fur, the pop- culture mockery of Bob
Burden’s Flaming Carrot, the precise
body horror of Charles Burns’s Hard-
Boiled Defective Stories, and the midwestern
rue suffusing Harvey Pekar’s
American Splendor. (Lloyd Llewellyn,
swinging star of “The Laffin’ Spittin’
Man,” first appeared in a teaser included
in an issue of the Hernandez
brothers’ Love and Rockets.) But in
the spirit of that titular sphere, Eightball
defied categories, ricocheting like
mad from the start. Or is it that, when
shaken, it foretold some of the comic
medium’s possible futures?

From 1989 to 1997, Fantagraphics
published the first eighteen issues,
which have now been collected in one
bullet- stopping volume as The Complete
Eightball.1 

1Five more issues appeared from 1998 to
2004. These later numbers concentrated
on single, long- form narratives (David Boring,
Ice Haven, and The Death Ray, all later
published as graphic novels) and are not
included in this volume.

The tentpoles are two serials
that proved Clowes could do pretty
much anything: the labyrinthine, Lynchian
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
and—beginning immediately after—
the indelible female friendship saga
Ghost World, both of which have been
issued as separate volumes (and, in the
latter case, developed into a much- loved
film). But it’s a richer experience to read
them in situ, interrupted by everything
else. Clowes was driven to perfectionism,
as well as to fill pages—deadline
as mother of invention.2

2The Complete Eightball includes a dozen
pages of illuminating notes and source images.
Of Eightball #6 (June 1991), Clowes recalls
that the printing was so abysmal that
he “threw the entire box of comp copies out
the window onto Division Street about two
minutes after cutting it open. Later, after
being told by the printer (now out of business:
HA!) that we couldn’t reprint until
these copies were sold, I went out in the
middle of the night and salvaged a few of
the copies that hadn’t yet been pissed on
by hoboes.” 

 
Thus we find unhinged screeds (a
Clowesian proxy lists personae non
gratae in “I Hate You Deeply,” including
“People who don’t capitalize their
name,” while “The Future” forecasts
that “everybody who ever recorded
anything will at some point be called
a genius by somebody”—see today’s
oversaturated podcast market for
proof), instantly fizzling franchises
(“Hippypants and Peace Bear”), and
wry urban daydreams (“Marooned on
a Desert Island with the People on the
Subway”). There are slightly facile musings
on art- making (“Grist for the Mill”),
as well as emotionally plangent stories
that say more in a dozen pages than
most graphic novels can at ten times
the length. Of this last group, “Immortal,
Invisible,” “Like a Weed, Joe,” and
“Blue Italian Shit” are luminous memory
plays that, despite centering on different
characters, read like episodes in
a single sentimental education.
Impressive later works like “Caricature”
and “Gynecology” distill the
earlier misanthropy into compulsively
readable noir- tinged narratives.
They have the meandering magic of a

Cheever story like “The Country Husband”
or “The Day the Pig Fell into
the Well”: populated with curious
characters who enter and exit without
fanfare, told in a voice bursting
with regret yet also ecstatic with the
sheer talent expended in the telling.
The busy, fevered covers—everyone
looks deranged—practically shout for a
browser’s attention, in contrast to the
subtler ones gracing later Clowes books
like Wilson (2010) and Patience (2016).
Even the letters sections (“The Bulging
Mailsack”), prank- call contests, and
ads for mugs and T- shirts feel crucial,
providing a glimpse of the hustle and
flow of audience engagement in the
pre- Internet era.3 

3Correspondents include fellow cartoonists
like Peter Bagge, whose Hate had its
heyday in the 1990s, comedian Margaret
Cho, a member of Yo La Tengo, Spike Lee’s
brother, and a Seattle woman who, after inquiring
about the pronunciation of Clowes’s
surname, adds, “Did I mention that you are
a white male and I hate you?”

The Complete Eightball
comes with no overarching table
of contents for its five- hundred- plus
pages, making individual pieces hard
to hunt down. (I developed an elaborate
system using shredded Post- its.)

The absence compels you to read the
whole thing in sequence, to regard it
as a polyphonic magnum opus tilting
at the monoculture, born under Bush I
and stretching into Clinton’s second
term. It’s a madcap portrait of the artist
as generational talent, recycling and
refining his themes, as well as a time
capsule bearing the moods and mores
of an American decade now so distant
it might as well be the age of Atlantis.

2.
[Comics] are in a sense the ultimate
domain of the artist who seeks to
wield absolute control over his imagery.
Novels are the work of one
individual but they require visual
collaboration on the part of the
reader. Film is by its nature a collaborative
endeavor. . . . Comics offer
the creator a chance to control the
specifics of his own world in both
abstract and literal terms.
—“So, Why Comics?,”
Modern Cartoonist

“To me, my art looks perfect when I
do it,” Clowes told The Comics Journal
in the summer of 1992.
I mean, it’s really what I see in my
head. To me it looks almost like a
diagram or like a coloring book or
something. It really looks very. . . I
don’t want to say bland, but it just
looks very perfect. It looks exactly
the way the world should look. And
I don’t see a style at all. I see it as
being each face is the way a face
really looks. . . . People tell me they
can recognize my style, and I don’t
understand what they’re talking
about. I don’t see my style.

The interview was published shortly
after Eightball #9, containing the penultimate
chapter of Like a Velvet Glove
Cast in Iron; the serial would reach
its shattering finish two months later.
Clowes’s confession- cum- manifesto,
as he nears the end of his landmark
work, is a mix of modesty and bravado,
the tone half- kingly, half- savantish.
His facility with multiple modes might
suggest the absence of a singular style
(in the same interview, he prioritizes
doing “all different kinds of drawing”),
but even in their variety, his panels are
always recognizably Clowesian—and
miles away from bland.

Glove is a startlingly original comic
that nevertheless trails numerous influences,
from the title (nicked from
Russ Meyer’s ferociously great 1965 film
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) on down:
a Manson- like cult, Lovecraft ian fishfolk,
a ubiquitous logo that recalls the
post horn in The Crying of Lot 49, not
to mention an important locale (Hourglass
Lake) that also figures in Lolita.
As in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet
(1986), a young man descends into a
twilight zone behind an explicitly all-
American façade.4 

4It should be said that Clowes’s Eightball
characters are almost entirely white, and
the gaze (with the significant exception
of Ghost World) is unabashedly male—not
unusual for the time, but more glaring
thirty years on. Clowes is aware of the uncomfortable
embrace of nostalgia. In the
provocatively titled “Gynecology,” late in
The Complete Eightball, the artist Epps feebly
excuses his bias for the iconography of
yesteryear, including problematic images,
by saying, “I just like the innocence of those
old drawings.” And the fried- chicken fran-

chise Cook’s in the 2001 film Ghost World
(for which Clowes cowrote the screenplay)
is revealed to have originally had a racist
name, later fixed by changing one letter

 A bric- a- brac connoisseur,
Clowes conjures a shadow
world of grim diners and collectible
tchotchkes, moronic ad copy (“Hey!
I Need a Liquor Store”) and periodicals
like The Octagon (newspaper) and
Luv Canal (girlie mag, named after
the infamous toxic dump site). Cryptic
storefronts do slow business at odd
addresses: you can find Yahweh’s Mistake
at 1977 Hair Street. Call it gentle
magic realism, a playful twist on the
everyday that prepares the reader for
more profound breaches of reality.

Clay Loudermilk is less of an innocent
than Jeffrey Beaumont, Kyle Mac-
Lachlan’s Blue Velvet character; the
story starts with him visiting a porn
theater, after all, and we piece together
that he’s divorced. What he sees onscreen
is not what he came for: a bizarre
S&M movie, entitled Like a Velvet
Glove Cast in Iron, with a mustached
man in diapers and a dominatrix who
looks alarmingly like his ex- wife. (We
don’t grasp this till later; we don’t even
learn Clay’s last name till episode 3.)
The masks of Melpomene and Thalia
pop up on the end credits, bracketing
the list of pseudonymous actors (Abel
Caine, Brock Thunder, Madam Van
Damme) and the name of the auteur:
Dr. Wilde. According to a restroom sage,
who dispenses advice—legal, dermatological,
and otherwise—from atop a
toilet seat, the company responsible for
that unsettling film, Interesting Productions,
is located in Blackjack County.

Which is where things really get weird.
Able- bodied, with a healthy head of
hair, Clay is nonetheless so staggered
by this celluloid version of his ex—is
it really her?—that for the rest of the
saga, he’s depicted with bags under
his eyes, desperate for a solid night’s
sleep. Some scenes, seen once, can’t
be unseen. This goes for the reader,
too. For all its visual wit and honed
banter, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
unfolds as a series of dangerous visions,
designed to make us reel. It’s apt
that Glove’s first chapter delivers not
just forbidden sights, but monstrous
means of seeing. One of Clay’s friends,
ludicrously, appears with the tails of
“Asiatic sea crustaceans” flailing from
his sockets, to treat some ocular malady;
he explains that his doctor had
his eyeballs removed, and the creatures
were “there to eat out the bacteria.”
Later Clay sits handcuffed in
the back of a police cruiser when the
cops stop a mute, possibly somnambulant
woman who has three vertical
eye slits in her face. One figure sees
nothing; the other, too much.

The overall effect is startling. It looks
exactly the way the world should look.
At its most potent, Glove can feel like
it alters, even negates, seeing. During
these moments of high anxiety and
maximal weirdness, style is obliterated
or irrelevant. The images attack
too quickly for style to be processed, like
medicinal sea worms that dive straight
through the eyeholes and into the brain.
Like Clay, we want to see more, even
if it ruins us. His dark desire for the
truth—the imperative to cherchez la
femme—brings him into the fold of
conspiracy theorists, who see in a grocery
chain’s primitive logo the sigil
of some vast secret network, and into
a death cult prepping for the Great
Cleansing, an apocalyptic revolution
that involves the assassination of the
advice columnist Ann Landers.5 

5In one of Glove’s rare off- key asides, the
revolutionaries take over the White House,
where they get annoyed by a freshly divorced,
foulmouthed Bill Clinton. Clowes
drew the panels in July 1992, months before
the election, and almost chose to depict
Ross Perot in the Oval Office instead.

 Clay strays into the clutches of a seductress
or three as he hunts for clues. All
the while, he shows decency to those
he encounters, no matter how strange
they look: a lovelorn waitress who is
part fish, a genetically engineered pet
with no orifices, a crawling man who
helps him out with directions. As in
Faster, Pussycat!, violence erupts on a
hair trigger; but unlike the exhilarating
drubbings doled out by the Amazonian
Varla (Tura Satana), the ones
delivered by a testosterone- injecting
brute named Geat kill the soul.
Clay lodges across the street from
his quarry: Interesting Productions,
the secretive entity behind the tawdry
film. Through binoculars, he spies
a small, pipe- smoking girl at a desk,
perpetually writing. (Going through her
trash, he later discovers she’s simply
drawing the same picture of a horse

head, over and over.) When he gets inside,
his fate is sealed.

Once he enters the building, movie
titles are tacked to a corkboard, with
keys to corresponding screening rooms.
Clay takes three keys. The first film is
a bug- eyed rant (delivered, in fact, by
Dr. Wilde, the director); the second,
a perverse silent movie in which two
babies are made up to look like bride
and groom. He walks out of both. With
grim fairy- tale logic, the third selection
is the worst thing he could ever see.
Later, in one of the most devastating
reveals in comics, it turns out that—
spoiler alert—all of Interesting Productions’
plots, from insipid to sadistic
to literally murderous, come directly
from the pipe- chomping girl’s mind, as
transcribed by a slavering Dr. Wilde.
By the end, Clay is molded into a new
shape, his fate in line with his name.

3.
Think of the comic panel (or page or
story) as a living mechanism with,
for example, the text representing
the brain (the internal; ideas, religion)
and the pictures representing
the body (the external: biology, etc.),
brought to life by the almost tangible
spark created by the perfect
juxtaposition of panels in sequence.
—“To the Young Cartoonist,”
Modern Cartoonist

The snippets of letters that ran in
Eightball #11, responding to the end
of Glove’s run, read as though written
in a state of shock. “Exactly what
was that all about??” wonders one
reader, while another says it “left me
with the same feeling I got when I finished
100 Years of Solitude—life can
be so great, and yet fucked.” Clowes
later joked that #11 was “one of the
most incoherent issues,” and some of
it feels pro forma, as if he were depleted
after the labors of Glove. There’s
the interior monologue of someone
bored at a party; an Irish folktale “illustrated
by D. Gillespie Clowes”; “Why
I Hate Christians” (about what you’d
expect); and “The Happy Fisherman,”
who is nude from the waist down, his
privates cloaked by an open- mouthed
fish. Actual Hollywood interest in Like
a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron inspired a
satiric riff, “Velvet Glove,” but it’s a
dud, alternating scenes of a superheroinflected
revamp of Glove with ones of
Clowes getting pressured to, e.g., cast
Jim Belushi as Geat.

But then, on page 25, there is “Ghost
World.” The story stands out immediately,
its pages shaded in a delicate
blue to evoke the soft glow a TV casts
into a room at night, numbing but also
holy. Best friends Enid Coleslaw (dark
bob, glasses) and Becky Doppelmeyer
(blond) are recent high school graduates
trying to figure out their next
move, and the pleasure is in their fresh
faces and how they find diversion—
even fascination—living in nowheresville.
6 

6The suburban milieu is geographically
vague—“a combination of Chicago and
Los Angeles. . .with decaying Midwestern
brick buildings and palm trees in the background,”
per Clowes. Aimee Mann’s song
“Ghost World” (2000), inspired by the comic
but released before the movie, suggests
the South: “If I don’t find a job/It’s down
to Dad and Myrtle Beach.”

Enid and Becky are witheringly
critical of bad music, retro diners, and
raw ambition. I was going to call them
sassy, but on the story’s first page,
Enid rips into Sassy, the magazine
du jour for their demographic: “These
stupid girls think they’re so hip, but
they’re just a bunch of trendy stuck- up
prep- school bitches who think they’re
‘cutting edge’ because they know who
‘Sonic Youth’ is!” To which Becky replies,
“You’re a stuck- up prep- school
bitch!”

Clowes initially didn’t think “Ghost
World” would be more than a one- shot,
but the voices must have been irresistible.
(He cites the charming if casually
racist 1964 movie The World of Henry
Orient, which follows two teenage girls
in Manhattan who are obsessed with
a concert pianist, as an influence on
his duo’s insular dynamic.) By their
second appearance, it’s clear that Enid
and Becky are trying to navigate the
uneasy life stage between school and
whatever lies beyond—and the newly
forming obstacles between them—by
directing their insecurities outward,
mocking their peers and especially the
adults around them.

They roll their eyes at do- gooder parents
and long- haired waiters, Satanists
and psychics and stand- up comics,
“guitar- plunkin’ morons” and the “pathetic
fucking loser[s]” who resort to
personal ads. (“I remember when I first
started reading these, I thought ‘DWF’
stood for ‘dwarf,’” Enid says. “I could
never figure out why so many dwarves
were placing ads.”) Enid sneers that
Becky’s foppish former beau seems
to have taken fashion cues from “a
gay tennis player from the Twenties.”
Browsing a free alt weekly sporting
the headline “In Bed with the GOP: A
Lobbyist Comes Clean,” Enid moans:
“People who are super- serious about
politics all the time give me the total
creeps! It’s like my dad. . . . I mean who
the fuck cares?!”

In earlier Eightball stories, when an
embittered Clowes stand- in goes
on a tear, you can feel like the hair’s
been singed off your head, even if his
bile matches your own. (“I wanted to
be kinda mean ’cause I’m really sick
of these people dominating my life,”
Clowes once said.) By having the
caustic observations come from two
young women whose lives are in flux,
and forcing these opinions to rub up
against social reality, the story achieves
a devastating poignancy while still displaying
Clowes’s gift for spite. Unfolding
in eight parts, Ghost World is the
spiritual opposite of Like a Velvet Glove
Cast in Iron. Though haunted by his
past, Clay Loudermilk remains something
of a cipher; living in the present,
in a world more closely conforming to
our own, Enid and Becky are both more
normal and deeply rooted.

The title came from some graffiti
Clowes passed daily near his home in
Chicago; after he moved to California,
the phrase floated to mind as he
began writing the story, and it memorably
captures that sense of being
out of step with what’s around you. It’s
as though, having plunged his talent
deep into Glove’s heart of darkness,
Clowes immediately turned it in the
opposite direction. A subtle but important
mirroring takes place between
the S&M mask in the first chapter of
Glove, which unzips to reveal Clay’s
ex- wife, and the black headgear that
Enid buys at Adam’s II, an adult store
that she begs her friend Josh to take
her to. That mask, divorced from its
intended use, looks like part of a superhero
costume: the sordid has become
adorable. Google “Ghost World,”
and one of the first images you’ll see
is Thora Birch as Enid in the 2001 film
version, winsome in a bat- eared mask.

Edward Gorey devised suitably
Victorian- sounding pseudonyms for
his morbidly wry stories from the
letters of his own name (Ogdred
Weary, Regera Dowdy, et al.). Vladimir
Nabokov inserted Vivian Darkbloom
into some of his books for an
enigmatic, anagrammatic cameo. For
Ghost World, Daniel Clowes, a serial
employer of pen names, rearranged
himself, lending his most enduring
and endearing heroine his letters. By
the end of the book, Enid Coleslaw’s
destiny is unclear, but she’s equipped
with all the wisdom and love her creator
has to offer.7

7. The affection is mutual, to a point. In chapter
3, Becky teases Enid: “Name one guy
who lives up to your standards.” “Somebody
like David Clowes,” Enid says dreamily.
“He’s like this famous cartoonist.” To
which Becky replies: “Yick! I hate cartoons!”
(Later Enid sees Clowes at a signing and
recoils in disgust.

4.
As we enter, voiceless and impotent,
a digital age of “instant access”
(or constant excess), the fragile
chemistry of this, our hand- held,
non- automatic pictorial narrative
device and its inherently sublime
nuances . . .appears to be in grave
danger. Reading a comic book as
God intended is a simple pleasure
and as such, our precious pictorial
pamphlet, like vaudeville and the
magic lantern, is just the sort of
thing that gets crushed in the gears
of progress.
—“The Future and Beyond,”
Modern Cartoonist

In May 2001, two months before Terry
Zwigoff’s film Ghost World hit theaters,
The Comics Journal ran a long interview
with Clowes, whom it had similarly
featured in 1992. This time, he
got to do the cover. Rather than a single
illustration of the kind he’s done
on occasion since for The New Yorker,
Clowes turned it into a mini graphic
memoir. In panel 1, he’s invited to be
the subject of an interview. (“Why did
I agree to that?” he wonders in panel
3. “I hate The Comics Journal.”) Later,
Clowes reads the results with dismay;
yet by the last panel, he’s somehow
agreed to do the cover illustration.
“What’s wrong with me?” he says at his
drawing board, composing the comic
we’ve just read.

In the interview, Clowes recalls the
arduous process of using Rubylith
sheets to get the distinctive color effects
for Ghost World. It was a bespoke
technique he learned at Pratt, and so
comically cumbersome that he muses,
“I might as well have spent four years
learning how to fix a cotton gin.” The
grumbling in both cases is tongue in
cheek, because the labors he undertook
worked. The Comics Journal cover—a
Möbius comic strip—is a witty master
class in the art form’s seductive
charm and narrative flexibility, and
Ghost World is what Clowes will be remembered
for.

Stuck in the pages of the final
issue in The Complete Eightball is
a stapled, fourteen- page pamphlet
called Modern Cartoonist. Easily detachable,
it’s a literal book within a
book, with publication attributed to
a fictitious Catholic group devoted to
the comic art form. On the cover, an
eyeshaded artist draws a goofy face
on the page before him, while outside
the window, a mushroom cloud looms
beyond a ruined cityscape. In a tidy,
minuscule hand, Clowes—the anonymous
author of the pamphlet—first
assesses the current (1997) situation,
deeming that there are at best “20– 25
[comic] creators producing work of an
extraordinarily high value,” followed
by “25 or 30 with noble aspirations,”
and around 2,950 others who are beneath
contempt—“teenage millionaires
who draw to create fodder for
‘development deals’ and those in waiting
to be same.” He praises the power
of the form (“Comics have an inherent
energy to them. . .a near- electric
charge”), and inveighs against sloppy
work, skewering artists who opt for a
more “iconic” style (mocked as “The
Adventures of a Featureless Blob”).
Just as the cultural change wrought
by the Internet becomes easier to
see, he makes a stand against the
“democratization” promised by new
technology, looking down his nose at
the “structural shift . . . in the reader’s
favor, giving him an exaggerated role
in the give- and- take between artist
and audience.”

It’s fitting that The Complete Eightball,
which contained a parody of Jack
Chick’s fire- and- brimstone pamphlets
in issue #1, should end with a tract
by Clowes himself in the final number.
Clowes has reminisced about buying
and consuming, in one evening,
about sixty of Chick’s tracts, telling
The Guardian it was “maybe the most
devastating comics- reading experience
I’ve ever had.” “I’d never been absolutely
convinced by a comic book before
in my life,” he told The Imp, Daniel
Raeburn’s sporadic but important
comics- crit magazine, in 1997,
but I was sure that he was right
and that I’d been crazy all along. . . .
To read that many in a row, this
overwhelming tidal wave of Christianity
coming at you—it’s an
amazing experience. Here was
this comic dealing with life and
death. The absolute most important
thing. I mean, he was pulling
out all the stops, there was no softpedaling,
he was just ramming it down your throat. 

Never before had
I been affected like that by comics.

I find Chick’s work repulsive. But it’s
easy to see why Clowes found those
cheap tracts (eight cents a pop at a
Christian bookstore) so potent. Here
was someone who used the medium
to its utmost, harnessing the power of
words and pictures, to his own furious
ends. (Chick died in 2016.) Clowes’s religion
is comics itself, and every word
in Modern Cartoonist—and each panel
in The Complete Eightball—is a testament
to his godlike prowess. As he
told The Comics Journal in 1992: “I was
trying to almost create something for
myself that I wish existed, or to create
for the world something I wish
existed.” .

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 

 

 

 

 

Quato vale uma ideia?

 

 

 

 ANA PAULA SOUSA

Roteiristas e diretores brigam pelo direito de ser remunerados a cada vez que suas obras forem exibidas

Ao longo da última semana,
diretores e roteiristas de
mais de 50 países reuni-
ram-se no Hotel Sheraton,
no Rio de Janeiro, para
participar do Congresso da Confederação
Internacional de Autores Audiovisuais
(Avaci, do inglês Audiovisual Authors
International Confederation).

 
Na véspera da abertura do Congresso,
os direitos dos criadores haviam entrado
em discussão também no Congresso Na-
cional, em Brasília, durante a sessão que
tratou do Projeto de Lei nº 2630, o PL das
Fake News.

 
A pauta que une os dois eventos para-
lelos tem como protagonistas diretores,
roteiristas e até mesmo atores de filmes
e séries que pedem a regulamentação de
um novo direito: a remuneração adicio-
nal a cada exibição pública das obras das
quais participaram.

 
O caminho mais curto para a compre-
ensão dessa demanda é olhar para a mú-
sica. A execução pública garante a com-
positores, intérpretes, músicos, editores e
produtores fonográficos certa remunera-
ção. Cabe ao Escritório Central de Arreca-
dação e Distribuição (Ecad), que foi cria-
do em 1973 e reúne sete entidades, reali-
zar a cobrança e o repasse desses direitos.

 
No caso de roteiristas e diretores de
obras audiovisuais, o direito autoral, ga-
rantido pela Lei 9.610, de 1998, refere-se
apenas à criação, ou seja, não contempla
a remuneração pela exploração comer-
cial posterior. “Como roteirista, você re-
cebe um cachê pelo trabalho, mas depois
não tem qualquer recompensa financei-
ra pelo sucesso da obra”, resume Thiago
Dottori, roteirista da série Psi e dos lon-
gas-metragens da Turma da Mônica.
Dottori foi um dos fundadores da en-
tidade de Gestão de Direitos de Autores
Roteiristas (Gedar), integrante da Avaci e
uma das principais defensoras dessa pau-
ta no País. Paula Vergueiro, advogada da
Gedar, foi a Brasília para conversar com as
lideranças dos partidos e pedir a inserção
do assunto no PL das Fake News. Com ela
estavam os roteiristas Marcos Berstein,
de Central do Brasil (1998), e Carolina
Kotscho, de Dois Filhos de Francisco (2005).
“A indústria sempre foi a voz dominan-
te e vitoriosa nessa discussão sobre dire-
tos autorais”, diz Paula. “Estando do la-
do dos criadores, minha sensação era a de
que íamos sempre perder, até por sermos
a parte economicamente mais frágil da
cadeia. Mas isso parece estar mudando.”

Em países como Argentina, Chile, Co-
lômbia, França e Espanha, esse tipo de re-
muneração está regulamentado, com os
repasses sendo feitos para as entidades
responsáveis pela gestão coletiva de direi-
tos – caso do Ecad e da ainda novata Gedar.
O fato de o Brasil não ter uma regula-
mentação que estabeleça como se daria,
no audiovisual, a arrecadação e a distri-
buição desses valores, impede, por exem-
plo, que os autores sejam remunerados
pela exibição de suas obras em outros
países. “Fomos mostrando aos nossos co-
legas da América Latina que, ao terem so-
ciedades de arrecadação, eles passariam
a poder receber os seus direitos”, expli-
ca Horácio Maldonado, coordenador do
Conselho Executivo da Avaci e diretor da
entidade dos Diretores Argentinos Cine-
matográficos (DAC).

 
Uma pergunta que tal movimentação
suscita é: por que, depois de décadas e dé-
cadas de certo padrão de direitos auto-
rais seguido na produção de filmes e sé-
ries, pede-se essa mudança? A resposta
varia conforme o interlocutor, mas pas-
sa, invariavelmente, pela nova configu-
ração do mercado imposta pela trans-
missão de conteúdo pelo streaming.

 
“A conexão que faço é que o modelo
que as plataformas de streaming adota-
ram no Brasil é o de ‘obra por encomenda’,
no qual elas são as donas das obras audio-
visuais que financiam, incluindo toda a
sua propriedade intelectual”, diz Rodrigo

Chacon, gerente da área de entretenimen-
to no escritório Cesnik, Quintino, Sa-
linas, Fittipaldi e Valerio Advogados.
“O que os criadores e produtores têm
percebido é a importância de proteger suas
criações, seja mantendo parte dos seus di-
reitos, seja criando mecanismos para que
possam lucrar novamente, caso aquela
criação se mostre um sucesso”, prosse-
gue Chacon. “Além disso, em um merca-
do que proporciona diversas explorações
para uma mesma propriedade – um livro
é adaptado para filme e, posteriormen-
te, para um jogo, por exemplo – as pro-
priedades intelectuais têm se valorizado.”
Dottori, por sua vez, chama atenção
para o fato de que, com o ambiente digi-
tal, as negociações, antes locais, passa-
ram a ser globais e que, embora o mer-
cado tenha crescido, “a remuneração dos
criadores tem diminuído”.

 
A julgar pelo que se viu na última
sessão sobre o PL nº 2630, a batalha se-
rá dura. A referência à remuneração dos
criadores chegou a ser inserida no tex-
to na tarde da terça-feira 2, mas, à noi-
te, já havia um destaque pronto para re-
tirá-la. Entre os pontos sensíveis do tex-
to estava a previsão de que apenas plata

ormas com mais de 10 milhões de usu-
ários tivessem de pagar a remuneração.

 
As plataformas de streaming e as tele-
visões argumentam, em suas conversas
com as lideranças dos partidos no Con-
gresso, que essa nova forma de distribui-
ção de direitos implica custos que devem
impactar suas operações e, por conse-
quência, levar a aumentos no valor dos
serviços oferecidos ao consumidor final.
“A relação entre os criadores e os distri-
buidores de conteúdo é bastante desequi-
librada economicamente”, reforça Paula.
“E a gestão coletiva vem para dar algum
equilíbrio a esta relação.” •

carta capital