All PostsAustin Kleon posted some quotes from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which included the oft-said “write what you know” advice:
Write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty – describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories?
This sets off one of my peeves in the comments, where I express the concern for too many works about depressed youths, too many novels and writers, too many comics about comic artists (I’ve been guilty of all in the past). Austin was quick to find a relevant quote from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (which I haven’t looked at in years):
The writer writes well about what he knows because he has read primarily fiction of this kind–realistic fiction of the sort we associate with The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, or Harper’s. The writer, in other words, is presenting not so much what he knows about life as what he knows about a particular literary genre.
This idea of writing what you know as a product filtered through genre seems of possible relevance to the genre of autobiographical comics. How many are filtered through the lens of Crumb, Pekar, Porcellino, or Chester Brown? Poor second hand copies of those who defined the genre. This is where work like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (my review) stands out so much, I think, because it treads outside those paths. It is less everyday, soul bearing, expression, and more a constructed narrative that goes beyong a direct telling of events/feeling.
I kind of agree Derik but I think a lot of autobiographical work suffers because the people creating it have no grounding in the study of literature, or literary criticism, or have just read too few books (which may well be your sub-text but you are too kind to point it out). And that is not a charge that can be levelled at Harvey Pekar.
Most autobiography is fiction anyway, just as much fiction contains autobiographical elements; and then there is a sort of unavoidable self-spin that centres the individual in their own narritive of the imagination. Even ‘historical facts’ are subject to a mixture of willing self-delusion that recreates the events not as they happened but in light of propoganda – something the Scottish historian Angus Calder dealt with in his book The Myth of the Blitz. Not being aware of this can lead to a text peppered with capital I’s, which symbolises the male-organ to many feminist-critics.
I honestly think it’s just down to the fact that some cartoonists have limited writing ability, and perhaps even very little interest in literature, unlike some authors who even write their autobiography with a Book of Symbols and a copy of Catcher in the Rye nearby.
Had I unrolled that thought, I think I’d have ended up the “not read enough” point. By focusing on a limited (one might say extremely limited) set of precursors/models/genre-examples an author/artist will end up with a limited palette (visually and narratively). That is, one will write the genre as one knows it.
I do agree that a lot of comic artists often suffer from being too much the artist and not enough the writer. Some of this might be assuaged by more reading outside comics.
If one reads enough literature from the past century it can be shocking to realize how conservative (and I don’t mean politically) most comics are.
Thanks for the comment!