Complex Art

I don’t think I’d call the American impatience with aesthetically complex fiction “anti-intellectualism.” Plenty of intellectuals themselves express the same disdain for writers like Pynchon and Gaddis, whose work can’t be reduced to sociological observation or political agitation. It’s more a resentment of complex art, a disinclination to give such art the sustained attention it requires. It’s less “laziness” than it is a fundamental suspicion of anything that isn’t useful in a readily apparent way. Critics want novels to be useful as tools of cultural analysis, while ordinary readers want novels to be entertaining, an escape from their own everyday reality.

Dan Green in response to Steven Moore (two guys whose opinions on novels I trust). “Betraying the Novel.” The Reading Experience (1 July 2008).

Whenever I read something like this on the complex (and often maximalist) novels I often favor (I’m a huge fan of Gaddis), I wonder where the comics are that might correspond to this “complex art.” Not just an issue of length (see previous post), but rather complexity, depth, thought, experimentation. In comics the idea of experimentation and difficulty often comes more from the visual art/style side (Chippendale, for instance), than from an overarching concept of form/style/content. Comics are still mostly conventional in a narrative sense.

Tags: complexity, graphic novels, maximalism, narrative, novels

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