British Journal of Aesthetics Vol 49
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COMICS AS LITERATURE? | 231 There are problems and unclarities with Goodman’s initial gloss of the distinction. 47 More-
over, Goodman’s subsequent account of the autographic/allographic distinction in terms of whether or not a work of art is ‘ amenable to notation ’ is problematic. 48 As Jerrold Levinson argues, it is plausible that no actual works of art are such that the identity condi- tions for genuine instances are completely specifi able in terms of a notation. 49 Neverthe- less, I believe that Goodman was pointing towards a number of important and related distinctions that we fi nd in our appreciative practices. Most signifi cantly for the purposes of this discussion, there is the intuitive distinction between works of art that do and do not seem to allow for a certain kind of forgery — forgery that involves the deceptive practice of producing inauthentic items indiscernible from authentic instances of such works. If you accept this distinction, then it is clear that there is an important difference between standard comics and standard works of literature. Comics — at least those that are standardly produced — are autographic, and they would have been characterized as such by Goodman. 50
template or, perhaps, another authentic instance. 51 It is in virtue of this that traditionally made comics are intuitively forgeable in the way described above — something may be falsely pre- sented as if it were mechanically produced in the right way. Moreover, comics are typically completely autographic; that is, they contain no aesthetically relevant spatial parts that are al- lographic. 52 In particular, it is not the case that typical comics combine autographic images with allographic text. The lettering in comics is aesthetically signifi cant and the physically embodied text in a comic functions more than merely linguistically. In most cases, the words as they appear on page must then be produced by means of the relevant template or they are not genuine. Relettering a comic by hand produces something that does not count as a genu- ine instance of the original. 53 The same seems true of the other features of the standard com- ic book page: panel borders and speech balloons also appear to be autographic elements. Occasionally comics contain bits of typeset text. In some cases (e.g. in Posy Simmonds’s recent graphic novel Tamara Drewe ) these are plausibly allographic elements of the work. But I have not been denying that comics may contain some allographic elements. The key points here are that being autographic is standard for the category of comics, and that being 47
For a sympathetic but critical discussionm see Jerrold Levinson, ‘ Autographic and Allographic Art Revisited’, in Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell U.P., 1990), pp. 89 – 107. 48 ‘ Since an art seems to be allographic just insofar as it is amenable to notation ’ (Goodman, Languages of Art , p. 121.) 49
Levinson, ‘ Autographic and Allographic’, pp. 100 – 101. 50 David Carrier agrees: ‘ Comics are an autographic art with, potentially, an indefi nite number of copies of the original image ’ ( Aesthetics of Comics , p. 63). 51 In the case of many traditionally produced comics the particular template is a printing plate. Some comics are produced by photocopying. In such cases, the original drawn and inked art may function as the template. 52 I assume here that it makes sense to talk of comics having spatial parts. I do not believe that this is an especially problematic assumption. Since it is untendentious that the tokens of comics have spatial parts, my claim about the lack of allographic spatial parts in comics could be easily translated into talk about the parts of comics that correspond to the spatial parts of their tokens. 53 And so, letterers count as among the artists who make a comic. This is refl ected in the credits that appear in standard commercial comics. And this is true even though the letterers of mainstream comics nowadays commonly use graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator. at University of Athens on June 19, 2011 bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from
232 | AARON MESKIN fully or completely autographic is at least typical of comics. Perhaps this latter feature is even standard or criterial (although not necessary) for the category. It would be too quick to distinguish comics from literature by combining this result with Goodman’s claim that literature is allographic. 54 The claim that literature is allographic is an overgeneralization. Most essentially illustrated literary works do require mechanical repro- duction from a template for the production of authentic copies and are, in virtue of this, forgeable in the relevant sense. Still, these autographic works of literature such as Safran Foer’s aforementioned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are (except perhaps for some very rare cases — see below) best understood as merely partially autographic. That is, one can cleanly and clearly distinguish their forgeable autographic parts from their non-forgeable allographic parts. A specifi c template is only required to produce part or parts (i.e. distinct spatial parts) of the authentic copy of Tristram Shandy . Cases which suggest the possibility (perhaps actuality) of fully autographic works of literature (e.g. A Picto-
novels) are extremely rare. Being fully autographic is contra-standard for being literature. Most comics, then, are fully autographic but being fully autographic provides evidence that something is not a work of literature. Combine this with the earlier observations about the relation between images and words in the two art forms and it looks as if the ‘ comics as literature ’ thesis is under threat. Perhaps there are exceptional comics that are not fully autographic and in which there is a preponderance of text over image. But if these were the only comics that counted as literature, then the ‘ comics as literature ’ thesis would be rather uninteresting. Of course it is still possible that a work may count as literature even if it is fully autographic and contains a preponderance of image over text since we are dealing with defeasible evidence not entailment. But these are not the only signifi cant differences between standard comics and standard works of literature. As we discover more standard features of comics that are contra-standard for literature, the evidence that typical comics are not literature appears to become overwhelming. Layout is important to ordinary comic books to a degree that is not the case with ordi- nary works of literature. Many artistic effects produced by comic books are generated by particular page layouts. Change the page layout of a comic book and you may signifi cantly change the aesthetic and artistic properties of it. But this is not typically the case with works of literature — especially non-poetic literature. You may change the layout of a stan- dard novel, short story, or work of dramatic literature without having any aesthetic or ar- tistic effect on it whatsoever. Even in the case of poems — where line length is often aesthetically signifi cant — larger-scale features of layout are often artistically insignifi cant. So, for example, page breaks do not usually play a signifi cant role in poetry even if line breaks do. 55 Moreover, the fact that most poems can fl ourish purely orally, and hence are 54 Goodman, Languages of Art , p. 114. 55 I believe that this is true with respect to most poetry. I have on my desk three books that contain Phillip Larkin’s poem ‘ The Whitsun Weddings ’ — each one presents the poem in a different layout. But I cannot say that my appreciation of the poem is affected by this. On the other hand, it is true that layout matters very much to concrete poetry. See below for further discussion at University of Athens on June 19, 2011 bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org Downloaded from
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