Dexterous platitudes
by Nicole Rudick
Monday, November 8, 2010
I’ve been doing research recently on Lynd Ward (whose wordless woodcut novels were just published by the Library of America). I found a trove of New York Times reviews of these early books—they all appeared between 1929 and 1937—and in each, the reviewer has a hard time taking the material seriously. Take, for instance, a 1933 Times review of Prelude to a Million Years. The review is by John Chamberlain, a syndicated columnist and book critic.
What the ‘reader’ will make of a series of woodcuts which tell this story is conjectural. For our own part, we wish Mr. Ward would employ his dexterity in catching shades of emotion in the illustration of other people’s written stories. The art of painting, or of the woodcut, by its very static nature, is not a good medium for drama, which must march. It is a platitude, of course, to say this, but the platitude has not yet convinced Mr. Ward.
Aside from the laughable “critical” faculties at work here, it’s interesting that the idea of pictures standing in for words seems such a difficult concept to grasp. Chamberlain feels that pictures in books are for illustration; they are secondary to the words and ought to play a supporting role. What might he have said of a comic book, in which words and pictures work together, often on equal footing?
The reviewer’s small-minded conception of the medium makes this quote by Ward, part of his 1953 Caldecott acceptance speech, in which he so succinctly describes what comics alone can do, all the better:
No other medium in which the artist can work has that particular element to offer, and it is that one thing that makes the book a form something different for the artist from what it is for the writer. It is true that the writer works with a succession of words, paragraphs and chapters that because of their sequence in time have a significance completely dependent upon that time sequence; but the turning of the page is not essential to that sequence, and, save at the end of the chapter, is more often than not likely to be an interruption that is tolerated rather than utilized for its own sake. For the artist, however, the turning of the page is the thing he has that no other worker in the visual artist has: the power to control a succession of images in time, so that the cumulative effect upon the viewer is the result of not only what images are thrown at him, but the order in which they come. Thus the significance of those coming late in the sequence is built up by what comes earlier.
Labels: Lynd Ward, New York Times
That a literary critic writing in 1933 has a hard time taking woodcut novels very seriously strikes me as utterly unsurprising. What is surprising is your vigorous condemnation of him. I mean, he held a very conventional point of view, so it seems weird to be excoriating him 77 years after he wrote this review (and 15 years after his death).
@Robert Boyd. Well it’s true that Chamberlain’s inability to appreciate the woodcut novel isn’t surprising. Still, not everyone was as blinkered as Chamberlain even back then. Thomas Mann wrote a very smart, responsive, and appreciative essay on Frans Masereel. (Kent Worcester reprinted that essay in Arguing Comics). So I think even back in the critical dark ages there was a distinction between people who could appreciate comics and para-comics (Mann, Seldes, Dorothy Parker) and those who were completely baffled by comics and para-comics (Chamberlain, Wertham).
Actually, I was a bit surprised because Chamberlain was an interesting guy. He had been a fairly conventional Ivy League type in the 1930s but was radicalized by the Great Depression and during the 1930s, so his book reviews of the period are quite open to fairly radical works of art. Later he reverted to conservatism and became a mainstay of the National Review. There’s a Mary McCarthy story (“The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit”) which is seen by many to be a portrait of Chamberlain.
Sorry, that should be ” He had been a fairly conventional Ivy League type in the 1920s….”
Great speech there.
Jeet, of course you’re right. But that’s one reason we find someone like Seldes such an interesting figure–he realized that comics could have artistic value so much earlier than the culture as a whole. That said, I think there is a value in studying the “conventional wisdom” of the past in our field. I just don’t think there’s much point in being indignant about Chamberlain, as Rudick seems to here. (I sometimes feel this way, reading critical writing from the past, say that of Clement Greenberg–“How can Greenberg have thought that? It seems utterly close-minded!” But then I remember, that was then, this is now, and while it’s worthwhile to engage with that criticism, it’s pointless to get angry about it.)
I dunno . Chronologically, you’re right. That *was* then and this *is* now, but I don’t feel like the critical climate outside the immediate comics community has warmed enough that it’s wrong to approach writing from that period aggressively. There are still echoes of Chamberlain’s and others’ sentiments in a lot of recent writing ( or, in places, a lack of recent writing). In other circles it wouldn’t always go without saying how wrong he was.
I think analyzing why intelligent, creatively-minded people didn’t “get” comics will provide a lot of the fuel for moving the medium forward. The war isn’t over 🙂
I should point out that this isn’t a review of Ward’s first woodcut novel, but his fourth. I’m hardly angry about—what difference does it make to me personally? What’s interesting to me is the extent of his argument, that such images are only suited to highlighting subtleties that already exist in someone else’s work. He’s not even really referring to comics but says that even paintings can’t express drama properly. What’s at stake in the quote is his resistance to the power of an image. And the excerpt from Ward’s speech argues precisely for the way in which a succession of images can achieve what Chamberlain insists they can’t. It’s great to read critics who were in time with new experiments in art, but it’s also useful to observe moments of critical disconnect—discovering where the point of contention lies. Greenberg is a curious example of both: a champion of a new art but a severe critic of everything outside that new mode.
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