Comic Books and The New Literature
27
Generically speaking, our literary canon is thus arbitrary and inconsistent,
for it accepts Pascal’s metaphysical meditations or Samuel Beckett’s plays, but
not Simone Weil’s La Pesanteur et la grace, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction,
or the pope’s latest encyclical letter. The authoritative literary canon has
exhibited complacency towards a performed art such as theatre and towards
openly non-narrative genres, such as philosophical essays or theological
meditations,^ and has been particularly harsh toward minor genres, such as
detective stories or science fiction, and even harsher towards alternative
narrative media such as comic books or, of course, cinema, without any real
justification: after all, there is no logical reason why cinema should have been
excluded from a field of “literary st udies” that welcomed theatre to the point of
hailing a playwright as the center figure of the Occidental canon.
As we see, the parameters used to define literature have never been
generically justified and one could say that the field of literary studies has
always been as undefined as that of cultural studies is today. As we are
witnessing the dissolution of Literary Studies into the pseudo-field of Critical
Theory,^ Popular Culture Studies provides a naturally privileged place for
structuring a new canon that acknowledges multimediatic diversity and therefore
does not exclude a priori entire narrative media and genres on the bases of
generically inconsistent criteria.
One of the most vilified narrative media in dire need of canonical
rehabilitation is that of comic books, which, in spite of having generated recent
interest among popular culture scholars, remains vastly understudied and has not
yet shed the prejudices that surround its cultural existence; generally considered
as a sub-cultural product, comic books have yet to be taken seriously at a
canonical level, for they have been long dismissed by the informed academic
structures as culturally insignificant, regardless of their obvious cultural impact:
although Herge’s The Adventures ofTintin^^ may have been translated into 40
languages, they are still far from being considered as part of any literary canon,
and the same could be said regarding Snoopy or Spiderman. Of course,
following a typical canonically informed value judgment, which is by nature
debatable, one could argue that the adventures of Snoopy or of Spiderman are in
essence childish and formulaic, and that they do not especially enlighten our
consciousness about human nature; however, regardless of the depth and
ontological message one may or may not see in Snoopy’s or in Spiderman’s
narrative universes, both have at least the advantage of actually presenting a
narrative universe, which is far from what can be said regarding Montaigne’s
disconnected conversations with himself, Teresa of Avila’s ecstatic
metaphysical speculations, or Pascal’s ominous theological contemplations.
Considered from the point of view of their most elementary components, the
adventures of Snoopy and those of Spiderman as cultural objects have in the end
much more in common with what we instinctively perceive as literature than
Montaigne’s Essays or Pascal’s Pensees. Peanuts or The Amazing Spiderman
may be aesthetically satisfying or not, they are still more “literary” in essence