Andrew, Why Are You Wasting Your Headspace Thinking About All This Shit?

Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.

                    Lex Luthor

And the big question, obviously, is "What would CS Lewis have said about all this?"

For Lewis, there were no "good books" or "bad books": there were only good readers and bad readers. Good readers, he says, receive books; bad readers merely use them. Good readers pay attention to what the writer actually wrote. They want to laugh at the passages the writer intended them to laugh at, and feel sad in the passages the writer intended them to feel sad in. (That's where criticism can help: by explaining obscurities and difficulties so the book can affect you in the way it is supposed to.) Good readers read the same book over and over again, and would notice if a single word were changed. Good readers want description which really describes; which shows them things they haven't seen before or which makes the familiar seem strange.

Bad readers, on the other hand, are only interested in the general shape of the tale; they read in order to find out what happens next. They forget the book once they have read it, and they wouldn't think of reading the same book twice. Once they know how it ends, the book is exhausted. Bad readers don't want proper description: they just want stock phrases which trigger stock responses. They are happier with a few words about a pirate ship or a penthouse or sexual encounter: they fill in the details from their own imaginations. They regard stylistic and literary effects as embellishments or distractions. 

It's a bit like music, says Lewis. The true aficionado cares about the arrangement, the performance, the placement of every note. The unmusical listener just wants a tune he can sing along with, dance to, or (most likely) completely ignore.

It follows that a good (high brow, serious, literary) book is one that allows for a good reading, or which is generally read in a good way. And a bad (low brow, pulp, popular) book is one which only allows for bad readings or is almost always read in bad ways. 

CS Lewis made this argument in a book called An Experiment in Criticism which he wrote primarily in order to annoy FR Leavis. It probably shouldn't be regarded as the last word on the matter. 

  

When I was a child, I could become completely absorbed in a book. The characters became real to me; and the places became real; and I became almost unaware of the world around me. I have sometimes returned to childhood favourites and been surprised at how slight they are; how little of what I remember is actually present in the text. AA Milne told me that Winnie-the-Pooh had a larder; but my mental-image of Pooh's larder isn't in the book. It's probably a combination of my Granny's larder and the one my Mum had before we redecorated the kitchen. Before fridges were ubiquitous, houses did often have walk-in cupboards to store food.

I keep being sent Facebook memes from groups with names like Book Lovers, Books Are Awesome and Awesome Librarians. These memes take it for granted that this is the whole point of reading. They perpetually tell me that they feel lost in books; that the places in the books are more real than the rooms they are reading them in and that the characters are more real than any of their friends. In extreme cases, they seem to say that engagement with real people or real places (as opposed to fictional ones) is weirdly deficient. Tellingly, there are groups called Book Addicts, Lost In Book Land and Books: An Escape. 

They rarely point out brilliant descriptive passages or point me to a pithy phrase or some telling dialogue. They often imply that close attention to the text is an affectation perpetrated by nefarious people called Critics or Teachers. Ha-ha, they say, there was once a teacher who told me that there was some reason that Thomas Hardy keeps on drawing our attention to red things. The poor booby didn't understand that the writer told us about Tess's red dress because that was the colour of the dress that Tess was wearing in the story. Ha-ha, they say, there was once a teacher who said that Moby Dick was a metaphor for the human race's struggle with the natural world and Ahab's personal conception of God. But the author had already told him he was a white whale! 

Dave Sim said that he was fascinated by comic books as a medium: the infinite creative ways in which words and pictures can be combined on a page. He contrasts his approach with that of Wendy Pini who (he asserts) read the Silver Surfer and the X-Men because she wanted the Silver Surfer and the X-Men to be her friends. She disliked Batman because she would not have liked to be a friend of his. When she became an artist, she created the elves and wolves that she would like to be friends with. Sim, being Sim, treats this as a gender issue: Wendy Pini's approach is characteristically female and therefore bad, and his approach is characteristically male and therefore good. But I think the distinction is a recognisable one. Sim's own masterpiece is a triumph of form over content: if you were to read Cerebus in order to find out what happens next, you would go insane. And there is no reason to read Wendy Pini's comics except in order to find out what happens to Cutter and Skywise. If you ever stop thinking of them as real people, with real problems, whose sorrows and joys you really care about, you would never pick up an issue of Elfquest again. Which indeed I haven't.   

On Lewis's terms, Sim's way of reading is good and Pini's is bad. So, by his logic, we would have to say that comics like X-Men and Silver Surfer, which invite bad readings, are bad (non-literary, low-brow) comics; and conversely, comics like A Contract With God or Maus are good (serious, literary, high-brow.) 

Which, very conveniently, is exactly what we would have said in any case. 

When the Books Are Awesome crowd sing the praises of reading, they are largely singing the praises of "bad" reading: and, indeed, they tend to advocate books of pure narrative and deprecate books of style and experimentation. When I regret or mourn the loss of my ability to perceive the Hundred Acre Wood as if it were an actual place, I am in fact saying that up to the age of eight, I was a "bad" reader: but when I began, precociously, to tackle War of the Worlds, a Study in Scarlet and Frankenstein, my reading was starting to become "good". The books I remember getting lost in were by any sensible standards very bad indeed. We aren't talking about Black Beauty or Alice in Wonderland. Think Blast Off At Woomera and South Seas Adventure and the "Great" Lensman Saga. Reading the final page of Galactic Patrol remains the most vivid literary experience of my entire life. 

"First Kinnison, the bullets whining, shrieking off the armour of his personal battleship and crashing through or smashing ringingly against whatever happened to be in the ever-changing line or ricochet. Then Helmuth, and as the fierce-driven metal slugs tore in their multitudes, through his armour and through and through his body, riddling his every vital organ, that was....THE END." 

It's the very definition of bad writing. 

I don't think that Lewis's distinction between good and bad books is necessarily a moral one; or indeed that he thought that everyone ought to read only "good" books. One of his quarrels with Leavis is that Leavis thought that literature was morally and psychologically improving, and didn't allow much room for simply enjoying books. Lewis liked to tell the the story of the Serious Student who was very offended that he, Lewis, had said in a lecture that Chaucer put fart jokes into the Canterbury Tales in order to make people laugh. 

There are plenty of people who would rather look at old buildings and old paintings without understanding them: their enjoyment of the pretty ladies with funny hats and the naked babies with wings would be spoiled if they knew which Biblical characters or allegorical figures they were meant to represent. Fair enough, says Lewis: they have their reward. If you want to sit dreaming in your chair, taking the words "It was a dark and stormy night..." as a cue to create a vivid daydream of a thunderstorm out of your own imagination, no-one in the world is going to tell you that you shouldn't.

Perhaps, rather than "good" and "bad" we could try saying "serious" and "playful". When I was in Miss Beale's class I could read a very bad boy's book about moon rockets and honestly feel as if it was me who had flown to the moon. But equally, I could spend a whole day building a moon rocket out of Lego and creating the same journey in my head, with the same vividness. The book and the toy were points of departure; but they were not the core of the experience. I didn't even go as far as Lego most of the time: old cardboard tubes and cooking foil did the job just fine. Bad reading is, in that sense, a ludic activity: reading and playing require you to flex the same imaginative muscles. 

I wonder if devotees of the Books Are Awesome school of criticism are likely to be, or to have been, Dungeons & Dragons players? And do those of us who no longer Get Lost In Books also find it difficult to get back to RPGs? A good D&D game is very like a "bad" book, The places and the characters seen real; but they exist only in the imaginations of the players; with no pesky text to mediate the experience. Can a person who enjoys Middlemarch ever really enjoy Dungeons & Dragons? Can a person who plays Dungeons & Dragons ever really see the point of Middlemarch? Is it a coincidence that college RPG clubs recruited more from the Science and Computer departments than from English Literature and Creative Writing?

But there is a catch. Very many of us study low brow literature extremely closely. We watch old TV shows and old comic books over and over again: we pay close attention to the actual words, the actual pictures, and what actually appears on the screen. We would notice and indeed write a jolly stiff letter to the BBC if a single line were changed. People with discerning and informed musical taste do, as a matter of fact, sometimes listen to show-tunes, boy-bands and bubble-gum pop music with critical appreciation.

So are we engaged in a perverse activity -- reading "bad" books in a "good" way? Or do we have to say that if even one person can do a "good" reading of the Amazing Spider-Man or Conan the Barbarian -- nay, of Rentaghost or Fifty Shades of Grey -- then these must, after all, be good texts? Or should we just retreat into subjectivism and say that HP Lovecraft became English Literature on the day Penguin put him in their "classics" range in the same way that Duchamps' loo became art when he put it in the Tate Gallery? 

It is certainly true that many fans engage in "bad" readings -- in the sense of pretending that Harry Potter is their best friend or imagining themselves on the bridge of the star ship Enterprise and generally looking through the text and imagining lots of things that aren't there. That could almost stand as a definition of "fan". But it is also true that "fans" engage with texts in subtle, sophisticated and creative ways. They write fan-fic, create role-playing games, make models and reproduce character's costumes in great detail. They write probable outlines of the careers of fictional characters and calculate the date of Peter Parker's birthday from internal evidence. "Sherlockians" (the amateur scholars who pretend that the Sherlock Holmes stories are historical documents) are arguably "using" Conan Doyle's texts rather than "receiving" them; but they are also doing something interesting and clever and fun. It may be "bad" but it isn't bad.

So maybe the field isn't divided into Good Books and Bad Books. Maybe there are good Bad books and bad Good books. Maybe we can distinguish between Good good-bad books and Bad good-bad books. Maybe there are even Bad bad-good books, and good Bad bad-good books. Little fleas have lessor fleas, and so ad infinitum.

When Germain Greer said that The Thorn Birds was the best bad book she had ever read, she meant, I think, only that its literary ambitions were not high -- it's a melodramatic love story -- but that it achieves its modest ambitions to the highest possible degree. Umberto Eco's judgement of the Count of Monte Cristo is more nuanced. It is, he says, very badly written; but if it were well written, it would not be such a good adventure story, and since it is the best adventure story ever written, it follows that it must be very well written indeed, The academic who told C.S Lewis that The Prisoner of Zenda was the best bad book he had ever read was (I think) using "Bad-Book" as a label for a particular genre and saying that Anthony Hope wrote that genre superlatively well. If someone said that Cyrano de Bergerac was the funniest tragedy ever written or that Twelfth Night was the saddest comedy, you would understand what was being said. 

It is interesting, by the way, that Umberto Eco and Lewis's friend both treat swashbucklers as their example of good good bad books. Are adventure stories, I wonder, a special case?

I would happily defend Jack Kirby and Steve Gerber and even Stan Lee as creative geniuses. Anyone not hopelessly mired in ideology and snobbery can see that Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim are good writers and even Good Writers. No-one on earth would place Bill Mantlo in the same league. It would be a category mistake. He's corny and derivative and in the nicest possible way, a hack. Michael Golden is a decent draftsman, but he's no Kirby and he's unfortunately badly served by his inkers and by 1970s four-colour reproduction. So, when I typed that Micronauts was the best bad comic I have ever read, I was really only thinking that I had a great deal of affection for it, but couldn't really defend it as a work of art.

In CS Lewis's terms, Micronauts is a "bad" comic. What I carry in my head is not the words and the pictures. What I carry in head is my first reading of it. My memories of my first reading of it. My memories of what was undoubtedly a bad, non literary reading. Not necessarily the words and pictures I found in the back of Star Wars weekly. The story and images I built in my own head.

In some moods I could wish that my life had fallen our differently. I wish I could tell you that if you drilled down to the core of my being you would find Anna Karenina or On The Road. But you wouldn't. What you would find would be Micronauts #11.

Maybe not that specific comic. But that mythology; those myths. Third-hand, discarded myths. Myths that were based on a series of children's play-things. Myths that grew out of a father's observation of a child playing with action figures. A game. A day-dream. 

Bill Mantlo is derivative; the fill-in king. But Bill Mantlo is transmitting Jack Kirby and Stan Lee; and Kirby and Lee were transmitting their own European Jewish cultural traditions on the one hand and a kind of obsolescent Great Tradition on the other. When you cut through all the bullshit, Stan Lee admits that he stole his ideas from Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson and William Shakespeare and the Christian Bible. 

Bad readings of good books. A child playing with action figures. Toys as text. 

Why do I waste my headspace talking about these comics? Because these comics are not what I am talking about. Have you not been paying attention?

I have a bunch of my old Superman comic books. It's pleasurable to flip through them once in a while. But... if I ever read the stuff and say, "This is so good!" Please. Shoot me.

     Dave Sim

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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