Can a Novel Contain a Comic? Graphic Nerd Ecology in Contemporary US Fiction

Abstract

Christopher Pizzino’s essay asks how print novels deal with comics given the latter’s persistently low status, which still prompts readers and critics to ask whether the graphic novel, so-called, can achieve the substantiality of print fiction. Ignoring usual questions of adaptation (the same narrative/content in different media), Pizzino investigates how the novel, as modern genre and print medium, “reads” or “sees” a medium unlike, and less legitimate than, itself. Discussing three examples—Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—he identifies a spectrum of ways for the novel to approach questions of medium specificity and cultural status that cluster around comics. What this spectrum reveals, surprisingly, is that novelists with strong personal and vocational commitments to comics, such as Chabon, can still approach the medium with condescension in their role as novelists. Contemporary US fiction now possesses legitimacy as, in the Lukascian sense, a formal property—of which it can only divest itself through radical labor of the kind Diaz’s novel exemplifies.