Nietzsche in the Nursery

Abstract

The concluding chapter addresses ways in which the novel as genre has provoked and stimulated cognate activities outside its normative parameters as literary genre. These are registered most recently in the exorbitant rise of the “graphic novel.” This chapter goes back more than half a century to an earlier graphic format, the comic book, particularly the transformational treatment of novels in the Classics Illustrated publishing series from 1941 into the 1960s. The focus is on debates about mass culture in the Cold War setting of congressional committee investigations of juvenile delinquency and the comic book craze. A conspicuous feature of cultural preoccupations was with the status of the classic, on the one hand (epitomized in the Great Books publishing enterprise), and lowbrow dissemination of existing “classics” in comic book format. A full-scale assault on comics by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham was instrumental in chastening the industry into self-censorship. Ironically, the pedagogic claims behind Classics Illustrated were highlighted as a threat to the supposedly innocent “mind of the child,” revealing an abiding split between the cultural eminence accorded the classic and the aptitude of the target audience. The audience as consumer had been the commercial engine behind the rise of the novel, but the specter of the innocent child now conflated cultural symbolism with political agendas. We’ve inherited the trauma of that moment in the form of “political correctness” and “cancel culture,” with old (and new) novels continuing to be singled out as affronts to public decency, malignant records of bygone traumas, or obstreperous reminders of an imaginative fertility in the human imagination that won’t go away.