CFG: Louis Riel Pt 1
Thanks to Gerhard for getting these to me, and thanks to Dave for letting me post them. This is the three part series "Louis Riel". The only change I made to the formating for the html is to put it in one column instead of two. If you would like to see the original word document, here is is as a MS Word doc.
Good
Ol’ Chester Brown
Dear
Chet:
Well
CONGRATULATIONS! Truly and
sincerely. In football, they call it
“the march downfield,” when the quarterback just takes command and play after
play gets the yardage he needs, in the air, on the ground, and finally puts it
in the end zone. You said “about ten
issues,” and here you are. TOUCHDOWN!
Again, congratulations from Canada’s other graphic novelist (Seth’s more of a
graphic novel hobbyist, wouldn’t you say? I mean, not to him, but wouldn’t you say?).
As soon as my copy comes back from the lab with an all-clear SARS-wise,
I can’t wait to read it. Just
kidding. Great finish.
Re:
As The Joe Turns: Not surprising on all counts, I guess. Why don’t you give him my number,
instead. You would have to be pretty darned
depressed to want Dave Sim to cheer you up.
Considering that it was at least partly my fault that he ended up with a
girlfriend in the first place (reading between the lines, the “next one” turned
out to be the complicated little bundle I predicted she would be, a Kris-like
Hurdle-Making Machine, perhaps?), he’s not apt to want to hear what comes
next. She beat him cold, I’m afraid, so
he now he lacks the “challenge” cachet that he had when New Zealand (I believe
it was) didn’t “work” on him. They’ll
be betting that he’s whupped and will happily toe the line and marry the next
middle-aged plain jane that comes along.
I doubt she’ll be along for another year or so. The sooner he can outright reject a couple
of them, the sooner he’ll be back in the pilot seat (or, at least, falling out
of the plane with a parachute for a
change).
Also
no surprise that he remembers nothing about his Cerebus appearance. He was
running on stun the last couple of times we saw him. (must…remember…to make…conversation…mustn’t…let…Dave…think…I’m…becoming…a…boyfriend).
Anyway,
on to bigger and better things: I think
we should start the “Dialogue: Louis Riel” since you’re actually done. Redrawing and doing a dialogue has to be as
easy as farting and chewing gum at the same time—as opposed to actually working
on yer book. What I thought we should
do is I will do my part in typeset form and you can hand-letter your part. No better way to get the authentic Chester
Brown voice. Same two-column format as
the From Hell dialogue, so you can measure it and letter to fit the space. Same deal as I had with Alan—unlimited space
for your answers. I’d prefer that you
go “long”—it’s just an extra signature (or two) of newsprint which is minimal
cost compared to the entertainment value of a thorough-going discussion. So lose your Pravda Radio (CBC) sound byte
mindset and answer at l e n g t h.
Chet:
Hey
good news about Joe. That went a lot
faster than I expected. He’s back on
the bench and should be ready to pinch-hit for somebody some time in the next
while if he’s inclined to. She did a
strip about how callous his treatment of her was? He beat her cold. Nice recovery, Joseph.
Okay,
I’ve decided to input your stuff, the alternating type and lettering just isn’t
going to work. So here’s what it will
look like. If you have any problem with
the punctuation and stuff (like my taking your point form list and making it
into a series separated by semi-colons), just let me know how you want it
fixed.
Likewise
anything that you want added in, as we go along, just write it in by hand and
I’ll insert it as directed.
Tell
Chris that I have nothing for the back cover of 293 which is going to the
printer sometime in the next three weeks.
If he can get a back cover ad on disk to Preney by then, that would be
great. I’d suggest All Riel—the book,
the back issues, and some sort of special deal for Cerebus fans (this last one optional)—or all Chester—all of your
books. 293 is the last installment of
“Why Canada Slept,” 294 is Aardvark Comment and 295-297 should be the Riel
dialogue so if he hurries he gets five back covers, if he dawdles he gets
four. We’ll just run the 293 cover
without type on the back if we have to.
Oh, and the dialogue is called ‘Getting Riel’ if I forgot to mention it.
Getting
Riel
Chester Brown discusses his
graphic novel,
Louis Riel
Part
One
Two
notable instances of my being as wrong as one person can be: when I first heard about your doing a book
on Louis Riel, I thought, as I told you, “Chet’s nuts. No one outside of Canada is going to be interested in reading
about Riel.” And when I saw it, I
thought, “Chet’s nuts. No one is going to buy a comic book that’s an inch
shorter and half an inch narrower than a real comic book. And what’s with the
light card stock covers?” We can get to
your decision to do a book on Louis Riel in a minute. First, what was the evolution of the format? Where did you get the idea for it? What were you picturing and did it turn out
the way you wanted it to?
Regarding those two notable instances where
you think that you were as wrong as one person can be? You can go back to
thinking that you’re right all the time—not only were there very few people
outside Canada interested in reading a comic book about Louis Riel, but the
book didn’t do that well inside Canada
either. Maybe the graphic novel will do
better—one can always hope.
As to the paper stock: I had to fight
Chris [Oliveros, Drawn & Quarterly
publisher] on this. I wanted the
book to be as inexpensive as possible which meant using a cheap grade of
paper. Chris hates the way newsprint
yellows so quickly, and he kept trying to convince me that there were nice
cheap paper-stocks that were better than newsprint. We’d been experimenting with various kinds of cheap non-newsprint
papers in Underwater and none of them
looked good to me. Some of them were
too transparent, some didn’t take the ink well, and they all looked harshly
over-white. I like the “warmth” of
newsprint. Sure it gets yellow, but that
just adds to that warm look. I ended up
insisting that we use newsprint and LR was—for a Drawn & Quarterly
title—relatively inexpensive. The last Peepshow was a dollar more than the LR cover price and the last Palookaville was two dollars more. Five to seven bucks for something that’s
only 24 pages seems kinda high to me.
The cover stock: I wanted a “warm” look
again. I prefer that yellow matte
card-stock to the slick, white, ugly stuff that you use for the covers of Cerebus.
The page size: I read a
lot of books and their page sizes are almost always smaller than those of comic
books. Comics just look kinda big and
awkward to me now. I had also hoped
that using the smaller page sizes would bring down the price even more, but
that turned out not to be the case.
The margin size: When I began using those odd-shaped panels in Yummy Fur 20 (“Showing Helder”) [reprinted in the collection, The Little
Man), I found I liked the look of having a lot of empty, open space on the
page, so when I went back to more conventional panel layouts I decided to leave
wide margins around the panels.
I didn’t sit down trying to think up a
distinctive format—each choice was made separately. I’m happy with how all the elements came together. If I do say so myself, I think they’re
pretty good-looking comic books for the most part.
I agree. I thought you were
shooting for a Victorian “Penny Dreadful” quality, missing it on the first
cover (in my opinion) by trying to avoid genuine Victorian typography of the
sort that Chris Ware used on Acme
Novelty Library since you insist on
hand-lettering everything. I thought,
come number two, he’ll either have to cave in and use Victorian type or abandon
the Victorian approach altogether. Wrong
again. The cover compositions and
hand-lettered typography on the remaining nine issues are very Victorian. A neat trick to pull off on short notice and
with the few elements that you had to work with. Number nine especially, I
thought was one of the best comic-book covers ever, with the shades of gray and
the logo in a golden yellow.
And I’m right with you on the “warmth” of newsprint. We use a “white” newsprint on Cerebus but there
are a lot of times I think regular newsprint would be an improvement. Wrightson’s “Black Cat” adaptation was done
on newsprint that practically (as Bill Cosby put it in one of his early
routines) had “hunks of wood floating around on there.” Even aged twenty years, it still looks a
hundred times better than the laminated stock most comic books are printed
on. I hate having to tilt the page to
read it because an overhead light is bouncing off the page!
I think Dan Clowes came up with a brilliant idea in “scanning” his
colours off of old newspaper pages and old comic book pages. The computer just matches colours, so you
get the exact limited palette that they were using in the old Ben Day dot
system plus the warmth of the aged newsprint colour. Looks just like the real article even on slick, white, ugly stock
like we use for our covers!
I want to get back to the decision-making you went through in developing
the look of the book, but first I also want to deal with the actual
content. If it’s okay with you, we’ll
just skip back and forth between the two sides. So:
When did you first become aware of the Riel
Legend? I ask this, because I suspect
that, growing up in French/Roman Catholic Québec, you might’ve had a greater
awareness of Riel than I did growing up in English/Protestant Ontario. If I’m way off base with that, I’d still
like to have a rough idea of what your mental picture of Riel and his Rebellion
(or “rebellion”) was before you decided to actually tackle the story
yourself.
Growing
up in Québec did not give me an
advantage in the “acquiring-knowledge-about-Riel” department. Prior to 1995—which was when I read Maggie
Siggins’ biography of the man—I knew the following about Louis Riel: he was a French Métis; he led a rebellion in
Winnipeg in the nineteenth century; he was somehow responsible for someone’s
execution—and there was a big fuss about that; and he himself was hanged. And that’s everything that I would have been
able to remember on that subject from my grade eight history class. And when I say everything, I mean absolutely
everything. I could not have come up with even one more detail—not a year,
not a place-name. Nothing! Maybe francophones in Québec learned more
about Riel, but I grew up in an English bubble. I don’t remember anyone ever talking about Riel outside of a
history classroom. He must have been
mentioned in the media, but I wasn’t paying attention. I certainly didn’t watch that CBC-TV movie
about Riel that aired in the late 70s.
I had no interest. Now, I’ve got
it on video. One of the few videos that
I own.
Now all you need is a TV and a VCR. In defense of my own thesis, that puts you
way ahead of me, Chet. In Ontario, we
were taught what really amounted to the Hudson’s Bay Company History of
Canada. It was taken as a given that
the HBC was a sort of interchangeable entity with the Canadian government and
the British Parliament. As far as I was
taught, Champlain and Cartier discovered Quebec but that was it until the HBC
just sort of landed in Hudson’s Bay and happily mapped out and built the whole
country without so much as having to ask someone to move their teepee. The first I knew of Louis Riel was when I
was in my last year of school and John Balge and I were doing CANAR and there
was this Socialist/Communist print shop collective in town called Dumont Press Graphics where we got the
negatives—and later the typesetting—done at the cheapest prices around. John was an ardent Trotskyite back in those
days so that was his “in” with them. I
was the dopey kid with John who was always bringing in these Conan pictures to
get stats made of. Anyway, they had
this Buffalo Bill looking guy on their logo who I found out by flipping through
as little of their on-site literature as I could manage was Gabriel Dumont and
only later that he was connected with Louis Riel. I just assumed from the context that Dumont and Riel were Wild
West Communists of some kind. I’m not
sure that anything I’ve read since then has persuaded me otherwise. Just
kidding. So, 1995. Which book were you working on at the time
and when did Louis Riel get put into the “on-deck” circle? You have the on-going adaptations of the
Gospels, The Playboy and I Never
Liked You, both of which you finished and
your problem child, Underwater, which
we can talk about as little or as much as you like.
Before
we deal with 1995, Riel: A Life of
Revolution by Maggie Siggins was published in hardcover in 1994. I saw it in a bookstore and flipped through
it, thinking something like, “This guy’s supposed to have been a significant
figure in our history—I really should know something about him.” Then I looked at the price and thought
something like, “I can wait for the paperback.”
Also in 1994, the first two issues of Underwater were released. I don’t think I want to talk too much about
that series. I suspect that discussing its problems too much in print might
kill any desire I have to return to it in the future. Let’s just say that I bit off more than I could chew. Not that I
realized that in 1994.
In 1995, issues 3 and 4 of Underwater came out. Number 4 contained “My Mom Was a
Schizophrenic”. I really enjoyed the
process of creating that strip. I’d
read a lot of books about “mental illness” and had condensed the
anti-psychiatry argument into a six-page strip. It was so much fun, that I wanted to do something like that
again—do a lot of research on a subject and cram it all into a strip. I thought that it would be a good idea to
look for a biographical or historical subject.
A life-story or a series of
historical events would provide me with the kind of narrative structure that
the schizophrenia strip had lacked.
And then the Siggins book was released in
paperback in the fall of ’95. I read
the book and thought, “That’s a good dramatic story—it’d make a good strip. Maybe I’ll do that when I finish Underwater. If I can finish Underwater.” By that point I realized that I was in trouble with
the series. But, I continued to work on
it for another two years. In the fall
of ’97, I took a break to work on the Little
Man book. While I was doing that,
my dad died. I finished The Little Man in February of ’98 and
sat down to begin Underwater #12, but
I couldn’t get started on it. After a
few days of doing nothing, I decided:
I’ll set this project aside until I solve its problems—if I go further
with it now, I’ll just be wasting my time.
My father’s death had me thinking that I did not want to be wasting my
time. I called up Chris Oliveros and asked him what he thought of the idea of
me doing a comic-strip biography about Louis Riel. He didn’t put up any resistance, so I got to work on it.
Interesting. That was sort of
like my first experience with Oscar Wilde.
I saw a biography in a bookstore and thought, I bet that would be
interesting. The only thing I knew
about him was that he had written Picture
of Dorian Gray which I had seen adapted
as a TV-movie and I was interested in
where the idea had come from. My instincts were pretty good. The fact that Wilde wrote Picture of
Dorian Gray before he met Lord
Alfred Douglas is, to me, one of the most amazing instances of life
actually imitating art (second spot
would be Dashiell Hammett creating Bridgette O’Shaughnessy, the pathological
liar in The Maltese Falcon, before he
met Lillian Hellman). But, I thought, I
can’t buy a biography of Oscar Wilde: the cashier will think I’m gay. I
got over it and went back a couple of weeks later to try to find it, but it was
gone. It wasn’t until the Richard
Ellman biography came out that I got another chance. Back in those days when I still had time to read books, it was
one of my major self-indulgences to buy hardcovers and not have to wait for the
paperback. “The cashier is really
going to think I’m gay, buying the
hardcover.” With all the reading that I
did—once I decided that I was going to make Oscar a character in Cerebus—I have to say that the Ellman biography is
still the best. Since you’ve read beaucoup
de Riel books by now, I’m curious as to
whether that was the case for you, as well:
is the Siggins book the best—or did you find someone better as you went
along? And how would you rate the Riel biographers you’ve read?
Of the Riel-related books that I ploughed
through, the one that would probably be the best for a general reader is Prairie Fire: the 1885 North-West Rebellion by
Bob Beal and Rod Macleod. It’s a good,
dramatic telling of the story. But it’s
not specifically about Riel—he’s one of many characters in it, not the central
one.
Yeah, if you’re looking for a book that is
specifically about Riel, the best biography is the Siggins one.
Some people prefer Joseph Howard’s Strange Empire: The Story of Louis Riel, but
I found Howard’s writing-style to be too self-consciously “literary” for my
taste. I like writers who are more
direct. If this had been the first book
about Riel that I’d picked up, I doubt I’d have made it past the first chapter.
Louis
Riel by George Stanley (the designer of the Canadian flag) and The
Life of Louis Riel are a bit on the colourless side. They were still useful to me—especially the
Charlebois book which has photographs and drawings on almost every page.
Thomas Flanagan’s Louis “David” Riel: “Prophet of the New World” is biographical in
structure, but it’s really a study of the development of Riel’s religious
thinking. I enjoyed it, particularly
because Flanagan accepts Thomas Szasz’s contention that “mental illnesses”
aren’t illnesses.
I also enjoyed Flanagan’s second Riel
book, Riel and the Rebellion: 1885
Reconsidered. While Siggins sees
Riel as a hero and the Métis’ cause as just, Flanagan thinks the Rebellion was
a mistake and that Riel was more concerned with satisfying the needs of his ego
than with doing what would have been best for his followers.
I tend to find conspiracy books fun, and 1885: Métis Rebellion or Government
Conspiracy by Don McLean wasn’t an exception.
Canada
and the Métis, 1869-1885 by Douglas Sprague mostly focuses on the legal
mechanisms that Sprague claims were used to oppress the Métis. It sounds dull, but it also has some conspiracy-theory
stuff, and Sprague’s sarcasm and barely-contained anger enliven the read.
Can you
do a quick Reader’s Digest
distillation of what Don McLean thought was the government conspiracy behind
the Rebellion?
The Canadian Pacific Railway was close to
being bankrupt. Prime Minister John A.
Macdonald wanted to keep the company alive, but the Canadian government had
already given it lots of money and didn’t want to shell out any more. Then the Métis rebelled against the
government, and the CPR was used to transport the Canadian troops who put down
the Rebellion. Parliament suddenly saw
the military usefulness of the trains and gave the Railway all the financial
support it wanted.
McLean speculates that Macdonald foresaw
what would happen if the Métis rebelled and deliberately provoked them into
doing so.
I know you’re a conspiracy enthusiast.
Did this one strike you as likely, far-fetched or something in between?
Something in between. As I wrote in the notes section of Louis Riel 6, (pages 258 and 259 in the
book), “I honestly don’t have a strong opinion on the matter one way or the
other.”
I just re-read the first three issues—a little more closely this time
since we’re doing this dialogue—and the centrality of the “legal mechanisms”
became more apparent to me, right off the top.
Obviously, the Rebellion ultimately comes down to who’s right and who’s
wrong. It seems to me that the seminal
point of that question is; did the British crown have the right in the 17th
century to designate vast tracts of North America as the sole possession of the
Hudson’s Bay Company or were those lands the possession of the Indian tribes
that inhabited them? Possession is
nine-tenths of the law, we are assured, but there is also a legal principle
called “easement” which basically states, if you knowingly let someone cut across your lawn for years
and years you can’t one day decide to charge them with trespassing.
I’ve never heard of easement before (and
I don’t like the concept so far) but I’m guessing that, in the example you
give, easement would allow the trespasser who cut across the lawn to continue
to do so, and that it would not give
the trespasser the deed to the whole property and home. Provided my guess is right, it would seem to
me that the easement argument would have allowed the Hudson’s Bay Company to
claim as theirs whatever trading posts and forts they’d set up and which the
local Indians hadn’t objected to, and it would not justify an HBC claim of sovereignty over all of Rupert’s Land.
But the phrase “objected to” is kind of
stacking the deck, isn’t it? You’re implying—or
maybe I’m just inferring here—that the land belonged to the Indians. There was perhaps just as valid a case to be
made for the HBC having not “objected to” the Métis farming on HBC land up to
the time of the Rebellion. The fact
that it was Métis who were the complainants and not full-blooded Indians would
imply, to me, that their claim would’ve been preempted by the earliest legal
action taken by the British Crown.
Full-blooded Indians could maybe claim that they had “been there first,”
but, to have (pardon my political incorrectness) half-breeds as the
disputants—well, there couldn’t have been any half-breeds before the white
people got here, right?
If
I’ve been implying it up to this point, then let me be clear: The land belonged
to the Indians before the HBC arrived on the scene and that didn’t change just
because Charles II said so in 1680.
But I think that getting into questions
of who has first right to the land by blood-line is getting away from the heart
of the 1869 dispute. There were white
settlers on the Red River who also objected to the sale of Rupert’s Land to
Canada—particularly the Irish Fenians in the community, who didn’t like Canada’s
connection to Britain.
The settlement had been run by a council
of HBC appointees. One of the reasons
the HBC was anxious to sell its rights to Canada was that, as the settlement
grew, the problems related to governance got more complicated. The HBC didn’t want that headache any more—it
just wanted to trade and make money. So
it sold the mess to the Canadian government, which (being in the governance
business) wanted the headache. The
question wasn’t so much one of land-ownership, as it was one of sovereignty—who
rules over us. No one in the settlement
(not even the HBC employees who lived there) knew that the HBC was selling
Rupert’s Land to Canada. They only found
out about it after the fact by reading the newspapers from out east. It doesn’t seem strange to me that some of
the inhabitants of the settlement were unhappy that they hadn’t had a say in
the matter.
There were
concerns over land-ownership, too.
If my memory of the situation is correct, it went something like this:
When the HBC started the settlement in 1812, it purchased a strip of land from
some local Indians. A record of
land-ownership was kept by the HBC for that original strip of land. But, as the settlement grew beyond its
original borders, people squatted on unoccupied land. By 1869, only the settlers living within the original settlement
boundaries had deeds that were registered with the HBC. When the HBC sold Rupert’s Land to Canada,
some of the-settlers-who-didn’t-have-deeds-registered-with-the-HBC were concerned
that they were going to lose their farms.
Hence the nervousness over the appearance of surveyors on pages 4 to 7
of the first issue. (Pages 9 to 12 in the book).
The origin of the name of our country seems relevant here: by legend, one of the early explorers asked
one of the natives, basically, what do you call this place? To which the native replied, Kanata (the
land). You know—what sort of a moron
are you? This is the land and that over
there, all that wet stuff you can’t walk around on? That’s called water. You can idealize it if you want—and most people in this country
do—the noble savage who has no notion that the land can be owned by anyone, it
is there for everyone; First Nations
Marxism. But, if that’s true, what was
the purpose of having different tribes?
What was the purpose of those tribes going to war with each other—as
they frequently did.
Yeah,
there was clearly a concept of land-ownership, but tribal or communal land
ownership is different than a system of private land-ownership. I think we’re both in agreement that the
latter is superior to the former.
I think we are, yes. Sorry. I always forget that you’re not a Marxist. So, the tribal or communal land may be
there for everyone, but, after a given Indian War, this land is Iroquois land,
because the Iroquois are the baddest bad asses in this here part of the kanata,
the non-wet stuff you can walk around on.
So, at that point the question, to me,
becomes can you hold the land that you claim? Whether it’s the British government, the Hudson’s Bay Company,
the government of Canada (at that time just a branch office of the British
crown) or WalMart legal and/or military muscle determine what you own and what
you control. It’s one of the reasons
that I warn small pressers not to take their works to DC or Marvel. You may think it’s yours. You may be right, legally. But you have to beat them in court to prove
it and legal might makes legal right and an individual has about as much chance
of beating a multinational corporation in court as the Iraqi Republican Army
had of beating the United States Army, Air Force and Marines. Any thoughts on this?
If
you’re asking if I believe that might makes right: no, I do not. Feel free to dig deeper here—I’m just not
sure where you’re coming from.
Let me try the question this way: is it that you believe might doesn’t make right, or that might shouldn’t make right?
Both. If I steal your property, I’m doing
something wrong, even if I’m powerful enough to get away with it. You’re not seriously arguing otherwise, are
you?
Oh, definitely. If I find myself in your
fashionable King Street Toronto condo, see my stolen property sitting in plain
sight, and I say to you, “Say, Chet.
That’s not yours, that’s mine,” take my property back, and have to, you
know, muscle you out of the way so I can leave with it, am I stealing? And if
you, in all sincerity, honestly believe it to be yours—you’ve had it for so
long that you’ve actually forgotten how you came to be in possession of it or
the terms under which it came to be in your possession are so indistinct as to,
in your mind, make a better case in
your mind for your owning it—and you call the police and tell them that I’ll be
heading down Queen Street West to the Sheraton and I have property stolen from
you in my possession, aren’t you using “might,”—albeit one step removed—by
using the police to intercept me, detain me and remove my property from my own
possession?
And isn’t that really the situation in the Red River settlement? The nervousness over the appearance of the
surveyors wasn’t just about whether or not people were going to lose “their”
farms, but whether those farms were “theirs” in any legal sense to begin
with. You may not be fond of
“easement,” but for those settlers outside the “strip of land”, those without
deeds to Rupert’s Land property, “easement” is going to be a substantial part
of their legal defense. It’s really the
only basis on which “squatting” becomes legal: you have to object and take
action against the squatters or answer to some authority as to why you chose
not to for two hundred years.
Dave, do you believe that everyone has a
right to life, liberty, and their property? (I prefer the old French formula
for the fundamental rights—“life, liberty and property” to Jefferson’s “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”).
You’re evading my point. Let me
“cut to the chase” and see what you think. Similar to your own enthusiasm for
conspiracy theories, I’m always looking
for the “finger of God” in stories these days. What I’ve been edging around is to try and get you to admit that
the Red River settlement was a pretty messy bundle of over-lapping claims. There’s the Indian claim, the Métis claim,
the British crown claim, the Canadian government claim and the Hudson’s Bay
Company claim. Being human, we can just throw up our hands and say, It’s too
complicated. Which, in my view, is a
luxury that God doesn’t have. He has to
sort out who is going to prevail and I believe He sorts these things out in His
own idiosyncratically scrupulously even-handed
fashion. Once Riel was universally accepted as the Métis leader—both for
the fact that he spoke English and because he was generally well thought of by
the community—that allowed God to personalize and individualize the conflict.
Everyone agreed that Riel represents the Métis? asks God. The “ayes”
have it. Good.
Then God—realizing that the mess was going
to get a good deal messier in short order—motivated John Schultz to react to
Riel the way that Riel was reacting to the Canadian government. That is, Hey, we’re getting steamrolled
here! We have to make a stand. When John Schultz gets the band of forty-five
Canadian loyalists together inside his home, it become the Red River settlement
in microcosm. Forty-five guys
surrounded by three hundred Métis, metaphorically the same situation that will
soon be confronting the Métis facing a much larger force of Canadian soldiers.
Schultz and his men realize they’re outnumbered and surrounded and, as
Riel has done with Ottawa, they send out a list of demands. What does Riel do? He tears up the list of demands and tells them they will be
spared if they surrender and he gives them fifteen minutes to decide before the
Métis start firing.
The die is cast—Riel has made
the decision himself as to how he and the Métis should be (and, consequently,
will be) treated by Ottawa. What do you
think so far?
I’m really not a conspiracy enthusiast—I’m not always thinking of the possible
conspiracy angle in stories in the way that you’re looking for the “finger of
God” angle. If anything, I’m always
looking for the property rights angle—that’s been my hobby-horse for the last
four years or so.
Anyway—the finger of God—as I think I’ve
mentioned to you before, it seems more likely to me that there is a God than
that there isn’t one, and my mental-model-of-how-things-work assumes that there
is some kind of “higher power” and an after-life of some sort. But I haven’t come to any definite conclusions
about the nature of God, and that just-mentioned
mental-model-of-how-things-work is very vague
on matters that don’t deal with this “real” world that we find ourselves in
when we’re “awake”.
Believing that we have free will, I always
assume that God has a hands-off policy as far as our actions are concerned, so
I have an initial resistance to the idea of God “motivating” Schultz, though it
perhaps is possible in some way that we can have free-will and that God can work his will through us at the ame time. But, I notice that your scenario has Schultz
being motivated by God, while Riel, in your scenario, seems to act all on his
own.
Leaving aside the question of God’s role
in the story, your observation of a parallel between how Riel-and-the-Métis
treated the forty-five “Schulzites” and how Canada treated Riel-and-the-Métis
is clever and accurate. You’re
right—what Riel did, was later done to him.
There’s a similar (but probably more obvious) parallel between the Scott
and Riel executions. Again, what Riel
did, was later done to him.
The
idea that Schultz is motivated by God is pure guesswork on my part. The analogy between the Schultz-and-Riel and
(I agree with you) Scott-and-Riel situations jumped out at me and then I try to
track it forward and backward from there.
As I’ve told you before, I don’t pretend to understand the rules of how
spirit or Spirits behave, but I am intrigued by what I see as their
manifestations. I want to explore that
further, but for the moment, I’ve been a bad host, monopolizing our dialogue
with my own legalistic viewpoint. Given
that you’ve had a good four years to examine the property rights involved, this
would probably be a good place for you to lay out what you see as the “bottom
line” in the dispute over the Red River properties which are now called
Winnipeg.
I don’t know if I’ve examined anything—I’ve
read some books and have some opinions based on what’s in those books. Also, I want to note that I started working
on Riel over five years ago, not four, so when I began the series I had zero
interest in the story’s property rights issues.
The bottom-line issues are, did any of the
Métis benefit from the land-grant that was promised to them in the 1870
Manitoba Act (Louis Riel 4, p.3 &
LR 5, p.15—pp. 77 & 117 in the
book)? The two academics I’ve read on the subject who’ve actually dug through
the primary sources—Sprague and Flanagan—have views that are diametrically
opposed. I think that Flanagan’s a bit
closer to the truth. Probably very few
of the Red River Métis lost much in the way of land and most of the Métis who
were supposed to benefit from the land grant did so. (But not in the way that Riel wanted them to benefit—not in a way
that resulted in a strong Métis community by the Red River.) There was a lot of bureaucratic delay and
bungling and some fraud, which caused justifiable anger, but the picture
probably wasn’t as bleak as Sprague paints it.
Mind you, I didn’t read Flanagan’s views
on the matter until after I’d picked up the second edition of his Riel and the Rebellion in 2000, which
was after I’d drawn Louis Riel 4 (I
specify the second edition, because Flanagan wrote the first edition before
he’d examined the primary sources himself, so he’d originally relied on
Sprague’s research and conclusions.)
Now, that’s interesting. How bleak a view did Sprague take? And how diplomatic was Flanagan in “calling”
him on it?
I’ll let you be the judge:
“[T]he
merits of Sprague’s work are overridden by defects that make it imprudent for
researchers to rely on his conclusions without an independent check of primary
sources. In his eagerness to condemn
the governments of Canada and Manitoba and to vindicate the rights of the
Métis, Sprague rushes into interpretations that simply cannot be sustained.”
(Flanagan, Métis Lands in
Manitoba, p.8)
The following is from Flanagan’s
discussion of the land grants to the Métis:
“There may also have been some cases of fraud, theft, or impersonation,
as is alleged by land-claims advocates; but only a tiny handful of such cases
has been documented. Frustration over
inability to demonstrate actual cases of fraud has led Sprague into the
netherworld of conspiracy theory, arguing that thousands of Manitoba
land-transfer records must have been forged.”
(Riel and the Rebellion, pp.72, 73)
Sprague contends that
“hundreds” of the Métis squatters were forced off their land (Canada and the Métis, 1869-1885, p.133),
while Flanagan seems to think that none were.
Flanagan makes it clear that he’s talking about settlers who’d been
squatting before the Manitoba Act of 1870 went into effect, and Sprague is less
clear, so perhaps a significant number of Sprague’s hundreds were people who’d
started squatting after 1870.
I should point out that, just because I
think Flanagan’s likely to be more right on those two particular “bottom line”
property questions, that doesn’t mean that I think Sprague is necessarily wrong
about everything or that Flanagan is right about everything. They deal with lots of other things in their
books.
I’d say that was a pretty diplomatic way of saying that Sprague was
“off-base”. And somewhere between zero
and “hundreds” of Métis losing their claim—given the temper and momentum of the
times—makes the whole thing something of a tempest in a teapot.
I thought you were pretty good at depicting that temper and momentum. I
mean, there was a steamroller effect that was, inevitably going to come into
play. As you say in your notes, John A.
Macdonald wasn’t a complete villain in the piece. Once the pioneer, nation-building spirit takes hold and there are
immense sums of tax dollars at stake on a railroad that seems perpetually
half-finished and which has to reach British Columbia or the “National Dream”
is dust and ashes and once that spirit is coupled with political ambition…well,
there are going to be casualties. I thought it was interesting in your notes
when you pointed out that although there seemed to be the good will to assist
Canada’s First Nations to begin farming (as an example), what actually happened
“on the ground” was sort of “all will and little way”. They were given very inferior farming
materials, very few supplies and what they thought were guarantees of food
while they were waiting for their first crops to grow turned out to be no
guarantees at all.
And the world of nature wasn’t
cooperating either. Again, I see the
finger of God in this. The buffalo
begin retreating before the onslaught of civilization. Do you follow the buffalo west or do you
stay put and change the nature of your way of life? And the sad part for the Red River Métis was that they had changed their
way of life. They were farmers and had been for some time. But, I
maintain the debate was still going to come down to: whose land was it by law? Your
own observation earlier that the HBC had purchased a small strip of land from a
specific band of local Indians for the territory occupied by the original
settlement is probably—along with easement or a related legal basis—the
strongest claim that the land belonged to the Indians. How else could you buy a strip of that land
from them? It would imply that the land
outside of that strip belonged to the
Indians until they sold it to someone. With
that in mind, it becomes really complicated because the squatters aren’t
squatting on HBC land or part of Canada, they’re squatting on Indian
lands. Where would you contest
jurisdiction? Did the Indians have a
First Nations equivalent of a Court of Appeal that the Métis could have gone
to? And didn’t the Métis—by actively
negotiating with Canada—imply that Canada had sovereignty over them? It seems to me that, as you say, the issue
is one of “who is going to rule over us?”
I want to get back to what I see as the central dynamic of the story,
Riel’s own choices and how those choices may have been influenced, but this is
a forum about your work and your ideas, so I don’t want to give property rights
short shrift at all.
Am I being too legalistic here, doing what I accuse Liberals of doing
which is multiplying “on the other hand” complexities where they don’t exist to
obscure a basic “right versus wrong” issue?
I think it’ll be more fun if
you ask questions-that-Dave-Sim-thinks-are-interesting than if you ask
questions-that-Dave-Sim-thinks-might-be-interest- ing-to-Chester-Brown. And get as legalistic as you want to.
“Didn’t the Métis—by actively negotiating
with Canada—imply that Canada had sovereignty over them?”
Uh…no.
If I own something and someone else
wants it, and I negotiate with them to see what they’ll give me for it, that
doesn’t mean they already own it. If I
don’t like what they’re offering, I’m free to say so and walk away.
The Red River Settlers achieved self-rule in 1869 and they were free to
choose who they wanted to be sovereign over them. Admittedly, there weren’t many choices before them. There was Canada, and there was the U.S. The
third possible choice—remaining an autonomous mini-state—was probably never
seriously considered. (They undoubtedly
realized that they wouldn’t be allowed to
remain an autonomous mini-state—better to negotiate and get the best deal you
can than to have a choice forced on you.)
I think that Canada was chosen over the U.S., not because it already had
sovereignty, but because that was the genuine will of the people. More people in the Settlement had ties to
Canada and Britain than had ties to the U.S.
Sorry—you’re probably wanting to move
along. But, you did phrase it as a
question.
Actually,
that rather nicely takes us back to the finger of God. As I said, I think that God pretty much
satisfied Himself—by either “initiating,” “provoking” or “allowing to happen”
Riel finding himself in the situation of judging himself in microcosm—with what
the ultimate outcome of the Rebellion was going to be. It’s interesting to consider the myriad
alternatives. What if Riel had agreed
to negotiate with Schultz? What if Riel had, indeed, done anything besides what
he did? Tearing up the list of demands
and saying Schultz had fifteen minutes to surrender or they would start
shooting? If someone had pointed out to
him the analogy of his situation to that of Schultz, would he have behaved
differently?
And then you have the earlier situation with Scott which represented, to
me, what was going to happen stripped to its absolute bare essentials. “This guy here is going to kill this other
guy really brutally and then he’s going to get killed himself”. Real “eye-for-an-eye” stuff.
The choices that Riel makes regarding Scott, as you mentioned, seal his
fate as well. Scott is no threat to
Riel or to the settlement. He’s locked
up. But, then he starts swearing,
loudly, denouncing Riel and the Métis, non-stop. You devote four pages to it which indicates—and I think you were
right—that what happens here is central to the ultimate fate of Riel and the
rebellion.
[a
not-so-short detour: I remember talking with Seth at the Now & Then Books
anniversary party, enthusing about how Riel
was coming along and saying, you know,
this could be sold in huge quantities in schools, libraries, universities and
Seth saying to me in his characteristic dry-as-dust fashion, “Yeah, if everyone
can just keep their pants on, it could be a real breakout, mainstream
success.” And I laughed, because it was
such a Seth thing to say. His belief
that you’re this inherently contrary, inherently perverse being who will actively
undermine his own chance at success by exposing a character’s penis just for
the sake of it. And then I mentioned
the comment to you the next time you and I and Joe and Seth were at Sushi on
Bloor. And Seth was stricken! Absolutely stricken! He
slumped over, grabbing his forehead.
Seth! What? What is it,
man? And Seth said that everyone had
taken a vow of silence (practically) not to say a word to you and that, being
Chester Brown, now you would have to expose someone’s penis because someone had mentioned what a bad idea
it would be. And to me, this is
nonsense! And the handling of the
swearing scene, to me, exemplifies what nonsense that is. Eight
pages of swearing and vile racial epithets, louder and louder and worse and
worse. And how does Chet handle
it? X’s! You show him saying, “Imprisoned by a bunch of XXXXX XXXX XXXXX”(and
indicate in a footnote that “these Xes indicate racist comments and
profanity.”) which is fairly innocuous, followed by “I’m not scared of your
XXXXX XXX guards!” You sort of go
over the “PG” line with “They’re too busy XXXX XXXXXXX each other to bother
shooting me!” I mean, anyone can and will mentally fill in those particular
XX’s and I can picture any number of school librarians getting their noses out
of joint over something like that. But then, you retreat back across the line
to safety with “Riel, you XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.”
And that’s it for any recognizable word. Over four pages of mostly
XXXXXXX. Not even X@#$%&. Now, me. I would’ve gotten to that part and
thought, hm. What insults would he be
letting fly with? And I’d lean into it.
When Cerebus was trying to improve to please God, I’d letter “no swearing” over
a swear-word—indicating his own self-censorship—but most of the time, if it’s
called for, I’ll just use “fuck” or “shit” where I think it’s needed. Or even worse as far as most people, I
think, would be concerned in this day and age, I’ll use “faggy” or something
like that which is probably a closer analogy to the “racist comments” you edged
around. But it seems obvious to me that anyone who is being that careful is
hardly a born provocateur.
Dan Clowes’ interview in the Comics
Journal—the one where he said you were a
Republican—came out shortly after that episode in Sushi on Bloor and that was
when I developed my theory that the comic-book field can be divided into
Sethites—people who think Chester Brown is an inherently perverse, unreasoning
contrarian just for the sake of being contrary—and Simites—people who think
Chester Brown is, if not the most
sensible person we know, he is easily in the top three.
As Kris, your ex-girlfriend says in “Helder” (The Little Man, p. 62) “Chester doesn’t play games.
He’s the most honest and straightforward person I know.” (to which you,
of course, added the caption “Take this with a grain of salt”.) Definitely a
Simite. Okay, anything you want to
interject here—I’m particularly interested in the decision-making on the
swearing scene—in the midst of my digression before I circle back to
Riel-and-Scott and Riel-and-Schultz?
My original intention was to fully write
out Scott’s racist comments and profanity—not
hide them with Xs. I assumed that
he was relatively unintelligent, so I tried writing dumb insults for him to
taunt the Métis guards with. I wrote a
bunch, but they didn’t work—I had difficulty imagining the Métis guards getting
upset about them. So then I wrote
insults that I imagined would get me angry
if I was a Métis, but to get the insults up to a level where they had some
genuine “punch” required a certain amount of cleverness and most of them ended
up being kinda funny. At least to
me. Cleverness and a sense of humour
are attractive qualities—I was afraid that, if I gave Scott clever and funny
lines, he would “steal,” not just the scenes he was in, but the whole book, and
that everything after his execution would seem anti-climatic. “Who cares what happens to Louis Riel—he’s
not as roguishly charming as that witty, if somewhat politically incorrect,
Thomas Scott.” I’m sure that a really
good writer could have come up with dumb, un-funny insults that never-the-less
packed a hard enough punch to make the Métis reaction understandable, but I
couldn’t. The best solution to the
problem seemed to be to leave the insults up the reader’s imagination. And, of course, I was not unaware that
taking that course of action would make the book more commercially
acceptable. I would have made the less commercial choice if it had worked
better, but this was an instance where the correct creative choice seemed to
also be the more saleable one—at least given my limitations as a writer.
I
don’t know whether all that proves that I’m a contrarian or that I’m sensible.
Sensible,
I think. One of the problems is the
dislocation of time, sensibility and culture.
What would be offensive to a half-Indian, half-French individual in the
19th century in the hinterlands of North America would be very apt to seem so trifling to us today as to eliminate
sympathy for the Métis cause at a critical juncture in the story. On the one hand, it isn’t difficult to
picture the level of offensiveness, given that Scott was of an English (or,
even “worse”, Scots-Irish) background finding himself imprisoned by what he
would have seen as his social and racial inferiors. On the other hand, “sticks and stones may break my bones…”
Again, I see the finger of God in this, playing on what I would see as
overweening French and Indian pride (what a combination!). Again, giving Riel—as the incarnation of
that dual-pride—the chance to prove himself in the crucible of human
history. The French and the Indians
were well on their way to national martyrdom by this point as Canada’s Greatest
Historical Victims with the air of aggrieved superiority that victim-status
always implies. So, here on the cusp of
the second chapter of the National Dream, the great push westward, here God
gives the victims a chance to prove that they aren’t just aggrieved, but that
they are superior both as individuals and as nations to their white, English
oppressors. Here at Fort Garry, Riel is
given another chance to demonstrate godliness (for want of a better term). Having failed his test with Schultz and the
forty-five followers holed up in Schultz’s house (by ruling out any possibility
of negotiation and making the extermination of the smaller force his first and
only choice) God gives Riel the benefit of the doubt and gives him an even
smaller and unarmed opposition by having the remnant of Schultz’s force wander
right into his hands.
Now, what will the Indian/French leader do, what compassion will he
exhibit, what qualities of leadership will he embody?
And the answer, as far as I can see, is
none.
Granted, he does (or, as you indicate in your notes, a member of the
provisional government does) intervene to save Scott from a lynch-mob of Métis
guards, but Riel still falls prey…
(and I have to interrupt myself here to compliment you on the number of
panels you devote to Riel thinking: thinking so hard that he looks as if his
head might explode. He makes what are,
to me, a series of wrong decisions, but it’s not for any want of thinking it
through. He knew, I think, exactly how
important all of this was)
… to the loss of authority he can feel over-taking him (“Something has
to be done. The guards are losing
respect for you.”) and sharing in the wounded vanity of his followers instead
of rising above it. And he makes his
second fatal error of charging Scott with treason, as he, himself, will later
be charged with treason. And not only tries Scott, but court-martials him, thus implying a purely military, state-centered
concern and implying jurisdiction as well, just as Canada will claim
jurisdiction over Riel and try him in a purely military, state-centered context. Again, he has determined his own fate. Had he simply charged Scott with
manslaughter of the Métis “spy”—it was definitely a crime of passion,
completely unpremeditated, and the only actual crime that Scott could be
convicted of in a civilized court—then he might have expected a more lenient
interpretation of his own actions—fomenting public discord, as an example,
instead of treason against Canada.
And to top it all off, Scott doesn’t speak French so he has no idea that
he has just been sentenced to be shot to death the next day! Was any effort made to apprise Thomas Scott
of the proceedings? That is, did he
face a Stalinist-style “show trial” and execution or was there even a semblance
of justice in providing him with an adequate defense and an interpreter?
It certainly seems to me to be a prerequisite of leadership that you
have to endure any number of insults from your opposition. Just think of what God has had to put up
with from his adversary and the followers of his adversary over millennia and
always with the Power to eradicate them in an eye-blink.
As far as I can see, Scott was executed for really offending the Métis
with his insults. Else, why were all
his fellow veterans of Schultz’s short-lived rebellion given complete
amnesty? Shouldn’t they all have been
executed or shouldn’t they all have been let go?
Flipping through the Riel books
at hand, only two give detailed descriptions of the trial—Stanley’s and
Siggins’. They both agree on the
essentials. Scott was not present while
the witnesses were examined, and there was no one cross-examining on Scott’s
behalf. Riel was Scott’s translator,
summarizing the evidence in English when Scott was finally brought in.
“It
is not clear whether Scott asked to examine any of the witnesses or not;
[Joseph] Nolin’s memory on this point was defective and Nolin was the only
eye-witness to give any details about the trial.” [Stanley, p.113]
Scott’s trial wasn’t quite as bad as a
Stalin show-trial. I do think that
Scott might have been able to save himself if he’d been on-the-ball enough to
give a really moving speech about the right to dissent or if he’d thrown
himself on the mercy of the court and told them about his poor mother or
something—there wasn’t the remotest chance of such tactics working in the
show-trials.
But I’m quibbling—the trial was very far
from being fair. And I can’t disagree
with your last paragraph.
I
have manfully tried to resist pointing out that both of your suggested
courtroom tactics are emotion-based—a “really moving speech” about the right to
dissent and telling them about his poor mother (his “poor mother”? What has his “poor mother” got to do with the price of rutabagas on
Guam?)—and, as you can see, failed utterly.
The fact that, as you say, such tactics wouldn’t have worked in the
Stalinist show-trials probably counts as the first thing I’ve ever heard enunciated in their favour.
The anger that the Métis felt
for Scott had blinded them to his humanity.
Reminding them that there were people out there who cared about the man
might have led them to contemplate the gravity of the situation and realize
that killing someone because he’s insulted you is maybe a bit of an
over-reaction.
See, to me it’s just compounding the problem. The problem is emotion-over-reason. It is inherently unjust, contrary to good judgment, to make literal
life-and-death decisions on the basis of emotion. Only emotion-based beings
would consider it sensible to kill someone because he insulted him (or her
or them). Supplanting “you insulted us
so we have to kill you” with “oh, you moved us to tears with your defense of
your right to dissent so now we don’t want to kill you anymore” or “oh, your
mother moved us to tears with her love for you so now we don’t want to kill you
anymore” to me, that’s just a textbook example of (foreshadowing our next
subject) schizophrenia, the inability to distinguish between reality and
fantasy. Likewise the “family values” underpinning
of the whole “his poor mother” argument.
Families don’t have values. If
you support your son and love your son no matter what he does, that is the
exact opposite of a value, it is evidence of clinical insanity (“I want you to
find out what those five girls did to upset my son so badly that he chopped
them up with a fire axe”) Which is a
given with families, particularly with mothers, which is why such “ideas”
shouldn’t be allowed within a country mile of jurisprudence.
In my opinion.
No, the way to keep emotion-based beings from perpetrating gross
miscarriages of justice like that which was perpetrated against Thomas Scott
isn’t by escalating the level of emotional warfare, but by eliminating emotion
from the proceedings. A) What did Scott
do? B) what are the relevant laws? C) What is an appropriate punishment. Had sequential reasoning been the basis of
the decision-making, they could never have voted to execute him.
Okay, now I have to ask you about the execution scene itself
(in the sense that I do a dialogue like this both as a basis to discuss Large
Issues and for purely selfish reader
and fellow-creator curiosity reasons).
Again, for the size of the total Louis Riel work itself, you devote very close to four pages to the execution scene:
a lot of space, relatively speaking. What was the decision-making process
like? Did it just land on the page like
that? The only instance of full sentences in French, without translation (at
least on the pages themselves) And the
single white panel. Given the rest of
the sequence, it couldn’t be self-censorship or squeamishness. I want to hear all about it, Chet,
everything you can remember.
I did several drawings of Scott
getting shot and none of them looked right.
I thought, “Well, I don’t have to
show Scott in the panel—maybe I can fill it with gunfire sound effects and draw
the line of rifles shooting.” But up to
that point, I hadn’t shown the line of executioners—focusing on Scott alone
seemed to be working—so I decided to not draw the line of rifles and to just
leave the sound effects in the panel.
It’s a short step from having only sound effects in the panel to having
nothing in the panel, but I can’t remember how that short step occurred to me.
Why I used French in the scene is probably
obvious—it’s a small taste of how Scott is experiencing the moment—at least for
the non-French-speaking part of my audience (which I assume is large). I don’t remember how the idea came to
me.
As for why I’d spend four pages on it—I
was milking the drama.
Nice
milking job, Chet.
I have to admit that the blank panel threw me the first time through but
it seems more and more appropriate with subsequent re-readings. It reminds me of a scene in a foreign film
(Polanski’s Repulsion maybe?) not a bad effect to create in a
scene where, as you say, anything that emphasizes Scott’s own experience inside
a completely alien context is all to the good.
Anything you want to add before we get to the religion and schizophrenia
part of our program?
Nope—except to say that, while
I don’t know the scene that you’re referring to in Repulsion, I thought it was a terrific film—especially memorable
was the use of ambient sound—the noises coming from the neighbourhood and the
other apartments. Just about everything
I’ve seen by Polanski, I’ve enjoyed.
And
then there’s that great moment—when Catherine Deneuve is closing the mirrored
door and just for a split second she and the viewer see someone in the
reflection behind her—which everyone has swiped by now so that it’s become a
suspense movie cliché.
Repulsion is really just a guess on my part.
It could be a Bergman film.
Evidently when he was a student he discovered a reel of overexposed film
in the trash, took it home and projected it and decided that this was the
perfect archetype for a movie, pure white light. That was what he was struggling to achieve with Persona, a pure white light movie. Virtually no
backgrounds. A motif Gerhard
appreciated a great deal in the Konigsberg section of Latter Days. “More
scenes from Persona, Dave.” So a pure white panel might be more apt to
be reminding me of a Bergman transition.
We have about two pages left to go here in part one and I want to lead
off part two with your “My Mom Was a Schizophrenic” strip and notes—before
addressing Louis Riel’s (possible) psychiatric profile in the course of the
events you depict—so I’d like to lay a little groundwork, beforehand. In your earlier autobiographical strips, The Playboy and I
Never Liked You, your mother makes
several brief appearances (which is only natural since you were still just a
kid living at home in those stories).
And she does seem a little…odd in what she says and how she chooses to
say it. What age would your mother have
been in those appearances and was that—again, for want of a better
term—“oddness” always apparent to you?
She was born in ’23, so in 1970 (when “The
Little Man” is set) she’d have been 47, and I’d have been 10. She was 53 when she died in ’76.
The “odd” things that my mother said, and
that later made it into I Never Liked
You, weren’t adding up to anything in my head at the time, and I’m not sure
they should have. I don’t see them as
pointing toward a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
That isn’t to say that I wasn’t beginning to think that my mother was
odd—more than odd. When I was 14 or 15
I began to think she was going crazy again.
But those fears weren’t caused by anything that I showed in I Never Liked You. She would get hysterically over-emotional in arguments with
my brother and me (mostly me) to a degree that seemed crazy. While I didn’t show this in I Never Liked You, the type of fight
that I show on pages 54 & 55 could have developed into one in which she
went “crazy”.
What seemed crazy to me at 14 or 15
doesn’t seem all that crazy to me now as an adult—or if that sort of behaviour
is crazy, it’s a pretty common kind of craziness. A lot of adults can’t handle arguments in close personal
relationships—usually romantic or family ones—and emotionally flip out in
them. At 14 or 15 I hadn’t had any
romantic relationships and the only family I was able to observe up-close was
my own, and I could see that when my father was angry, he still managed to stay
relatively rational. My only other
examples of how adults in close personal relationships argued would have been
on TV and in movies and adults there always argued rationally. I knew that kids, of course, threw temper
tantrums—I’d done so myself—but I thought that adults were different. Helped along with the knowledge that my
mother had been institutionalized in the past, I assumed she was going
nuts.
You may be wondering why it took me ‘til
adolescence to notice my mother’s tendency to flip out. My parents almost never fought. My father proclaimed when they got married
that he wasn’t going to fight with her.
I can remember one occasion when a few sharp words were spoken (I wasn’t
in the room, so I don’t know what it was about) and my mother retreated to
their bedroom in tears, and that was it for arguments between the two of them
that I witnessed. (And since I wasn’t
in the room when the angry words were spoken, I didn’t even really witness
it.) When my brother and I were young,
any arguments with our mother would be settled quickly with a spanking. As my brother and I grew older, and spanking
was no longer an option, and as we entered adolescence and began to want to
express our independence and began to be able to verbalize at almost an adult
level, clashes with my mother increased and I, more and more, saw her becoming
hysterical.
To
me, it’s a gender thing. When I had my
breakdown in ’79—when I was diagnosed as a borderline schizophrenic—it scared
my wife and she called my mother and my mother came over and both my wife and
my mother proceeded to get scared and decided that I needed to get medical help
(the court of first resort for most emotion-based beings).
Your mother was in the opposite situation, one female against three
males. There is usually some peculiar
negotiation that goes on in order to grease the wheels of a long-term
relationship, like your Dad telling your mother he wasn’t going to fight with
her. At the courtship stage when the endorphins are still pounding through the
system, it sounds like a wonderful thing.
Oh, good. We’re never going to fight. My father had, evidently, told my
mother at the same endorphin stage that he didn’t think he loved her but if she
could live with that he wanted to marry her.
Strategically cagey in both cases—particularly my father’s strategy
since my mother, as an emotion-based being, was bound to do everything to
please him in order to make him love her—but a recipe for disaster
ultimately when “something’s got to give”.
The definition of schizophrenia—the inability to perceive the difference
between reality and fantasy—is, to me, self-evidently ludicrous because it
presupposes that there is a universally agreed upon perception of what reality
is. I see there as being a fundamental,
primary, seminal schism between emotion-based feminine reality and reason-based
masculine reality—which your mother, I think, experienced: having her emotion-based
feminine reality “outvoted” three-to-one by reason-based masculine reality. And then there’s individualized reality
which, to me, breaks down four ways into Reality, reality, “Reality” and
“reality”. You see this in marriages
all the time. The husband and wife both
experience the same events in their lives and on the news and yet they put
those events into different categories.
Common-law marriage, as an example, can be seen as a Reality by one
partner (We. Are. Married) and as a “reality” by the other partner (We’re sort
of married, but not really). Although
perceived as “reality” by him, if he knows what’s good for him he’ll keep it in
the “Reality” column, sequestered from discussion or consideration in the
interests, again, of “greasing the wheels”.
As we attempt to merge female oranges and male apples, society itself
dissociates as emotion-based reality attempts to supersede reason-based
reality. As you say in “My Mom Was a Schizophrenic,” in 1973 the American
Psychiatric Association took a vote and decided homosexuality wasn’t a mental
illness anymore. I laugh out loud every
time I come to that caption. I mean, to
me, it’s just funny to vote on reality.
5,854 to 3,810 you cite Paula J. Caplan as reporting as the vote in They Say You’re Crazy (Addison-Wesley, 1995). But,
doesn’t that mean that in 1973 there were 3,810 schizophrenic psychiatrists who
were unable to perceive reality accurately, unable to perceive that
homosexuality was not a mental illness and were so seriously deluded that they
voted that it was one? Shouldn’t their
credentials be called into question?
Shouldn’t they face rigorous psychiatric examinations before they’re
allowed to treat any more patients?
But, instead, I would be viewed as the schizophrenic, laughing at people
taking a vote on whether homosexuality is a mental illness. My laughter would be seen as delusional and
“inappropriate.” All the more so when the courts are being used to determine
the nature of reality. What is
marriage? What is a wife? What is a husband? Emotion-based beings have determined that if they can take over
the Supreme Court—as they’ve pretty much done in Canada—they get to define
reality. The half of the population who
see gay marriage as legitimate are sane and the half that see gay marriage as
illegitimate are insane. The half of
the population who see abortion as murder are insane and the half who see
abortion as a human right are sane.
Your turn, again.
How did I know you were going to see it as
a gender thing? Having met rational
women and overly-emotional men, I fail to find convincing your contention that
women are emotion-based and men are reason-based. You’re right that there isn’t a universally agreed on perception
of what reality is and that there’s a clash of views-of-reality going on, but I
don’t see that clash divided between emotion-based beings and reason-based
beings. I think the division is between
everyone. I think that, if we were able to somehow create a society
that was completely made up of Sim-approved reason-based humans, there would
still be people in that society who would seem crazy to the majority.
By the way, I definitely don’t see your
opinions on gender matters as valueless—I agree with a lot of what you’ve
written on the subject. As I’ve told
you in person, Cerebus #186 did push
me in the direction of questioning the whole romantic relationship thing. Marriage and boyfriend-girlfriend
relationships, at least at this point in history, don’t look very sensible to
me. We agree in large part on the
current state of gender relations—it’s the root causes that we disagree
on.
We’re
either in danger here of swerving very far from our subject, schizophrenia, or
we’re getting right to the heart of it.
I would maintain that you’ve agreed with me, personally and
individually, because you know that gender relations today implicitly consist
of men having to choose between the rock of capitulating to lunatic viewpoints
or the hard place of spending most of their waking hours arguing about them but
that you are afraid to agree with me in a general way because you don’t want to
seem like a misogynist.
Like the time you and Joe and I were walking
down College Street—in no danger of becoming the new Queen Street in my books
unless they can increase exponentially their population of astonishingly
beautiful teenaged girls—and I stopped to give a decrepit old street guy twenty
bucks. And when I caught up to you and
Joe you said, with anecdotal ferocity, “Don’t you think that Diana Schutz is
more intelligent than that guy?” And,
as I said to you then, my experience with so-called intelligent women—and Diana
Schutz was no exception—is that they aren’t so much intelligent as…and then I
was at a loss for a term and I think what I came up with was “cunning”. In the feral sense. Virtually all of my conversations with Diana
Schutz and all the other women I’ve known who are considered intelligent,
consisted of her trying to convince me that men and women are equal. And to me, that’s a lunatic idea and the
degree of your lunacy can directly be determined by the extent to which you are
absorbed a) in believing it b) in trying to convince others of it and c)
ostracizing anyone who refuses to capitulate to your insanity.
In my personal experience, Chet, you are the only person beside myself
not actively engaged in those three occupations. It may be an insurmountable step from “I don’t, personally, see
any clothes on the Empress” to “The Empress is naked,” but at least you’re
closer to accurately perceiving reality than anyone else I know.
Sorry to disillusion you, Dave, but the
proposition that men and women are equal doesn’t seem like a lunatic idea to
me. Of course, it depends on what you
mean by equal. In terms of physical
strength, sure, there’s inequality.
There may be individual women who could beat me up, but the average man
is physically stronger than the average woman.
I don’t have a copy of The
Guinness Book of World Records, but I’m confident that the person who can
currently lift the most amount of weight is a man and has been a man for every
edition of that fine publication. But,
in the intellectual realm, I see no reason to assume that women are inferior to
men. Intellectual strength isn’t as
easy to measure as physical strength—I don’t see IQ tests as accurate gauges,
and that just leaves us with individual perception. Some of the women I meet seem
intelligent to me, and some them seem
dumb. And some of the men I meet seem intelligent and some of them seem dumb. It may be that a cultural bias has affected my perceptions, but
it seems to me that the two genders
come out about even. That’s not going
to sound like convincing proof to you, and that’s okay—I know that trying to
convince you on this point is futile.
I’m just stating my position.
If I don’t think that arguing about or
capitulating to “lunatic viewpoints” is the source of the problem, then what
is? Here’s my quick, simplified
overview of the situation:
At one time marriages were held together by
a social network of community, family and religious ties. Those ties have loosened in the
industrialized world in the last few centuries, and they got really loose in
the 20th century. With the rise of the
romantic novel in the late 18th century and the increase in literacy in the 19th,
love came to be seen as more and more important in marriage and in
quasi-marriage (boyfriend-girlfriend relationships). Love is now the reason why people enter into
marriages/quasi-marriages and—as those above-mentioned social ties have
loosened—love is expected to be the tie that will keep such relationships
together. The problem is that love
(being just an emotion) is ephemeral—here today, gone tomorrow—and therefore a
very weak tie and a weak guarantee of happiness. Also, we’ve grown up in a media-saturated culture where the
dominant story being constantly broadcast at us is one of idealized
eternal-love, and that’s had an effect on what we expect in those
marriages/quasi-marriages. And when
neither person can live up to those expectations, tension and fighting are
inevitable. Some couples accommodate
themselves to lowered expectations better than others, but I doubt that what
happens in most marriages/quasi-marriages lives up to what the couple had hoped
would happen when they first fell in love.
Men and women have to learn a different way
of relating to one another. In the
meantime, the whole marriage/quasi-marriage game looks very “un-fun” to me, and
I have no interest in playing along.
Yes, I know that trying to convince you on this point is futile as
well. If women were willing to forego
alimony and all manner of affirmative action (university enrollment quotas
being a great place to start) then I think we would have evidence supporting
your view of gender equality.
I do agree with you that the rise of the romance novel is one of the
sources of our present trouble. When a
girl is allowed to follow her heart, nine times out of ten she will end up
entangled with a fellow who, in a previous century, her father would have
forbidden her to have any interaction with (and who he would have had
horse-whipped if he set foot on the property).
And, in a like fashion, when a man is allowed to follow his dick, he
ends up entangled with women who, in a previous century, his father would have
forbidden him to have any public interaction with. Joseph Kennedy spent a lot of money buying off gold-digging
tramps that he saw as jeopardizing his son’s advancement (the few that JFK was
in danger of falling in love with—Inge Arvad, the Nazi spy as an example—being
the most expensive). The wiser course
of action, of course, is to teach morality, but with a “lodestone hunk” and an
“anything goes” society that only goes so far.
Jackie obviously taught her son, to the extent it was possible, to be
the opposite of JFK when it came to women, but that just made him an easy mark
for a garden-variety, social-climbing tramp like Caroline Bisset.
This, to me, is society-wide schizophrenia: The reality of what men (who are the most desirable to women) usually
are and the reality of what women (who are the most desirable to men) usually are. Put another way, now that I know that what I
want isn’t good for me and assuming that what is good for me isn’t what I want,
I see myself as permanently on the sidelines, quasi-marriage-wise.
Some women are willing to forego alimony.
When my friend Kris divorced her first husband, she didn’t ask for
anything—and, believe me, she could have used the money.
I share your opposition to things like affirmative
action programs, but I’m not in any position to call into question the
intellectual capabilities of people who take advantage of such programs, having
personally accepted money from a government-run arts funding agencythat I don’t
think should exist (Chet applied for a
got a grant from the federal Canada Council of the Arts to complete Louis
Riel). Seth, being a typical Canadian
leftist, teases me about that a lot.
Nor
did Deni, nor did Diana Schutz when she and Bob Schreck divorced. My point, however, isn’t anecdotal, its that
equality can’t exist until females as a gender remove alimony from the
law. Either that or make alimony
voluntary on both sides of the equation both in terms of how much is paid and
whether or not it is paid.
I have to admit that I was torn when I heard about your grant—on the one
hand disappointed that you had compromised your principles and on the other
hand floored by the fact that the Canada Council finally gave a grant to a
comic book! Jim Waley with ORB magazine, me,
Gene Day with Shadow Press. We all got
shot down repeatedly back in the 70s. The
Council’s policy was that comic books were commercial and Real Art wasn’t
commercial. Looking at what they’ve
been funding for the last thirty years, I have to go along with them on
that. At least Louis Riel I can understand.
Next
issue: More schizophrenia and some old
time religion.