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PEOPLE WHO READ THE INGENIOUS and imaginative articles of Jeet Heer, or have the pleasure of seeing him engage in intellectual debate, find it difficult to believe that as a little boy he was no star of the classroom. We can accept that Albert Einstein, an accredited genius and therefore an oddball, had trouble learning arithmetic, but we tend to assume that the merely clever and talented people among us were clever and talented from the start.
Jeet wasn't, so far as anyone could tell. Today, a 38-year-old scholar and journalist, he writes for publications as different as the Boston Globe, the Literary Review of Canada, the National Post, Slate.com and the Comics Journal. But he didn't learn to read till he was nearly eight years old, and his primary-school teachers thought he needed remedial English. This was partly because English was his second language, and perhaps also because he was working out his attitude to the unfamiliar society into which fate and his parents had dropped him in his sixth year.
As it turned out, he learned English in a way that foretold some of his future concerns as a writer – by reading comic books. Parents have traditionally feared that comics would undermine literacy among the young, but Jeet became a reader by picking his way through stories about superheroes and evil scientists. They were among his best teachers as well as a source of pleasure. He calls them his "bridge to literacy."
His life and career embody two big changes on the Canadian landscape in recent times. The first is the appearance of intellectuals from non-European countries as cultural leaders, people like Neil Bissoondath, a Trinidadian Canadian who has published muchadmired books and now teaches creative writing at Laval University in Quebec City, and Irshad Manji, who grew up in Richmond, B.C. (because Idi Amin expelled her family from Uganda), and has now become famous around the world as an analyst of her religion, Islam. The second change is the emergence of popular culture, including comics, as a subject studied by intellectuals.
Jeet (I call him that because I've never heard him called anything else) was born in 1967 to a Sikh farming family in the Punjabi town of Dadyal. Seeking to improve his family's prospects, Jeet's father, Mohan, followed the path by which many earlier emigrants from India and elsewhere reached Canada: he set off by himself to find a more promising home, sending for his wife, Simer, and two sons once he was settled in Toronto. In the 1970s, Mohan ran a convenience store, and later he became the driver of an airport limousine as well as a promoter of Punjabi music in Canada. He died two years ago.
The Heers were relatively secular. On religious holidays the family went to a Sikh temple, a modest storefront arrangement in a strip mall in suburban Rexdale. Mohan didn't wear a turban until the last few years of his life, and Jeet has worn a turban only on special occasions, such as a cousin’s wedding.
But the family didn't leave the Punjab behind. Jeet liked the music his father helped to import and often watched movies from India with his parents. He learned some of his Sikh history from comic books published in India, another early sign of his future interests. Comics also play a large part in the life of his younger brother, Bob, who runs a Web site for Dragon Lady, a store on College Street in Toronto that sells rare comic books. The family spoke Punjabi at home. Today, having been immersed in Canadian English for three decades, Jeet speaks his first language in a way that makes him feel like an immigrant to the Punjab, groping for vocabulary.
In high school, having finally established an amiable relationship with the English language, he made up for lost time by reading much more than his contemporaries. By necessity, he also became a student of the world around him. Everything he encountered seemed to demand analysis. "People would say things I wouldn’t get, like, 'A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,' and I'd have to figure out what they meant. It made me into a real nerd, looking up everything in dictionaries." It also made him a critic. He was studying North American culture from both the outside and inside. He couldn't let a reference slip by him. "I remember a kid speaking of James Bond. I had no idea who he was. I had to find out."
His local high school turned out to be a spectacular anachronism in the new Canada of the 1980s: Thistletown Collegiate Institute, a proud centre of Scottish tradition. Intramural sport was organized according to Scottish clans, and the yearbook was – and still is – called The Clansman. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no Scots on the premises. There were Caribbean students, South Asians like Jeet, East Asians and whites of no noticeable cultural affiliation. But Jeet never met even one student who had a direct contact with Scotland.
No one objected. It was just one more mysterious aspect of this mysterious country where people from all over the world came together. For Jeet, it was another cultural puzzle that required sorting out.
JEET IS A HEAVY-SET, genial man who seems always to be in a good mood. His smile makes one think of someone who has just won a modest prize in a lottery or expects to do so any minute now. He's highly articulate, as you might expect, but his conversational style takes some getting used to. If you offer an opinion, he usually answers in a way that would baffle the uninitiated. His reply always begins something like, "Yes, yes, yes, yes. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No."
This is not to be taken, obviously, as his response to what has been said. It indicates a certain degree of nervousness, perhaps, but it's also the way he clears his throat, or his mind, as he prepares what he wants to say.
What he says usually indicates intellectual poise, curiosity and knowledge. This is at least partly because he and the Canada in which he grew up have learned to accommodate each other. While he was using mass culture to find his way through the New World, Canadian academic life was unconsciously preparing a place for thinkers like him. For generations, some of our most talented humanists had been studying mass culture. At the University of Toronto, Marshall McLuhan, who'd grown up in Winnipeg, had become famous for his theories of media. Hugh Kenner, who was born in Peterborough, Ont., and ended up as one of the world's leading literary critics, worked with McLuhan as a University of Toronto student and absorbed his views.
In the 1980s, Jeet read a Toronto Star piece about Kenner and liked the sound of his ideas. Although the works of Marshall McLuhan (who died in 1980) were not particularly popular among his professors, Jeet pursued his interest. He came upon Philip Marchand's biography, Marshall McLuhan: the Medium and the Messenger.
"Marchand was an eye-opener," Jeet remembers. Through Marchand, he became a student of McLuhan and much else; the biography helped make Jeet a writer on popular culture. He wrote his master's thesis on the intellectual circle around McLuhan, and ever since then he has been tracking the McLuhanites, examining their ideas and extending them. He loves finding unnoticed or forgotten themes in McLuhan; he points out, for instance, that McLuhan's first book, The Mechanical Bride, published in 1951, depicted the way media were turning women into machines. McLuhan, Jeet says, outlined theories about women that feminists didn't approach till the 1970s.
Jeet's curiosity, intensified by his outsider status, makes him attentive to everyday culture that others take for granted. When he writes or talks about phenomena in the popular arts, he typically examines something familiar in a way that makes it new and freshly exciting. The fact that he consciously worked his way into Canadian life made him a natural part of the school of communications that McLuhan had dominated.
Meanwhile, international culture was also preparing a place for Jeet. The comic books of his childhood were turning into the graphic novels he would encounter as an adult. In the American novel Maus, whose two parts appeared in 1986 and 1991, Art Spiegelman did what everyone till then considered impossible: he made a brilliant, searing and profoundly engaging graphic novel about the most serious of subjects, the Holocaust. A comic book on genocide? It couldn't be, yet great reviews rolled in. Maus cracked open the field of graphic novels, attracting the attention of serious artists and serious readers, Jeet among them.
But is a graphic novel the sort of subject that trained academics like Jeet Heer should be studying? Should he be (as he now is) writing his Ph.D. dissertation at Toronto's York University on the way comic strips reflect American politics? Is there really a place for all this in universities? These questions aren’t yet entirely answered.
The late Northrop Frye, Canada's most eminent scholar in the humanities, argued in a 1973 lecture that the academic world needed to be broader and more open. He acknowledged the existence of interdisciplinary courses, where different departments met "politely but suspiciously, like diplomats arranging for a ceasefire." But the future would require much more, the recognition by academics that knowledge has no limits. Like God as defined by St. Augustine, it "has its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere."
This is roughly what has happened, though perhaps not in the way Frye envisaged. Certainly Kenner, who died at the age of 80 in 2003, believed scholarship had no boundaries and that he was entitled to write on anything to which he could bring both competence and enthusiasm. An authority on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, he also wrote a book on Chuck Jones, who made cartoons about Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, and two books on Buckminster Fuller, the engineer who created the geodesic dome.
Today, it's no longer uncommon for professors to study material that was considered, only a generation ago, to be beneath contempt. At York University, where Jeet has chosen to pitch his tent, someone did a thesis on Canadian doughnut stores. Lowbrow and middlebrow culture, once denigrated as "kitsch," is now seen as an expression of society, therefore worthy of study. In the Times Literary Supplement, a musicologist recently remarked that nowadays "we are attentive to all manner of kitsch, ancient and modern. I just had coffee with a colleague who is writing a paper on zombie movies. He is a professor of philosophy." Charles K. Wolfe, an American who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Charles Dickens, has turned into the leading authority on postwar country music inspired by the atom bomb. As the co-editor of a book called Country Music Goes to War, he argues that these songs express the relationship between citizens and technology. Like many such specialists, he's renewed his career in a previously unexplored niche. "I would hate," he said recently, "to have to go back and do scholarly papers on Victorian England."
In a similar way, Jeet loves to explore the work and influence of someone like Gary Panter, a 55-year-old artist originally from Texas. He's a hero among illustrators, designers and cartoonists but little known to the public. Watching Jeet's critical imagination play over Panter's work is an education in itself.
Panter made a reputation in California during the 1970s with grungy record covers and magazine illustrations. Eventually, he began to develop a reverse twist on modernism. For close to a century, serious artists have drawn material from lowbrow products, lifting popular images up toward high culture. In 1912, Picasso used bits of newspapers in his Cubist art; in the 1960s, Andy Warhol made Campbell's soup labels into influential paintings and prints. But Panter, as Jeet explains, moves in the other direction. Instead of bringing popular images into art, he brings art into mass culture. In the 1980s, he designed the set for the hugely popular TV show Pee-wee's Playhouse, using surrealist images to make a surprising, stimulating environment.
Last year, Panter came up with something far more ambitious, Jimbo in Purgatory, nothing less than an attempt to bring the insights of Dante into the world of graphic novels. Dante created The Divine Comedy by knitting together extremely disparate elements of his era's culture, from classical learning through courtly love to early science. Panter brought from his childhood an imagination similarly crammed, but with monsters, spies, robots and spaceships. Dante-like, he poured everything he had into his book, making Jimbo a kind of spike-haired Everyman. Just as Dante met troubadours and poets, Jimbo meets musicians such as Tiny Tim, Boy George and John Lennon. As Jeet says, "Panter has created an enormous echo chamber, allowing us to hear Dante's themes ringing through the ages."
Jeet has become a particular enthusiast for the work of Seth, the pseudonym of a greatly talented Guelph artist named Greg Gallant. "Each drawing is invested with loving attention," Jeet says. "His book cannot be flipped through lightly. It has a steady calmness that forces us to slow down and look." Like Jeet himself, Seth luxuriates in nostalgia, but it's nostalgia with serious content. Discussing Clyde Fans, Seth's recent graphic novel, Jeet wrote: "In the hands of an artist, the past can be a source of emotional depth. Few artists have thought about it as much as Seth. Both his drawings and his comics show how an engagement with history enriches the present." Every good artist deserves at least one good critic. Seth has Jeet.
A few years ago, on a Fulbright fellowship, Jeet spent some time in the library at Boston University studying the papers of Harold Gray, the man who created Little Orphan Annie. From 4,000 letters about Annie received by Gray in the period 1937 to 1968, Jeet made some interesting discoveries. He noted, for instance, that Annie's temporary loss of her dog, Sandy, touched the most important industrialist of the early 20th century: a 1933 telegram read, "Please do all you can to help Annie find Sandy. Stop. We are all interested. Henry Ford." Jeet also learned that in 1948, the 15-year-old John Updike wrote Gray a letter declaring Little Orphan Annie his favourite strip ("Your draughtsmanship is beyond reproach"). Updike, now long established as a major American novelist, told Jeet he was so influenced by Gray and others that he planned to become a cartoonist – and in a sense did. "One can continue to cartoon, in a way, with words; whatever crispness and animation my writing has, I give some credit to the cartoonist manqué," Updike wrote in an essay.
We don't need to wonder why Jeet was glad to quote that last sentence in an article. In a sense, it sums up Jeet's world. It shows Updike casually leaping from apparently simple-minded cartoons to highly subtle novels. It's the sort of leap that Jeet, and Jeet's generation, have come to accept as part of their lives. They live in a time when western society in general, and their own country in particular, believe that breaking down once-accepted barriers is a key to the future. Barriers between subjects in university, barriers between villagers in the Punjab and intellectuals in Toronto, barriers between high culture and low – all of them are challenged and often dismantled.
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