The announcement that a graphic novel, American Born Chinese , by Gene Luen Yang, has been short-listed for the Young People's Literature category of the National Book Award seems to have generated a certain amount of excitement in the United States.
Ostensibly, this excitement centres on the fact that the book is a graphic novel, since a cartoonist has never before been made a finalist.
I suspect, however, that the controversy is not limited to the book's graphic content. After all, Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The controversy centres on the book's form only in so far as it provides an euphemised opportunity to fulminate about other matters.
Cultural conservatives, no doubt feeling especially defensive at the moment for political reasons, have complained that the nomination of American Born Chinese represents an unprecedented concession to a populist medium, one that is, in some quite literal sense, semi-literate. The cartoon is precisely the kind of form that the National Book Award - inaugurated in 1950, as the post-war economy of mass consumption boomed, and at the time that American culture first became comprehensively televisual - was implicitly set up to oppose.
Gene Yang, then, is a barbarian at the gate, albeit an accidental one. And the book is about being a barbarian at the gate, since it is the autobiographical account of a boy who moves from San Francisco's Chinatown to the suburbs, where he is one of two Asian children in his local school and treated, at least initially, like an alien. The book is an extremely thoughtful coming-of-age tale, like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, the sophisticated emotional effects of which are an inseparable product of its often deliberately naïve graphic techniques.
Mixing apparently competing forms, American Born Chinese is an expression of the experience of cultural conflict that it seeks to represent.
At a time when Asians in America are contending with paranoid suspicions, the book's very format makes the case for a more inclusive society.
"Is our discussion purely literary?" asked the Hungarian critic Georg Lukacs in the 1930s, in the course of a debate about modernist versus realist artforms, "I think not."
