Eco, Umberto. "The Myth of Superman." Diacritics. Vol. 2, No. 1. (Spring, 1972), 14-22.
Eco's analysis of Superman doesn't bring anything exactly new to the table, though I think we can forgive it for that, since it was written in 1972. The article puts a few specific, if somewhat obvious, features of the Superman cycle in extremely logically-deduced terms, and draws some conclusions that feed directly into central questions within Cultural Studies.
The article covers two basic features of Superman's stories. First, Superman is both mythic and novelistic, and here is where Eco brings up something that is not entirely unoriginal. In his split personality, Superman/Clark Kent embodies, in the first place, the iconic and mythic presence that we can partly define as that which is out of the range of human experience. It may, in kind, resemble human experiences of love and struggle, but it cannot in scale, or else it would lose its mythic quality.
The love affair between Superman and Lois must be nearly cosmic, as we see in Grant Morrison's DC 1,000,000, set several thousand years in the future, and in which Superman lives in the centre of the Sun, is made of living gold, and manages to revive a living, solid-silver Lois to be his eternal lover. The battle against monolithic evil must be logically unwinnable in order to be never-ending, so he can never fully defeat Luthor or Darkseid or Metallo. Superman's edict against murder is helpful, here, because he's powerful enough to not only not have to kill, but to save the lives of defeated villains.
Clark Kent's stories, however, must necessarily be small in scale in order to carry the wish fulfilment of the reader. His experiences must be those that we all are familiar with, so he is (pre-Crisis) consistently turned down by Lois and stymied by his mundane job. The very fact that he wears glasses, a prosthetic compensation for bad eyesight, is a visual signifier of his humanity.
The second, and far complex, feature of the Superman cycle is related to his narrative immortality. Superman does not "consume himself," (153) which means that his actions do not consume time, he "accomplishes a given job [... and] at this point the story ends. [...] If [the story] took Superman up again at the point where he left off, he would have taken a step toward death" (153). His immortality, in the comics, comes with an inability to actually progress as a character.
He cannot be allowed to, for example, clearly enunciate and recall all of his adventures because doing so would imply that he'd had specific experiences that could be documented and numbered; experiences that have a finite number at all would ruin the illusion. Within this timelessness and deathlessness, Eco locates what I've taken to calling the "neverwhen" of American superhero stories, and he describes as "the illusion of a continuous present" (156).
That concept, by whatever name, is very closely related to what Eco takes great pains to explain in complex detail, and which Roy Thomas popularized a term for in 1983: "retroactive continuity" or "retcon." Eco marvels at retcon, at the writer's ability to revisit a previous event and add more and more details to it so as to tell a new story about it. "The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again, as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said" (153).
He gives the example of the original (pre-Crisis) Supergirl who arrived on Earth as a teenaged girl, but had been secretly helping Superman in his adventures the whole time even though no one knew of her existence. This arrangement meant that the writers could go "back in time to tell in how many and in which cases she, of whom nothing was [originally] said, participated during those many adventures where we saw Superman alone involved" (154).
Eco's tone implies that this device isn't used anywhere else, but he doesn't outright say that. In truth, something like retcon happens every time a myth or legend is retold by a new voice, the dozens of versions, for example, of the Arthurian Cycle. Obviously, this example isn't the same because there's no official affiliation between the storytellers, as there is in comics, but there's a conceptual commonality that we'd be remiss to fail to mention. This timelessness, this neverwhen, means that superhero stories are endlessly repetitive iterations of themselves. Perhaps each pass at the same story gets a few more details, is a little richer for it, but it really just invokes a simple pleasure response for being told something you already know.
Experience tells us, by the way, that each pass is just as likely to make a dog's breakfast of the whole glorious tapestry as it is to add subtle detail and narrative richness. Retcon easily creates just as many continuity problems as it solves, as we can see from the several times that DC and Marvel comics, the two companies with the longest, continuous narrative threads, have had to "reboot" certain characters (Spider-man, the X-Men, the Legion of Superheroes), or even the entire universe, in the case of DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, which they've now followed-up on twice, with Zero Hour and, just this year, Infinite Crisis. They even tried to entirely avoid the problem of continuity (I.e., time flow and causality) through another mini-series called The Kingdom, in which they introduced an extremely post-modern narrative principle called "hypertime," which would have done away with strict continuity entirely. Because fans didn't like the concept--they read it as a lazy writer's trick--it didn't stick.
Eco initially characterises these endless iterations as wholly negative, which is where a Cultural Studies point of view steps in: "In growing accustomed to the idea of events happening in an ever-continuing present, the reader loses track of the fact that they should develop according to the dictates of time. Losing consciousness of it, he forgets the problems which are at its base, that is, the existence of freedom, the possibility of planning, the necessity of carrying plans out, the sorrow that such planning entails, the responsibility that it implies, and, finally, the existence of an entire human community whose progressiveness is based on making plans" (156)
Obviously, there's something very wrong, here, with the presupposition that stories that move through time the way we do are necessarily superior to the stories that don't, with the assumption that "common" readers and writers are ignorant of the manner in which their narratives function, and with the unargued declaration that this state of affairs is logically anathema to free will. Eco doesn't argue these points very well, and they are very easy to counter, if not fully defeat.
But the subsequent section of the paper makes clear that he's playing Devil's advocate in his condemnation, which, he makes clear, is really a way to point out that it presupposes several things to be "good," such as so-called high-class literature, the "cultured" reader or writer, and the ideology of individualism from which a defence of free will might spring. This is not to argue that these things are necessarily bad either, merely to point out that their goodness has not been defined. The real question we ought to ask is "What is Good?" (163) What do superhero stories classify as "the Good?" From what endlessly repeated moral message do their readers get a habitual pleasure response?
The answer is, again, nothing new to us, but meticulously argued through all of this reasoning. Essentially, Eco points out that most superheroes defend private property as opposed to larger issues of social or political fairness, and that Superman, in particular, could solve most of the world's problems through far less effort than it takes to defeat a few street criminals. Superman addresses the most superficial symptoms while remaining blissfully unaware of the root causes, and therefore is totally unable to affect real change.
What Eco misses is the possibility of symbolic action. Previous to pointing out how the superhero mission statement is something akin to Captain Metropolis' claim that "Somebody has to save the world!" in Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen), he admits that "the pedagogic message of these stories would be [...] highly acceptable, and the same episodes of violence which the various stories are interspersed would appear directed toward this final indictment of evil and the triumph of honest people" (163) if the content of the stories themselves were morally acceptable.
Eco merely attacks the political and moral features of the genre, not the fact of repetition, so if those features can be shown to be morally acceptable, then so is that genre. It is not my job, of course, to either defend or attack superheroes unless the evidence tells me to, and even then, my job is merely descriptive. So what I'm about to suggest is merely for the sake of argument, a new thought that occurred to me as I read Eco's paper, and which occurred to me, ironically, because of his example.
"It is strange that Superman, devoting himself to good deeds, spends enormous amounts of energy organizing benefit performances in order to collect money for orphans and indigents. The paradoxical waste of means (the same energy could be employed to produce directly riches or to modify radically larger situations) never ceases to astound the reader [I.e., Eco himself] who sees Superman forever employed in parochial performances" (164).
"Performance" is absolutely the right word to use, here. We can't ever forget that narratives are a set of events on display. They function to be witnessed. Superman is undoubtedly a cosmic-level character, one who can practically juggle planets and ignite suns at a glance, but his roots are street-level, and the whole genre, created by two Jewish guys living in the poor part of Chicago in the early 30s, retains some of the street. Superheroes don't just act, they perform. Certainly, many of them have the power to do far more than they do, to act for the good in ways beyond beating up street criminals. But the reader does not.
The reader, who gains a pleasure response from watching Superman, among other things, raise money for an orphanage, witnesses his adventures as strings of symbolic acts; they do nothing in themselves (they never even happened!), but through the sheer pleasure of repetition, they might inspire a reader to act similarly. A large portion of the symbolic action of superhero stories instils a pleasure response from violence, and anyone who has watched an action movie, or watched an audience watch an action movie, can attest to the reality of that very physical response. I do not deny this. However, condemning these characters for performing small acts of charity and community support seems rather petty.
Posted by orion at March 1, 2006 6:01 PM