Stories About Stories
Waugh's structural metafiction, in which metafictive gestures happen at the level of plot, character, genre, and other narrative details, is perhaps the simplest kind, but if that is so, it is also the most direct, most clear, and most efficient kind. Chapter 2 focuses on this form of metacomics, the one that comments quite directly on the process of storytelling. Promethea, as has already been mentioned, begins with a term paper about its title character and almost pedantically lectures on the nature of stories and language using the device of Sophie/Promethea's journey through Moore's construction of the Kabalistic 'World Tree.' The commentary is so blatant, here, that characters often give up the pretence of talking to each other and simply address the audience directly, as in the Tarot-deck issue (#11), and the final issues (#31-2). Promethea's direct addresses, however, are often about what Waugh identifies as "the level of the sign," which is why Promethea is also a focus of Chapter 3. Moore's other structural metacomic is Supreme, which constructs a cosmology and a metaphysics for its characters based on the industry practises of American comics, specifically the rotation of writers and artists who radically change characters when they take over titles. Gaiman's Sandman is quite explicitly a story about stories, as is established early during Dream's storytelling duel to retrieve his helm (in Preludes and Nocturnes), and continues through to the final issue, a domestic view of Shakespeare writing ostensibly his final play, The Tempest. The series makes constant reference to storytelling as an act of pure imagination, often using dreaming as a symbol. Sandman's storytelling does not follow the same metaphysical rules as Promethea's, and in fact gradually demonstrates, through Dream's obsessive dedication to his own, self-imposed code of conduct, that the only structure to storytelling is that which we impose upon it.
Finally, Transmetropolitan has probably the least semiotic and the most structural commentary on storytelling, focusing as it does on media and journalism, and a search for an always implicitly objective "Truth." The narrative is a study in how media lies to us, and how politicians use that media to gain power over the street-level citizen, ironically called "The New Scum" by the protagonist, Spider Jerusalem. It is a story about how to tell stories truthfully and how to tell them manipulatively, and what the difference is. There are very real logical inconsistencies in this implicit argument behind the text, of course. Spider's style of journalism is loosely modelled after Hunter S. Thompson's 'gonzo' technique, which involves first-person accounts in explicitly subjective terms. Both Transmetropolitan and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '73 contain gonzo reportage of an American presidential election. Transmetropolitan takes up the basic problem of communicating something akin to objective truth through subjective accounts, though it does not always coherently address that problem.
Posted by orion at January 8, 2007 5:52 PM