Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
It took a while, but Jameson finally started saying something useful around page 280 of Postmodernism
I should digress, though, and trace my path through Jameson so far, which starts with Stephen Helmling:
Helmling, Steven. The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime and the Dialectic of Critique. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.
Helmling's book is very difficult to get through, one suspects deliberately so. There is an ultimate irony to the writing style itself. Helmling takes great pains to belabour Jameson's use of the Barthean concept of the scriptable meaning (very briefly), writing that inspires further writing, as opposed to writing that closes an idea, thus implying that there can be no more thought on a subject. Neat concept, actually. That Roland was a clever lad. The title of the book, The Success and Failure of... reflects the idea that a critical text shouldn't 'succeed' (say the last word on something), but rather 'fail' (leave it open). According to Helmling, there's a Marxist angle to the potential 'success' and 'failure,' as well, but it's empty doctrine, so I'm not going to bother with it.
Helmling's quite explicit, though, that the scriptable isn't just emulation. It's not writing in the style of a text, or even necessarily taking up a the same problem a text might present. It is, to paraphrase, more like taking a similar path to a similar goal, or if you like, taking up a similar practise to solve a similar problem. In any case, it's not just aping a style, which is hilarious once you compare Helmling's writing to Jameson's. It doesn't just copy Jameson; it multiplies and intensifies everything about Jameson to comical proportions.
Where Jameson's sentences are long and circuitous, usually involving a digression of some kind, Helmling's are twice as long, constantly interrupt themselves so as to create the impression of fragments even though the sentences are technically complete, and contain two or three parenthetical statements each. It's astonishing. I'm not sure what he's attempting to do, exactly. It could be that by creating eye-splitting text he hopes to leave his subject 'open to interpretation' (I.e., incomprehensible), and thus achieve 'the scriptable,' but I suspect he just loves Jameson so much that the 'J' on his WWJD bracelet doesn't stand for 'Jesus.'
And the emulation isn't just stylistic, as far as I can tell. It's also conceptual. Whereas Jameson creates chains of terms that either double for each other, contrast with each other, or directly antagonize each other, Helmling is obsessed, with a religious zealotry, with defining Jameson's key terms in as many different, equally incomprehensible, ways as he possibly can, thus leaving them 'open' by virtue of being evacuated of meaning because they can suddenly mean any of seven or eight totally unrelated things.
I'm not exaggerating for comical effect, here. Helmling's book is the critical equivalent of a drooling fan-boy who spends years studying the same comic book so he can draw just like Todd McFarlane, and thereby not only develop no style of his own, but produce nothing more than an insulting parody of the style created by the object of his sycophancy.
Suffice it to say that Jameson's actual text is crystal clear in comparison. The problem with Jameson is not the sheer density of his text; he could be a lot clearer, but that's a common illness among literary theorists. No, his problem is that he seems to treat Marx and later Marxist theorists as a crutch. Now, to be clear, I have a very thin understanding of Marx, and it may be that I'm simply unable to make sense of Jameson because I don't know his context. If what I'm about to say merely reflects my own ignorance, I will cordially accept it.
That said, Jameson seems to make bald assertions without a whole lot of actual evidence. I have two favourite examples. The first relates to the cover art for Postmodernism, which is an Andy Warhol piece called "Diamond Dust Shoes." Jameson compares it to the Van Gogh painting "A Pair of Boots", claiming that where Van Gogh's "shoes slowly recreate about themselves the whole missing object world which was once their lived context" (I.e., the real conditions of material existence), Warhol's shoes "no longer speak to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh's footgear," that "Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer," and that "There is therefore in Warhol no way to complete the hermeneutic gesture and restore to these oddments that whole larger lived context of the dance hall or the ball, the world of jetset fashion or glamour magazines" (Postmodernism, 8-9, italics are mine).
Doesn't that 'therefore' just make you want to scream? Jameson has, here, and in many other places, followed a series of bald, unsupported assertions with the word 'therefore' to create the illusion that those bald assertions actually constitute evidence. I'm not trying to just attack the guy. He might very well have extremely good reasons for differentiating between how Van Gogh and Warhol's paintings either succeed or fail at invoking historical context, but none of that actually arrives on the page. The only clue as to why those two paintings are supposedly different that I can see is in Jameson's use of the neologistic noun-phrase "object world," which could imply that Van Gogh's realism itself (objective world?) constitutes 'historicization,' while Warhol's pop-art style detaches his painting from what Jameson presumes to be reality (I.e., material conditions). But that's giving him an awful lot of credit for a very badly-argued passage.
In the other example, even more maddening, Jameson makes a fascinating point and then almost deliberately cuts off at the knees any chance of going somewhere with it. He claims that "our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network [the internet] are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism" (37), and that capitalism is, for Jameson, synonymous with postmodernism. This idea has legs. The connection between capitalism and communications technology is powerful. Multinational corporations wouldn't be able to function without, for example, email or web sites. You can't have head office in New York and your factories in the Philippines, the Caribbean, and South-East Asia without real-time communication.
But Jameson immediately undercuts that statement, claiming that "high-tech paranoia," or "conspiracy theory," "must be seen as a degraded attempt [...] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system" (38), which at the very least strongly implies that it's impossible to imagine that world system, for which the internet is a potent symbol, or even a material doppelganger. I wracked my brains trying to figure out how he could think that. All I can think of is that Jameson goes from postmodernism to global capitalism to the internet, and it is doctrinally dictated that no one can fully understand capitalism, therefore, in an exercise of pure rationalism that is totally unconnected to the 'material conditions of existence,' no one can understand the internet.
But that's not actually true, is it? Regardless of whether I agree with the ethical implications of their assessments, there are people who can absolutely conceive of the international economic system, and regardless of whether or not I understand their explanations of it, lots of people who can conceive the structure of the internet. I can give you their email addresses.
But, there is a bit of Jameson's book that is useful, if all-too brief. His chapter on film, "Nostalgia for the Present," is mostly about a Philip K. Dick novel (don't ask) that takes place in the pax Americana, the neverwhen of the fifties, in a small down with all the nice feelings of safety and uniqueness that goes with that setting. Think Pleasantville. Unfortunately, that town actually exists in 1997 (an impossibly far-flung date for Dick), during an interstellar civil war.
In the midst of this discussion, Dick starts to compare the historicizing qualities of science-fiction as a genre to the historicizing qualities of the 18th-centuiry novel. First, though, he makes the point that mainstream, pacifying television of the 1950s represented America as a land of abundance and peace, think of Leave it to Beaver, despite the reality of WWII in recent memory, the Korean war being fought, Beat poetry and the revolution that came with it, and all the other very un-status quo things that actually happened in that decade. Mainstream American entertainment of the decade revised the stifling surveillance of the 1950s and projected it back at Americans as the comforting projection called 'the fifties.'
However, instead of blaming mainstream television for misrepresenting the world, Jameson points out that it was actually a kind of coping strategy. So-called 'high art' "apparently cannot deal with this kind of subject mater except by way of the oppositional" (280), whereas what logically must be 'low art' does what oppressed people are usually forced to, try to make the best of an awful situation, turn the 1950s into The Fifties.
Dick's book then represents a convolution of the concept of history, something that Jameson sets in direct opposition to the novel, which he claims "'corresponded' to the emergence of historicity, of a sense of history in its strong modern post-eighteenth century sense" whereas "science fiction equally corresponds to the waning or the blockage of that historicity, and [...] to its crisis and paralysis, its enfeeblement and repression" (284). Needless to day, I think his attack on sci-fi as a genre is probably based in severe ignorance of it (he calls it a "subgenre," for example [283]), but in defining "historicity" as the thing science fiction supposedly isn't, he actually describes the genre as I know it.
Think about this claim: "Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future," but rather "a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective" (284).
Now, replace 'historicity' with 'science fiction,' and you have an absolutely clear statement about the defamiliarization effect of science fiction and fantasy. Paul Kocher's Master of Middle-earth describes The Lord of the Rings as "strange, but not too strange, familiar, but not too familiar" (paraphrase from memory). The defamiliarization of fantasy and science-fiction is how it historicizes, how it makes us look at ourselves as if we weren't products of our environment, in a cultural or material sense, or even the much more reasonable position that it's both. Jameson seems to conceptually agree, saying that "Dick's 1997," the era of the novel, "is not, however, centrally significant as a representation or an anticipation [...]" (285). Instead, that setting is a "narrative means" (285) to do certain things with history, and yet, he spends several pages arguing that sci-fi/fantasy is diametrically opposed to the novel, and the novel is inherently 'histiricitic' (or some such made-up word for something we already have word for).
The trouble is that (a) he rarely backs up his claims with evidence or logic, and (b) even if I wring some useful statement out of this chapter, it's the opposite of what he's claiming. Why is this man so famous?
On hockey and comics.
First, a question: at what point did it become standard to sing national anthems as sporting events? Does this go back to the Olympics? When you think about it, it's a really weird thing to do in Canada and the US where the rivalry is regional, not national. And what does singing the anthem have to do with sports, anyway? It seems rather suspicious to have everyone sing their nation's official song, itself an act of nationalism, and then play sports that, often as not, simulate a battlefield situation. I have no problem with sublimating our more violent rivalries through sport. Hell, I think that's a great way to work of those kinds of frustration and resentment, but why fuel the fires of nationalist pride in the process? It all seems rather imperial.
Second, an idea about comics. They're not a 'popular' medium anymore, in terms of the sheer number of people reading them. They became 'cult' a long, long time ago. But they might serve as an especially clear microcosm of the audience-to-artist relationship. Almost every comics artist--writer, pencillor, etc.--I've ever read about was, at some point, a fan as a kid, and the vast majority learned to write or draw from comics to begin with, even if they persued it in other ways after the fact. That, coupled with the fact that our childhood heroes stick around for generations, means that we get to write their stories when we grow up, if we make it as professional writers. Comics, as well as a lot of mainstream SF, are essentially fan-fiction approved by a corporate sponser. Does that make them more indicative of the relationship between author and audience? Does that make them more indicative of the basic art-society/cause-effect problem? Does it actually model a feed-back loop, a chicken-and-the-egg relationship, rather than a top-down 'false consciousness' model or a bottom-up 'feeding the beast' model?
Just thoughts.
Sanders, Joe (ed). The Sandman Papers. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphic Books. 2006.
Murphy, B. Keith. “The Origins of The Sandman.” 3-24.
Hanes, Stacie and Joe Sanders. “Reinventing the Spiel: Old Stories, New Approaches.” 147-170.
McMullen, Lyra. “Omnia Mutantor: the Use of Asian Dress in the Appearance of Dream in The Sandman.”
What a bit of blind luck to find this book at my local comic shop! If I were more self-centered, I’d say that the guys at my ’shop know that I’m an academic geek, but either way, it’s a whole book of essays on The Sandman. I bought it on the spot, of course. The papers do not form any kind of cohesive whole so far, accept that the first half of them is on specific issues and themes, and the second is on “Larger Contexts” (how a theme isn’t a larger context, I don’t know). I’ve read three papers so far, and I’ve had a few thoughts.
Murphy’s “Origins” is, ironically, the highly informed gushing of a fan-boy who, along the way, derides American superhero comics and the fan-boy culture it exists within. The paper is a history of the exchange of horror and comic-book styles between the US and the UK (the ‘Anglo-American comic-book tradition,’ as I’ve seen it called in other places), and makes a reasonable but, taken in all, problematic argument about the history of comics, and British writers’ place in that history. “[B]y the early 18th century, British readers had tired of Gothic horror, turning instead to novels in which more fully developed characters such as Jane Eyre encountered situations the were outré but not quite macabre. Meanwhile, the Gothic had traveled to America […] where action and tight plotting were more important than subtle characterization or polished prose” (4-5). As the paper continues, Murphy separates American and British popular fiction, consistently implying, as this quotation demonstrates, that the latter is inherently superior to the former.
The historical argument continues, though, that by the late 19th century (the Victorian period), the penny dreadfuls overtook British popular fiction, and then combined with the medium of the imported American comic books that were streaming into Britain around the same time. Until the 50s, American and British comics were basically the same, mostly horror titles but with superheroes as well. In the 50s, however, the genre was all but eradicated by censorship in both countries. The US had Wertham and the Comics Code Authority, but the UK had the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publication) Act, which, though Murphy doesn’t say so directly, seems to combine a ‘save the children!’ crusade with a protectionist economic measure, “isolat[ing] the British comic industry and its audience from the overwhelming majority of American comics and their influence” (8).
At this point, American and British comics diverged. The American path lead to superheroes, according to Murphy. The British returned to humour books, but retooled them into covertly subversive tales that “championed the common man as an anti-authoritarian force” (9). Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre identifies a traditionally British character, the ‘dunderhead hero.’ That character came back in British comics. Even the few superheroes who survived in Britain, according to Murphy, “retained a certain disdain for authority figures” (9), but his example are Judge Dredd, an authority figure by virtue of his job, and Marvelman, who was an agent of the R.A.F. in his original incarnation, so I find his statement difficult to take a face value.
Also, superheroes were hit hard by the CCA’s restrictions; it’s a very violente genre. American comics largely switched to humour and romance. We tend to backwardly assume superheroes took the fore because they’re presently associated with comics in America, but that’s despite the dearth of non-superhero comics, not because of a lack of them (where the ‘superheroes = comics’ association actually comes from is a matter of
some debate).
By the 70s, Murphy claims that American superherocomics, by virtue of being created by American artists who read exclusively American superhero comics, had become “little more than a parody” of themselves (4). Therefore, when Moore, “just about the first British writer brought into American comics” (Daniels qtd. in Murphy 10), wrote Swamp Thing, he brought with him the anti-authoritarianism of British comics, but also retained the literate horror styles of the Gothic writers, and “found the ‘mold’ of American comics easier to break than had those raised on them because, as with Gaiman, British writers’ exposure to the books and their generic expectations/restrictions was limited” (10), as opposed to the American writers, who were locked into the superhero genre, which has a strong set of “expectations/restrictions” (10).
Here’s where the problematic aspect presents itself. Murphy switches to talking about Gaiman at this point in the paper, and claims that “The work of the authors, and the narrative expectations of the British comics Gaiman read shaped his work into a form that was more literate, more intelligent, and distinctly British” (14), but his argument strongly implies that Murphy defines “distinctly British” as “more literate, more intelligent.” By contrast, “American comics tend to feature on-dimensional characters in shallow plots where violence trumps intelligence [and] images trump words” (14). The associations are clear: words are intelligent and British, while pictures are violent and American. Furthermore, Murphy is, essentially, glorifying Gaiman and Moore by distancing them from the comic book tradition (labelled ‘American’), and associating them with the “literary tradition” (labelled ‘British’) in which “the characters are more fully developed and the plots are rife with symbolism” (14).
I have used this phrase before, but Murphy’s move is maddening, but not surprising. Claiming a connection between Gaiman/Moore and the rich literary history of British culture is simply easier than trying to argue that comics have their own history. Ironically, Murphy explicitly argues that they are part of British literature by connecting them to the Gothic tradition, but implicitly, he won’t have it. The defining trait of comics as an art form, the use of pictures, is an albatross around its neck, keeping it from fully embracing the inherent sophistication of literature, a text-based art form.
Murphy concludes that “by protecting young British minds form stereotyped American comics books, the [Harmful Publications] Act allowed the modern version of this genre to blossom” (21) By ‘genre,’ he actually means ‘medium’; he’s referring to comics. There are a couple of interesting conceptual slips, here. First, he implicitly associates ignorance with innocence, a common fallacy, imagining British children as ‘unsullied’ by American comics, as if knowing more about the medium and the uses to which it can be put would have destroyed their sense of it.
Second, his assertion that Gaiman inspired the ‘modern version’ of comics employs the false connotation that the contemporary is always better than the antiquated, another common fallacy. Finally, he uses the word ‘stereotyped’ to refer to American comics, not ‘stereotypical.’ The latter implies that American comics are unfairly judged; the former implies what he means, that they are shallow and depict unfounded assumptions about, for example, race, gender, and law. His editing mistake reflects his attitude, which is surely accidental, but highly amusing none the less.
Hanes and Sanders’ “Reinventing” is a lot more convincing. It compares Gaiman’s depiction of the tripartite Goddess figure, ‘virgin, maiden, and crone,’ with Terry Pratchett’s depiction. The comparison itself is quite interesting, falling onto familiar lines: social vs. individual, sociological vs. psychological. Pratchett, they argue, constructs the ‘weird sisters’ as servants of a community, and who find their identities through their work. Gaiman, on the other hand, shows us a the ‘Kindly Ones,’ who are incapable of change and individually interchangeable. They take revenge on Dream for spilling family blood and don’t care at all that it’s a mercy killing (his son, Orpheus, begs to die). When depicted, they randomly swap places as they surround their cauldron. The Kindly Ones are a negative example of stereotypical womanhood. They are a destructive, unrelenting force of nature.
However, many of the other female characters come to represent them, and those characters’ serve as examples of how people, specifically women, find individuality through the ability to change, to grow, to develop, which itself is the theme of the whole series: Dream arranges his own ‘death’ so that he can be reborn into a form that is not only different, but capable of changing over time. Lyta Hall and Thessaly end the story locked into the revenge typical of the Kindly Ones themselves, Lyta against Dream--who she believes killed her son, but who in fact became Dream--and Thessaly against the Kindly Ones--for killing Dream, her former lover. They, too, are negative examples, but when put up against Wanda, who makes the ultimate change from pre-op transsexual to woman, in Barbie’s dream), or Rose Walker, who is pregnant by the end of the series, they, all of them, collectively represent the many paths of femininity, the individuality that can be found by limiting oneself to one identity, rather than keeping all options open, remaining primal and iconic, but without individual judgment or will.
McMullen’s paper on Japanese costuming does not manage to tickle my personal fancy, but it makes one point that is emblematic of not only this series, but a lot of both Gaiman and Moore’s work. “Originality often happens when a fresh set of eyes, without the same baggage of shared cultural history, gaze on something they have never seen before” (181). Originality and creativity are located in the viewer, no the product of that viewer’s work. Seeing and perceiving is a creative act, an act of expression, if only internally, and the first step towards external expression.
Three down, nine to go.
Berger, Arthur. "Comics And Culture." The Journal of Popular Culture. 5:1 (Spring 1971).
Harvey, Robert C. "The Aesthetics of the Comic Strip." The Journal of Popular Culture. 12:4 (Spring 1979).
Coleman, Earle J. "The Funnies, The Movies And Aesthetics." The Journal of Popular Culture. 18:4 (Spring 1985).
Three papers yesterday, all over 20 years old, the first quite insightful, the other two, not so much so. But they're all fairly quotable, which is convenient. It's always nice to cite someone saying something that you want to assert. Makes you sound all learned.
Berger�s paper, �Comics and Culture� is mostly about comic strips. He talks about serialisation in newspaper strips, saying that they �satisfy a need to know what happened �next� [�]� (168), explaining that, in the three- or four-panel strip, we know the format by virtue of sheer repetition, but we keep reading to see how the strip will get to the punch line in the last panel, which is a lot like genre expectations in general. We know that the hero will (a) beat the villain a fair fight then, (b) the villain will double-cross the hero, thus forcing the hero to kill him such that (c) the hero can be conveniently free of guilt, but we still watch, both because the repetition is comforting and because we want to see the slight variation. �Thus what the comics do is raise moderate levels of anxiety which they then satisfy� (169, italics are original).
He also reverses a couple of commonly-held critiques of popular entertainment. First, he refutes the �lowest common denominator� argument, which assumes that because they must appeal to mass audiences, popular arts must be �inoffensive and uninteresting� (169). �Yet the opposite argument can be made: if you have a strip with many readers you can always afford to �lose� some of them for any given day�s adventure� (169), an argument that �was brought to [his] attention by Charles Schulz� (169). This argument applies to any serialised material, or for that matter, any regularly broadcast material, that has a large enough audience that individual episodes could be aimed at different parts of the mass audience with some security that, though some of the audience might drift away, or even be offended, they�ll probably be back next week.
There are some problems, here, with regard to how a strip (or television show, or magazine) gets to that level of popularity, and thus that level of security, but the logic is sound. Once again, we�d have to actually test that theory in the real world to see if it were true. It occurs to me, as well, that producers and publishers might institute the LCD problem merely as a product of their own fear of losing their audience, even if the problem didn�t exist.
Second, he points out, counter to points made by Jewett and Lawrence that intelligence is a sign of villainy in popular culture, that both heroes and villains in superhero narratives employ high-technology. �Rather than refusing to face the contemporary world and returning to the older simpler days of the pastoral, many comics use science and technology for their subject matter� (173) in such a way that �The triumph of the heroes reflect [sic] an awareness of the potentialities for good and evil in machines and a faith in man�s ability to control them; that is, a realism and an awareness of the moral dilemma posed by science and technology� (175). Rather than either glorifying or demonizing technology, superhero comics tend to simply use them as a plot device, as modern magic.
Finally, again counter to Jewett and Lawrence�s insistence that the superhero strikes an inherently anti-democratic/individualist ideological stance, Berger points out that �The diminution and humanization of the superheroes [in the 60s] suggest a different conception of the role of the superhero in our culture. We have, in effect, rejected the old, infantile superhero�who represents the strong father who will rescue us (as individuals, who are weak and powerless, and as a society in general) and have accepted responsibility for ourselves and the social order� (171-173). The more flawed and human heroes get, the more like us they are, and therefore the less their very presence takes away our ability to control our own lives. It�s a fascinating point, actually, and brings a very specific political angle to the iconic/specific dimension of fantasy literature. I will have to think about this one more.
Harvey�s �Aesthetics of Comics� is a very old-school bit of criticism that seems to take the job of the critic to determine whether a piece of art is of high quality or not, which is quite alien to my experience! He seems to be taking the position of the reviewer, as opposed to the academic. What�s interesting about that position is that it almost invariably affiliates the reviewer/critic with the artist, and not the audience. If we�re looking at the art from a point of view of trying to make it �good,� then we�re looking over the artist�s shoulder. If we�re looking at it from the point of view of figuring out what it does or says, then we�re generally looking over the reader�s shoulder.
Harvey does make one very good point, though. He insists on defining the medium before entering into an analysis of it because �If critical examination of the comics is to rest on a theoretical foundation of any substance, then that foundation ought to consist of a precise knowledge of what the comics uniquely are� (641). He defines comics in the conventional way, �pictures + words� (as opposed to the Eisner/McCloud �sequential art� definition), and then tries to adjudicate them based on how much they employ both elements in concert with each other.
What he demonstrates, I assume inadvertently, is that how we define the medium has everything to do with how we look at the medium. If we define it in terms of the combination of text and art, then we will see certain kinds of techniques at work. Moore�s habit of repeating innocuous dialogue from previous scene during a violent scene, for example, is a great example of using pictures and words in combination to achieve a certain effect. However, if we follow the �sequential art� definition, we will notice how Moore visually connects panels to each other, such as in Watchmen when Jon Osterman, Dr. Manhattan, without himself moving, flashes through his own memories. The panels consist of Manhattan standing still while the world changes around him. His lack of physical change in the panels is an indication that he sees all time periods simultaneously. Definitions matter because they will direct and deflect our attention in specific directions.
Finally, Coleman�s paper is interesting because, in the process of comparing comics and film, he anticipates McCloud�s definition of comics in Understand Comics. �Detecting movement in the comics is far from automatic, since neither the pages nor the lines thereon actually move or change position. If there is to be the perception of motion, we must play an active role; our eyes must trace contours, follow the paths or rhythms of lines. Thus, it is the movement of our own eyes which enables us to impute movement to comics� (97). Aside from the implication that this process requires conscious effort, which McCloud strongly argues against, these couple of sentences neatly sum up McCloud�s theory of �closure�! The page does not move. Only by comparing one panel to the next can we perceive movement.
Coleman also quite lucidly explains that �comic strips, which arrive in the adult container of a newspaper, are regarded as a less childish mode of expression than self-contained comic books� (89). Strips are regarded as sophisticated because they are packaged with other, ostensibly sophisticated materials. By virtue of being in a newspaper, strips are connected to a strong history of political cartooning, and cartoons that are political, such as Doonesbury or Pogo. Comic books started as collections of strips, thus their packaging implies a reader who doesn�t want, or doesn�t have the capacity to understand, the sophisticated part of the newspaper.
I think I was wrong about Buffy's death and resurrection. She embraces the world after her journey through death, rather than preaching disengagement from the world. I wonder if that marks the difference between religious and secular 'myth'? Campbell wants to embrace the infinite void that is the godhead, while Jewett and Lawrence are very much concerned about the 'here and now.' Worth thinking about.
That divergence marks two distinct reading practises, the literal and the mythic or abstract. Our official institutions teach abstract readings, both educational and religious (except those peculiar religions that preach literal readings, but we'll level them aside). When I say we're "taught to read literally" I dodn't mean by the official institutions but by the genre expectations of our age.
Realism has been the dominant mode of storytelling since (off the top of my head) the 19th century. The mode itself strongly pushes the reader towards literal readings because, after all, the narrative supposedly occurs within the real world; therefore the tools of navigating the real world would be the most effective in understanding such a story.
The wrinkle, of course, is that realism isn't the same as reality. It has its own set of narrative standards that pretend to be real (and I'm thinking here of Todorov on 'verisimilitude'). Either way, the reader thinks that those narrative standards are real, and because of a couple of generations of total media saturation, we've actually started treating real life by the same standards with which we treat realist narrative, but that's a claim that would require verification.
Either way, the way to read realism is the way of common sense, often confused with but not quite the same as logic, whereas the way to read myth and fantasy is the way of symbol and metaphor. Those two areas overlap a lot, but they're not the same thing. Campbell argues that we've lost our sense of symbol and metaphor. Jewett and Lawrence, however, argue that we're simply not aware of our dominant metaphors, and that we employ them on an unconscious level and convinced ourselves that our symbols are the things they represent, a narrative/psychological form of idolatry.
The really weird part, to me, is when that sense of literal reading, with its rigid assumptions that are not consciously perceived, is turned towards fantasy literature. There's a lot of popular fantasy that, despite non-realist elements (magic, super-science, psionics, etc.) is written within the realist emotional/psychological mode to appeal to the audience's expectations of that mode. The success or failure of those kinds of novels is, as with any artistic endevour, based on execution. Sometimes it really works; the new Battlestar Galactica does it beautifully. Sometimes it falls flat on its face, as in any number of anachronistic pseudo-medieval fantasy novels I could name.
What we seem to have lost in our age, outside of our official institutions (education, religion) is the ability to self-consciously read abstractly, using metaphors and symbols that don't behave according to logic, looking at how narratives represent the world, as opposed to simply trying to be a little piece of the world. To try to read fantasy as a piece of the world would render it nonsensical.
The Trekkie fanbase, and a few other truly dedicated fan-communities, are neither religions nor cults because there is no level at which there is any official belief that these events are real.
The individuals might, on some unconscious level, treat them as 'real,' but when cornered, everyone admits it's a TV show. It seems to me that one of the defining points of religion is that it has to, on some level, believe that the spiritual world is 'real' while the temporal world is 'fake.'
As for cults, as I understand it, they're defined as requiring payment to be in them, and having a central leader figure of some kind, a high-priest or a self-appointed deity on Earth. This is all dimly-recalled definitions from a religious studies and a sociology class at SFU, so I'm playing pretty fast and loose, here.
We should study fan communities as something unto themselves that uses elements of the cult, elements of religion, elements of literary readerships, and creates something new. That method is least likely to get it 'wrong.' If we keep trying to stuff fandom into a pre-existing model, we're going to end up forcibly interpreting it in terms of something else, carving the corners off of the square peg so it will fit in the round hole.
That said, I think it's fair to say that fans often treat the text (TV shows, movies, books, etc.) like scripture in a few respects, like memorizing details of the narratives and quoting passages that might apply to a current situation as if they were parables. That use of pop culture as scripture happens commonly with Yoda from Star Wars because his dialogue is specifically constructed to sound like 'ancient wisdom,' so "Do, or do not. There is no 'try,'" is repeated, ad nauseum, as if it were the word of God. "There is no spoon" had a similar resonance, until the sequels to The Matrix turned out to be extremely unpopular, at which point its philosophical power as a quotable text disappeared. We evaluate the power of the philosophy primarily based on the perceived quality of the narrative itself. If it entertains us, if it moves us, we believe its espoused wisdom.
I think internal conflicts that are resolved by embracing difference are a sign of an internally complex text that doesn't have any one meaning. In Trek, Spock and McCoy butt heads regularly, right to the end, but that friendly friction is taken as a source of strength, as is Kirk and Spock's totally divergent behaviour in regards to sex (the penis vs. the brain) and problem solving (the gut vs. the brain). Variety, represented in no small part by the multi-ethnic cast, is constantly championed in Trek.
That's not to say it doesn't have some rather discomforting imperialist overtones, of course, but despite Kirk's domineering presence (he does act as judge and jury of every culture they meet) the 'one true path' that the show advocates for is a self-guided one based on freedom of choice. Kirk's interventions are almost always based on rebelling against an alien presence that controls a society, like the computer Landrew, for example.
As for Moore, Gaiman, and Ellis, none of them have cultish fans in this way, although Sandman comes fairly close. A lot of young women dressed up as Death for a very long time, but half the time, they didn't realize it. It just turned into a 'look' in Goth fashion. But as my supervisor, the esteemed Dr. Douglas Barbour points out, that kind of obsessive behaviour is all but impossible with texts that constantly unwrite themselves, call attention to their own nature as texts, and deconstruct their genres.
Ellis' work is particularly stark about its rejection of standard genres. Less subtle, perhaps, but very powerful. Planetary unwrites the history of the Pulps up through the early days of comics, and evn James Bond. Global Frequency gets about 75% of the way through totally deconstructing the singular hero, but stops short of really blowing it to bits.
The discussion on-line around Civil War has taken the form of that most American political debate does. It treats the Constitution like scripture, and the 'Founding Fathers' like a group of semi-deities.
Although I'd need more research to say, I think that Americans might have a form of secular worship of their political system, which is ironic given that one of the central ideas of their system is a constant libertarian suspicion of their government! Perhaps the ability to hold those contradictory ideas simultaneously is like, for example, the ability for a Catholic to perceive the Trinity as both three and one at the same time? Religion is full of holy paradoxes.
The fan-based discussion about the series that I've seen didn't boil down to "Are you one Captain America's side or Iron-man's side?" A few people responded that way, but very few. Most took on the political dimensions of the question in a very honest way. What would be more safe? Can we really trust the US government to use Iron-man responsibly as just another piece of military hardware? Etc.
Where that argument gets fuzzy, though, is that realist vs. abstract reading we're talking about in the other message. I think the creators of the story are expecting an abstract reading in which the story is about 'privacy vs. civil liberties,' but the details of the story are so concrete that, to me, it begs for a literal reading, 'vigilantism vs. the police state.'
As for Moore and Miller, Watchmen is definitely all about these kinds of questions. The heroes are forced to either join up with the government or give up their masks in the 1970s (an interesting parallel to the HUAC in which comics themselves were forced to take on self-censorship). Once the US governmentt has control of Dr. Manhattan and The Comedian, they become just more parts of the American arsenal.
The really interesting thing about Watchmen, though, is the strong implication that the way to solve the problem is to just get rid of the superheroes altogether, which is an option that mainstream superhero comics can even contemplate. Civil War will almost undoubtedly end with Cap and Iron Man joining forces to stop some country-wide threat, thus convincing the public that they're necessary, and giving the politicians no motivation to outlaw them. I suspect we'll see a very similar ending to the new Superman film this summer, which brings up some very compelling ideas (Superman returns after four or fives years in space to find that the world has grown out of him, and Lois has a child by another man!), but will probably avoid actually coming to a conclusion by introducing a suitably distracting threat to human life.
There's some fascinating research that's floating around the last Presidential election that shows that when directly confronted with their own mortality, in an advertisement featuring a pack of wolves for example, people stop thinking either collectively or rationally. They start thinking merely of their own survival. Therefore, in a small way, introducing those kinds of threats to characters with whom the audience identifies is a great way of distracting an audience away from an ideological problem that might only be soluble by abandoning the narrative, and this gets back to Moore. He abandoned not the narrative, but the genre. Marvel and DC can't do that. It would be economic suicide; therefore their only option is to bring in a giant threat that will distract us and lead the question essentially unanswered.
Jewett, Robert and John Shelton Lawrence. The American Monomyth. Garden City, USA: Anchor Press/Doubleday. 1977.
For my one-hundredth post on this here blog, I present my concluding thoughts on Jewett and Lawrence's The American Monomyth: they can�t seem to get a grip on sexuality in media at all, and their insistence on individualism means that they render their own stated problem insoluble.
The insistence that American heroes renounce sex seems like an idea they struck upon and felt they needed to conclude, despite scant evidence of it. There is a long commentary on Playboy that makes the insightful observation that in it, and other porn, the women are aggressively sexual while the men seem uninterested in sex at all. J&L take this tendency as a kind of sexual renunciation, transforming male sexual desire into a service men grant to women, thus creating another kind of rescuer/redeemer figure. �Men appear to be doing women a favor, giving them something they desperately need, rather than acting upon their own freely expressed impulses. It is puzzling that the quest for honest male pleasure should go so bafflingly astray in an era that has unshackled itself from the archaic notion that sex is sinful� (66). �If Playboy males have no sexual desires and no aggressive traits, this proves they have angelic purity� (69).
The desire to bend over backwards to demonstrate sexual renunciation is palpable in these pages. The aggression on the part of women in porn is, as they tentatively admit, part of the fantasy, a role-reversed world in which men don�t have to constantly chase women and convince them to have sex. Within that fantasy is a perceived power reversal, as well. If men have the responsibility to do the chasing and the convincing, then women have the power to refuse the attempt. In a world where women are the chasers, men have the power. Now, this model that attributes sexual power to women may not be realistically accurate, but that�s not the point. It�s a very common perception amongst young men who don�t get the sexual attention that they want; therefore it�s presented in Playboy and porn in general. It�s an inherently sexual fantasy of a world of women who desperately want a man, any man (meaning the viewer qualifies) to satisfy them. Jewett and Lawrence testify to all of these things, and yet still insist that it is a form of sexual renunciation, which, to use their word, is baffling.
That said, the last two chapters of the book are much clearer, and must more convincing than any others. The important detail, as in so many cases, is their implied belief in the power of the equality of individuals, through democratic political structures, rather than an �litism of powerful hero/saviour/redeemers. They even lament, accurately, that the element missing from the American monomyth, which by the end of the book is a force of ignorance and indoctrination, is the ability of the hero to be reintegrated into the community, as in Campbell�s monomyth.
They don�t seem to make the elemental connection, though, that Campbell�s argument is that the monomyth doesn�t argue for individualism, despite the presence of the one, true hero. He credits the mythic audience with the ability, indeed the propensity, to not read the stories literally. Jewett and Lawrence seem convinced that the American audience can�t help but read the American monomyth in terms so literal that they will either directly emulate the hero, the so-called �Werther effect,� or emulate the powerless �innocent bystanders� who have no ability, or responsibility, to solve the problems of their communities themselves, and instead wait passively for the arrival of a redeemer figure.
They give far too little credit to the intelligence of the audience to read/watch myths subversively and to interpret it abstractly, so I don�t buy their basic argument, but I find it curious that they miss the solution to their very own problem: how do we get people to see through the American monomyth and act to protect their own communities and solve the problems that arise from within them? They provide the answer but seem blissfully unaware of it: �Democracy has its own necessary myths concerning [�] the efficacy of individual reason� (225). Jewett and Lawrence consistently take for granted their belief that individualism is vitally important to their crusade (a mode of argument that they deride!) against the tendencies of the American monomyth to argue for heroic �litism. They never seem to consider what Campbell argues for over 400 pages, that individualism is part of the cause of �litism. Acting for the good of the community is difficult in an ideological space in which I value myself above all else. They seem to have become convinced by their own construction. They build up democracy as the ultimate counter-force to �litism, but load their version of democracy with �litism from the start. The result is that they build their own inescapable conundrum.
We have my friend Jocelyn Read to thank for finding this wonderful link. It'll only take a second, and it's hilariously on-the-nose. Philip Sandifer, another comics scholar, describes it perfectly as "masterfully discomforting."
This mornings CBC Radio 1 show "The Current" had a short but interesting round-table discussion about Marvel's newest 'big summer cross-over event' series Civil War, in which the US government is on the edge of passing laws requiring all active superheroes to divulge their secret identities and register with the government.
You can see a short description of the segment (scroll down to "Superheroes Panel"), and you can also download the segment (although I'm ashamed to admit that my national public radio station uses Real Player audio files... I feel dirty).
In the discussion were Joe Quesada, Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics, Peter Coogan, a comics scholar and e-colleague of mine, and Laurel Bowman, a Classics professor from UVic. I have some thoughts on the matter myself...
Civil War is an interesting attempt to address a current political issue over at Marvel. It's working and it's not, in different ways. It's been constructed to contain a discussion about privacy vs. safety (and you can go ahead and attach the hackneyed phrase "... in a post-9/11 world" to that sentence, and any others like it), and some creators have managed to do some very interesting things with that. JMS's Amazing Spider-man went to Washington and was part of a congressional Q&A, so they were actually discussing legal precedent and American history.
The only problem is that it's not actually a privacy vs. safety issue. Instead, it strikes at the heart of the superhero 'doctrine' (if you will). The story isn't about keeping tabs on everyone, just the people who run around viciously beating those criminals that they deem to be dangerous enough to deserve it. Judging from Quesada's side of the interview, I don't think that he realises that, which is interesting. Civil War, like a lot of superhero stories, tries and/or pretends to be about 'street-level' Americans, but ends up being about the clash of 'great' powers and 'important' people.
Now, in as much as superheroes have always made an attempt to represent us street-level people metaphorically, they might have some leeway to stand for us, but they're still more powerful and doing something that we don't, so the political commentary in this case is a little off the mark.
If they really wanted to push the privacy vs. safety issue, they should have superheroes going around America removing wire-taps. Watching Captain America stare down an NSA agent on a mission to kidnap and interrogate a Muslim American would be much more 'on the nose.' I'm afraid that Civil War might have pushed so far past the reader's political situation that it only just barely applies anymore.
That said, the on-line chatter regarding the series has been fascinating, and it's clearly provoking thought, discussion, and debate amongst fans. "Who's side are you on?" is a very hard question to ask. It requires that you not only decide which world you're going to answer the question from, ours or the Marvel universe, but also untangle a very complex set of assumptions and political ideas about whom you trust.
In America, it's not uncommon to espouse a healthy distrust of government; it's supposed to be a very libertarian state, after all. The reality doesn't quite match that, but the idea is very deeply-rooted in many American minds. From that point of view, slapping laws onto citizens who are 'clearly' (a word that always makes me sceptical) improving the world by protecting others, is state interference, and exactly the kind of thing that Americans revolted against (or so goes the logic). "How long will it be," asks Captain America in the first issue, "before the government decides who the supervillains are?" The implication of that question is not just domestic, either. How long will it be, really, before Cap. is dropped into Iran and told to assassinate the King? How long will it be before the Avengers are put on duty protecting oil wells in Iraq? How long will it be before superheroes are just another military resources used for political ends?
A just as apt question, though, is "How did superheroes earn the right to make that decision in the first place?" If we analyse the doctrine of the superhero, we'll see that they usually intervene only at moments of imminent threat to human life, or occasionally property. I can't say I disagree with that. It is perfectly moral to pull the baby carriage out of the way of the on-coming bus. However, you have to ask what qualifies as an imminent threat. Is cutting off the power to a little old lady in California enough of an imminent physical threat that it justifies beating up the regional VP of Enron? If not, why not?
On the flip side of that problem, in cases of mere theft, and not physical attacks, is viciously beating, for example, a purse-snatcher a justifiable act? Urban police forces often debate about the safety issues around 'hot pursuit' through populated areas. There is a parallel to Spider-man swinging after a pick-pocket in New York.
This line of thinking is why I say that Civil War isn't about civil liberties but about the superhero convention itself, and I'm not, in hindsight, surprised to see that. The more comics writers examine the genre in a realistic way, the more they're going to come to the conclusion that it rests on extremely thin ideological grounds. In Daredevil comics, right now, Matt Murdock is in jail, ostensibly just for being Daredevil. Unless you move your narrative mode to the level of the icon, as is more the case in DC's comics, you run the risk of revealing your genre to be at least highly questionable, doing as much harm as good, and at the most inherently unethical. However, unless you honestly examine that genre in its ethical dimensions, which is more the case at Marvel right now with books like Civil War and Squadron Supreme, then you're just wilfully ignorant, possibly even hypocritical.
The most common accusation made about fantasy literature, which includes science fiction, superheroes, anything that�s just plain impossible, is that it�s a way to escape reality, and that anyone who seeks it out must not have the will or strength or ability to cope with reality. That just can�t be true for the simple reason that in fantasy literature, we don�t leave reality, we take it with us, often in very thinly-disguised forms. Fantasy is not an escape from the real world; it�s a replication of the real world but with details changed.
Tolkien called fantasy writing �sub-creating� in his essay �On Fairy Stories� (one of his very few works of literary criticism; he as too busy writing Lord of the Rings). To him, creating a fantasy world was an act of creation that was under God�s creation (hence the �sub-� part), so building fantastic worlds was an homage to God. If we alter that to a secular version, we find a whole different way of looking at fantasy. Creating a fantasy world requires a creativity and an imagination that is not to be dismissed, but when all�s said and done, that imagination is the product of exposure to mundane ideas here on Earth.
Tolkien�s Middle-Earth is, as anyone familiar with European mythology knows, the result of a lifetime of reading Medieval literature of Northern Europe, but also observing the world around him as it changed over the course of the early 20th century, being aware of international politics, and (though he denied it in his lifetime), the violent interruption of his life that was the Great War, and then the Second World War, as well. All of that stuff was allowed to mulch, percolate, and take on a life of its own inside his head. The same is true of almost any writer of fantasy. They take all the things they�ve seen in the real world, including a lot of other literature, of course, and they recombine and reformulate it into a narrative.
It would seem to be nearly impossible for a fantasy story to not be about the �real world.� I don�t mean to claim that all stories have equal amounts of narrative density or depth. Some of them are downright devoid of meaning (ever watch old Lost In Space episodes? the mind wobbles), and some of them are so rich you feel slightly drunk after reading them (and we�re back to Tolkien!), but they can�t help but be reflections of the world and the artist, who is a product of that world. Lost In Space, for example, brought the cultural values of 1960s America into the distant future and alien worlds, including the fact that Mrs. Robinson did the laundry by hauling a washing machine out of the ship and did the folding out in the open! I don�t mean to dismiss genius or vision, but even geniuses and visionaries live in the same world we do.
The interesting part about these fantastic creations, which are rearranged and re-emphasised reflections of the real world, is that because they�ve been rendered into fantasy, it�s very easy for a reader to overlay them onto reality. That sounds crazy, I know, but I do have a point. When we render reality into fantasy, certain social or personal situations for example, we are effectively re-writing reality, and usually to solve some kind of problem. This practise can take the form of a thought experiment, puzzling out how people might react to a situation that has never happened. It can be a pleasure fantasy, imaging a world that is better than ours, imagining characters that we�d like to emulate or know.
It can also take a situation in the real world that is unsatisfying for some reason, and render it satisfying. It can take a political situation that is untenable or morally irresolvable, and resolve it by altering the situation, or even just ignoring the kinds of logistics that keep us from solving our problems in the real world. Thus, a fantastic story that seems an awful lot like the terrorist attacks on New York, but in which the surrogate Americans react swiftly, reduce the loss of life, and not only catch but make peace with their attackers (season four of Enterprise), creates an alternative version of events that the viewer can substitute, not on a literal level, but on an emotional one, for the reality. James Burke, whose �new rhetoric� I find otherwise fairly boring, calls this �symbolic action,� and it�s an extremely useful concept. We read literature and feel as if we�ve experienced the events that have taken place, which can feel like action even when there is none.
This effect can be used in positive ways, allowing a reader to feel someone else�s point of view, or experience an emotional epiphany vicariously. In the previous example, however, Enterprise didn�t offer a way to understand world politics, or to resolve the problem after watching the show. It just offered a version of events that were palatable, that nudged the viewer to see the events from a particular point of view: �we� (Americans) were the victims, unethical acts (torture, theft, murder) were necessary to protect ourselves, and in the end, our survival proves that we did the right thing. This, I want to stress, is not an escape. An escape would be to deny the events took place. This is something else. It is way to rewrite reality, much as a convenient version of history might do.
Jewett, Robert and John Shelton Lawrence. �Trekkie Religion and the Werther Effect.� The American Monomyth. Garden City, USA: Anchor Press/Doubleday. 1977.
This book is frustrating me. Jewett and Lawrence seem to come up with interesting ideas to apply to pop culture, but then apply them with the grace of drunken rhinoceri. I this case, we have the idea that Star Trek fandom behaves like a religion, and that there is precedent for the fan-to-faithful slip that happens in fan communities.
They argue that Trek is like a religion and use its fanatical fan-base as evidence. The fans� enthusiasm and passion for the show, combined with what J&L argue are the show�s mythic qualities (in Chapter 1), makes it effectively a religion, but one that is wrapped-up in a candy-coating of secularism and science. In my horror at their factual errors and free-wheelin� method, from the previous chapter, I didn�t give them the credit they�re due for pointing out something very important about Star Trek. It is a vehicle for American values, though of a particular kind.
�Projecting traditional American values and repressions into imaginary planets where their workability can be fantasized apparently enhances believability. What has failed in American experience is nevertheless affirmed to be �true� because it is depicted operating successfully in outer space� (32-33). Which is to say that Trek enacts American values, such as isolationism in the Prime Directive, Imperialism in Kirk�s constant meddling with alien worlds, sexual Puritanism in Spock�s asceticism, sexual revolution and �free love� in Kirk�s dalliances with alien women, etc. It�s important to note that there is nothing necessarily malevolent here. Most art carries the politics and ethics of its culture. We should not condemn that practise, though we might want to condemn the actual politics or ethics that are carried. This distinction is important!
What Trek does is project those American values out into the universe as if they were literally universal. As in most science fiction, the human race comes to represent the country or culture of the creators. In American sci-fi, �Earth� means �America� and �human� means �American,� and so too with British or Japanese science fiction. The home culture is projected out to the whole race, and, in Trek or Doctor Who for example, that race goes around the universe teaching people how to be �better� (I.e., more American, more British, etc.).
This practise is nothing particularly new. It�s just another iteration of the faulty universal, but science fiction and fantasy do it in within imaginary worlds so that those values can actually be universal, if the artists depict them that way, thus creating a narrative that is internally accurate, but still ideologically effective. Vulcans are Puritanical. There�s no disputing that fact because that�s the way they�re written. They do, by their presence and the fact that the show glorifies their practises, represent a kind of argument for asceticism and rejection of a certain kind of sexuality. Of course, there are counter-examples within the show, as well. Kirk�s sexuality reprents the exact opposite of Vulcan commitment sans sex; he�s is passionate and lusty, but never commits to any woman, only to his ship and his duty. In either case, though, SF/fantasy can side-step certain obvious objections to the practises they represent by saying �it�s not real,� which it isn�t! However, even if �it�s not real,� it can still carry a very real payload of ideological content.
However, at no time in the chapter do J&L actually define �religion.� They point out fan emulation of redeemer figures, like Kirk and Spock, and they claim ritualistic behaviour without actually referring to any. They compare fan practises with those of �mystery religions,� but then fail to define them, either, though from context, they are presumably cultish organisations that we, the readers, are supposed to take to be �bad� in some way. But they never say exactly how religion works, therefore the comparison to Trekkies is quite empty.
They do, however, define something they call the Werther Effect, in reference to an 18th-century novel by Geothe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which a young man commits suicide when he can�t have the woman he loves. The book was so popular that several fans committed suicide because of their own unrequited loves, and either left notes referring to the novel, or had the book on their persons when they died. This, they claim, is a historical parallel to the kind of devotion found among Trekkies, and they name that devotion �The Werther Effect.�
They define it thusly: �In the Werther effect a member of the audience (a) experiences a work of fantasy within a secular context that (b) helps to shape the viewer�s sense of what is real and desirable, in such a way that (c) the viewer takes actions consistent with the vision inspired by the interaction between his own fantasy and popular entertainments. A Werther effect is the form of voluntary behavior alteration produced by interaction with a powerful artifact of popular culture. It is a religious type of ethical scheme within a nonreligious context, occurring regardless of the intent of the artifact�s creators. It characteristically embodies a redefinition of the boundary between fact and fantasy� (36)
This definition of the Werther Effect, and its ties to religious emulation of heroic characters, is, first, very similar to Barthe�s definition of �myth� as �depoliticized speech,� communication that pretends to have no ideological content as a way to hide its ideological content, and deliver it in such a way that the reader/viewer has his metaphorical guard down. The SF/fantasy �it�s not real� defense is a great example of Barthean myth. It�s a semiotic Trojan horse (which is really a Greek horse, as Bernard of Yes, Minister explained, so many years ago).
Second, though, the Werther Effect is really just the implicitly bad or superficial kind of myth interpretation that Campbell describes. J&L�s examples of people changing their behaviour are all very literal. Men and boys emulate the lead characters: �A sixteen-year-old youth resembling Leonard Nimoy has had his hair cut and his eyebrows shaped in slanted Vulcan style. He almost always wears a blue velour shirt [�]� (33). Women tend towards not wanting to emulate the characters, but to have sex with them: �One enterprising group of girls tried black-magic rituals to make their Star Trek heroes fall in love with them� (34).
The myth reading that J&L are attributing to Trekkies is pretty shallow. It is what Cambell called the �Do thus� model, as opposed to the �Know this� model (319). It is mere ritual rather than deep understanding. Considering how indebted The American Monomyth is to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I expect Jewett and Lawrence to not just make up names for things that Campbell already named. They�re perfectly free to dispute Campbell�s construction in order to deconstruct it, but they don�t do that. Again, alas.
The chapter essentially argues that fandom ought to be studied like a religion in order to draw attention to it and make a point that I entirely agree with: �The complex interaction between individual imaginations and popular artifacts should [�] be brought to consciousness and subjected to criticism. One must avoid both Puritanical ban and the bubble-gum cop-out� (36).
J&L are essentially talking about the twin poles of cultural studies, the �pop culture will destroy us all� model�which assumes a populace that can be moved to violence at the drop of a hat�and the �pop culture has no effect whatsoever� model�which assumes a monolithic populace that�s incapable of change at all. At both extremes, we assume that the mass audience is a bunch of morons. I don�t think Jewett and Lawrence have fully avoided enacting the same mistaken logic in their book, but I do applaud the effort. The book�s heart is in the right place, anyway.
What they�ve really failed to recognise is that fandom is a thing unto itself, a cultural practise that is not exactly without precedent, at least not in the 20th century. No analogy to religion is necessary to describe it. It is a thing unto itself. It should be studied in its own right. Certainly, there are similarities between fandom and religious practise, but there are also similarities to minority culture behaviour, and many conceptual techniques left over from literary analysis. This might sound like my solution to everything, but instead of trying to slot this practise into a pre-existing category, why not just admit that it�s a permutation of a bunch of activities, practises, methods, and concepts combined in a new way? We need neither find an old category, nor create a new one. We simply look at the intersection of all of those practises as having, by their existence, defined a cultural space in which fan communities already live.
There now, was that so hard?
Some follow-up thoughts from yesterday on the creation of patriotic mythic heroes, and on Buffy's return from the dead.
Campbell's (I think it's fair to say) condemnation of the cult of the individual is probably the most politically useful aspect of the book. The casting of the state as an individual is a common mental slip, like trying to use psychology to analyse an entire species (although Campbell does eventually back off of psych, which is a smart move considering his subject).
Embodying a state within an individual, and an Althusserian capital-S 'Subject' at that (I.e., a patriotic superhero), is all part of the process of turning a nation into a person, thus endowing the nation with the (perceived) freedoms of the person, and yet somehow removing all of the requisite responsibilities (which is ironic, given Stan Lee's most famous contribution to pop philosophy, "With great power..."). I haven't quite figured out how that last part is rationalised yet.
And then there's Buffy's literal return from the dead. I'm not sure what to make of that yet, although I suspect someone has beaten both of us to the punch! Her resurrection is unwanted, and she doesn't spread all that much wisdom when she gets back, but we do get the awesomely powerful message in "Once more, with feeling!" that "The hardest thing in this world is to live in it," which sounds an awful lot like the 'veil of tears' imagery we get from almost all world religions. Although that message comes from Dawn, we could hand-wave it into a holistic part of Buffy's narrative, and thereby show that her journey, if not she herself, eventually spreads that message.
One of the really smart things Campbell does is stress that the hero is not to be simply emulated. We can't just ask "What would Jesus do?" (so to speak), but "Why would Jesus do that?" He (Campbell) is at base advocating that people should simply pay a lot more attention to myths, and read them a lot less literally. I've had this thought myself, on several occasions.
If we read myths--Classical, contemporary, whatever--as realist drama (as we've been trained to do, by our literary institutions), we end up reading about people who kill, maim, rape, betray, and generally act extremely badly to each other all the time. Read literally, the story of Job is bloody horrifying. But if we read Job as a signifier for a principle of Christian thought, it all comes together. The same could be said of the Story of Abraham and Isaac (so wonderfully rendered by Leonard Cohen!). The idea that God would actually force a father to kill his son is atrocious, literally an atrocity, but if we look for the abstraction, then we can find a meaning that is useful to the everyday life. Similar examples abound in Classical myth, where they were a-killin' and a-rapin' all the damn time.
Now, this leads to a very important question: does the contemporary fantasy/sci-fi audience read realistically or mythically? Do they take the situations a models for action, or food for thought (for lack of a better phrase)? If it's the latter, and I'll have to find some way to find out, then we know why fantasy nerds are some of the gentlest, most non-violent people in the world, and why it's really difficult to be a racist Star Trek fan (if Kirk's hitting on green chicks with funky ears, what's the big deal about a black guy dating your sister?).
Jewett, Robert and John Shelton Lawrence. ��Star Trek� and the Bubble-gum Fallacy� The American Monomyth. Garden City, USA: Anchor Press/Doubleday. 1977.
Continuing in my series of vicious lambastings of Jewett and Lawrence�s The American Monomyth, we now dive into the first chapter.
They report, but do not cite, casual fans of Star Trek referring to it as �bubble-gum,� and contrast that attitude against the �fanaticism� (1) of dedicated fans. They also cite a sociological study by one Herbert J. Gans that seems to simultaneously argue that �people pay much less attention to the media and [�] would not think of applying its content to their own lives� (Gans in J&L 2), and that �popular culture does not harm either high culture, the people who prefer it, or the society as a whole� (Gans in J&L 3), that �If the media had as significant an effect on aggressive behavior as the critics and some researchers charge, a constantly increasing tide of violence should have manifested itself in America since the emergence of mass media� (Gans in J&L 3), but also that it �has played a useful role in the process of enabling ordinary people to become individuals [� and] offer[s] ideas to the audience which it can apply to its own situation� (Gans in J&L 3).
On the face of it, that combination of quotations seems pretty damning, but J&L consistently misquote Campbell, so they�ve already lost the benefit of the doubt with me. Based on the few glimpses of Gans� paper that we get, I can see a way in which the argument is consistent. His claim could be that though audiences don�t pay as close attention as critics, and though violence in media doesn�t cause violence in the real world, it has other effects on and uses to that popular audience. They might take up the media�s situations on a less-than-conscious level. They might take up only the general thrust, rather than the minutia that we literary critics are so fond of. There might, even for reasons unknown, simply be no causal chain between fictional and real violence. These statements could all be true, and accurate.
Regardless, J&L arrive at a somewhat useful concept, the �bubble-gum fallacy,� which �paradoxically ascribes trivial and instrumental qualities to popular culture materials,� and �obscures [its] mythic qualities,� the result of which is that it �discourages any investigation of the power of such materials to shape consciousness and thus indirectly influence behavior� (4). Their quotations do not quite demonstrate that Gans� paper did any such thing, but, nevertheless, the complaint is valid. Such a claim would be fallacious.
The rest of the paper doesn�t come back to that fallacy, nor does it actually demonstrate that there is a causal connection between media and behaviour, even though making such an argument would be as easy as citing the effects of either advertising or propaganda, which amount to the same thing in their effects and practises. They do, however, name a few of the specific features of the so-called American monomyth. The first is the �saga,� the �defense against malevolent attacks upon innocent communities� (12), a motif that�s not exactly unique to American adventure fiction, nor does it contradict Campbell. The second is �sexual renunciation,� in which the hero �renounce[s] previous sexual ties� and �avoid entanglements and temptations that inevitably arise� from �his trials� (12).
The example they use is Captain Kirk, which is somewhat odd, considering that he is particularly known for having many and varied sexual encounters with many and varied alien women, and doing so in about two out of three episodes. Several years ago, there was a comedic tagline used on message boards that read �Captain Kirk: Any Race. Any place.� Other American heroes are similarly known for their bed-hopping. Commander James Bond, �007,� a British character but long ago subsumed into American culture, sleeps with at least two women per film, and often ends up killing one of them (the �bad� one often precedes the �good� one, though there are variations). American heroes do not renounce sex; they renounce commitment. We find total sexual abstinence only in stories that are aimed at consumption by children, post-CCA superhero comics, for example.
We find this cross-culturally, too. In The Saint, a British television series, Simon Templar has girlfriends; it was aimed at adults. In Doctor Who, also British, the Doctor is all but asexual; it was aimed at kids. The Doctor has shown some degree of sexuality in the new series produced by Russel T. Davies, famous in Britain for producing both Queer as Folk and Casanova, but that�s arguably because the new series aren�t actually aimed at kids. Finally, we find renunciation of sexuality in major mythic heroes outside of the United States, such as Jesus and the Buddha, who, taken as pair, would seem to constitute a fairly powerful counter-example.
The last quality of the American monomyth is �redemption,� �selfless crusading to redeem others� (15), which would seem to be very similar to Campbell�s monomythic �return,� in which the hero comes back to the community in order to spread the wisdom he has discovered. Admittedly, there is enough difference that we might call attention to an American variety of the �return� trope. The American hero seems to spread redemption simultaneously to the actions required by his trials, and Campbell�s hero spreads it as a result of his trials, but Campbell constantly calls attention to the vast flexibility in his system. It just doesn�t seem different enough to deserve its own, all-new category.
Finally, the paper addresses the pseudo-science of Star Trek, and makes a mixed-bag of claims about them. First, it dresses up the concept of suspension of disbelief in new terms, using Gene Roddenberry�s phrase, �believability factor� (Roddenberry in J&L 18) to describe the illusion of technological realism as it is achieved through visual complexity. The characters on the bridge of the Enterprise should be as �efficient as the blinking lights and instrumentation around them� (18). J&L point out, accurately, that the function of this veneer of scientific accuracy is to suspend our disbelief, to actually refute objections to scientific accuracy.
Unfortunately, they take that claim one dumb-ass step further, claiming that �While exactitude and gadgetry are parts of science, they do not constitute the degree of scientific objectivity capable of calling one�s own myths into question� (19), and quoting Karl Popper, who states that �what we call �science� is differentiated from the older myths, not by being something different from a myth, but by being accompanied by a second order tradition�that of critically discussing
the myth� (Popper in J&L 19). They call this particular kind of suspension of disbelief the �myth of mythlessness� (italics are original 17), claiming that Star Trek�s �implicit claim to be antimythical and purely scientific is itself a myth�that is, a set of unconsciously held, unexamined premises� (17).
I suppose it�s typical of a scientist to think that myths are not discussed traditionally, despite the long-standing tradition of scriptural interrogation within Jewish culture, for example, or the active debate within the Catholic Church. I suppose it�s also typical to ascribe total selflessness to scientific research, despite the planet-sized egos involved in it, or, as a historical example, how long the scientific community, including Einstein, clung to Newtonian physics despite the clear evidence that it didn�t work at the quantum level. It�s typical, but disappointing nonetheless. J&L have an interesting point, here, that science-fiction uses fallacious science to create a sense of realism that is, in fact, just another generic feature, just another part of the myth, but they burry it in inaccurate claims.
As an example of a scientifically ridiculous episode, J&L offer up the infamous �Spock�s Brain� and ask �Why doesn�t the audience discern the transparency of the myth of mythlessness in an episode like this? Why do science students desert their labs or such Amazonian fare?� (18) The answers are simple and obvious. First, audiences did and do see through that particular episode. It is known among fans as one of the worst of the series, and that�s a tough contest to win! Second, those science students might very well desert their labs because the episodes are so scientifically inaccurate. J&L seem blissfully unaware that audiences occasionally watch television out of a sense of irony or kitsch. Contemporary viewers of shows like Star Trek, Kung Fu, or Batman were entirely aware of how silly the shows were. That�s why they watched. To miss this possibility is to assume that the audience is capable of only the most literal and superficial interpretations of popular culture.
There are three more papers in this book that are pertinent to me, another on Star Trek, and one on superheroes, and I�ll read them, and I probably won�t bother picking them apart the way I have here because there�s seems no reason to bother. This book is, so far, a total misreading of Campbell, an interesting idea executed without any grace or critical rigour.
Jewett, Robert and John Shelton Lawrence. "Introduction." The American Monomyth. Garden City, USA: Anchor Press/Doubleday. 1977.
I can�t avoid sounding arrogant when I say this, but I am astounded at the lack of basic critical integrity in this book. I�ve read the forward and the first chapter, and they contain multiple factual errors that, to say the least, don�t fill me with confidence, but the content of the chapter almost seems like a text-book example of a misguided attempt to redeem popular culture�s importance by declaring that its audience is a bunch of mouth-breathing idiots.
Jewett and Lawrence seem determined to read Campbell�s Hero with a Thousand Faces in the exact opposite way it�s presented. I grant them the right to reinterpret him as they see fit, but they have to provide some reason for their readers to agree with them, and so far their reinterpretations seem like the product of lazy reading. As I said just earlier today, there are some very serious methodological problems with Hero, but J&L�s claims about the book are wildly inaccurate from almost the first moment they mention it.
�In [the book], Joseph Campbell depicted the archetypal plot of heroic action in traditional myths. The plot of the classical monomyth, as he called it, is as follow [�]�(xix, italics are original). He didn�t call it the �classical� monomyth. First, it�s a contradiction in terms; if there�s more than one, then it�s not a monomyth, is it? Second, his whole point is that the monomyth is a product of the universal character of the unconscious identified by Freudian and Jungian psychology; it�s been proven by psychologists that that model is not, in fact, universal, but Campbell�s claim is made clear in his introduction. Either J&L simply didn�t pay that much attention to the book, which honestly could be the case, or they invent this distinction to further their own critical effort.
Which is to say that J&L�s book professes an American monomyth without much addressing the concept of the monomyth, at least not in the introduction, which is where you�d sort of expect to see that. If they wanted to challenge or deconstruct the notion of a singular mythic super-structure, especially one based on Freudian/Jungian psychology, then they could have done so without too much trouble.
They could argue, for example, that though Campbell�s monomyth seems accurate in reference to Classical, Ancient, Christian, Buddhist, Chinese, and Indian mythology, as well as pre-contact aboriginal mythic structures of the Americas, Australasia, and Africa, American popular mythology behaves differently. They could argue that Campbell�s theories gloss over national character in general, and simply declare that their book fills in that gap for America, and other such books are possible in other countries/cultures. They could argue that Freud and Jung were simply on crack, which isn�t as tough as it sounds. All of these would have been perfectly legitimate ways to turn Campbell�s monomyth, clearly argued as a universal, into fodder for a national myth for pop culture in the US. They don�t do that, though. Instead, they misquote Campbell and coin the oxymoronic term �American monomyth.� Alas.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press. 1949.
The fame of Joseph Campbell outside �the academy� is almost undoubtedly because of George Lucas. He uses Campbell�s book to construct Star Wars. The premise of the book is pretty simple. All of the great myths, most of them religious, but including fairy tales and folk legends, follow a formula. There are variations, of course, but the basic structure is always the same, even though it might be a little mangled by a particular narrative. Basically, �separation-initiation-return [�] might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth (30), or in less abstract terms �A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men� (30).
Although the book�s argument is that all myths follow this structure, the major mythic heroes covered are Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna, who take up about two-thirds of the examples in the text, though of the three, Buddha is the most common example. The other third of the book takes up many of what Campbell somewhat apologetically calls �primitive� myths (I.e., those told by brown people who didn�t �discover� gun powder), Jewish mythology, including the Kabala, and Classical/Ancient texts of the West (I.e., white people who hadn�t yet �discovered� gun powder).
The whole book is quite dismissive of colonised peoples and utterly fails to acknowledge the suspect nature of the exclusively European or American sources he uses for understanding the mythology of colonised peoples, either for reasons of translation or cultural presumption on the part of the researchers. However, it consistently places those local myths and legends on the same level with the �great� tales of the Buddha or Krishna. Though Post-Colonial critics could, and probably have, found no end of methodological faults with the book, Campbell�s most basic point is that these myths, all of them, tell essentially the same story over and over again. As such, no one can be �better� or �higher� than any other. The structure of his argument occasionally betrays a greater sense of reverence for one or another set of myths, specifically the Buddhist and the Hindu, but the book attempts, with great success, to show that equal reverence is due to all, and it deserves some recognition for that. Writing in American in the late 1940s, this book puts Jesus on the same level of importance as the gods of the Maori or the Lakota.
His treatment of gender is less successful, but has a similar attempt made. In his language, he occasionally refers to the hero as �he or she,� but the overwhelming majority of the time, the hero is distinctly male and his journey and challenges are distinctly geared towards a male hero, including his encounter with a lover or queen who is an emissary of the divine and his conduit to it. That said, once again, the argument attempts to counter-act that gender presumption, at least to some degree, by arguing that the godhead is almost universally conceived of as a combination of masculine and feminine qualities. Though both genders stay �in their places� in this book, the ultimate secrets of the universe and of total enlightenment require abandoning gender entirely, though it could still be argued that by going from �male� straight to �divinely sexless� neatly removes femininity from the divine experience. Again, though, writing in 1949, we must give the book some credit for attempting, with less success than with racial assumptions, push the idea that femininity is inherently part of the divine, and even revealing the existence of things like hermaphroditic godheads, of which there are many in the traditions of the world.
Those issues aside, it�s a remarkable book. It attempts to find a universal set of generic features of myth and then analyse that meta-narrative, the genre itself, as the collective dreams of the human race. It�s all a bit too Freudian for my tastes, mind you, and it never quite argues exactly how we can be sure that it�s appropriate to analyse myths using the tools of psychoanalysis, essentially equating them with dreams; it even admits that they�re not because �they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary, their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as a powerful picture language for the communications of traditional wisdom� (256), and thus the point is left dangling.
But within that logical gap is the most interesting aspect of the book, especially considering the book I�m reading right after it, The American Monomyth. The hero�s ultimate goal, according to Campbell, is to embrace the infinity of the university and lose himself, in the language of psychoanalysis, to extinguish his own ego. �The gods and icons are not ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only pedagogical lures: their function, to care the unadroit intellect away from its concrete cluster of facts [�]� (180). Myth, like all literature, involves the use of subjective, intuitive, and non-logical elements to achieve metaphysical wisdom, as opposed to what Campbell calls the �cluster of facts,� theology and, at the extreme, science.
�As he [the hero] crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos� (190). The hero gives up his power to annihilate the self, while simultaneously evoking more and more power, against his enemies and (in an meta-narrative sense) even of his enemies, until that power destroys reality, as well. The hero�s narrative is a demonstration that reality doesn�t exist. It�s a set of symbols that can lead us to the truth: reality itself is an illusion. Once the hero learns this, usually by symbolically dying (crossing into the void, as Buddha does, or dying, as Jesus does), he can return to our illusory world and spread the truth, much like a Neitzschean �bermensch.
But Campbell also repeatedly points out that the hero�s journey isn�t like a recipe for making a cake, �the lesson being not �Do thus and be good,� but �Know this and be God� (319, italics are mine). At moments like this, I can�t help but read Campbell�s interpretation of the monomyth as distinctly Buddhist in its implications. None of us can actually be Jesus, even if we wanted to, and to equate ourselves with God would be blasphemy, but we can aspire to achieve what is sometimes referred to as �Buddhahood,� if we can find within ourselves the same enlightenment. The odds are fairly steep, a Buddha comes into the world once very thousand years or so, but still, it�s possible. Becoming God, then, would not seem to be a commonly-conceived Christian goal.
But the real point, the punch line, of the book, is that the monomythic hero�s purpose is to arise from the community, face his many tests, and then return to the community with a boon for everyone. He doesn�t just journey into the underworld to get a magic sword to slay the dragon, though that�s often how it turns out in more shallow texts. The boon is the experience, and it is the experience that he must explain to those who haven�t taken it. That�s the literal interpretation, anyway. What �really� happens (whatever reality is at this point in the discussion) is that we read the arguably fictional account of one of these heroes, and in the act of reading we learn the boon directly, or at least some glimmer of it. We learn, through the act of interpreting the literature, that everything is an illusion made of linguistic signifiers, or for that matter pictures and sounds. In a religious context, the literal interpretation applies if you believe that the hero actually took that journey, such as the faithful Christian or Buddhist does. In a secular context, the literary interpretation applies if you study not just the events of the hero�s journey, but the manner in which that journey is presented to us.
The book directly takes on the rugged individualism on which his country is founded. �From the stand-point of the social unit, the broken-off individual is simply nothing�waste� (385). �Individual destiny is not the motive and theme of this vision [�]� (230). �Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot [as opposed to the hero] tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumsized, barbarian, heathen, �native,� or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbour� (156).
In the book�s final section, �The Hero Today,� Campbell argues, quite directly, that individualism cuts us off from the very wisdom that myth has to teach us because it won�t let us see society as something more important than our individual selves. Instead, we project that self to the national level, using �the flag as totem� (388). Thus, nations (and tribes, churches, classes, �or what not�) act as individuals who know only how to act out of self-interest. �The community today is the planet� (388).
Dedicated to the late Joseph Campbell
I don't really remember the moment I died. I was kind of distracted by the noise and the lights and the voices, the shouting. I don't remember a lot of pain. I mean, there was a lot of it, but I don't remember it much. I mostly remember struggling to move. I felt like I'd been drugged. I couldn't lift my shoulders. I felt heavy. It's weird. What I remember most about my death is trying to not die. I had been very scared of death when I was alive. I don't have any religion to fall back on, so as far as I could tell, dying meant I'd just stop being. At all. I couldn't understand the idea of a universe without me in it. I couldn't imagine what that would be like. I think what I didn't want to accept is that in a universe without me, there wouldn't be any 'me' to notice I was gone.
I woke up on a beach. Well, I didn't really wake up. I kind of found myself. Anyway, I was on a beach. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool, the sky was blue with big, puffy clouds. There is always the smell of the ocean, here. The smell of salt water. There's a beach, and then there's the tree line. Big, green trees. Thick ones. Cedars, mostly. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this place looks just like where I grew up.
I was very aware of my body, of every sensation of being here. I smelled the ocean, I felt the breeze, the sand between my toes as it dried in the sun after wandering through the low-tide. I got hungry at some point and I started to just find food, easy as that. It was fruit and fish at first, fruit that should never have been falling off of cedar trees and fish that beached themselves, just for me. And the fires. There were fires and spits there, just there. I barely remember sitting down at them, and I'm certain I didn't build them.
It was pretty clear that the food was for me, that it appeared when I was hungry. So, I got creative. I imagined different food, and it was there. At first, it only appeared when I wasn't looking, but that didn't last long. I imagined full turkey dinners, hamburgers dripping with fat, pizza boxes stacked up a foot high, platters of sushi, everything. Sometimes, the food would change in the middle of the meal, and I'd hardly even notice. Not until later, anyway. If I felt like something different, it just was something different, right away.
One day, I got a visitor. I say it was one day, but I don�t really know when one day ended and another started. I remember the daytime and I remember the night time, but I don't really remember any division between them. Anyway, I got a visitor.
I guess I should admit that food wasn't the only thing I indulged in before my visitor showed up. I mean, once you figure out that you can call up any food you want to, what's the next thing you'll try? Sex, of course. I spent some time flying and swimming and tooling around the beach, but the simpler instincts took over. I went from consumption to reproduction pretty quickly, even though I didn't really need food and the sex was certainly not procreative.
I had every kind of sex I'd ever had in my life, with gangs of women of all kinds. Then I started having all the kinds I'd never gotten to have in life. Then I started wandering off into all kinds of things I hadn't really wanted to do, but now that I could at a whim, why not? I surprised myself, actually, with what I ended up enjoying. But I guess that's the point of this place. I imagined something pleasurable, and no matter what it was, it gave me pleasure. Sometimes, the women would change in the middle, her hair, her body, how many there were. Sometimes, they turned into men, which was disconcerting. My mind would wander and my world would wander with it.
When they started turning into animals I was very, very disturbed. Not as disturbed as the first time a man showed up, though, and the fact that I was less disturbed by bestiality than homosexuality was the most disturbing, but you probably don't want to know about that. The thing is, I have some phobias, and one of the things that happens with phobias is that you get locked into a frightening image, you get obsessed with the thing that scares you. It's a kind of manic behaviour, I guess. So when, in the middle of having sex, the woman you're having it with turns into the one thing in the universe you're more scared of than anything else, you start to learn to maintain your concentration. I don't know how long it took, but I managed to take control of it all, but the control meant it wasn't as fun.
So anyway, I got a visitor. I was sitting in an armchair on the beach watching a sunset, and she was just there, a stunning, gorgeous, tall woman. I was used to my mind calling things up without me being conscious of it, and I'd learned to trust it, to just go with whatever I'd called up, but this was different. At first, the women who came to visit me didn't talk much, and when I did start asking questions like who are you? and what are you doing here?, they'd avoid them, but eventually they had to admit that they were just part of my imagination. Once the illusion of a real interaction was gone, a certain amount of the enjoyment went away. Trusting my subconscious was the only way to get a surprise of any kind.
But then, there she was, the woman of my dreams, which made sense because I was in a place that was a lot like a dream, but she didn't have that sense of the familiar about her that all my other women had. She said hello, and so did I, and she asked me, actually asked me if I wanted to have sex. I didn't say no.
It was a totally new experience. Not like the imaginary women. Not like sex in life, either, although I don't remember it very clearly, so it's hard to say. Having sex with her was the first time I started to understand that place. It was like a dream. It was just a representation, a set of symbols for other things. The sex we had, the bodies we were in, were just signifiers for something else. I wasn't sure what yet, but I knew that our bodies weren't real, or were real, but what 'real' was had changed for me, somewhere along the way. Time passes strangely here, and in a way, we never stopped... I don't even have a word for it. It wasn't making love. I didn't love her. It wasn't fucking though, either. There was too strong a connection for that. Time passes strangely there, and in a way, I feel like we never stopped, even though that was a long time ago. We never stopped, but I see it differently, little by little. I feel it differently. The bodies are less and less real, and the other thing, the 'something else' is more and more real. When we were done, for the first time since I'd died, I actually felt exhausted. I was panting and sweating and my muscles were shuddering from the effort while the surf splashed up around my legs. But even while I was doing it, I knew that I didn't have a body in that place. She disappeared pretty quickly after that. I can still remember the smile on her face.
I started seeing everything differently. I knew that the beach was my imagination, but I started to think about what that really meant. That woman, whoever she was, was not from my mind. She was too different. If this beach was my mind, then she was from outside of it. Outside of me. I had become my own universe, but apparently, there were other people like me, other dead people, othe minds, other souls.
The visits got more and more frequent. There was a lot of sex. Usually with several people at once. Some of them were less distinct than others. Their bodies shifted, blended into the background. It was creepy, until I realised I was doing the same thing. The interaction, the seeing past the symbols, got more intense. I started to see how immaterial all this matter actually was. Matter just didn't matter anymore. The physical world that I'd created was starting to seem foggy, indistinct. It shifted all the time, without me realising it. It scared me. It scared me that it didn't scare me. I was losing the world. I was losing my body. And I was hardly even noticing it as it happened. It was liking dying again, but slowly, bit by bit. If I wasn't this body, in this place, I didn't know what I was. But I knew I was slipping off into a place that isn't one, where the idea of a position in space or time is meaningless, where there is no such thing.
But the more I let go of the world, the more I'm visited, and without that, I think I would go crazy. Playing in your own imagination is fun at first, but after a while, you're locked in a room by yourself with nothing to do but an elaborate form of masturbation. If I let go of this imaginary world, I'll get to be with people again, but people who aren't people, people who don't have bodies or gender. I won't be a man anymore. I won't be a human being anymore. I don't know what I'll be.
I can't decide if I'm dying or being born or just growing up, but it's going to happen soon. I don't have a choice. I'm starting to see my existence without this body, and there's no going back from that.
I don't know if you'll hear this. I don't know if living people can understand, but I wanted to tell you about what's happening to me here, that I won't be me much longer, that there is no here here. I don't know if that'll help you or scare you. I haven't met any gods or angels or demons since I got here. It's not heaven, but I suppose you could think of it as hell, maybe limbo, if you want to. Maybe telling my story is just the last bit of ego I have. I dont know, but itll be very soon now, and I think this message, if anyone can hear it, is my way of saying goodbye to the way that I understa
I've only just started skimming this article and I'm oddly transfixed.
I've read just enough to understand that it's an attempt to bring a great number of various sci-fi and comics narratives into one universe, but I'm left with the simple question:
WHY?
I mean, sure, fun as hell. As a fan-boy way to kill time, I'm in awe. I'm co-designing a superhero-based RPG, but this is impressive! I suppose my question
WHY?
has more to do with critical application or analysis of the effort. Does the impulse to unify different sci-fi worlds, in fan-fic for example, represent the fact that all of these worlds do, in a very real way, interact in our own heads, thus we want to bring that conceptual interaction to 'literal' interaction within the narrative? Would that impulse demonstrate a desire to project the personal and subjective sense of the narrative into a falsley objective form?
Or perhaps in the midst of one of the most changeable of all genres, sci-fi/fantasy, we want to find some kind of monologous narrative, a single thread that ties it all together, thus saving us the trouble of having to move between and within worlds that are totally different and ideologically divergent.
Or perhaps, again, instead of an effort to unify a narrative within the singular mind (in this case, dual minds) of the fan/reader, this article actually represents a counter-intuitively democratic desire to bring all narratives into play with each other, to include everyone as opposed to pairing down to the personal preference?
I have no idea, but I'm fascinated.