MYTHCOMICS: "A DREAM OF FLYING" (MIRACLEMAN, 1982)

(Note: "A Dream of Flying" is the title of the first MIRACLEMAN story, and is used for a Marvel Comics reprint of material with the character. In my review-usage the title denotes what I deem the first main arc of the MIRACLEMAN story, from the beginning to the death of the hero's principal villain.)

Though WATCHMEN will probably continue as the main touchstone for many readers regarding the talents of Alan Moore, MARVELMAN-- renamed MIRACLEMAN in its first and subsequent American reprints-- may carry more cultural weight in the long run. When the character first appeared in the first issue of Great Britain's WARRIOR magazine (1982), Moore's idea of examining the superhero in more realistic terms was far from new, as evinced by the 1970s works of creators like Steve Gerber (for DEFENDERS) and Ross Andru (for THE FLASH)-- to say nothing of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN of the 1960s.

What Moore did was to up the game. Lee, Gerber and Andru all remained firmly within the ethos of melodramatic entertainment, but Moore created a sociological and psychological myth of the superhero that embraced the dominant critical attitude he'd apparently grown up with: that of literary modernism.

In this essay I touched on the salient differences of modernism and post-modernism as regards popular culture, so when I define Moore as a modernist, I'm thinking primarily in terms of my distinction that "modernism was essentially tied to a realistic paradigm not appreciably different from that of representational realism, and that post-modernism was in essence a reaction against that realistic paradigm."

In short, though Moore did not invent the idea of "the realistic superhero," he brought the idea in line with one particular philosophical outlook: that of rejecting the fantasy-appeal of violence and regarding it as a violation of "real" human values. Though not all literary modernist authors favored this view-- Jack London being a major exception-- it's a common trope throughout the early 20th century. A cogent example would be Simone Weil's 1939 essay THE ILIAD, OR THE POEM OF FORCE, whose radical interpretation of Homer's classic epic was grounded in a rejection of the credo of "force" that had plunged the world into a Second World War.

The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.

In old interviews Moore stated that in his MIRACLEMAN work he was seeking to exorcise the part of him that loved the "fascist power-fantasies" of the 1950s "Marvelman," of which MIRACLEMAN was a more "adult" reboot. Throughout the first large arc of the story crafted by Moore and various artists, the inhuman "force" which Miracleman incarnates-- as well as his fellow "monster" Kid Miracleman-- is treated as a source of horror rather than as an occasion for juvenile excitement. Moore's "overthought," as I've employed the term here, is clearly to interrogate the genre of superheroes for its love of "force before which man's flesh shrinks away," as Weil puts it. In many respects, Moore's tone sounds not unlike that of Frederic Wertham, decrying outrageous fantasies in favor of humble normalcy.

And yet, despite the mediocrity of this "overthought," Moore was-- and possibly still is-- too much of an artist not to allow for a deeper "underthought," in which he can still see superheroes and supervillains as transcendent presences. Thus we get this authorial observation during the city-smashing battle between Miracleman and his opposite number, Kid Miracleman.

They are titans, and we will never understand the alien inferno that blazes in the furnace of their souls. We are only human. We will never grasp their hopes, their despair, never comprehend the blistering rage that informs each devastating blow… We will never know the destiny that howls in their hearts, never know their pain, their love, their almost sexual hatred… …And perhaps we will be the less for that.

This poetic aside does not nullify the thrust of Moore's modernist critique, of course. In the "real world," superheroes are not made by stalwart young chaps being given powers by saintly old wizards. Such expenditures can only come from the government, and the government only makes such expenditures in the name of war-technology. That said, Moore can't quite resist the allure of  a key trope of superhero fiction: the "supervillain-as-master-manipulator." The man responsible for turning an ordinary English bloke into an Aryan god is not a faceless bureaucrat, but the closest reality can come to a "super-villain:" an obsessed schemer whose whole project is to use the "superman technology" as a way of gaining personal immortality. The villain can only do all this through one of the most popular tropes in modernism: that of "everything you know is wrong"-- in this case, causing ordinary bloke Mike Moran to become consubstantial with Miracleman.

By now it should be obviously that I'm passing over the specific permutations of Moore's plot, with his confused double-identity hero and his no-less-confused wife, for the key to A DREAM OF FLYING lies in Moore's "Readers' Digest" version of Friedrich Nietzsche. Put bluntly, I don't think Moore read the German philosopher with any great insight. Nevertheless, as a teller of fictional stories, he's allowed to bowdlerize, as long as what he produces is a *good story.* Nietzsche serves the same purpose for Moore that he did for Wertham: he's a name everyone knows as a proponent of a "superman philosophy."

Happily, Moore only selects one or two actual quotes from the philosopher: like Wertham, Moore's real target is capital-F fascism. Both of the main villains of the arc-- "opposite number" Kid Miracleman and master manipulator Doctor Gargunza-- are strongly associated with Nazis. In the case of the former, he rants that "the real era of the Overman is here." Gargunza, though he is of Mexican nationality, ends up working under the Fuhrer himself, not to mention enjoying kaffeeklatches with famed "Nazi philosopher" Martin Heidegger, whose only purpose in the story seems to be as a stand-in for Nietzsche. Gargunza defects to England-- possibly a comment from Moore on the alacrity with which Allied nations accepted ex-Nazis into their midst. In Old Blighty the unscrupulous scientist comes in contact with the alien technology that will make the Miracleman project possible. Thus, as Moore points out at least twice, Gargunza is in a philosophical sense the "father" of Miracleman, but he hopes to become a "son" by impressing his brain-engrams upon the persona of the infant offspring of Miracleman and Mike Moran's wife.


The "Flying" arc ends with Mike Moran escaping a trap by Gargunza-- a trap which, like those of most super-villains, is entirely unnecessary, compared to the ease of shooting the vulnerable alter ego in the head. Moran manages to re-assert his Miracleman persona. First he kills various thugs working for Gargunza, all of whom seem to be practicing modern Nazis ("Forty years we have waited for you, for the first of the blonde gods that would replace us"), and then the hero executes Gargunza while Moore's captions invoke the "Star Light Star Bright" verse.

I don't take seriously Moore's political take on superhero psychology; while it's deeper than that of Steve Gerber, it's still fairly shallow. I do, however, regard him as a leading creator in the modernist tradition-- and my next mythcomic will show how one can examine some of the same content through a more "postmodern" lens.

WRAPPING UP FAKE-RAPE

In this essay I cited this Heideggerian morsel:

"'How we find ourselves' expresses the fact that we are thrown into a 'world' already there before us -- this is most evident in the radical sense of Birth. Hence, one is literally 'thrown into a world' beyond one's control -- but this 'world' is not merely a particular environment -- it has its place in history: one is, broadly speaking, thrown into a historical moment."

I didn't return to this point at the conclusion of Part 4 of the "fake-rape" series, but I will here because I think Heidegger's general concept of being "thrown into a world beyond one's control" applies very well to the topic of fictional rape.

No world is entirely beyond all control, of course. If I say that I want to promote freedom in the arts, I'm trying to influence others to my point of view, which is at least a limited form of controlling others. And if a feminist ideologue claims that my defenses of sex and/or violence are an attempt to validate male privilege, that too is an attempt to control one aspect of the world.

Obviously, I think that the latter interpretation only holds if one disregards the facts of nature I discussed in the above SWEPT AWAY essay. I'm aware, of course, that there are individuals who have used "facts" to validate repressive viewpoints. I will briefly re-quote Dave Sim on "male-female difference," though I examined his perspective in more detail here:

For a man to win an LPGA tournament would be humiliating for the man. It would be like entering a children’s T-ball tournament and really tearing up the base-paths and smacking some major home runs. There isn’t enough money in the world to overcome the resulting humiliation of knowingly competing against…(pay attention, “ladies”)…
…inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings. -- Dave Sim, CEREBUS 293.

It would be easy for an ideologue to look at what I've written here and to assume that I, by speaking of such aspects "male-female difference" as strength-weight comparisons, am trying to validate fantasies in which males are inherently superior.  This is not the case, however.  Gender difference is a fact that influences many fictional scenarios-- whether Doctor Light tries to rape a woman rather than a man, whether serial killers with mommy problems choose to assault females or males. However, in my philosophy, the fact of male-female difference does not determine the status of either gender, either in fiction or reality.

My borrowed Heideggerian metaphor of "throwness" merely means that one must accept some facets of reality as having a non-ideological level of influence. Most women are "thrown" into a world in which, 99% of the time, the men they encounter are both bigger and stronger. This does not determine their status as one of inherent inferiority. But it does influence any attempt they make toward self-determination. To disregard the way the world often works, or to claim that it is a creation of "male privilege" or "rape culture," remains a fundamental dishonesty.

And now-- back to the boring literary analyses!!

SWEPT AWAY BY A BLUE COMICON REPORT JUST A LITTLE BEFORE AUGUST

I hadn't planned to write further about the topic of harassment and/or rape after I finished the BREASTS, BLOOD, AND JUSTICE series. However, I had to voice my disagreement with one of the examples of harassment in Rebecca Keegan's article. This resulted in FEELINGS, NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS, and later, my statement in the comments-section that "I have an idea for an exploration of the topic in works aimed at particular genders, as opposed to those that appear to be "across-the-board," as MAY be the case with GAME OF THRONES."

My motive in doing so would be to suss out the ways that symbolic rape-- that is, rape as it is depicted in literature, mythology, and cultural practices-- differs in terms of the gender-audience at which it is directed. I've said elsewhere that the differences between men and women are not reducible to sociological programming; if anything, the genders have the same range of affects, separated only in terms of attitude, what Nietzsche helpfully terms "tempo."

Physical rape-- the term I use to distinguish the real thing from symbolic treatments or even the related concept of *raptio*-- is almost always represented as the violation of a female by a male. Obviously, as I have stated earlier, this is not the only manifestation of rape, and not all rapes are committed by males, as attested by the narrative surrounding Joyce McKinney.  With these exceptions in mind, it must be specified that not all physical rape stems from the sexual dimorphism in homo sapiens. However, the effects of that dimorphism do skew the statistics toward males as perpetrators, whether against females or other males.

It should be noted that in nature as a whole, sometimes females of other species are given the advantage in terms of assault.  There is the notorious example of the black widow spider, where the doomed male is quite a bit smaller than his blushing-- and perhaps hungry-- bride.

More recently, we even have the so-far-unique example of a species of "cave insect" in Brazil where the female has quite literally "taken back the night" by evolving a "female penis" with which she plunders the sperm out of her opposite number.

But yes, in homo sapiens, men are usually bigger and heavier than women, so this factor predetermines many, though not all, instances of physical rape.

Now, biology does not determine our status any more than sociology. Yet there are aspects of one's existential physical situation that must be accepted even if, or when, one seeks to modify them-- again, whether biologically or sociologically.  I'm put in mind of my remarks to a poster named "JR" many years ago, who holds the record for the longest verbal duel with me on this blog. My remarks built in part on a commentary about Heidegger's concept of "thrownness:"

"'How we find ourselves' expresses the fact that we are thrown into a 'world' already there before us -- this is most evident in the radical sense of Birth. Hence, one is literally 'thrown into a world' beyond one's control -- but this 'world' is not merely a particular environment -- it has its place in history: one is, broadly speaking, thrown into a historical moment."

True, the series of essays I'm envisioning deal with "symbolic rape" rather than "physical rape," since I'll be talking about its appearance in popular fiction, in order to disprove poster Marionette's statement that symbolic rape is no more than "a hideously overused trope."  But while symbolic discourse is also neither determined by biology or sociology, it will be seen that it does find its expression in terms of the aforesaid "historical moment."

MIRROR VS. LAMP PT. 4

Liberalism may have triumphed in the political sphere, but it was the illiberal philosophy of Heidegger that won the day at [the Davos debate between Heidegger and Cassirer] and went on to leave the deepest stamp on 20th-century culture. Who now shares Cassirer's faith in the humanizing power of art or the liberating power of science?  Who now believes that the truth will make us free? Even optimists limit their hopes to economics and politics, disclaiming any broader vision of human redemption.  Francis Fukuyama's end of history is not the glorious consummation of Hegel or Marx, but a vista of endless banality. Contemporary liberals are faced, whether they like it or not, with the unpromising task of erecting a philosophy of political hope on a foundation of cultural despair.-- Edward Skidelsky, EDWARD CASSIRER, p. 222.

Skidelsky's profoundly pessimistic verdict in the final chapter of his book hinges on his conviction that the dominion of the technical sciences has effected a permanent "alienation of reason," one that can no longer countenance reason as a faculty beneficial to human beings or their culture.  When I first starting writing about the book here, I noted that Skidelsky had distanced himself from Cassirer's Goethean stance:

In his first draft of his book Skidelsky advocated Cassirer's goal of finding the unity of all human endeavors into terms of their value as "symbolic constructions."  However, in the finished version of the book, Skidelsky confesses that he changed his mind: that he somewhat devalued Cassirer because the philosopher "did not see what Heidegger and many others saw so clearly: that the secular idols of humanity and progress were dead."

I would not deny that most discussions of culture today, whether from the "left" or the "right," are consumed with utilitarian "economics and politics."  I'm not as certain that these utilitarians are alienated from reason in the sense Skidelsky defines alienation.  To them, reason and utilitarian ends are identical, and "redemption" is simply a matter for those with a taste for religious concepts.

That said, Francis Fukuyama isn't a particularly well chosen exemplar of the utilitarian attitude.  It's true that his seminal work, 1992's THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, does not delve deeply into such matters as "the humanizing power of art" or "the liberating power of science."  Nevertheless, END OF HISTORY, written in the full bloom of 1990s optimism, does demonstrate a conviction in the idea that the reason typified by liberal democracy can indeed "redeem" society, even if Fukuyama doesn't advocate Hegel's more ambitious visions.

Further, Fukuyama certainly does not claim that the triumph of liberal democracy will inevitably lead to any "vista of endless banality."  I surmise that Skidelsky may be thinking of those sections of Fukuyama's book in which he takes the other side of the liberal-democracy thought-experiment.  In these sections Fukuyama speculates that a truly "isothymic" society, one in tune with the ideals of liberal democracy, *might* result in a culture devoted to what C.S. Lewis called "men without chests;" i.e, human beings who lack the deeper passions of *thymos* and are indeed concerned with nothing but means and ends.  But at no time does Fukuyama claim that this is an inevitable development, and I for one find it heartening that he considers the possibility of such a downside, as most modern utilitarians will not.


It's true that Fukuyama is not as ambitious as Hegel about considering all aspects of human culture, but then, Fukuyama is not a philosopher like Hegel or Cassirer.  He's a political and economics theorist, so it's understandable that he should frame his arguments strictly in those terms, even though I've argued that his Hegel/Kojeve-influenced mediations can have meaningful application to literary studies. 

In a much more recent essay-- one written over 20 years since the aforesaid 1990s optimism-- Fukuyama admits that he sees the need of "an ideology of the future that could provide a realistic path toward a world with healthy middle-class societies and robust democracies," and that at most he can only suggest a few potential aspects of such an ideology.  It's true that nowhere in the essay will one find a Goethean belief in "the humanizing power of art," but "the liberating power of science" does put in an appearance:

The ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new, technology-empowered approaches to delivering services. It would have to argue forthrightly for more redistribution and present a realistic route to ending interest groups’ domination of politics.

Is this a "vista of endless banality?"  I would say not, and the fact that Skidelsky propounds this demonstrably false argument shows that he's oversold his own vision of the extent to which the current world must erect its hopes upon "a foundation of cultural despair."  Fukuyama may not be as visionary as Hegel-- indeed, some of his later books are less ambitious, perhaps because END OF HISTORY was in some arenas hijacked by American right-wing political groups, and led some commentators to falsely claim that Fukuyama was about nothing but "triumphalism." 

Nevertheless, while I don't entirely credence Skidelsky's "foundation of cultural despair," I will reiterate that it is rooted in the real polarizations of culture, as I expatiated at the end of my first essay of this new year:

...[Skidelsky] offers a useful warning about how extremists can deliberately misrepresent the arguments of others-- especially of those offering a synthesis between extremes-- and with that warning in mind, one can view just how long the road ahead will be.

MIRROR VS. LAMP. PT. 1

The title of the book identifies two common and antithetic metaphors of
mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects, the other
to a radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives.
The first of these was characteristic of much of the thinking from Plato to
the eighteenth century; the second typifies the prevailing romantic conception of the poetic mind.-- M.H. Abrams, preface to his own THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP (1953).

Are the products of human culture bound to the finitude of human existence, or do they contain a moment of transcendence, an "eternal validity?"-- Edward Skidelsky, summarizing the positions of Heidegger and Cassirer vis-à-vis culture, in ERSNT CASSIRER (p. 214) 

I confess that I never got around to reading Abrams' famous lit-crit book.  Its title simply came to mind after I finished reading Skidelsky's book, and found myself returning to the dichotomy proposed by Hegel re: "reflective" and "speculative" forms of philosophy-- a dichotomy I first explored in this essay.  In that essay I complained that almost all comics-criticism today is practiced in the "reflective" mode, which would seem a natural analogue to Abrams' "mirror," given that the mirror connotes the ideal of reproducing the world as it is.  It's not much of a stretch, then, to see an analogous relationship between Hegel's "speculative philosophy" and Abrams' "radiant projector," given that the root word of "speculate" is "to look"-- and how can one look at anything, without a source of light?  Further, the speculative mode is an active one, imagining the interaction of an "intellectual intuition" with the world even as we apprehend it, while the reflective mode is passive, the same way that the mirror is passive in its reflection of appearances.  Mirrors don't show their reflective qualities unless some phenomenon provides light whereby those qualities may be seen.  The lamp requires human intervention to make its illuminative qualities come alive, but once activated, its nature in reality and as metaphor suggests continued activity rather than a passive operation.

I should note in passing that Abrams and Skidelsky propose tenable yet wholly opposed views of cultural history. 


For Abrams, the "metaphor of mind" in which a human subject seeks to reproduce the world "as it is" has dominated human culture from the era of Plato until the 18th century, while the metaphor that posits the mind as making an illuminating contribution to the world's ordering is one of comparatively recent vintage.

For Skidelsky, though, what I am calling "speculative philosophy," the philosophy of the lamp, is one that dominated human culture at least since the Renaissance, which is as far back as this author extends his cultural analysis-- and such cultural speculations have usually affirmed that, yes, some transcendent validity is indeed possible .  The rise of the technical sciences, which in Hegelian terms causes the rise of "reflective philosophy," is the comparative newbie on the block, and under the scrutiny of the so-called exact science, all culture is indeed "bound to the finitude of human existence?"

The solution to the contrast is not a hard one, though.  While it's possible to cite exceptions to Abrams' Aristotelian view of literary culture from Plato onward-- I mention one such exception in my reading of Longinus-- he's probably right that literature was dominated by the mimetic impulse, at least in Europe and the United States. Yet for many authors the "real world" was a glass through which one could perceive, however "darkly," the hand of God or similar abstractions.  Thus finitude could lead one to infinitude.

In contrast, philosophy was the primary home of such abstractions for many years.  But with the rise of technical sciences, philosophy had to throw more of a "light" on its own operations.  And so philosophy increasingly began to frame its abstract questions in more formally logical terms, as we have seen in the rise of "symbolic logic"-- which is another way of saying that the idea of infinitude is seen as derivable from finite causes. 


Yet it may be observed that at the same time the Romantics' aversion to scientism led them to endorse in literature abstractions no longer possible in philosophy.  This transformation of literary priorities didn't occur overnight, for even through the 19th and early 20th centuries, the ideal of "fantasy" in literature remains disreputable for authors seeking a literary reputation.  Yet by the late 20th century, fantasy's highly abstract evocations of the infinite are embraced by such authors as Borges, Calvino, Lessing and Eco.  None of these authors maintain any continuity with the literary tradition of " the Romantics" as we know them today.  Yet it may not be a coincidence that some moderns find themselves embracing those modes of thought rejected by many modern philosophers, who apparently hunger for the validation given "the exact sciences."


This hunger for what Walter Cerf deems the tendency to "solve intellectual puzzles rather than give the true conceptual vision of the whole" will be one of the subjects of Part 2.

THROWN IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU

"Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial 'sources' from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand."-- Heidegger, BEING AND TIME, p.43.

I don't expect I'll ever become a big Heidegger fan, in part because in recent years I read a translation of the "dueling lectures" that he and Cassirer gave opposite one another at Davos, Switzerland in 1929. While Cassirer's lecture might not have been his best work, Heidegger was flat-out BORING.

Still, certain aspects of the Heidegger philosophy work for me, at least on a poetic level, such as his concept of geworfenheit, usually translated as "throwness." Neither version appears as such in the passage above, but the oblique reference to "origins" is helpfully glossed by Robert Cavalier at his webpage, Overview of Being and Time:

"'How we find ourselves' expresses the fact that we are thrown into a 'world' already there before us -- this is most evident in the radical sense of Birth. Hence, one is literally 'thrown into a world' beyond one's control -- but this 'world' is not merely a particular environment -- it has its place in history: one is, broadly speaking, thrown into a historical moment."

Thus, long before Steve Gerber invented Howard the Duck, Martin Heidegger too found himself "trapped in a world he never made."

The idea that one is thrown into history (and by extension, into biological reality as well) might be a useful corrective to exaggerated ultraliberal claims as to the social construction of human reality, such as this one from poster JR on 12-2-09:

"Traditional conceptions of gender roles state that women, and by extension the feminine, are weak, and that men, and by extension the masculine, are strong."

This is part of her attempt to prove that said conceptions are at the root of hetero male antipathy for gay males, who are also conceived of as being effeminate and "weak" for being more like women than men. The reason that I call this statement "ultraliberal" (that is, taking sensible liberal concepts to an eccentric extreme) is simple.

It is not a "conception" that women are "weak" and men are "strong." It is, far more than any of the statistical verdicts that JR Brown has endorsed on her comment-posts hereabouts, a "fact."

Such a statistical verdict does not exclude the possibility that some women are physically stronger than some men. Nor does it nullify the niggle that women can be as "strong" with respect to their gender's physical potential as men can be with respect to theirs.

Based on a comparative scale like the ones JR champions when she thinks it supports her positions, men are "strong" insofar as they can move more sheer mass than can "weak" women.


I know that JR knows this, because everyone knows this. I'm forced to emphasize the obvious because JR's statement so flagrantly omits it. By putting aside the physical nature of the two sexes--"what has come down to us," in Heidegger's words-- she manages to structure her argument to elide this fact and so imply that symbolic attributions of strength and weakness are largely sociocultural constructions. And they are not.

Now, there exist real "conceptions" that arise from this statistical fact. One "conception," with which I would not have argued had JR put it forth, would be that the greater physical strength of men led them, in most cultures, to conceive that "strong" men should be the leaders and "weak" women the followers. That's a conceptual extrapolation from a particular fact but not a fact as such, and several developments of modern liberalism demonstrate its false logic.

From this base fact also arises the conception that JR does cite-- that gay men were effeminate and therefore "weak" like women-- though the etiology is not as crystal-clear as JR presumes. If one takes as a given JR's statement that the stereotype's oldest known manifestation is to be found in the days of the Roman Empire, that in no way proves that the the stereotype was articulated by hetero Romans, as JR implies. JR claims elsewhere that gays are quite capable of circulating their own stereotypes as cultural markers, and that their preference for hypermasculine bodies is one such marker, albeit apparently only of recent coinage. By that token it's also possible that early gays created the "mincing queen" stereotype themselves. One might well imagine the "mincing queen" stereotype arising as a marker that set the ancient gay apart, so that his society did not hold him to the same expectations as that society did for straight males. (The situation with lesbians would obviously require a different set of cultural markers, given the differing set of societal expectations.)

But whether straights or gays created the "weak effeminate" stereotype, there would be no question that it too could properly be called a "conception." Stereotypes, whether positive or negative, belong to that symbolic universe in which humanity lives while seeking to explore, excuse or understand the demands of their "given" natures in terms of biology and history.

The essential problem with the ultraliberal's tendency to overemphasize social constructedness of that nature is that it does a disservice to the complexity of our existence.

To the best of our knowledge no human being, prior to being born, asks to be either male or female. One is "thrown" into that somatic situation and then seeks as best one can to maximize life with that "given" status. (Even the surgical attempt to change that status is still a strategy to deal with the "given" status). One thus inherits not only one's biological potential and proclivities but also a long history of historically-originated cultural strategies through which men and women seek to maximize their lives, sometimes in conflict with one another, other times in cooperation.

Heidegger certainly was not a liberal, but his philosophy does bear a degree of resemblance to classical liberalism in that the individual does not simply accept his/her "thrown" nature, but ideally strives to evaluate every aspect of his existence (which is as close as I want to get to his concept of *Dasein* in this post).

In evaluating literature that is strongly aimed more at one gender than the other, one must determine what is "given" about it in terms of its history and the biological nature of said gender. JR attempts to address the historical nature of the adventure-genre through a purely social conception:

"Culturally-widespread conceptions of ideal maleness emphasize strength, both as a positive trait in its own light as well as a marker of masculinity.

Therefore, culturally-widespread conceptions of ideal maleness produced by men for male consumption (in the form of pulp fiction, action movies, and superhero comics, among others) reject femininity, both as a general marker of weakness and as a specific marker of gayness. This leads to the presentation of hypermasculinity as the ideal male state in such works."

The problem here is that JR has equated the portrayal of strength that one finds in the dominant type of adventure-hero with "hypermasculinity," which is an ultraliberal distortion of the literary mythology. I've already shown elsewhere that a pop-culture mythos like that of Superman does not "reject femininity" simply because the mythos is predominantly oriented toward a male readership. The "women men see" in such works may not be the way women want to be seen, any more than the "men women see" in women's romances are the way men want to be seen. But in neither case are we dealing with "rejection," and therefore we are not dealing with this incoherent conception of "masculine incoherence."

One can certainly find particular authors in the adventure-genre who reject femininity in a statistical sense-- that is, women have no substantive presence within a given mythos. Conan Doyle's novel THE LOST WORLD provides a strong example of this syndrome that does not necessitate willfully distorting the text, as JR and Noah Bertlatsky do in their considerations of Golden Age SUPERMAN comics. But negative depictions do not cancel out positive depictions, except for those who have made up their minds to see what they want to see.

I'll have more to say in a future post on the subject of the "throwness" of biological natures and how they affect each gender's dominant preferences, but for the present this will be the last response to JR's comments.

HEIDEGGER AND ARTCOMICS

I'm in the process of reading Iris Murdoch's METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS, which, based on a series of 1982 lectures, covers several developments in the history of philosophy up to the 2oth century, with particular reference to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Hume, Kant and others, as well as some observations on structuralism. (Nothing in there about artcomics, though; I'll get to that later.) Both structuralism and semiotics are hermeneutical systems of criticism that have influenced my Cassirer/Frye approach to literature, and I would be lying if I didn't admit that my notion of different gradations of symbolic complexity (myth vs. null-myth) are strongly derived from the concepts of signal and symbol as named if not originated by semiologist Charles Morris. Murdoch shows too much of a tendency to meld structuralism with deconstruction (it being hard to break down the difference thanks to Roland Barthes' having joined both clubs), but she has a nice breakdown of structuralism's objectives that bears on the signal/symbol linguistic dichotomy of semiotics:

"Structuralist thought is then also driven to distinguish discreetly between 'low,' fairly simple... self-referring linguistic codes... and 'high,' sophisticated, creative, self-aware, uses of language by scientific geniuses, or by philosophers and poets and poetic writers who... invent concepts and hint at values"-- Murdoch, METAPHYSICS, p. 48.

Murdoch goes on to specify how this awareness of the "deeper" reading of linguistic codes has the result that "literature is required to be linguistically self-conscious... and to treat language as an experimental adventure playground where what is important can only be said by poetic or quasi-poetic means."

Later in the book, Murdoch referred to a lecture which Heidegger gave on his own concept of poetry; a lecture centered entirely around one poem, "The Ister," written by German poet Holderlin (sorry, can't add the little "tilde" to his name on this keyboard). Though it's probably not prudent to quote from a writeup of the lecture rather than the lecture proper-- and maybe not at all from Wikipedia-- I will quote here from the uncredited Wiki writeup, since what it says seems to concur pretty well with what Murdoch says of Heidegger.

Wiki writes:

'Rather than delving immediately into this question, Heidegger makes a detour, elaborating the "metaphysical interpretation of art." He argues that metaphysical interpretations are incapable of comprehending Hölderlin's poetry.

According to the metaphysical interpretation, art presents objects in nature such as rivers, but this presentation is at the service of something else, of their "meaning" in the artwork. Heidegger speaks in this regard of the etymology of the words "allegory" and "metaphor." The metaphysical interpretation of art relies on the distinction between the sensuous and the non-sensuous, the aesthetic and the noetic, the sensible and the intelligible. And according to this interpretation the artwork exists not for itself, not as a sensuous object, but for the nonsensuous and suprasensuous, which is also named "spirit." In this way the superior and the true come to be identified with the spiritual.

Against the metaphysical interpretation of art, Heidegger asserts that the rivers in Hölderlin's poetry are in no way symbolic images of a higher or deeper content. He draws attention to the final lines of the poem—"Yet what that one does, that river, / No one knows"—in order to indicate that, whatever the rivers are, or whatever the river does, remains an enigma. Even the poet knows only that the river flows, but not what is decided in that flowing'

Now, from the standpoint of structuralism/semiotics, it would seem that here Heidegger is choosing to read Holderlin's poem as an enigma based in the "self-referring" world of the sensuous. It's not quite identical to what Morris calls a SIGNAL, a "low linguistic code" that stands for nothing but one representation or representational concept ("red stop sign means STOP.") But Heidegger is certainly trying to get AWAY from the notion that the river ought to refer to the noetic/intellectual CONCEPT of the river, whether it would be Holderlin's particular concept of riverness or some concatenation of concepts from the history of literature featuring rivers. So Heidegger manifestly does not want the river to be a SYMBOL, the sort of linguistic code that Murdoch says leads to higher concepts and values, etc.

Be that as it may--

It does occur to me that Heidegger's concept of a sort of non-symbolic "enigma" may explain the approach of certain practitioners of artcomics. Despite admiring certain exceptions, in the main I find many of the most praised artcomics to be intellectually unchallenging works that don't merit the word "literature," at least in the terms of the best prose literature has to offer.

A particular example: Charles' Burns' BLACK HOLE. When I began reading this much-praised work-- a series of "vignettes" (for lack of a better word) about a weird mutation-inducent plague that descends on a small town-- I don't think I expected Burns to give me an experience typical of unreflective narratives. I didn't expect the closure of either a happy or tragic ending, or that the disease would be explained neatly.

But still, after reading these rather rambling vignettes-- in which the obvious objective correlatives for the mutations are the hormonal changes of the average teenager-- I thought, "What are artcomics readers getting out of this?" Burns' art is finely rendered, if not to my personal taste-- but surely, given the praise it's received, BLACK HOLE has some sort of significance for its readers beyond just the horrors of the hormones.

But then, on re-reading the Heidegger passage, I wonder: is this what Burns and maybe a lot of artcomics-practitioners are going for? Are Burns' mutant-mouths-that-appear-in-throats supposed to be rough parallels to what Heidegger thought Holderlin's river signified? Despite a modicum of symbolism in Burns' conception, did Burns consciously AVOID trying to inflate that symbolism in order to keep the plague enigmatic and imponderable-- as arguably, it would not have been had he layered on references to Sartre's FLIES or Cronenberg's THE FLY or whatever?

Or is it that artcomics practitioners in general-- over and above any particular artistic aims of Charles Burns-- are radically divorced from the very concept of symbolism, for reasons having to do with their oppositional stance toward unreflective narratives, particularly that of genre narratives?

Food for thought, perhaps.