Hollow, or Just Stupid?

Posted on by

More nattering about the new Comics Journal — one of the long reviews in the issue is a piece by Tim Kreiner about Alan Moore’s Black Dossier. Kreiner’s overall point seems pretty dead on — the book is self-indulgent in a really boring way. A lot of his smaller points seem kind of off base, though. For instance, he argues that:

Moore seems particularly interested in the reasons for the decline in the quality and power of fantastic literature in the 20th century. Part of it has to do with the postwar ascendancy of American culture over British (a shift in power made explicit by the internecine plot that Mina and Allan uncover), but part of it is a more general atrophy of the popular imagination. By mid-20th century, flags had been planted at the poles, and the Congo and Amazon basins were no longer tantalizing terra incognita, leaving the world more bounded, finite and known than it had been in Victorian times. Imaginative literature left lost continents and battling airships behind for other planets and the wholly imaginary worlds of Lovecraft and Tolkein, leaving present-day genre fiction to the sordid realities of the Cold War. This book is set uncomfortably closer to the unromantic present…. The difference in tone between the first volumes and this one is the difference between Wells’ exhilarating apocalypse and Orwell’s dreary dystopia, between Conan Doyle’s logical world of problems and solutions and Graham Greene’s murky moral ambivalence.

I don’t know…I just don’t quite buy it. Lovecraft’s world isn’t wholly imaginary, just for a start, and Moore uses the Elder Gods to good effect (as Kreiner notes). I love Wells, but C.S. Lewis is at least his equal (Lewis’ martians actually show up in the first series). Kreiner suggests that Emma Peel is weak tea as an iconic character, but I’ve just finished watching her entire run on the Avengers, and I think I have to disagree. She’s certainly a much more interesting character than the original Mina — the success of Dracula has had as much to do with great movie adaptations as with the original book, which was actually pretty mediocre. Conan Doyle isn’t any better than Agatha Christie. Sure, Hercule Poirot isn’t quite as big a name as Sherlock Holmes — but is Captain Nemo really all that iconic? I guess you could argue back and forth, but It just seems a bit much to blame Moore’s failure on the decline of Western literature.

I also think Kreiner’s a little off base when he argues that:

This, I’m afraid, is what happens when a master craftsman starts thinking of himself as a Great Artist and becomes more interested in increasingly elaborate filigree than in the nuts-and-bolts structure of the thing he’s supposed to be building. In this regard it is classic Stoner Art, so richly frilled with reverberant detail that the underlying form dissolves. The obsessively worked-out backstory and metatextual jamming — which were perhaps always Moore’s real interests — have been brought unabashedly to the fore, while the ostensible plot and main characters have receded to perfunctory sketches. When the characters and the story stand on their own, this extra dimension is just a bonus. But what was peripheral in the earlier works is now the whole point; this book’s raison d’être seems to be to provide fodder for Jess Nevins’ website. The Black Dossier is, in other words, the stupefying Silmarillion to volumes I and II’s rousing Lord of the Rings.

Kreiner also compares the Black Dossier to the end of C.S. Lewis’ “Last Battle”, when Aslan is more directly linked to Christ, and all the major characters die — which Kreiner characterizes as a “creepy and didactic ending”. I happen to think that the Last Battle is pretty much perfect, myself; it’s certainly creepy and didactic, but such is the apocalypse. It’s also, I think, actually the antithesis of the Black Dossier. Moore’s whole point is that the real is imaginary; Lewis is arguing that the imaginary is real. For Moore, the intertextual games, the play of imagination, is the point of existence — he worships his own imagination; it’s geekery as religion. Lewis, on the other hand, has created a fiction, and the fiction is truth, but it’s the truth that is real, not the fictiveness. Moore’s problem in the Black Dossier (and, I’d argue, in Promethea) is that he’s mistaken his own wankery for a moral and philosophical stance. You may disagree with Lewis, but he certainly never does that — his philosophy and morality are Christian, and, whatever you may say about Christianity, you can’t say that Lewis worships it because he made it up.

I guess the point is that I don’t think that the main problem is that Moore has let the philosophy overwhelm the plot, so much as that he’s let the philosophy overwhelm the plot, and that the philosophy happens to be both glib and stupid. There are great works of art that don’t rely on plot — everything from Lautremont to Becket’s novels to Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, to name just three. But if you’re going to abandon plot as the main engine of interest, you do need to have something else to say.

My brother Eric Berlatsky actually has a really interesting take on the Black Dossier’s intellectual content, or lack thereof, if more Alan Moore bashing is your cup of tea….

9 thoughts on “Hollow, or Just Stupid?”

  1. What is the inherent benefit of worshiping something that someone else made up?

  2. You’ve got to give me a little more to go on when you post these koans, Jason; I had to reread my own essay to figure out what you were talking about! And goodness knows, nobody, not even me, should be forced to plow through my prose twice.

    But, what’s done is done, and thus prepared, I will attempt an answer. The inherent benefit of worshipping in a tradition, rather than worshipping your own intellectual products, is that traditions are communal and historical. They’re about other people; the divine is seen as an aspect, or embodiment, of connection with society and history. Christianity opens outwards as well as inwards; Moore’s New Age mystical elevation of his own personal belief system, on the other hand, ends up with him worshipping himself.

    I mean, I’m not a Christian, but it’s a complicated and thoughtful tradition that I respect for a lot of reasons. I respect Alan Moore too, but least when he sets himself up as a religious guru, and most when he’s content to be an (exceptional) artist.

    Thanks for your comments, by the way. Nice to know someone is reading this stuff!

  3. I’m with Jason! Your argument is quite literally conservative, it seems to me. If other people say it, then surely they must have had some reason for doing it. I don’t believe that counting how many people adhere to something is a good measure of it’s worth.

    As no less a fellow than William Blake said: “I must create my own system, or live by another man’s.”

  4. Hey Gavin. Yes, my argument is literally conservative. Rejecting all past knowledge and tradition strikes me, at least, as a really bad idea. You end up with things like the French Revolution, Enron, and idiotic New Age wankery. A little respect for other people’s opinions can take you a long way.

    Don’t get me wrong; William Blake was a great artist. But so was C.S. Lewis.

  5. Yes, my argument is literally conservative. Rejecting all past knowledge and tradition strikes me, at least, as a really bad idea.

    Noah, you seem to be defending one extreme by holding it up against another! To quote another learned fellah, Blake’s buddy Newton said “I can see far because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

    But he didn’t see previous notions as anything fixed or insurmountable. He spent his life adding to them and, where he felt appropriate, knocking them down.

    Also, Lewis often wrote quite scathingly about how Christianity-as-custom merely got in the way of Christianity-as-religion. It’s unlikely he’d thank you for defending him along these lines.

    And I’m not sure Moore has ever identified himself with New Age-ism.

  6. Lewis is no fan of dead custom or unfeeling religion, of course. But he is certainly a conservative, in the sense that he (like Chesterton) believes that community and tradition are very important, and not to be lightly tossed aside.

    Both Blake and Moore are cranks, with private cosmologies they’ve essentially pulled out of their asses. That looks like New Age to me, whether they explicitly call themselves that or not. It can be fun to watch someone put that sort of thing together, but (as a nonbeliever myself) I find those exercises a lot less valuable and stimulating than more tradition-based theologies, which (among other things) seem to me to do a much better job of dealing with questions like human evil, and how people relate to each other, as opposed to how people relate to their own navels.

    I don’t think past traditions are insurmountable; I’m way, way to the left of Lewis. But I find the (very traditional at this point) romantic self-assertion that Blake and Moore posit to be pretty deadly, intellectually, ethically, and morally. I love their artwork, and they can both be very wise in various ways. But, overall, as far as words to live by, I find Lewis and Chesterton a lot more amenable — (even though Moore’s views of feminism and gay issues, forr example, are a lot closer to my own than Lewis’ are.)

  7. Both Blake and Moore are cranks, with private cosmologies they’ve essentially pulled out of their asses. That looks like New Age to me, whether they explicitly call themselves that or not.

    Blake’s a New Ager? He got in pretty early, didn’t he?

    If you live in a town like mine (Brighton, England) you get exposed to New Ageyness on a pretty regular basis. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with everyone inventing their own private cosmologies. Quite the contrary, it’s a whole industry of workshops, guidebooks and other paraphernalia designed to fleece gullible middle class people out of their pension funds. New Agey-ness is postChristian, in the same way you couldn’t have Post-Modernism without Modernism. It’s essentially a consumerist approach to religion, which allows you to pick and mix the good bits provided you’ve got the requisite cash on you. As we seem to be quoting ‘the greats’ in this debate, how about Chesterton?
    ”The problem isn’t you’ll believe in nothing, it’s that you’ll believe in anything.”

    And consumers don’t like to make things much. That’s what makes them consumers to begin with.

    Saying this relates to Blake, who lived well and truly within the Christian era, is patently absurd to be honest with you. You might as well say he’s a quantum physicist. Saying it relates to Moore is theoretically possible, but you’d need to argue your case. Saying he’s devised something himself therefore must be a New Ager isn’t much of a basis for anything.

    more tradition-based theologies, which (among other things) seem to me to do a much better job of dealing with questions like human evil, and how people relate to each other

    As above.

  9. The one I just had or another one?

    Thanks for the link, I’ll try to delve into it when I have a bit more time…

Comments are closed.