“We Are Who We Choose To Be”: Sadistic Choices, Forking Paths, and the Rejection of Social and Narrative Progress in Superhero Comics and Films

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Eric Berlatsky

The idea for this paper began when I noticed a pattern in a series of superhero films that I was showing to a recent class devoted to the genre. Whether it was the 1978 Richard Donner Superman film, the pilot of the 1970s Wonder Woman television show, the 2002 Sam Raimi Spider-Man, or the 2008 Christopher Nolan Dark Knight, superheroes are repeatedly asked to make a “sadistic choice” (to quote the Green Goblin) between two equally unpalatable options. In the case of Spider-Man, he must choose to either save Mary Jane Watson from being dropped off of a New York City Bridge, or to save a tram-car full of children from the same fate. Superman must save Lois Lane or Hackensack NJ from being obliterated by a cruise missile. Wonder Woman must save either Steve Trevor or Washington DC from death-by-Nazi, and Batman must save either Harvey Dent or Rachel Dawes from the Joker’s explosives. As the Goblin notes, these choices seem designed to define the heroes, and heroism itself. Will they make the “selfish” choice that benefits them directly, or the more “selfless” choice that benefits the greater good.

These choices seem to advance the familiar superheroic dictum, “with great power comes great responsibility,” suggesting that super powers make people necessarily more responsible to others and that “heroes” must abandon their own selfish interests for the good of the many. In fact, however, these scenarios most often emphasize not the burden of great power, but the ways in which great power alleviates the hero from responsibility. In almost all of the examples mentioned above the hero is never actually forced to make a choice. Rather, Spider-Man, Superman, and Wonder Woman are all able to triumph over time itself and save both parties. It is my goal in this paper to indicate the ways in which this exercise in simultaneity provides a useful metaphor for the ways in which superhero comics, particularly those by mainstream publishers, treat matters of diversity. Rather than shouldering the ethical burden of social, political, and temporal “progress,” Marvel and DC more often attempt to have things “both ways,” retaining a troubling embrace of white male hegemony, while simultaneously introducing more diverse characters and storylines, without ever admitting that these two ends may be mutually exclusive. These companies, like their heroes, seem unwilling to “progress” temporally, or ethically, particularly in terms of race, class, and gender equality, despite initial appearances to the contrary.

Part and parcel of this problematic, as mentioned, is the fact that the scenes described deny temporal progress in multiple ways. First, each scenario presents a fundamental spatiotemporal impossibility, the idea of being in two places at the same time. The Superman film acknowledges this most clearly when Lois is initially killed by the missile, prompting Superman to reverse the Earth’s rotation, improbably turning back time and saving her life. More metaphorically, the Spider-Man film also “turns back the clock” and brings the hero’s lover back from the dead by restaging the comic-book death of Gwen Stacy, which occurred some thirty years previous in Amazing Spider-Man #121 (1973). In the comic, as in the film, the Green Goblin hurls Peter Parker’s love interest from a NYC bridge. In the comic, however, Spider-Man is too late to save her. The film Spider-Man, then, succeeds not only in saving Mary Jane and the children, but also in metaphorically traveling through time to save Gwen Stacy. The fantasy of power in play in this alternate continuity, or “forking path,” is a fantasy of overcoming the progression of time and therefore overcoming mortality itself. Concomitantly, it is a fantasy in which ethics are not asserted, but abandoned.

As Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular, and existentialist philosophy in general, remind us, our identity and our ethics are only a compilation of the choices we freely make dynamically in time. If we do not have choices, we have no ethics. Indeed, near the outset of “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre also discusses a “sadistic choice.” He tells of a “boy” he knew, who “was faced with the choice of leaving for England and joining the Free French Forces…or remaining with his mother and helping her to carry on” after the death of her other son (24). Sartre uses the example to explain the ways in which “we are condemned to be free” (27) and to insist that our choices will define us. We do not make our choices on the basis of a ready-made system of ethics, argues Sartre. Rather, ethics are made only through choices. “In creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be” (17). Similarly, the film Green Goblin functions as a surprising Existentialist when he tells Spider-Man, “We are who we choose to be,” emphasizing the ways in which heroism, ethics, and identity are a matter of choice. In my initial examples, however, and quite frequently, superheroic power involves not the power to make choices, but the power to avoid them. Here, Superman and Spider-Man need not choose between their love interest and a broader catastrophe. They instead save everyone involved, denying the basic relationship of cause and effect, and therefore of ethical responsibility.

In the 1962 essay “The Myth of Superman,” Umberto Eco articulates the ways in which mid-century Superman comics operate in an “oneiric climate” that involves a basic denial of temporal progression, and therefore of mortality, and of ethics, citing Existentialist thinkers like Heidegger to make the link. Like Sartre, Eco notes that the “existence of freedom, the possibility of planning….[and] the responsibility it implies” all depend upon temporality (156). However, subsequent critics like Charles Hatfield and Henry Jenkins have argued that the introduction of “continuity” particularly to Marvel in the 1960s served as a rebuttal to Eco, pointing to the ways in which events in continuity did have consequences and therefore could serve as a meditation on ethics, morality, and social progress. Indeed, Gwen Stacy’s death is one of the most obvious examples of “events with consequences,” and therefore, as Ben Saunders illustrates brilliantly in his book Do the Gods Wear Capes? it serves as an event that can teach both Peter Parker and his readers important truths about ethics, about cause and effect, and about the real possibility that we will never be powerful enough to overcome mortality, nor good enough to avoid tragedy.

Certainly, continuity, and even death, remain, even now, as central components of the Marvel and DC universes. Events do occur month after month, and these events do seem to have consequences, resulting in the births, deaths, marriages, and separations of heroes and/or their enemies, companions, lovers, and acquaintances. It is worth noting, however, as Marc Singer does, that rarely, if ever, are these consequences permanent. Superman, after all, has died and come back to life, as have Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Phoenix, Batman, Captain America, and a slew of others, helpfully chronicled by Wikipedia’s extensive chart of dead and resurrected characters. Superman and Spider-Man have both been married and now are not (though neither has been divorced). Spider-Man has graduated high school and been returned to it in at least three different alternative realities. These events happen both “in the continuity” of the basic Marvel or DC universes and in “alternative continuities” in the comics and other media like video games, television shows, and movies, all of which continually elaborate new paths forking outward from the temporal “nodal point,” what David Bordwell calls an “intersection,” from which they begin. The “Imaginary Stories” of the 50s and 60s cited by Eco have been superseded by Marvel’s “What If” tales, DC’s Elseworlds, periodic reboots of standard continuity, the Ultimate Universe, and etc. There is no fan of superhero comics and/or films that is not versed in the idea of multiple realities, and, indeed, Henry Jenkins notes that the age of strict continuity was very brief, if it ever truly existed. He argues that there has been “a shift away from focusing primarily on building up continuity within the fictional universe and towards the development of multiple and contradictory versions of the same characters functioning as it were in parallel universes” (“Just Men”). As a result, like their own characters, the editorial staff of Marvel and DC never have to live with the ethical and material consequences of decisions they make about characters and worlds. Instead, time can be rewound, universes rebooted, and/or alternatives created, allowing mutually contradictory outcomes to coexist, just as they do when Superman both fails to save Lois and rescues her.

In this way, contemporary comics resemble a series of thought experiments of the “What If” variety. “What if” Superman died? (an eventuality played out both in a 1950s “Imaginary Story” and in the 1992 in-continuity comic adventure)? What if he didn’t? What if Aunt May died? What if the woman who died was just an actress playing Aunt May? What if Gwen Stacy came back as a clone? While these perpetual reboots and alternative explorations are both frustrating and delightful to fans, the provisional nature of all superhero adventures denies any kind of permanent consequences.

What then, if anything, does this have to do with questions of diversity? Though Marvel and DC have been introducing racially diverse characters to their superhero universes since the 1960s, in the past few years, such efforts have increased dramatically, and have been widely celebrated in the popular media. Certainly, this increase in attempts at diversity is preferable to the alternative. But the reliance on the structure of multiplicity as opposed to continuity limits the impact and suggests the ways in which comic book companies (and perhaps their primary fan base) are willing to accept diversity only up to a point, as long as it requires no sacrifice of privilege on the part of hegemonic interests.

It is worth recalling, in this regard, that the superhero idea is a variation on the notion of the übermensch, popularized by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The übermensch itself is tied to the idea of racial Eugenics, a discourse that imagines an ideal human being as a blond-haired, blue-eyed hyperintelligent white man to be achieved through selective breeding. Early proponents of Eugenics opposed immigration by “lesser races” and were, not surprisingly, anti-miscegenation. The quest to become “ideal” or “super” was then, in many cases, the quest to become “whiter.” As critics as diverse as Gershon Legman and Chris Gavaler have noted, the Ku Klux Klan is not far removed from the idea of superheroes, masked men embodying and protecting white male privilege by rooting out the alternative through violence. A true transformation, then, of the superhero concept along the lines of racial, gendered, or sexual egalitarianism would need not only to introduce characters and heroes of different backgrounds, but to challenge the notion of white male heterosexist supremacy. It would have to make a choice between white patriarchal heterosexual privilege and actual equality.

Unfortunately, as I have articulated above, contemporary comics are not designed or inclined to pursue this kind of choice. As in other matters, diversity is almost always presented in the form of a “What if” question. What if, for instance, Spider-Man were black? This thought experiment is explored through the character of Miles Morales in the Ultimate universe. Interestingly, in this timeline Peter Parker dies in order to pave the way for Miles’ ascension to superhero status. In a vacuum, of course, this turn of events seems to dynamically symbolize the exact scenario I suggest. If Peter Parker is a symbol of white privilege, then perhaps his death is a symbol of the sacrifice of the privilege that must occur if true equality is to be achieved. However, “Ultimate” Peter Parker is only one “forking path” and, in fact white, straight, male Peter Parker remains as Spider-Man in the primary Marvel Universe. In truth, Marvel is not willing to sacrifice white male power and privilege for the sake of diversity. Instead, diversity here becomes a consumer option that requires no sacrifice of another more common to the superhero idea, that of white supremacy.

Similarly, “Wwhat if Superman were black” has been answered in multiple contexts, none of them challenging the primacy of white male Clark Kent. In 1992, John Henry Irons was introduced as Steel, briefly replacing Superman while he was dead. When white Superman returns, however, Steel becomes a secondary or supporting character, indicating the ways in which DC, like Marvel, is unwilling to entertain the notion of the sacrifice of white power and privilege for the sake of diversity. Another black Superman, Calvin Ellis, is President of the United States in an alternate, secondary continuity. Again, what exists here is not temporal, social, or political “progress” in time, but the willingness to view space-time as a series of forking paths, where any spatiotemporal “intersection” can be revisited and followed without sacrificing any other path, regardless of its troublesome politics. Likewise, John Stewart, James Rhodes, and Sam Wilson are introduced to answer the question, “What if Green Lantern, or Iron Man, or Captain America were black?” In all cases, however, even though these shifts have occurred “in continuity,” the emblems of white power and privilege that are Hal Jordan, Tony Stark, and Steve Rogers return to their original roles (or will), displacing their African-American counterparts into subsidiary ones.

Woman superheroes often undergo similar fates, as the dual questions of “What if Gwen Stacy had lived?” and “What if she were bitten by a radioactive spider?” can both be explored in the alternate universe Spider-Gwen. Likewise, the recent turn to the idea of “Thor as Woman” will seem progressive until Thor the man returns to the role (likely keeping the female Thor as an alternate or subsidiary character). In this, as in the above examples, the typical strategy, is to create separate but “unequal” universes, timelines, or comics magazines, just as separate but unequal schools, bathrooms, hotels, and drinking fountains were created in the aftermath of Plessy vs. Ferguson and in the Jim Crow south. Obviously, the results are far less important in the world of formulaic genre fiction than they were in real historical circumstances, but it is worth noting the ways in which “progress” here is rejected in favor of marketing “alternatives.”

In his reading of “multiple draft” or “forking path” films like Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, and Groundhog Day, David Bordwell notes that in almost all such films, though multiple alternative narratives are presented as emerging from one spatiotemporal “intersection,” (“What If”) the director is careful to “mark” one narrative as the correct, “real,” or “authentic” path. For a conventional single narrative, Bordwell, argues, it is always the final path that “we take…as the correct one” (“What If”). In serialized and multiple narratives wherein there is no “final” version, it would seem, as Karin Kukkonen posits, that there would to need be no “baseline reality” or preferred version. In truth, however, and particularly in regard to diversity, there is, as Marc (qtd. in Duncan, Smith, and Levitz 214) has argued, a preferred “state of grace” for iconic characters, a constellation of historical, physical, and personality attributes that are deemed authentic by creators and fans, even if no currently functioning “version” of the character fulfills them all. In the case of the heroic pillars that mint cash for Marvel/Disney and DC/WB, part of the superheroic “state of grace” seems to be, in most cases, whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. Certainly, there are characters whose “authentic” identity is black, or female, or even gay (or all three), but the economic and symbolic flagship heroes of Marvel and DC are white men who still serve the symbolic function of the übermensch, an ideal founded on notions of white power and privilege that are diametrically opposed to ideals of diversity and equality.

While Steel exists as an independent character, he was also introduced as a decidedly “inauthentic” Superman to be shoved aside upon Clark Kent’s inevitable return. While John Stewart has played the role of Green Lantern for years at a time, both in the comics and on an animated television series, Hal Jordan repeatedly returns as the “one true Green Lantern” (despite his death) both in the comics and in a failed blockbuster Hollywood film. Tony Stark/Robert Downey is the white hero who fights brown terrorists in the Iron Man film franchise, while Rhodes is a faithful friend and sidekick. Blond-haired blue-eyed Steve Rogers roams the movie screens even as he has been momentarily displaced/replaced by Sam Wilson in the current comic book series. In the Marvel Universe, it is always Rogers who is the “authentic” Captain America, the perfect representative of the white male heterosexual privilege that is America, whether we like it or not.

On one hand, it might be seen as laudable that comics companies, like their heroes, wish to “save all parties,” refusing to sacrifice their iconic heroes even as they attempt to introduce alternatives. At the same time, ethical decisions are predicated on sacrifice and difficult choices. Alternative continuities and reversible temporalities allow comics companies to avoid those choices. In fact, in clutching so tightly to nostalgia for the middle part of the twentieth century, when most of their heroes were created, they, like Superman, show a perhaps buried desire to spin the Earth backward upon its axis to a time when Jim Crow ensured the white power and privilege that superheroes exemplify. Likewise, it takes us to a time before second-wave feminism or the gay rights movement. While it is perhaps understandable that Superman does not wish to sacrifice Lois in order to save strangers, at long last white male America should be willing to sacrifice our own power and privilege, rather than constantly revisiting and rebooting it, while retaining more diverse alternatives only provisionally and without any permanence. As the Green Goblin says, “We are who we choose to be,” and as long as we choose to privilege white power, and to refuse temporal, social, and political progress, we should not be congratulating ourselves on a provisional, temporary, and, yes, marginalized, turn to diversity that functions primarily as niche marketing. Perhaps questions like “What if Ms. Marvel were a Muslim” and “What if Batwoman were a lesbian” are the beginning of a more egalitarian comic book world, but it can only be a beginning if we are willing to progress forward in time from there.

Bordwell, David. “What-If Movies: Forking Paths in the Drawing Room.” Observations on Film Art. http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog.

___. “Film Futures.” Observations on Film Art. http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/poetics_06filmfutures.pdf

Duncan, Randy, Matthew J. Smith and Paul Levitz. The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Trans. Natalie Chilton. 1962/1972. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on A Popular Medium. Eds. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2004. 146-64.

Gavaler, Chris. “The Ku Klux Clan and the Birth of the Superhero.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. 4.2 (2103): 191-208.

Hatfield, Charles. Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012.

Jenkins, Henry. “Just Men In Capes.” Confessions of An Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/just_men_in_capes.html.

___. “ ‘Just Men In Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics In An Era of Multiplicity.” The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Ed. Angela Ndalianis. New York: Routledge, 16-43.

Kukkonen, Karin. “Navigating Infinite Earths.” The Superhero Reader. Eds. Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2013. 155-69.

Lee, Stan and Gerry Conway, writers, Gil Kane, penciler, John Romita, Sr., penciler and inker, Jim Mooney and Tony Mortellaro, inkers. Amazing Spider-Man: Death of the Stacys. New York: Marvel Worldwide, Inc., 2012. Originally published as Amazing Spider-Man #88-92 and #121-22, 1970-73.

Legman, Gershon. Love and Death: A Study in Censorship. 2nd edition. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1949/1963.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions (often published as Existentialism is a Humanism.) 1957. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1990.

Saunders, Ben. Do The Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. London: Continuum, 2011.

Singer, Marc. “The Myth of Eco: Cultural Populism and Comics Studies.” Studies in Comics 4.2 (2013): 355-366.

Spider-Man. Dir. Sam Raimi. Perf. Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Willem Dafoe. Sony, 2002.

Lone Woolf and Cubs: Alan Moore, Postmodern Fiction, and Third-Wave Feminist Utopianism

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Eric Berlatsky

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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Alan Moore’s most recent glossy graphic novel is, despite its title, more akin to Lost Girls than to the two previous volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (LOEG). LOEG: The Black Dossier, like Lost Girls, is preoccupied with other creators’ fictional characters having copious amounts of sex with one another in a variety of positions. This is particularly the case in the first third of the book where Allan Quatermain (King Solomon’s Mines, etc.) and Wilhemina Murray (Jonathan Harker’s Dracula companion) have bathed in a fountain of life/immortality, which serves to make them both young, blonde, and perpetually randy. The pool may as well have been filled with liquefied Viagra, given the dramatic shift away from the subtly represented sexual dynamics between the two in both previous volumes, set some fifty years earlier. Their intermittent congresses are punctuated by excerpts from the “Black Dossier,” a government file stolen by Quatermain and Murray, which collects documents on the “extraordinary” members of the League in its various incarnations. Among these are Fanny Hill, star of a pornographic 18th century novel by John Cleland, and Virginia Woolf’s androgynous Orlando, eponymous hero/ine of the 1928 novel. Introducing Hill and Orlando as part of Leagues that both preceded and followed the turn of the Victorian century version detailed in the previous two volumes gives Moore an excuse to indulge again in somewhat graphic sexuality, particularly with Orlando, whose propensity to change gender every few centuries allows for the exploration of heterosexual couplings from either gender’s perspective, as well as frequent gay and lesbian sexual encounters, with a heavier emphasis on the latter.

Graphic gratuitousness, from LOEG: The Black Dossier

To suggest that Moore’s increasing interest in sexuality is merely an excuse to get artist Kevin O’Neill to draw some dirty pictures for him is unfair, however, since the fascination with sexuality is clearly linked to an almost Romantic obsession with the liberating powers of the imagination. The “Blazing World” section that closes the book presents readers with a utopian “magical kingdom” of fantastic fictional creations, symbolically representing the scope and power of the human imagination, frequently repressed or ignored in the “real world.” That is, while Moore’s LOEGverse is already only populated by fictional creations (James Bond, Hugo Drummond, Emma Peel, Wodehouse’s Jeeves, etc. all make memorable appearances in The Black Dossier), there is a constant implication that in this “real world” the most imaginative of imaginative creations are slowly being pushed out, due to oppressive social policies and a general incapacity (or unwillingness) to access the most powerfully imaginative parts of our brains. England, in the 1958 LOEGverse is ruled by the dystopian Party from Orwell’s 1984, while fairies, sprites, and magical beings (apparently common in the LOEG Renaissance Britain) have either been exterminated or have fled to the “Blazing World” (from Margaret Cavendish’s novel of the same name). So, while Moore retains the trappings of the previous LOEG in giving us a world wherein all of the characters are other authors’ fictional creations, he also creates yet another world in which things are even more “fictional,” fantastic, and imaginative…turning the original LOEGverse into a dystopian lack of imagination and the “Blazing World” into its utopian flipside. Not coincidentally, the “Blazing World” also presents its readers with tantalizing sexual possibilities, including the union of Fanny Hill and Venus, the goddess of love, and a ménage in the offing between Quatermain, Murray, and Orlando. All of which brings us, at long last, to my erstwhile brother’s project on this website of “the gay utopia” and it’s problematic application in Moore’s graphic novel.

What does Moore’s pornographic fascination with and valorization of polymorphous and androgynous sexuality have to do with his equal fascination with the potential utopia of the human imagination? Presumably, the former is what my brother is labeling the “gay utopia,” a label I do not completely understand or endorse, since it is neither “gay” nor a “utopia” from what I can discern. Rather, it seems to be a version of “third wave” feminism, or “post-feminism,” or (perhaps) postmodern feminism as theorized by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault (and many others) and practiced by contemporary writers like Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Caryl Churchill (and many others), all of whom are transparently influenced by Woolf’s exploration of androgyny in both Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. Moore’s affinity with this group of writers is not only indicated by the central place of Orlando in Black Dossier, but also by the conspicuous placement of a poster advertising the performance of Fevvers, Carter’s androgynous winged circus aerialist in Nights at the Circus, on a poster in Quatermain and Murray’s seedy hotel room.

Woolf’s discussion of androgyny in the final chapter of A Room suggests the possibility that all people are both male and female, and that it is, in some sense, “unnatural” for us to think of ourselves as linked to one gender or the other. Rather, Woolf suggests, many of the problems with contemporary writing is in its “unnatural” sex consciousness, most likely caused by the women’s suffrage movement and the proprietary masculine response to it. While much of A Room, then, is spent detailing various oppressions of women (particularly economic and educational deprivations) that have presented the flowering of female genius in the field of writing, she ends by advocating the dissolution of the gender categories which make such oppression possible. If we do not think of ourselves as male or female, it would, no doubt, be impossible to deprive certain members of society certain privileges on the basis of gender. Logically, it would also dissolve the notion of default “norms” of sexual orientation, since sexual attraction would be based on a much looser sense of both our own gender and that of our partner(s). Again, it would be impossible to oppress people on the basis of the gender of the person we choose to sleep with if gender itself were not an operable category. Woolf herself doesn’t explore the sexual ramifications of this notion of androgyny in A Room (she tended to be fairly reticent in portrayals of and discussion of sex), although there is a bit more of this kind of thinking in Orlando, wherein the hero/ine falls in love with women, men, and other metaphorically androgynous characters (who likewise fall in love with her/him). None of this seems to shatter Woolf’s fundamental belief in gender, however, since she insistently suggests that there is something “special” and “suggestive” about women’s writing that is simply absent from the majority of male output. That is, while it is essential for women to forget that they are women while writing, that writing will still be characteristically feminine. All of which is to say that Woolf herself never quite asserted that gender did not exist in some kind of fundamental/natural way, just that gender consciousness had taken a far-too-prominent role in human society.

Not to fear, however, because these fairly limited suggestions about a possible “androgyny of the mind” become a full-fledged denial of the existence of the male/female gender division in post-structuralist (and post-post-structuralist) thinkers like Foucault and Butler. To boil down the highly influential thought of both theorists into two words, gender and sexual orientation become matters of “discourse” and “performativity.” For Foucault, of course, there are no natural or “essential” truths. Rather, “truth” is a matter of social agreement, or what people “say” in a variety of discourses. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault details how certain sexual practices are described through discourse (and therefore authorized) as “normal,” while others are labeled as “abnormal.” Implicit (and occasionally explicit) in this argument is that there is no “real” normal, just what people have labeled as “normal” through discourse, all of which provides the impetus and the practice of the “specification” of and oppression of the “perverse”: the gay, the pedophiliac, the practitioner of bestiality, etc. The attribution of these behaviors as “abnormal” is primarily a practice by which societies label and specify an abnormal “other” which serves to justify and valorize the “normal” self of any community. The normal/abnormal binary then authorizes and excuses various forms of oppression.

While Foucault is more interested in “sexuality” than in gender, his general argument works just as well for these categories. There is no such thing as “natural” sex or gender divisions, the argument goes. Rather, the binary is created in discourse as a means of defining the masculine (normal, complete, phallically endowed) self against the other (abnormal, lacking) that is the feminine. Those in power generate the most influential discourse, and these discourses perpetuate power relations by presenting social constructions (like gender) as biological fact. For feminist thinkers following poststructuralist thought (third wave feminists in Julia Kristeva’s formulation), then, resistance to masculine dominance becomes less a matter of advocating for economic, political, or educational equality, and more a matter of exposing the fact that gender is a false category that merely perpetuates certain power relations. Presumably, exposure of this “false consciousness” will lead to a revolution of the mind that would put an end to oppression on the basis of these categories (gender, perversion) and lead to some kind of gender-free utopia. Foucault’s own position on this is never this optimistic, however, since he argues that any discourse is by its nature “disciplinary” or oppressive, and so a change in discourse about sexuality would not free us from oppression, but merely deliver us into a new form of it.

Butler’s claim in Gender Trouble (1990) is somewhat more positive, however, since it hinges on the liberating potential of “performativity” and not on the inherently oppressive power of discourse. For Butler, as with Foucault, gender categories are inherently false. In fact, Butler denies the typical division of “sex” and “gender” with the former referring to biological/natural differences between men and women (chromosomes, genitalia, etc.) and the latter referring to socially defined “roles.” For Butler, while chromosomal and genital differences may exist, it is a social (discursive) decision to use these categories that divide a society. We might just as easily call all blondes “male,” and all brunettes “female” and ignore the differences we now use to distinguish male from female just as we now ignore other kinds of differences between people (finger length, for instance). So, while differences between people may be “real” in some sense, the meaning of particular differences is never natural, essential, biological, or ontological. Butler argues the “gendered body…has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (2497) and that this “fact” is the essential definition of performativity. Our sex/gender, she argues, is only a collection of acts within a social discourse. Drag queens and transvestites, then, become her primary examples, since their “internal” essence is so easily confused with their “external” act. Quoting Esther Newton, Butler notes how drag queens may be read as female on the outside (clothing), but really male (since they have genitals, Y chromosomes, etc.), or they may be read as male on the outside (in their bodies), but female on the inside (in their “soul,” their “self,” their primary self-identification). Butler notes then that drag, while an imitation of gender, also reveals how all gender is imitative: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of the radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.” (2498). Again, as with Foucault, gender/sex is revealed not as “natural” and “biological” but as a social construction of discourse. If we only see these constructions, then, we can perhaps act outside of them, performing the gender we wish to perform (including, perhaps, androgyny, or some other gender outside the male/female binary) and not be constricted by discourse. As with much thought I think of as postmodern, the primary claim here is for the “lack of reality of reality” (Lyotard 146), or the revelation that things we think of as “real” (sexual orientation, gender/sex) are in fact not real at all, but are instead mere social agreement that would change if we (as a society) were merely able to “imagine otherwise.” If, as a culture, we could shift our attention away from binary divisions like normal/abnormal, hetero/homo, woman/man, etc. the oppressions that arise from these divisions might be avoided, subverted, or destroyed. As Butler argues “gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (2500) and presumably if “gender” were eliminated, those consequences would be alleviated.

While Foucault’s discussion of unavoidable discourses from innumerable intersecting power structures may be unnecessarily draconian (you’re oppressed by discourse, but there is no way out!), Butler’s discussion of drag and performance may be unrealistically utopian (despite the fact that Butler always keeps an eye on the oppressive discourses that construct gender). By suggesting that “performance” is the most operative word in discussions of gender and sexuality, she implies that if we all start “performing” in opposition to dominant power structures, such structures would dissolve. Moore’s Black Dossier and Lost Girls seem to operate within that logic. By presenting us with a cornucopia of sex acts, sexual attractions, and shifting genders, Moore works to undermine typical oppressive divisions like male/female and homosexual/ heterosexual, particularly in his clever division of the “real” LOEGverse and the “Blazing World,” the latter of which is only clearly viewable with a pair of included 3-D glasses. Again, the message seems to be that a shift in perspective (from the two dimensions of the league to the 3 dimensions of our world, through the 4th dimension of time, and finally to the supposed 5th dimension of the “Blazing World” wherein the characters experience all times simultaneously). The possible simultaneity of time is a standard element of Moore’s work (from Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen to Jack the Ripper’s multi-temporal experiences in From Hell), as is kinky and non-conformist sex (perhaps the most vivid example being Abby Cable’s intense and sweaty sex with a vegetable in Swamp Thing). The two are brought together most clearly in the final section of The Black Dossier, however, wherein it becomes clear that a shift in dimension, an escape from viewing time as linear, gives a fresh perspective, allowing us to see gender itself as not “real” and therefore available to re-vision.

This is particularly the case because although the “Blazing World” represents vivid and imaginative fiction, the restrictive oppressive world of the “real” LOEGverse is clearly just as fictional as its Blazing counterpart. Both are populated by fictions. It is merely the case that one of these fictions reinforces typical gender binaries and oppressions, while the other frees us from them, that separates the two. Ian Fleming’s James Bond (called merely “Jimmy,” no doubt for copyright reasons) is the key character in this regard in the “present” section of the real LOEGverse. His brutal violence and misogynist attitude towards both Mina and Emma Peel (of the Avengers) suggests the standard gender divisions and gender oppressions that exist in our own “real” world. At the same time, his obvious fictionality reminds us that these attitudes are also “fictions” in their own way, constructions of social discourse without recourse to “essential” reality. Of course, any character in a “novel” is a fiction, but Moore’s characters are made more obviously so by the fact that he is appropriating them from other people’s fictions. This self-referential indication that one’s creations are “texts” not “truths,” is a staple of “postmodern” fiction, of course, but it not mere textual game-playing here (although it appears to be in parts of the other League volumes). Rather, it serves the post-feminist agenda of suggesting that sex/gender and sexual orientation are themselves fictions. The polymorphic sexuality of Orlando is then set against the misogynist heterosexuality of Bond, both as fictions from which we can choose, but only one of which has a proven track record of oppression and abuse. It is in this way that The Black Dossier’s utopian dimension functions: as a “real” choice between two discursive fictions, not as a choice between quotidian reality and liberating imagination. As Prospero/Moore heavyhandedly notes in his final speech, our reality is at least as much a fiction as our imaginative creations. Nevertheless, in The Black Dossier, Moore makes the choice between these two fictions too easy and too reductive.

In any accounting of gender in a postmodern context, it is important not to too easily adopt a utopian perspective about the liberating potential of gender performance without also acknowledging the pervasively restrictive power of discourse and the possibility of additional restrictions of biology/nature, which may be too easily disregarded by radical social constructivists like Butler and Foucault. Grant Morrison, another comics “star,” provides a similarly utopian outlook in The Invisibles, which also combines explorations of the simultaneity of time, extra-dimensional perception, existential freedom of consciousness, and trans-gender androgyny. (Really, he and Moore may as well be the same person for all their personal squabbling). In the Apocalipstick story arc, the transvestive Lord Fanny can only gain her eldritch powers if she can “fool” a Mexican goddess-figure into believing that s/he is a girl. S/he stabs herself near the groin, fooling the extra-dimensional creature into believing that s/he is menstruating and thus gains his/her superheroic powers. As in Black Dossier, Morrison seems to suggest that gender is a matter of performance and self-identification, available for vision and re-vision, given the proper perspective (again from a 4th or 5th dimensional angle in the majority of the story). Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: A Game of You, while less giddy and inventive, may provide a reparative to this perspective, however. In this story, a witch gathers together the various women in an apartment complex to rescue one of their sisters from the “evil” Cuckoo. Wanda, a pre-operative transsexual formerly named Alvin, prepares to go with them, but is denied access to the dream realm because, well, he still has a penis. While Gaiman’s story (like Moore’s, like Morrison’s) is largely about the freedom to choose one’s identity, to perform the self, and to resist social discourse and definitions, here this possibility is ultimately defeated by the intractable reality of Wanda’s gender. In this case, the goddesses cannot be “fooled” or convinced by performance. Indeed, Wanda’s inability to accompany his friends leads inexorably to her/his death. Gaiman’s cautious pessimism indicates a less “postmodern,” and perhaps more realistic approach to gender oppression. Imagining gender differently, while possible and potentially liberating, doesn’t necessarily make certain “realities” disappear. Indeed, even if sex/gender are merely products of social discourse, there is no “Blazing World” that we can access in which such discourses disappear. Rather, discourse may be just as intractable as biology.

Morrison in Moore drag.
The Invisibles ©Grant Morrison and Jill Thompson

Most works of postmodern feminist fiction acknowledge these substantial barriers to gender liberation more clearly and more comprehensively than Moore’s does, and this is one of the primary failings of Black Dossier. Indeed, Woolf’s Orlando, written almost eighty years (and thousands of pages of feminist theory) before Black Dossier, is already more sophisticated on these issues than the later book. When Orlando emerges from her male to female sex change, she initially has no sense of her own gender while living among a group of gypsies. As soon as she returns to English society, however, her new gender has a significant impact upon her life. The juxtaposition of the “civilized” English with the “natural” gypsy culture gives Orlando (and Woolf) the opportunity to configure gender as something that rises out of social discourse, while Orlando’s experiences as both man and woman allows him/her to act as both despite the fact that s/he “remained exactly as he had been” (138). Orlando then is able to experience the freedoms of dressing as a man at night, while remaining a woman in the day during periods of the 18th century. At the same time, however, her activities and opportunities, particularly social and economic, are drastically curtailed as a woman, and her marriage (to a more ambiguously androgynous man) is described not merely in terms of love, but also in terms of social compulsion and as the “jaws of death” (262). That is, despite being Woolf’s most “utopian” novel, exploring as it does freedom from gender, the possibility of androgynous and lesbian love, and emergence into a new “present” that may evade the constrictions of the past, much of the novel is devoted to the depiction of these restrictions and the monumental power they have to control our sense of self and our daily actions. Woolf is more concerned in her work with the disciplinary nature of discourse about gender than with a performative utopian escape from those discourses.

Likewise, followers of Woolf, like Winterson and Carter, are less inclined to display a utopian dimension without counterbalancing it with a more “realistic” reparative. Carter’s Nights at the Circus (cited in Black Dossier) contains an androgynous heroine (Fevvers) and an increasingly androgynous man (Walser) who get married (like Orlando and Shel) and declare the possibility of a utopian future led by Fevvers as “New Woman”. Still, the book focuses at length on a variety of patriarchal abuses, including the merciless beating of one character, Mignon, by a series of men. These abuses are accompanied by sardonic critiques of a utopian mindset by Fevvers’ lifelong companion, Lizzie. Similarly, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, which, like Black Dossier, contains meditations on the simultaneity of time as part of its feminism, provides us with a more ambiguously heroic androgynous heroine. The Dog Woman’s excessive enjoyment of and reveling in violence makes the reader begin to think that her feminist resistance to masculine discourse results not in “freedom” from gender binaries and oppression, but in a new era of oppression, violence, and abuse that merely reverses the male/female terms rather than erasing them. In depicting matters in this way, there is some suggestion that such an erasure of the gender binary may be impossible. Winterson’s The Passion also contains an androgynous heroine, Villanelle, whose webbed feet are signifiers of masculinity, while her genitalia/chromosomes suggest otherwise. Her liberation from an abusive marriage doesn’t result in freedom/happiness, however, at least not for all, as Henry (her friend and murderer of the husband) ends up on an island insane asylum, much like his previous “love,” Napolean.

Similar ambivalences are available in Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9, whose very title suggests a utopia, but whose contents are more conflicted. While the first act focuses on repressive Victorian gender and racial discourse, the sexual fantasmagoria of the second act is surprisingly less liberated than one might expect. While the first act is dominated by simple oppressive binaries of race and gender (complicated by transgender casting), the second act is dominated by homosexual affairs, followed by various ménage a trois, and finally by incestuous and inter-generational orgies. None of these physical acts seem to free their participants from the discourses of patriarchy available in Act I, however, as two gay men quickly adopt typically “masculine” or “feminine” roles, while the matriarch of the family, Betty, continues to want to serve men even after she leaves her husband and discovers the liberating pleasures of masturbation. That is, while Churchill’s play clearly views gender and sexual orientation as both discursive and performative, she is not so quick to suggest that a sudden shift in perspective, or trip to a “Blazing World” will make liberation from circumscribed gender conceptions possible.

None of this is to suggest that Moore is completely devoid of irony or self-critique. One humorous aside notes that when Orlando is male, he has a tendency to become increasingly violent, while a brief Tijuana Bible from the 1984 years depicts a man declaring, in the middle of a sexual act, “Ahh! Yes! In this moment of timeless animal love, we cast off our shackles!” That this sex act is immediately followed by betrayal by his partner and submission once more to the totalitarian government, seems to suggest the folly in believing that a series of diverse sexual practices will somehow “free” us from the discourses that determine social “norms” like gender and sexual orientation.

Still, despite this ironic disavowal of such unalloyed utopian notions, this is precisely the idea that The Black Dossier most frequently represents. The key first movement of a new consciousness in post-feminist thought is the realization that gender (and sexuality) are social constructs that can be ignored and re-invented. The result of this, perhaps, would be an openness to polymorphous sexuality and more various gender-identity. Moore’s book, however, seems to suggest that exposure to polymorphous sexualities and gender-identities will somehow lead us to an acknowledgment of gender’s inherent falsehood. While Black Dossier thematizes the fictionality of gender, it more often shows us lots of sex (especially in the first third of the book), a practice that tends not to serve the interests of post-feminism, but instead has the reverse effect. Mostly, what readers of the book are given (and it is a given, in the world of mainstream comics, that most of those readers are male) is a plethora of beautiful women in various states of undress, performing sex acts with men and/or other women. Rare is the depiction of homosexual male intercourse, and rarer is the depiction of sex that doesn’t conform to what might be typically titillating to men. Women are quite consistently, and especially in the Orlando and Fanny Hill sections, on display for men to ogle and appreciate, with the more serious ideas about the value of gender re-evaluation likely missed by many if not most readers. Nowhere is this problem more clear than in the Fanny Hill section in which one page (and its only picture) are devoted to a society in which all women walk around naked, while the men are fully clothed. While it is possible to view this as a commentary on the socially-derived convention of wearing clothes (and its ridiculousness in warmer climates), it is more likely to be read as an opportunity for mostly male readers to look at pictures of naked women. It is hard to construe this as a step for feminism. While, again, it is possible to argue that Moore seeks to be true to the style of his source material, reproducing such source material in an effort to advocate overcoming it is a problem typical of postmodern pastiche.

The exact same problem emerges in Moore¹s treatment of race. The “rescue” of Murray and Quatermain performed by the blackface sambo-style doll, the Golliwog (a character in children’s books by Florence Upton and Enid Blyton, the latter a favorite of Moore’s), may be read as an effort to promote the possibility of “reimagining” racial stereotypes in positive ways. Given the lack of critical distance, or self-conscious discussion, in the book itself, however, the portrayal of the Golliwog seems more consistent with racist caricatures than in opposition to them. Given Moore’s sketchy history of representing race (the zombie issues of Swamp Thing, the firedrake in Miracleman), there is little in Black Dossier to suggest that racist representations are under critique. Instead, the Golliwog is presented as an imaginative “hero,” instead of as a typically white failure of the imagination. The problems of racial politics inherent in the use of the Golliwog should, at the very least, be explored, just as the contradictions inherent in a man presenting naked women for the viewing/reading of other men should be considered, before claims for the inherent “liberating” power of Moore’s (or anyone else’s) imagination can be taken seriously. None of this is to suggest Moore is a “racist” or a “sexist” in any kind of easily attributable way. His left-wing credentials are, indeed, well-established. Instead, the Black Dossier seems to assert a bit too easily that intractable social problems (like racial and gender discrimination) can be overcome with a little fifth dimensional imagination, a notion that is offensive in itself.

White people are so imaginative!

Overall, The Black Dossier is a disappointment in almost every way. The playful integration of Victorian fictional characters in the previous volumes is replaced by an exhaustive encyclopedic attempt to integrate nearly all fiction into one world. The sex doesn’t reach the erotic excesses of Lost Girls, but retains many of the philosophical problems associated with pornography. The meditations on the freedom of the mind are less compelling and less complex than Moore’s early ruminations on anarchy in V for Vendetta or his vision of an unavoidably repressive utopia in the closing issues of Miracleman. Moore’s engagement with feminism and sexual freedom has been evident over the course of his illustrious career, but his most recent efforts to depict and promote a kind of utopian alternative to our vexed reality in Promethea, Lost Girls, and Black Dossier is both less entertaining and less insightful than his previous work, all of which contained fewer sex scenes.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. From Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 2488-2501.

Carter, Angela. Nights At The Circus. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Churchill, Caryl. Cloud 9. New York: Routledge, 1979, 1984

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Gaiman, Neil. Sandman: A Game Of You. New York: D. C. Comics, 1991-1992.

Morrison, Grant. The Invisibles, Vol. 1, #¹s 13-16. New York: D.C. Comics,
1995

Moore, Alan and Kevin O¹Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. Wildstorm/America’s Best Comics, 2007.

Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. New York: Vintage, 1987.

___. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1928.

___. A Room of One’s Own. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1929.

More Superheroes, More Ideology

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Eric Berlatsky

Note by Noah: Eric posted a brief review of Dark Knight and other recent superhero films in comments. It seemed a shame to let his thoughts languish at the bottom of an old threat, so I’m highlighting them here.
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I liked DKR way more than the previous two Nolan Batman movies. It does seem pretty conservative in some ways…though…as it turns out…the “Bad Guys” are not really 99%’ers at all and are just manipulating political unrest and class division to take revenge. In some ways this is a copout (just another madman/madwoman bent on revenge or world domination), but in other ways it mitigates the conservatism of the film (which initially seems to take the side of the rich/status quo vs. the “crazy” poor and downtrodden). In some ways, one could read the film to suggest that it’s the mistreatment of the poor and mishandling of the economy that “primes” that (large) section of society to be manipulated by “evil.” That is, there is some suggestion that if we had a more egalitarian society, revolution/anarchy wouldn’t be necessary (or on the verge of happening). (Just as criticizing the results of the French Revolution in the short term doesn’t necessarily mean one is in favor of the ancien regime). For all those reasons, it’s an interesting film, that (to me, anyway) made more sense plot-wise than Batman Begins or Dark Knight…and had enough fun mindless superheroing and explosions to make it enjoyable. Anne Hathaway was also surprisingly good as Catwoman.

I also liked the new Spider-Man movie quite a bit. That one had almost no ambitions that I could see… I liked the return to Gwen Stacy, though, since I read about her in Ben’s book. Both DKR and ASM were better than Avengers, to my mind (which really made almost no logical sense…never mind the ideology).

Also…the fact that Bruce Wayne loses all of his money is meant to make him a more ambiguous figure (not clearly on the side of the rich). Instead he ends up in the same place as Bane—stripped of everything…at the bottom of a well…etc. I don’t think this really works to make Batman a “working-class hero” (it’s something to be, I here)… but that’s clearly the intent…and it adds an extra layer to any kind of ideological reading. To some degree, I agree that “it’s a mess”—but at least it’s an interesting mess…which is more than can be said for something like Avengers…which is both a mess…and completely mindless.

“Lightning Only Strikes Twice Once, Y’Know”: Phallic Mothers, Fetishism, and Replacement in the comics of Los Bros Hernandez (Part II)

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Eric Berlatsky

In Part I, I discussed the Freudian model of fetishism, phallic mothers, and their importance to Gilbert Hernandez’s Poison River graphic novel. I’ll wait here if you want to go read that piece of mindbending wisdom. Waiting…waiting… Welcome back!
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What the preceding has to do with the Locas roundtable, or Jaime Hernandez’s work more generally, may seem a bit distant, but it all links, fairly directly, to the primary theme of the roundtable thus far: nostalgia. Jaime’s works function nostalgically, or seem to, and are frequently about nostalgia (however one wishes to define the term) and the traffic between past and present. Freud’s account of fetishism is, in fact, an account of nostalgia as well…nostalgia for the phallic mother…nostalgia for that originary moment before knowledge of sexual difference, and before the traumatic fear of castration.

The phallic mother represents a “perfect” time, a time of wholeness and unity in a number of ways. First, it is a time when mother and son are still joined together without the interference of the father. While the child may be aware of the competition with the father, he has not yet given up the notion that he will be forever joined to the mother and that their blissful union will be eternal. It is the threat of castration that frightens the child out of these utopian beliefs, at least for boys, but the attachment of desires to the fetish is an attempt to retain such a utopia, to hold onto this perfect past even after it is already gone. To fetishize a shoe (or an athletic support-belt) is to cling to the past with the mother, and to be “nostalgic” for it.

Second, the phallic mother represents a complete and ideal “whole” human being, who has both breasts and a penis, the complete and unified being the boy imagines his mother to be before the revelation of her (and the prospect of his own) castration. When the child learns of sexual difference, he learns that none of us are “whole.” We are one gender or the other, but never both, and so, it is “natural” to reminisce and to feel “nostalgic” for such an ideal wholeness even as one pursues a replacement for it in the field of romantic love.

Again, there is no reason why we must believe in the narratives Freud provides, but it does provide a useful heuristic for understanding Jaime Hernandez’s work as well and especially the stories collected in La Perla La Loca (which includes the graphic novel, Wigwam Bam and the stories which follow). Perhaps most central and helpful in looking at these stories is the central truth of these Freudian narratives, which is that “nostalgia” here is never nostalgia for something real, but is instead nostalgia for a fantasy of wholeness which never existed. Simply put, of course, the boy’s mother was never an androgynous whole with both a penis and breasts. This is, of course, merely a fantasy the boy has (or a fantasy Freud has and projects upon the boy in his story). Likewise, the mother was never castrated. Rather, she never had a penis from the beginning. Similarly, the boy never had a direct, unmediated, love affair with his mother uninterrupted by the father. Again, this is simply an Oedipal fantasy that serves to structure the boy’s psyche, but has no basis in reality. A fetish, then, is a replacement for something that was never there in the first place, a replacement for the female phallus that Peter Rio (in Poison River) searches out, but which was never present in his own mother. It is this model of replacing an absent original that is central to Jaime Hernandez’s work in general and Wigwam Bam in particular, and which helps explain the peculiar “emptiness” at the center of his nostalgic forays.

As evidence, it is perhaps worth recalling one instance of explicit sexual fetishism in Wigwam Bam, which occurs when Hopey spends a brief period couch-surfing with her friend, Jewel, in New York, after leaving another friend’s apartment. Jewel’s mother, Nan Tucker, has her own peculiar fetish, which rivals Peter Rio’s. While not fixated on a particular object, Nan pays a young woman, Crystal, to dress up as a much younger girl, and pretend to be her “baby,” allowing Nan to change her diaper, and role-play similar activities. In fact, as it turns out Nan organizes gatherings of famous TV sit-com mothers (of which she is one) who have identical fetishes and who bring their own “wards” with them. While conventional sex itself never seems to be in play in these relationships, and the girls are paid well to act their roles, the scenario certainly plays out in fetishistic fashion, particularly given the Freudian material cited in Part I.

The TV moms’ fetishization of youth encapsulates a similar kind of “nostalgia” to the kind that Freud discusses, if somewhat in reverse. Nan nostalgically attempts to recapture her own youth, both as a young mother, and as a child, paying Crystal to “act out” the wholeness and unity of mother/child relations that are central to the Oedipal scenario (if, in Freud, usually from the point of view of the child). Given Nan’s vexed relationship with her own daughter (whom she competes with for Hopey’s affection), like Freud’s version of the fetish, Nan here is nostalgic for something that never existed. With Crystal, there is an ideal union with a daughter who will always be young and obedient (because paid to perform that role), as opposed to her real daughter who is now an adult and disgusted by her mother’s behavior. In fact, it is strongly implied that these women’s entire careers on television, as sit-com mothers, is already a replacement for their own failed relationships with their daughters, and the young women they hire serve as replacements for the replacements…second order fetishes that help them to convince themselves of the original’s existence (while also disavowing it).

Here, Jaime provides a broad satire and mockery of a nostalgia for innocence and childhood, which belies the notion that Locas itself represents a simplistic foray into such nostalgia. Instead, via the logic of fetishism, Locas suggests that any such nostalgia is a longing for an absence, whether it be the mother’s phallus which never existed, or a perfect mother/child relationship that can only be simulated in sit-coms or by hiring a child not one’s own.

Nan Tucker’s nostalgia and desire for a perfect, originary moment of wholeness is not an isolated incident in Wigwam Bam, but is rather a synecdoche for its entire workings. As Douglas Wolk notes in his reading of WWB, perhaps the most clever formal trick deployed in its pages is the strategic absence of Locas’ most central character, Maggie Chascarillo (known also as “Perla” in the book in question). Apart from the first 14-page section of the 115 page graphic novel, Maggie does not appear in WWB and so the reader takes place in the grand search for her that is also enacted by its characters. In particular, Maggie’s childhood “punk” friends from Hoppers, spend the story looking for both Maggie and Hopey, who have traveled to New York (one in pursuit of the other). Izzy Ortiz, in particular, dealing with mental health issues of her own, becomes obsessed with the absence of Maggie and Hopey, cutting out the backs of milk cartons which picture Hopey in “Have You Seen Me” mode and taping them to her walls. Eventually, Izzy’s obsession with the missing Maggie and Hopey leads her to travel the country in search of the two friends, meeting up with a variety of Locas characters along the way.

Here again, Izzy’s search is clearly an act of nostalgia. For Izzy (and Daffy, and their friends), the friendship (with benefits) of Maggie and Hopey represents a prelapsarian utopian paradise that is linked to the punk culture of which they were all a part. The punk community of their youth, or the women’s imagined vision of it, rejects dominant culture’s series of hierarchies and divisions, including those of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The punk community’s rejection of consumerist/corporate capitalism is well-established, but the concomitant image of an angry, loud, violent opposition is largely eschewed in Locas, in favor of an image of a community which is accepting, multi-racial, gender-equal, and open to non-heteronormative sexualities. Maggie and Hopey, in particular, represent both the rebelliousness of the Hoppers punks (particularly in Hopey’s case), but also its friendly, open, and forgiving face (particularly in Maggie’s case). Their lesbianism (or bisexuality) is open to interpretation but is never censured or rejected by their fellow punks, whether male or female (many of whom are also “queer.”) The blurring of gender divisions, and therefore heteronormativity, is, as discussed in Part I, part and parcel of a hearkening for the pre-Oedipal, a time before such divisions are known. The Maggie/Hopey relationship (or the memory of it) serves as a fetish for Izzy, who desperately tries to track them down and regain the utopian promise of Hoppers in its younger, punkier, days.

It should be no surprise, given these thematics, that among the individuals Izzy finds on her journey are both a Maggie lookalike (an explicit replacement) and a “phallic woman” from her own youth, a woman who has undergone a sex change to become a man. Likewise, it is not surprising that this “real” phallic woman fails to hold the attraction of the utopia Izzy has imagined. S/he is a failed replacement for Maggie/Hopey, just as Peter Rio’s strippers are failed replacements for his (phallic) mother.

By the time Izzy finds Maggie and Hopey, of course, they are no longer “together” despite their earlier efforts to reunite. In fact, their brief blissful attempt to reignite their friendship and recover their youth is sabotaged by the racial difference that is rarely of explicit emphasis in the previous stories that take place in Hoppers. When Maggie is mocked at a party for being Mexican, she seeks solace in Hopey, who is less than sympathetic. When it becomes clear that Hopey, who is half Colombian, can “pass” for white, a racial divide opens between the two women that, perhaps, had previously existed, but which had gone unmentioned. Hopey’s casually homophobic reference to “art fags” (despite her own sexual orientation), further cements the ways in which the nostalgia for the “perfectly punk” Maggie/Hopey relationship is misplaced in “real world” New York, which, despite its cosmopolitanism, is rife with racism and homophobia.

Indeed, later in the story, we learn that the Maggie/Hopey relationship is itself merely a replacement for, or copy of, Maggie’s first “punk” relationship, with her best friend Letty, who introduced her to punk music before dying in a car crash. In a telling diary entry, Maggie writes, “I hope Hopey never dies in a car crash. Lightning only strikes twice once, y’know” (115). Hopey is here explicitly framed as a “replacement” for Letty, a fetish which covers up an absence, while attempting to replace the “wholeness” of the Maggie/Letty relationship, though Maggie worries that the replacement itself cannot be replaced.

Within this context, Ray D, Maggie’s next serious relationship (one which “culminates” in the recent Love Bunglers arc), serves as a replacement for Hopey, who herself is a replacement for Letty. Within a Freudian logic, Letty can only be a replacement for the mother (or the mother’s phallus), and Maggie’s expulsion from the maternal family home to live with her Aunt Vicki in Hoppers as a youth might substantiate such a reading. At the same time, the important point here is that regardless of the idealization of the Maggie/Letty relationship, it is clear that such idealization is a mirage, a hope for something which, like the mother’s phallus, never existed to begin with. The Hopey/Maggie relationship is, after all, similarly idealized, but is revealed to have many cracks in its façade.

Similarly, Ray D.’s relationship with Danita Lincoln is characterized as a replacement for his earlier affair with Maggie. In particular, Danita’s confidence in the level of Ray’s commitment vacillates. She worries both that she is merely a “sex object” for Ray and that he cares not for her as an individual, but as a Maggie substitute, even going so far as imagining Ray in her own bed, cuddling with his ex-girlfriend. Danita’s fears about her own “fetishization” (her transformation into a sex object and Maggie replacement) is played out in multiple scenarios. She serves as a nude model for Ray’s drawing/painting and as a stripper at the local club, Bumpers. Her friend Rocky suggests that Ray sees her only as an object, when looking at Ray’s drawing, as if he were one of the members of the strip-club audience. At that moment, Danita, who had initially been flattered by Ray’s appreciation, begins to wonder to what degree she is just a body, filling the space recently left empty by her predecessor. Likewise, where she once saw her stripping as an empowering experience of agency, she now begins to see herself through the eyes of her audience, as one of a procession of naked bodies on a stage, objects which occupy the same space, replacing each other at regular intervals.

In this scene, Wigwam Bam examines itself as well. Ray too becomes a replacement of sorts, not only of Hopey in Maggie’s life, but also of someone “real,” Jaime Hernandez himself. When Rocky accuses Ray of objectifying Danita, it functions as Jaime Hernandez accusing himself of objectifying her, and his other female characters for good measure, for it is he who really draws naked pictures of women, both for his own pleasure and that of his mostly male audience. Again, as in the case of his brother, Gilbert, the fetishizing and objectification of women is here brought up against a moment of self-examination and an acknowledgment that from Danita’s point-of-view, she cannot merely be a body for the pleasure of the male gaze or a simple replacement for the superior/utopian relationship that preceded it, even if that relationship never really existed in its ideal form. Danita’s self-conscious worry is, indeed, a sign of her subjectivity. Her vulnerability and determination make her in some ways similar to Maggie, but far from identical to her. Her assertion of her own subjectivity is a tacit critique of the practice of fetishizing people, of transforming subjects into (replacement) objects for the purposes of sexual pleasure, and it comes as no surprise when she leaves Ray, a tacit rejection of her objectification at both his, and Jaime’s hands.

The encounter/conflict here between Danita-as-object/replacement/fetish and Danita-as-subject/original here sets up the ways in which WWB and its immediate sequels take things a step beyond the fetishism on display in Poison River. In Poison River, there is a focus on fetishism-as-utopian-fantasy and then disillusionment with that fantasy. That is, the fantasy of reunification with the phallic mother is revealed to be a fantasy and the book closes on a note of disillusionment where everything is corrupted, gender divisions are enforced, and a bloodbath ensues. In the Perla La Loca stories, simple disillusionment is not enough, however, and Jaime pushes the narrative forward into a more “realistic” engagement with utopian premises.

As Danita’s introspection suggests, while “fetishism” may, in some ways, envision a utopia wherein gender divisions, racial divisions, and divisions on the basis of sexual orientation do not obtain, they do so on the basis of a backward-looking fantasy to the pre-Oedipal. In such a fantasy, no individual in the present is fully acknowledged or accepted for their own sake, since they are always inevitably viewed as a replacement for someone else. As we have seen, Hopey functions as a replacement for Letty (and Ray for Hopey), while there are also a seemingly neverending series of Maggie replacements as well. In addition to Danita, Marcia/Marco, and the Maggie lookalike, we learn in “We Want the World and We Want It Bald,” for instance, that Hopey’s brother Joey’s girlfriend, Janet, is also a Maggie replacement, and plays a role in the sexual fantasies/fetishes that Joey inflicts upon her. In all of these cases, however, if one reads the stories “realistically,” as opposed to merely as an instantiation of Freudian theory, the danger arises of reading individuals as merely replacements for one another, as “fetish objects” as opposed to as autonomous subjects.

In fact, Jaime uses the pervasive theme of replacements and fetishes in order to probe and reject the tendency we all have to use people in our lives as “objects” for our own pleasure (fetish objects), as opposed to as subjects with autonomy. Danita may function as a replacement for Maggie for Ray (though this is somewhat questionable), but for herself she has autonomy. Likewise, Hopey wonders what Janet “gets out of” her fetishized relationship with Joey, when she seems to serve merely as a stand-in (again) for Maggie. Even Maggie herself is in danger of falling victim to a kind of objectification if we are content to view her simply as a “symbol” of phallic motherhood (a figure that remains an idealized symbol of wholeness, unity, innocence, and purity), and not as a complex, fallible individual.

This theme of objectification plays into Locas’ parallel exploration of the problems of capitalist culture to which punk is configured as an alternative. As Marx notes in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism reduces all relationships to “the money relation” (659), wherein individuals view other individuals not as human beings (subjects), but as a means to their own acquisition of wealth (objects), a weigh station on the way to the acquisition of capital. It is for this reason that Marx can articulate the existence in society of “commodity fetishism,” in which people put outsized importance upon specific commodities. If money is the only value in society, it should be no surprise that “pleasure” can only come from them. If one combines Freudian and Marxist logic, then, to fetishize a commodity (or object) is both to imagine a world wherein there are no divisions (and therefore no exploitations) and to value a world wherein those exploitations are inscribed upon the very object being fetishized. As a “replacement” for the phallic mother, the fetish object symbolizes a perfect “whole” world devoid of divisive qualities, while, as a commodity, it carries the trace and history of endemic class exploitation. The contradiction brings to our attention the limits of thinking through the logic of Freudian fetishism. While, symbolically, the “objectification/fetishism” may represent a challenge to the race, class, and gender divisions in a society, in social practice, to treat an individual as an object/fetish is to treat them, á la Kant, as a means to an end, as opposed to as an end in themselves.

All of this is clear in Danita’s rejection of her role as Maggie’s replacement, as well as in her eventual rejection of her role as a stripper. The stripper role is complex in the story, as Danita clearly feels like it gives her agency and power, but even though this is the case, it also positions her as the object of the male gaze, a position she is increasingly uncomfortable in occupying. In either case, however, it is interesting that, despite her role as the object of the gaze (as nude model for both Ray and the reader, and as stripper for both Bumpers and the reader), she never relinquishes her subjectivity, insisting that while she may be the object in the eyes of the “other,” she nevertheless remains a “subject” to herself.

Increasingly, the notion that all individuals are both subjects and objects becomes thematized in Locas, not merely for Danita, but for others as well. Maggie, in particular, occupies a similar position, when, in Chester Square she is turned into an accidental prostitute. Stranded without money and without means of transportation, Maggie twice “sells herself” sexually, becoming an “object” in the capitalist economy, and tacitly rejecting her role as symbol of the classless Marxist/punk utopia.

If punk culture rejects the ways in which the dominant culture puts everything up “for sale,” then it undoubtedly rejects the notions that individual subjects can be seen simply as “objects.” Prostitution, on the other hand, is, in many ways, the ultimate symbol for capitalism. In prostitution, almost literally, “everything is for sale,” as it is in capitalist society more generally. Despite the logic of the prostitution=capitalism analogy, however, Jaime rejects the most extreme of its ramifications in “Chester Square.”

In the pair of panels pictured here, we see a clash of “Maggie as object” and “Maggie as subject.” In the first panel, she imagines herself as the prostitute she eventually (if momentarily) becomes, “posing” as a sex kitten who invites her own “use” by the men just outside the door. It’s clear though that this self-fetishization is simply a pose, or fantasy, when she is surprised by the knock at the door. Her humorously exaggerated response reveals other facets of her personality, beyond just as an object for sexual use. The juxtaposition of the two panels reveals two women juxtaposed, one of aggressive sexuality and the other of an exaggerated modesty. The fact that the two women are actually one at two different moments in time reveals a complex individual, who, when beyond closed doors, displays contradictory and complicated impulses.

Of course, Maggie is not, here, exactly “behind closed doors.” Rather, her naked body (like Danita’s) is on display for the reader, and in the first panel, she looks at us, inviting us to “use her” as we will sexually. The second panel, however, deflates the pornographic quality of the first, reminding us that behind every “objectified” woman is also a subject and behind every prostitute who is transformed into a commodity is a woman who may be embarrassed, humiliated, or even, simply, modest in her “real” life.

Maggie’s impulse toward subjectivity (again, like Danita’s) and her resistance to her own commodification, makes her reject the man, Enero, who in subsequent pages mistakes her for a prostitute, even though she was willing to sleep with him for free. Ironically, however, when she invites the security guard in for a sexual encounter that is not supposed to be a monetary transaction, he makes the same mistake, leaving her money on the nightstand. Though mortified, the money allows Maggie to escape the Square, taking a bus to her Aunt Vicki’s, where she eventually tells her friend Gina about the incident, noting that “I really didn’t feel bad about doing it. Like it was no big deal” (153). Though she eventually backtracks on this claim, calling herself a “whore…trollop, floozy, harlot, doxy, cocette, chippie” (153), it is clear that while Maggie (and the reader) might expect her commodification, or objectification, to rob her of her subjectivity, in fact, she leaves the encounter in much the same way that she entered into it, as a complex woman who is not defined by this single act. In fact, she only begins to see herself as a “whore” when she tells someone else about it, viewing herself not from the inside (as subject), but from the outside, through Gina’s eyes. Doing so allows Maggie to view herself as she initially views the prostitute, Ruby, who she is, for a time, mistaken for, not as a human being, but as a commodity.

The episode, then, like Danita’s posing and stripping, refuses a simple subject/object dichotomy, where there is an “original” subject of fantasy (the phallic mother), and a series of objects that replace her (fetishes). Instead, the replacements themselves are subjects, who may be objectified by society, or the individuals they interact with, but who cannot be reduced to such a function. Concomitantly, the book suggests that the ideals of acceptance of differences of race, gender, and sexual orientation are not proposed simply as symbols of a mythological or utopian punk past, but are instead cast forward as a goal for society that we must attempt to achieve in the present. When Maggie and Hopey reunite at the close of La Perla La Loca (or at the close of the original run of Love and Rockets), they do so only after they separate over issues of racial discrimination and homophobia. That is, if they are to move forward and reunite, they must overcome such differences, rather than “pretend they never happened” as fetishism (in Freud’s account) attempts to pretend that castration never occurred.

Again, this is explicitly emphasized in the closing pages of “Bob Richardson,” wherein Maggie has a dream/fantasy that Hopey never left her for the East Coast tour with her punk band which provides the impetus for much of the action of Wigwam Bam. Like the fantasy of the phallic mother, Maggie’s dream is a fantasy of wholeness and unity that predates all of the divisions that infect their relationship in the weeks, months, and years to come. Instead, however, Maggie “wakes up,” to be “slapped in the face” by all of the people she’s hurt in the interim (or whom she believes she has disappointed). She can only move forward, here, by rejecting her “dream” of a perfect past untainted by her own errors and those made by those around her.

The rejection of fetishism-as-nostalgia is articulated clearly at the close of Wigwam Bam, wherein Nan Tucker hires thugs to brutally beat both Crystal and Hopey as a warning to cover up the beating (and possible death) of one of the other fetishized play-acting “babies.” There, a fixation on a supposedly utopian “childhood” is explicitly coded as “dangerous,” resulting in a rude awakening to the realities of a world wherein self-interest trumps all. Though Nan and the sit-com mothers fantasize about a perfect union with their fetish “children,” in the end such a fantasy cannot stand up to naked self-interest, as they are willing to sacrifice (and brutalize) the fantasy to protect themselves. Wigwam Bam is not, however, the end of the story, and the brutality of exploitation and cover-up we see there (and also in Poison River) tell only part of Jaime’s story.

In the aftermath of the disillusionment of Wigwam Bam, Maggie, Hopey and their surrounding cast of characters consistently reject the notion that “living in the now” must simply mean the objectification and commodification of others, and the abandonment of a more utopian community which, it turns out, was always a fantasy to begin with. Instead, they search for a way to love and accept others’ subjectivities even after the corruption and commodification endemic to capitalist society. Even after Maggie is commodified as a prostitute, she moves forward in an attempt to make a better world for herself and her friends. Likewise, when Maggie is arrested at the close of “Bob Richardson,” Hopey abandons her self-interest in order to join her in the police car. Similarly, when Gina intuits her friend Xo’s need to win a wrestling match, she chooses to throw the match to her, despite the fact that she knows she will not get the reward for doing so that she wishes (159). Perhaps most tellingly, despite the abuse she has sustained at her hands, Maggie seeks out the regular Chester Square prostitute, Ruby, in order to make amends and to treat Ruby as a human being: a subject, not an object, despite her profession.

As Ruby herself articulates, then, the ultimate goal of the “love” of Love and Rockets is then a “love” of mutuality, openness, and intersubjectivity in the present, and in the real world, not a nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed in the first place. While there is certainly the notion in Locas that our present world is one of exploitation and objectification, there is also offered the possibility that even within that world, we need not see others merely as “means” for our own ends. When Hopey and Gina sacrifice themselves for the good of their friends, we are, perhaps, free to read those actions as self-interested, but it perhaps makes more sense to seem them as acts of love. Maggie’s variably successful efforts to make amends for her past behavior in the closing pages of “Bob Richardson,” both with Ruby and others, similarly indicates the importance of looking forward, not back.

Continually, then, as several of the other entries in the roundtable make clear, Jaime revisits the past in the ongoing Locas serial not to revisit a sentimentally idealized ür-time but to expose the ways in which the past was never like that. As in the Freudian account of fetishism, the phallic mother never existed, and so our attempts to return to her, or to an idealized past, are merely a series of self-deceptions. The recent storyline of Browntown, in particular, serves to remind us that the past is not a place free of exploitation, division, and oppression and is therefore not something to be nostalgic for, or to fetishize. Rather, as Jaime’s characters age inexorably along with us, we are reminded that if we want such a place to exist, we must work for it in the present, and hope for it in the future.
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The Locas roundtable index is here.
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More Works Cited
Hernandez, Jaime. La Perla La Loca. Seattle, Wa: Fantagraphics Books, 2007.

Marx, Karl and Friedrick Engels. “From The Communist Manifesto.” 1848, 1888. The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Second Edition. Eds. Vincent Leitch, et. al. New York: W. W. Norton, Inc., 2001, 2010. 657-660.

“Lightning Only Strikes Twice Once, Y’Know”: Phallic Mothers, Fetishism, and Replacement in the Comics of Los Bros Hernandez (Part I)

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Eric Berlatsky

This is a belated entry into the Jaime Hernandez roundtable…and so, in Part II (Update: now online here) I’ll be discussing Locas. Forgive the circuitous approach…
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Some months (or possibly years) back, in a roundtable devoted to Charles Hatfield’s book, Alternative Comics, various HU luminaries and commenters discussed the tendency of Gilbert Hernandez to employ, exploit, and self-reflexively examine a variety of sexual fetishes. In particular, though Hernandez is sometimes praised for the depth and complexity of his female characters, there is also a tendency in his work to linger upon, obsessively expose, and/or overemphasize particular “surface” elements of the female anatomy. In the case of his most frequent protagonist, Luba, and her mother, Maria, the fetishization of breasts might be said to reach an extreme. In the roundtable discussion and comments, the term “fetish” was used without any particular theoretical apparatus, and there is no reason why such an apparatus is fundamentally necessary. Certainly, we all know that when we talk about a “fetish,” we are discussing some object that takes on a surprising amount of significance and importance, often without any obvious reason. In the realm of the sexual, a shoe fetishist finds outsized sexual pleasure in a shoe, despite the “normal” social tendency to not view footwear as a necessarily sexual object. Though female breasts are quite often a focus of sexual attention in our (Western, American) society, it is certainly the case that there seems to be no intrinsic reason why they must be so and the heterosexual male’s obsession with women’s breasts may be attributed to a “cultural fetish” of sorts, one that Gilbert Hernandez exaggerates, but certainly does not invent.

Typical understandings of breasts as a cultural fetish might advert to a kind of pseudo-Freudianism, which gestures to Freud without reading his work very deeply. Certainly, anyone who knows anything about Freudian psychoanalysis, knows that it hinges around the notion of the Oedipus complex, or sexual desire for the mother, combined with competition with the father for her love. According to Freud, initial pleasures come principally orally (from eating) and anally (from excreting), before a subsequent move to genitally centered pleasures. Because a baby’s first “oral” pleasure comes from the mother, and at the mother’s breast, Freud argues that the child then “associates” pleasure with the mother and so, when pleasure itself becomes genital, sexual desire too is first directed at the mother. Likewise, since the breast is the first locale of oral pleasures (only for breast-fed babies, obviously…but bottles don’t preoccupy Freud overmuch), it should be no surprise that breasts become a locus of genital/sexual desire (again, through the “association” of varying kinds of pleasure). I would make no argument here for the biological or scientific “accuracy” of Freudian psychoanalysis, but merely note how the fetishizing of breasts might, in a Freudian context, seem like a “natural” one…part of the prescribed journey through the Oedipal cycle and the “natural” fixation on breasts and orality that precedes genital sexuality.

Neither Freud’s nor Hernandez’s version of fetishism is so simple, however, and, in fact, in Freud’s essay on fetishism, breasts don’t get so much as a mention. Instead, Freud defines any sexual fetish as “a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up” (842). It no doubt comes as a surprise for those uninitiated into psychoanalysis that women, or our mothers in particular, have a penis, but of course Freud is not really saying she does, or not in so many words. Rather, he argues that there is a point in early childhood that boys, at least, believe that everyone has a penis, and so they are shocked when they learn, by hook or by crook, that their own mother does not. The acquisition of this knowledge, the knowledge of sexual difference, is central to the journey through the Oedipus complex, because it is when a boy learns that his mother does not have a penis that he realizes that his own may be in imminent danger. That is, the boy apprehends his mother as a castrated (wo)man instantiating his own “castration anxiety.”

The logic of such a claim is dubious, of course. Is there any particular reason to view a woman this way, as a man “lacking a penis” and therefore not whole? The answer is, of course, “no,” and the preoccupation with the phallus as the seat of all that is whole, central, and important in life is part and parcel of a long history of patriarchal thinking which feminists (even feminists interested in psychoanalysis) rightfully reject. Nevertheless, in the context of Gilbert Hernandez’s “fetishist” (or, at least, fetish-y) comics, and eventually his brother Jaime’s as well, it is useful to follow Freud just a bit further.

According to Freud, when a boy is faced with the supposed castration of his mother, it plays a significant role in the repression of his desire for her. Since he has been in competition with his father for the love and affection of his mother from the outset, the realization that his mother has been castrated introduces fears by the child that the castrating was done by dad himself. This possibility makes the boy a) fear for his own penis (if dad castrated mom, what is to stop him from castrating his son, especially when they are in competition for mom’s affection?), and b) repress his desire for his mother. With the revelation that dad is strong and, apparently, ruthless (willing to castrate his enemies at a moment’s notice), the idea of continuing to compete with him for mom’s affection becomes not only less attractive, but actively terrifying, and so, the boy will repress his sexual desire for his mother, forgetting it altogether and redirecting it onto a more socially appropriate object, simultaneously entering the more “appropriate” social world where incest is unacceptable. In most cases, argues Freud, this is what occurs. In some cases, however, a child is not quite ready to give up the mother’s phallus, and instead “replaces” it with a fetish object. Says Freud, “the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute” (843) and the substitute will usually be linked to the moment of revelation in some way.

Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish—or a part of it—to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and velvet— as has long been suspected— are a fixation of the sight of the pubic hair, which should have been followed by the longed-for sight of the female member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic. (843)

Interestingly, Freud argues, then, that the fetish allows for the fetishist both to know and acknowledge the fact that his mother has no penis (to know and acknowledge sexual difference), while simultaneously repressing or denying that fact. Allowing for a replacement for the mother’s penis allows for the fetishist to retain the sexual bliss of the first attachment to the (phallic) mother, while also displacing it away from the mother herself, as well as from the penis itself, which “saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual” (843). Here, Freud reveals himself to be a homophobe, as well as a sexist, and quite possibly a loon, interpreting male gay love as merely another displaced attraction to the phallic mother, which, he suggests, is better displaced upon a shoe, or undergarment.

Given all the logical, political, and social problems with Freud’s argument, it seems like a waste of time to recap or belabor it here in association with the comics of Los Bros Hernandez, except insofar as this Freudian view of fetishism is courted so openly by Gilbert and therefore may help us understand and/or appreciate his work. In Poison River, Gilbert’s first post-Palomar graphic novel, Luba’s husband Peter Rio, runs a strip club whose strippers are pre-operative transsexuals, or in Freudian terms, phallic women. Significantly, Rio demands that the women tuck their penises tightly into their panties while they are dancing, so that they are invisible. Any sign of a bulge offends Rio and, it seems, his fetish, though if he truly did not wish to see “phallic women,” he could presumably run a more conventional strip joint.

In all of this, Rio fulfills Freud’s claims about fetishists to the letter. Fetishists, says Freud, must maintain two “incompatible” claims, “the woman has still got a penis” (which allows the fetishist to retain the notion of the perfectly whole “phallic mother” who was the object of his initial desire) and “my father has castrated the woman” (which allows him to integrate into society, to break away from his family, and direct his desires elsewhere) (844). That is, fetishism allows the man to consciously enter the social world and participate successfully in it, while still being able to fulfill his deepest (unconscious) desires for the mother, and not just the mother, but the phallic mother that preceded the shock he received at the threat of castration. Freud notes how well an “athletic support belt…which covered up the genitals entirely” works as a fetish object, since it “signified that women were castrated and that they were not castrated” (844). The link of the panties of Rio’s strippers to this description seems too obvious to be further “unpacked.” Rio needs the strippers to retain the possibility that castration never occurred, but he needs the “tucking” to signify that it (simultaneously) did.

One could push this further in Poison River and in Gilbert’s work more generally, especially given that Rio’s fetish is not actually (or not only) panties, but bellybuttons, and given his involvement not only with Luba, but with her mother as well. In addition, Peter’s father, Fermin, also has an affair with both Maria and with the transsexual Isobel who later becomes Peter’s mistress. It is, in fact, a running joke of sorts that Peter is only attracted to women whom his father has had first, a clear intimation of his “mother issues” and, as Hatfield discusses, his continuing need to protect his mother from Fermin’s brutal beatings, even after his mother is long gone. Every step of the narrative, then, mirrors the Freudian one of desire for the mother and competition with the father, complicated only slightly by the fact that one of the fetishes involved is not of a different object that replaces the mother’s penis, but of the female penis itself, albeit now attached to different women, indicating further how Peter’s repression of his desire for his mother is insufficient by Freudian standards.

All of this is linked to the social and political pattern Hatfield notes in his reading of the graphic novel. Hatfield argues that much of Poison River is devoted to the attempt by Peter, Fermin, and others to maintain a corrupt “public sphere” of drug trafficking and gang warfare, while “protecting” women from such a world by confining them to an “idealized conception of the home” (Hatfield 90) and keeping them in the dark about male activities. That is, Peter and his “men” enforce “sexual difference” in a variety of paternally protective (i.e. sexist) ways, even as the book indicates the ways in which such an effort is doomed to failure. The drug use of Luba and her girlfriends, for instance, indicate the ways in which it becomes impossible to insulate women from the dangerous “masculine activities” of the public sphere, as does the way in which women serve as pawns or objects in the world of masculine competition. Without their own knowledge, for instance, Luba, Maria, and Isobel all become objects over which Peter and his father compete sexually. They are, then, part of the world of masculine competition (and capitalist acquisition), even when they are unaware of their role within it. Likewise, as Hatfield points out, even the stereotypically feminine world of childbirth and childrearing is tainted by the masculine world of crime and “business,” in the fact that Peter buys a child for Isobel on the black market, a purchase he must later “pay for” in kind.

These thematic reminders of the impossibility of completely separating the worlds of the two genders is complemented by the consistent references to the world that, in Freudian terms, exists before the introduction of sexual difference. The “phallic mother” is an exemplar of a fantasy world that predates the necessity of dividing mother from child (esp. mother from son), male from female, and public sphere from private. While, on one hand, Peter vigilantly enforces social and public gender divisions, in his private/sexual life, he is continually attempting to re-unite the two genders, fixated as he is on the fantasy of the “phallic mother.” While he, like Freud, continually worries that his sexual behavior may be read as “queer” (insofar as he is both literally and metaphorically constantly desirous of the penis which is both missing and present), it is also clear that this “queerness” is itself a utopian desire for a world that predates the gender divisions he also polices.

When, in Palomar and “beyond” so many of Gilbert’s characters reveal themselves to be “queer” in some fashion, attracted to both genders (despite often years of strictly hetero- proclivities), it suggests a nostalgic hearkening back to a pre-Oedipal “queer paradise” before gender divisions, or before we became aware of them. If, after all, gender divisions do/did not exist, what can it mean to even identify someone as hetero- or homosexual? Such terms only have meaning in a post-Oedipal world and not in the paradise of the phallic mother. Poison River never suggests that it is exactly possible to return, regress, or progress, to such a paradise. Rather, the tone, as Hatfield notes, is persistently one of disillusionment and acknowledgment that the effort to retain a paradise of any kind is inevitably a losing one (whether that paradise be the matriarchal world of Palomar itself or the androgynous world of the phallic mother). However, Poison River does serve to both suggest and reveal the presence of the desire for such a paradise and its prevalence, particularly through the mechanism of fetishism. Far from being a text that simplistically fetishizes women, or particular parts of their anatomy, as objects for the male gaze, it suggests that the mere act of fetishizing blurs the divide between male and female. The fantasy is not here of an empty, mindless, female object (though Maria, at times, seems to occupy that space), but of a mother with a phallus, a pure union with a love object that precedes and blurs sexual divisions. As Freud notes, fetishism always moves in two directions, both acknowledging “castration” of the mother and the world of gender divisions which follows and disavowing such divisions, hearkening back to a pre-Oedipal utopia, wherein sexuality is polymorphous, bisexual, and incestuous. Poison River dynamically presents both the pre- and post-lapsarian worlds that are retained in the psyche in the process of fetishism. In all of this, there is an acknowledgment that an entry into the social world where gender divisions are policed and enforced is both inevitable and unfortunate, but there is also a retention of the utopian desire to transcend that inevitability.

But what does any of this have to do with Jaime Hernandez and Locas? Tune in to Part 2!

Works cited
Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” 1927. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed. NewYork: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001, 2010. 841-45.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Hernandez, Gilbert. Poison River. 1988-94. Beyond Palomar. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books, 2007. 7-189.

Alan Moore: Conversations Hype

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Eric Berlatsky

Thanks to Noah and HU for agreeing to shill my new book, Alan Moore: Conversations, now available in paperback (and hardcover) from The University Press of Mississippi. As the name suggests, it’s an edited collection of previous Alan Moore interviews, spanning from 1981 to 2009. I tried to collect the interviews that were most enlightening in terms of Moore’s creative practices, and/or most revealing about the meaning and significance of his oeuvre. The book contains lengthy discussions of most of his major works and many of the minor ones as well. There is also an introduction be me and a chronology of Moore’s career. My goal was to make the book an indispensable one for Moore scholars, critics, and readers. You can only judge my relative success by buying a copy at retailer!

Below, I’ve included a series of quotes (one from each interview) to whet your appetite and make you ache desperately to have the book in your sweaty palms, now driven mad by the spirit of capitalism, and the wisdom of Alan Moore, who speaks at length on comics, sex, drugs, brain science and bad movies.

On the struggle of writing comics: “I find writing comics to be staggeringly easy.” (from David Lloyd’s 1981 interview in the SSI Newsletter)

On the complexity of Marvel characterization: “That’s characterization the Marvel way. They’re neurotic . They worry a lot. If they haven’t got anything wrong with them like that, something physically wrong will do— perhaps a bad leg or dodgy kidneys, or something like that. To Marvel, that’s characterization.

…[Chris Claremont’s] thing with characterization is that he makes all his X-Men foreign. One’s a Russian. One’s a German. Russian! They’re incredibly Russian. They sort of sit there and let you know how Russian they are by thinking:

“How I long for my Ukrainian homeland. How I miss my poor dead brother Thiodore.”

And then:

“How I miss the happy camaraderie of the bread queues and the surprise purges.”

(from David Roach’s 1983 interview in Hellfire fanzine)

On the social function of comics: “Comics, when I was growing up, were part of the working class tradition. Mothers gave them to their kids to pacify them. Instead of a Valium, it would be a copy of The Topper or The Beezer.” (from Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker’s 1984 interview in Comics Interview)

On influences: “If I had to single out one major influence on my work, it would probably be [William] Burroughs. I would never attempt to duplicate his style of writing….I do admire his style, but I suppose the biggest influence is his thinking, his theoretical work, some of which has been wild and extreme, but the relationship he draws between the word and the image and the importance of both, I think, is significant. Burroughs tends to see the word and the image as the basis for our inner, and thus outer, realities. He suggests that the person who controls the word and the image controls reality.” (from Christopher Sharrett’s 1988 interview in Comics Interview)

On paranormal experiences: “I have only met about four gods…a couple of other classes of entity as well. I’m quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances, I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the logical explanation — that it was purely an hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience, however, and the fact that having had some experience of hallucinations over the last 25 years or so, I’d have to say that it seemed to me a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once. It is everything you’d imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is [a] late Roman snake god, called Glycon. He was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. Which is a lousy name to go into business under. He had an image problem. He could have done with a spin doctor there. “ (from Matthew de Abaitua’s 1998 interview in The Idler)

On brain science and comics: “They found that comics was far and away the best way for people to take in information and retain it. I think people would remember the picture and that would cue the words they had read going along with that picture. I think that this might be because comics engage both halves of the brain simultaneously. One half is concerned with words. One half is concerned with images. With comics, you do have single static images, single clumps of words. Maybe the two halves are engaged in a different way than they are with other art forms, and this accounts for the kind of imprinting that comics are capable of. This is only speculation. I try to keep up with science and neurology, and how the brain works, but at the end of the day, I am largely a comic writer, so you probably shouldn’t trust me to perform extensive brain surgery or anything like that.” (from the edits of Tasha Robinson’s 2001 interview in The Onion)

Looking back at Watchmen: “Watchmen was kind of clever. I was going through one of my clever periods— probably emotional insecurity. I thought: ‘People will laugh at me ‘cos I’m doing superhero comics. I’d better make ‘em really clever, then no-one will laugh’ [laughter]. So, we’ve got all this sort of thing with the metaphor of the clock face, and yes, it is a kind of clockwork-like construction— a swiss watch construction— where you can see all the works of it. Different areas where the text reflects itself, different levels— I was showing off…I kind of decided after Watchmen that there was no point ever doing anything like that ever again…” (from Daniel Whiston’s 2002 interview in Zarjaz)

On sex and censorship: “Sex—we all got here because of sex. We all do it, if we’re lucky. We’ve been doing it for millions of years. It’s perhaps time we got over it and moved on. A couple of million years, that should be time for us to have gotten over our understandable panic at the idea of sexual reproduction.” (from Jess Nevins’ 2004 interview in A Blazing World)

On the mainstream comics industry: “…I think that the comics industry, really, if it wants to attract, if it wants to be talked about as a grown-up medium, then it ought to be a medium that will attract grown-ups, in terms of [the] rights of the artist.

It ought to be a grown-up medium. It ought to grow up its business practices, rather than have them all rooted in the prohibition-era gangsterism of the 1930’s. If it really wants to be an industry that’s proud of itself, then it really shouldn’t go around alienating the talent that has actually lifted it up our of the quagmire.

That is obviously something that is not in my control. It is purely in the industry’s control. I think that having spent 25 years laboring within the comics industry, that has probably reflected better on the comics industry than it did on me. Probably the comics industry got more out of the association than I did. (from Chris Mautner’s 2006 interview in The Patriot-News [Harrisburg])

On the Watchmen film: “Sure, I’ve heard it’s great seeing Dave Gibbons’s images reproduced on the big screen. ‘They’re exactly the same as in the comics, but they’re bigger, moving, and making noise!’ Well, putting it cruelly, I guess it’s good that there’s a children’s version for those who couldn’t manage to follow a superhero comic from the 1980s.” (from Alex Musson’s 2009 interview in Mustard)

The Real, The True, and The Told

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Eric Berlatsky

From The Real, The True, and The Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation, by Eric L. Berlatsky, now available from The Ohio State University Press.

Preamble: The below is an excerpt of chapter four of the book, entitled “It’s Enough Stories”: Truth and Experience in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” The book itself has very few images from Maus (two actually), due to copyright permissions expenses and red tape. The below section had no images, but I’ve included some low resolution pics for this online excerpt. This constitutes about a third of the chapter—itself about 1/6 of the book. The “Works Cited” is a selection from the larger one in the book. It’s possible some sources were left out and that some listed are not referred to in this section. Click on the images for a larger view (in most cases).

(…) Likewise, a photo of Vladek included near the close of Maus II shows him in a concentration camp uniform, but it is revealed in the course of the narrative that it is not his own, but a mock one used at a “photo place” for “souvenirs” (134). That is, the “realistic” picture of the Vladek of the camps can only be produced afterwards, staged for the purposes of memory: a simulacrum of a past that is already, thankfully, gone. Maus, then, uses photographs not simply as a means of establishing a mimetic attachment to the historical past, but also to suggest the ways in which all media are subject to staging and manipulation, distancing us from the referent they claim to reproduce.[1] While cartoon mice are quite obviously not “true” copies of their human surrogates, Maus illustrates how photographs may be no closer to their referent. As Marianne Hirsch writes, “Spiegelman lays bare the levels of mediation that underlie all visual representational forms” (11). The occasional and increasing use of drawn photographs that remain true to the animal metaphor alongside the “real” photographic reproduction of human figures only serves to blur whatever boundaries may remain between the purportedly real photograph and the definitively constructed drawing (Maus 17 and Maus II 114-115).

From all of this, it is clear that although Artie dramatically excoriates Vladek for distancing him from Anja’s past, Spiegelman performs a similar task for the reader, indicating to us how any representation of the past is more mediated, and therefore distant, than it may initially appear. In fact, not only are Spiegelman’s representations far from the reality they initially appear to reflect, but they continually run the risk of asserting ideological control. Like the Nazis’ depiction of Jews and Vladek’s redeployment of his Holocaust memories to justify his racism, Spiegelman is sure to implicate himself when he depicts Artie at the outset of chapter two of Maus II. Sitting at his drawing table, in front of television interviewers, Artie discusses the commercial success of the first volume of his book while sitting atop a pile of anthropomorphic mouse corpses. He is depicted not as a mouse, but as a man wearing a mouse mask, performing Jewishness for commercial gain. The simultaneously humorous and threatening depiction of the American advertiser offering a license deal for Artie vests (“Maus. You’ve read the book now buy the vest!” [42]) indicates how Artie (and Spiegelman himself) uses the past not merely to recall it in the present, but for his own profit and on the backs of the Jews his book is purportedly “remembering.” Artie displays a questionable connection to the past in order to participate in the circulation of power and profit.[2]

It is for these reasons that Artie questions his whole project when, on a visit to his therapist, he quotes Samuel Beckett in saying, “‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness’” (Maus II 45). Here, Artie notes how any attempt at speaking, witnessing, or portraying history runs into not only the impossibility of finding the historical real, but also into the ethical difficulties that suggest that any representation is an act of power and oppression. The therapist, Pavel, inspires Artie’s observation when he says, “…look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What’s the point? People haven’t changed…Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust” (Maus II 45). Here, Artie and Pavel seem to reject representation in two ways. First, Artie promotes a complete withdrawal from signification, preferring silence and nothingness. Second, while Pavel is clearly commenting on the dark side of human nature, his remark also suggests that a return of the referent (a newer, bigger Holocaust) would be preferable, since a repetition of the event itself would no longer be a representation of it, but the thing itself, independent of the ethical and epistemological dilemmas Artie raises. Elsewhere, Artie also voices a desire to have been at Auschwitz himself, “so I could really know what they lived through” (Maus II 16).[3] While Artie eventually withdraws this wish, it is indicative of the kind of paralysis that a poststructuralist view of representation can induce. Artie’s epistemological and ethical despair leads him to wish for silence or renewed genocide, neither of which seems artistically or ethically productive. Nevertheless, Maus’ representational despair is supplemented and complicated both by its commitment to traditional historical accuracy and by its capacity to convey Ankersmitian experience through the media of both memory and history. Given all of these doubts and recriminations about the possibility of historical representation, one wonders why such care is taken by Spiegelman in “getting it right,” or how it is possible that so many readers praise Maus precisely for its truthfulness.

Maus as/and Memory

Pavel’s rhetorical wish for a “new Holocaust” indicates a desire, even a desperate yearning, for the materiality of the referent that is not uncommon in contemporary theory. This possibility is not limited, however, to Pavel’s fantasies about the referent’s literal return, but is often, particularly in the context of the Holocaust, configured in terms of the opposition between history and memory. As Jonathan Boyarin observes, the postmodern attempt to delegitimate “universal history” has, at times, led to the reification of memory and the effort to understand history and memory as “fundamentally different modes of relating to the past” (93). In the previous section, I discuss Maus’ treatment of the past without making a significant distinction between these two “modes,” but given the fact that Vladek personally remembers the Holocaust while Artie comes to the same material belatedly, like a historian, collating, arranging, and fact-checking documentary evidence, it is a crucial distinction and one that bears further examination.

If traditional history presents us with unified events, “sponging […] all diversity off of them” in an effort to create “coherent comprehension” (de Certeau, Writing 78), memory, due to its individual nature, resists this unifying effort at social definition, at least according to some theorists.[4] According to proponents of memory, it can resist history’s retrospective reconstruction of the past that tells only a single story. That is, because memories are typically (if not always) conceived of as individual and unique, they are by their nature not integrated into a larger institutional or cultural narrative that defines the “self” of the culture and marginalizes or oppresses its “others.” The power of memory is likewise linked by its proponents with the capacity to make the referent of the past present, as opposed to merely creating a representation of the missing. It is for this reason that, for theorists like Pierre Nora, memory overcomes the debates over Holocaust representation. Instead, memory is often seen as something else entirely.

“Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformation, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History […] is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond […] to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past” (8).

Similarly, Maurice Halbwachs notes that memory focuses on that which is continually present, repeated, and “essentially unaltered,” while history focuses on the rupture between the past and present (85-86). For Nora and Halbwachs, the past is not gone in an ontological sense as long as it is remembered and memory keeps alive any slivers of the past that remain in its grasp. If a historian writes an account of the Holocaust, it is merely a representation of the past, separated from its “presence,” or essential being. If a survivor, like Vladek Spiegelman, remembers the Holocaust, however, it is, in some sense, present (“eternally”) and real (“perpetually actual”). While both memory and history are, then, prone to error, manipulation, and appropriation, only one transmits the referent of the past, while the other “refers” to it with the compromised tools of signification. It is for this reason that personal memory retains some authority over the proliferation of textuality and electronic media so pervasive in contemporary society. Ankersmit’s account of Aristotelian impressions on the wax of the mind, or Freud’s “mystic writing pad” seem, in fact, to support this notion. The mind that remembers retains the impression of the past, carrying it into the present. This may help to explain the collective Jewish impulse to “witness” through memory the events of the Holocaust. Indeed, first-hand accounts are typically called “testimonies,” a name tied closely to the “legal process of establishing evidence in order to achieve justice” (Young, Writing 28). That is, the sense of “testimony” as authoritative is linked to the notion that the truth of the past is integral to the possibility of justice in the present. Such a belief is amply reflected in both the Yale Fortunoff and Survivors of the Shoah Foundation collections of videotaped survival “testimonies.”[5]

Michael Staub pinpoints the contradictions within the impulse to collect memory-work, however, indicating that the faith entrusted to these memories more accurately reveal fears about the loss of a connection to the past, than an effective means of accessing it.

“[T]hey reflect a general anxiety over the impending death of all concentration camp survivors and their living memories. When they are gone, we will have mountains of written texts, videotapes, films, recordings, and other evidence. But the actual voices will be lost forever. How, then, to approximate the authority of the oral in a world increasingly suspicious of […] written evidence?” (35).

Staub’s “authority of the oral” identifies an attempt by many to hold on to Nora’s notion of a “continuous present” carried through individual memory. History, from this perspective, can only be a second-hand, prosthetic addendum to memory’s witnessing of the past. While “writing” may be the most-cited prostheses that intercedes between the source of the past and its immanent memory, Staub notes how our contemporary age is replete with alternative prostheses, or texts: videotapes (and now DVD’s and YouTube files), audio tapes (and now CD’s and mp3’s), films, etc. Each of these, it is suggested, can only approximate the oral and the remembered, which are implied to be versions of the referent itself.[6] This division between the oral and the written is, of course, one of the earliest targets of Derridean deconstruction in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” some twenty years before Nora offers the distinction, and it is useful to consider how poststructuralism blurs the distinction between these modes of relating to the past.

In the Phaedrus, Plato privileges memory, the “real,” and the internal retention of the past over and against any prosthetic version that might be aided by writing. Derrida, however, rigorously illustrates that this distinction can only be arbitrary since “[t]he outside is already within the work of memory […] A limitless memory would in any event be not memory but infinite self-presence. Memory always […] already needs signs in order to recall the non-present with which it is necessarily in relation” (Dissemination 109; emphasis in original). That is, memory is not a pre-linguistic internal recreation of past events, but is already a process by which “signs” are used to approximate the “real” of the past, and always unsuccessfully so. Memory is writing in the sense that it is the use of signs to “represent” that which is no longer there. A “limitless self-presence” would entail a timeless subject whose past is also its present and therefore also its future. Such a subject does not exist outside of theoretical physics. Likewise, if memory did not partake of signs, a memory of the Holocaust would bring it back into being, reviving a referent better left behind, despite Artie’s occasional wishes in Maus.

Memory, then, according to poststructuralist logic, is not what Nora claims, but is what he defines as history, a “representation of the past” with no claim to a “presence” that we can know without mediation. In fact, writing and history’s prosthetic character is not its most threatening attribute, according to Derrida. Rather, it is threatening because it can breach the perceived internal self-presence of the subject. Plato voices the concern that writing will sap the internal capacity of the thinker to remember without its aid, indicating that writing is not actually irremediably external to the truth of the past, but that it can invade the inside, weaken, or destroy it. As Derrida points out, writing is then already inside, since memory is a process of signification, not a reproduction of the past. It is for this reason that the “line between memory and its supplement [writing], is more than subtle; it is hardly perceptible” (Dissemination 111). Here, the distinction between memory and history proposed by Nora and Halbwachs dissolves. While it is hopeful to conceive of memory as a “present” alternative to the re-vision that history offers, the notion of memory’s “presence” is a false one, since both are merely signifiers of a referent long gone. The only thing “present” in the mind of s/he who remembers is the “absence” characterized by signification, a “trace” of the past without its object: “a pseudo-trace, a detritus, a re-ferent, a carrying back to/from a past that is so completely decontextualized, so open to recontextualization, that it […] becomes […] an emblem of a past evacuated of history” (Crapanzano 137). From a poststructuralist perspective, memory is no different from history.

Maus as/and Narrative

At first blush, Maus performs the same deconstruction of the memory/history binary as Derrida does in “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Initially, we are given the first-hand witness and the seemingly immanent memory of Vladek in opposition to the second-hand and prosthetic history of Artie. However, while Artie and Vladek’s versions of the past are competitive, they are similar in terms of their distance from the historical referent. Read through an Ankersmitian prism, however, the similarity of memory and history does not have to mean that neither have the capacity to convey the truth and/or experience of the past. Rather, it may mean that both do. A look at Maus’ treatment of narrative and non-narrativity helps elucidate this possibility.

Interestingly, Spiegelman’s attitude towards, and public statements about, narrative are filled with ambivalence. In many of his early comics (“Ace Hole, Midget Detective,” “The Malpractice Suite,” “Don’t Get Around Much Any More”), Spiegelman is largely uninterested in telling a “story.” Instead, they serve more as commentary on the medium itself, pushing the boundaries of the comics’ page’s paradoxical and simultaneous presentation of multiple sequential temporal images (narrative) and a single static atemporal one (non-narrative). In a 1982 interview in The Comics Journal, Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly observe that plot is largely just a “conventional formula,” a “comfortable matrix”,” and “manipulation” (Groth, Thompson, and Cavalieri 45-47). Nevertheless, Spiegelman admits that he doesn’t “think comics can be non-narrative” (55), principally because that which separates comics from painting, still photography, and other visual art is precisely the juxtaposition of sequential images. Without sequentiality and temporality, the medium of comics does not exist. Despite this observation and his consistent admission that Maus is “narrative in every sense of the word” (Groth, Thompson, and Cavalieri 36), Maus retains an antipathy for elements of plot. While the book(s) certainly tells a story and formally embraces narrativity in ways that Spiegelman’s previous work did not, it retains a critique of narrative, and particularly its tendency to “comfort,” to make meaning out of the meaningless, and to obscure the historical truth.

In Maus, then, Artie partakes of various textual prostheses (tapes, photographs, history books) in order to connect with the past. It soon becomes evident, however, that Vladek too is distanced from his own experience by a less concrete prosthesis of signification: narrative. While it is true that poststructuralist philosophy might focus more closely on language as that “text” that neither Vladek nor Artie can escape in their search for a referent, narrative is more clearly the problem that Maus addresses, as it is for Hayden White and postmodern historiography more generally. Ankersmit, for instance, even in his earlier, more radically relativist, period, was willing to concede that while individual statements about the past can be true, narratives present thornier problems and yield greater results since they present us not with a collection of statements about the past, but with a proposal about what those statements mean.[7] It is this meaning-making quality that White argues arises from “emplotment,” the transformation of events into a narrative. This problem is most clearly articulated in Maus in Vladek’s efforts to provide closure to his Holocaust experiences after being reunited with Anja.

On the final pages of Maus II, Vladek recounts his return to Sosnowiec, Poland, and his reunification with Anja after their time in concentration camps. As Vladek describes the encounter, “It was such a thing that everybody around was crying together for us […] More I don’t need to tell you. We were both very happy, and lived happy. Happy ever after” (Maus II 136). While the moment is poignant, reflection on the rest of the book reminds the reader of the fallacy of Vladek’s statement. While he may well have been happy at the moment of the reunion, all readers know that they do not live “Happy ever after,” given Anja’s 1968 suicide and all that follows. The presentation of that suicide in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” gives the reunion a different meaning when made a part of Maus.[8] Spiegelman’s explicit rejection of “fatuous attempts to give [the Holocaust] a happy ending” (Dreifus 35) must, in this context, be read as a rejection of his father’s Romance “plot,” and perhaps of “plot” generally conceived.

As Arlene Fish Wilner points out, Vladek’s oral narrative is specifically configured not only as memory, but also as “story,” subject to the perils of emplotment. The idea of the “authority of the oral” is belied by the ways in which the oral too is dependent upon narrative structures that assert meaning where none inherently exists. Vladek’s account also indicates the problematic role closure plays in narrative representation. While the reunion itself undoubtedly occurred, its placement within a narrative, and particularly at the end of a narrative, gives it a meaning that is conspicuously misleading. In Metahistory, White points out the ways in which historians not only make events into stories but into particular types of “plots,” those familiar from fictive writing: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire (37). While it may be true that this list is too limited for more general purposes, it is clear that Vladek is making an effort to emplot his Holocaust experience as “Romance,” making it “mean” the happiness and joy of true love that overcomes all obstacles, even when the most significant of those obstacles is the Holocaust. The fact that Vladek’s narration closes here indicates an effort on his part to exert the power of narrative closure over the power of the camps.[9] For White, it is closure that makes narratives “mean,” in that they satisfy the desire (by reader, writer, teller, or listener) to put everything in its place and to fit together. As I discuss throughout this book, narratives are narratives by virtue of their closure, allowing the retrospective gaze that makes sense of all that precedes it.[10]

What makes Vladek’s closure interesting, however, is that it is neither inconclusive (a staple of twentieth-century modernism) nor tidily explanatory (a staple of nineteenth-century realism). Instead, the conclusion is resolutely incongruous. It does provide a tidy conclusion, but it is manifestly unsatisfactory in its efforts to do so. When the reader recalls Vladek’s eyewitness account of prisoners being forced to jump into piles of burning bodies, with the body fat being “scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better” (Maus II 72), his “happy ever after” not only fails to provide an explanation, but highlights its failure to do so. Likewise, earlier in the book, Vladek attempts to control the beginning of his “Romance” by excluding his messy affair with Lucia Greenberg. While Vladek does tell Artie this story, he makes him promise not to include it in Maus (Maus 23). Spiegelman’s inclusion of the episode, in order to make the book “more real—more human” (Maus 23) indicates the degree to which he resists the conventional plot into which Vladek tries to wrestle his experiences (even as it implicates Artie for betraying his father’s trust). While “happy ever after” is a conventional end to a conventional romance plot, the un-edited beginning, when combined with the traumatic middle of Vladek’s tale, and the “future” events recounted in Artie’s competing narrative, renders such a conclusion not only unsatisfactory, but also inaccurate. The fairy tale ending is obviously false.

This romance plot is not, as we have seen, Vladek’s only attempt to make narrative sense of his experiences. At times, he wants to make himself an exemplar of the post-war Jewish/ Israeli narrative of innocence and redemption, a narrative that prevents him from seeing himself in the role of racist, or oppressor, in the incident with the black hitchhiker. He also uses his Holocaust experiences as a means of returning half-eaten groceries and gaining discounts on their replacements, transforming his inexplicable trauma into a way of garnering sympathy from the store manager (Maus II 90). Traumatic and anti-narrative experiences are thus transformed into simple narratives for personal gain. While these narratives may provide momentary comfort, clarity, understanding, or explanation to Vladek, they cannot, in the end, satisfactorily account for or integrate the events of Vladek’s past. While Vladek’s Holocaust experiences are part of an emplotted romance, they also resist their role in that story.

Indeed, Vladek’s Holocaust experiences exemplify Ankersmit’s observation that we should “expect the translation of the world into language to meet with some resistance now and then[.] […] Is it not only at such occasions that we can become aware of reality itself, as possessing autonomy” (Historical 143)? It is clear, in fact, that the reader particularly feels reality’s autonomy when Vladek attempts to transform his survivor’s account into a conventional narrative. Pace White, events, and particularly the Holocaust, do not make sense and this reality shows resistance to the systems of signification applied to it, narrative foremost among them.

Although several critics note the implicit critique of Vladek’s narrative compulsion in Maus, it is important to see this critique not merely as an attack on Vladek’s personal failings, but on the form of narrative itself insofar as it attempts (and fails to achieve) mimesis. The “happy ever after” panel that concludes Vladek’s narrative is succeeded by several more that conclude Artie’s “present-day” account. Vladek says to Artie: “So…let’s stop, please your tape recorder…I’m tired from talking, Richieu, and it’s enough stories for now” (Maus II 136). Vladek reclines upon his bed, exhausted, and Spiegelman ends the book (outside the narrative) with the drawing of a tombstone with the names of Vladek and Anja, accompanied by their birth and death dates. Finally, Spiegelman’s signature is included, along with the dates of the composition of Maus (1978-1991). While Vladek’s narrative is closed within a version of a conventional “marriage plot,” Artie’s is concluded with another typical version of closure: death. While we do not witness Vladek’s death in the narration, we have witnessed his progressive decline, and the tombstone dates his death to 1982, four years after Spiegelman began work on Maus, but long before its 1991 completion. The deaths of Anja and Vladek are not, however, merely arbitrary endings to a story. Rather, in Maus, they are also metaphors for the end of all stories, or the idea of stories. The last words spoken, “…it’s enough stories for now,” echo Pavel’s “…maybe it’s better not to have any more stories” (Maus II 45).

While the inclusion of a work’s dates of composition is not uncommon, Spiegelman’s juxtaposition of Maus’ with those of his parents’ lives indicates that the telling of the story is itself a kind of death, perhaps of one version of Art Spiegelman, but also of Holocaust “stories” themselves. Vladek mistakenly calls Artie Richieu, the name of Spiegelman’s elder brother, killed by relatives in an attempt to save him from the Nazis (Maus 109). This cements the relationship between the two hinted at earlier, in which Artie discusses his sense of competition with Richieu. “The photo [of Richieu] never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble…It was an ideal kid and I was a pain in the ass. I couldn’t compete” (Maus II 15). By calling Artie by his brother’s name, Vladek unconsciously attempts to recall or revive this (idealized) portion of his past that is forever gone. At the same time, however, he declares the close of his narrative impulse, indicating that his efforts at recovering the past through narrative are over and that Artie will never, of course, be Richieu, no matter what stories Vladek (or Artie) may invent.

The inclusion of the two sets of parallel dates also invokes the familiar analogy of writing and death. Both Derrida and Foucault emphasize the “kinship between writing and death,” noting how writing is only necessary if the originator of the story is “absent” or “the writing subject endlessly disappears” (Foucault, “What” 1623). This lack of the author’s “presence” indicates not only death, in poststructuralist thought, but also the impossibility of connecting with the referent. For Derrida, the pharmakon of writing wields “power, over death but also in cahoots with it,” since it allows the author to live after death in representation, but at the same time contributes to the “forgetting” or loss of the “original” (Dissemination 104-105). In the latter sense, the completion of Maus, accompanied by the tombstone and the composition dates, may be read as merely another account of the failure to revive the referent: the Holocaust itself.

In drawing attention to the text as representation, as writing, these dates reiterate the counter-narrative that Maus has kept alive throughout. While Vladek’s account is a narrative of the Holocaust, trying to revive its events and make sense of them, Artie’s “present-day” narrative is always (and increasingly) an account of the failure to do so. If the tombstone and signature combine to be a model of narrative closure, the meaning they convey is a lack of meaning, of the impossibility of Holocaust representation and of the necessity of silence. Artie’s despair is, like Vladek’s romance plot, a narrative that makes sense of his mother’s suicide and his father’s Holocaust experiences. In this case, however, the “meaning” is, ironically, a lack of meaning.

Artie’s account of the failure of language and representation to convey the truth of the past is itself predicated on reading its events as a narrative in which time progresses in a linear fashion from the past to the present and dramatic change occurs that spurs a narrative desire for explanation. It is, after all, only through articulating a rupture that separates present from past that we can begin to say that the past is irretrievable and inaccessible. This rupture, or change, is precisely that which spurs narrative itself, according to such influential models as those of Todorov, Peter Brooks, and D. A. Miller, as discussed in previous chapters. The introduction of this change is that which separates the present telling from past events and which, paradoxically, introduces the impossibility of completely capturing those events, even as they become narratable. From this point-of-view, the present is of a fundamentally different nature from the past, and language, representation, and narrative merely (and futilely) try to bridge the gap that has engendered their necessity. That is, the typical conception of an event like the Holocaust as “impossible to represent” rests, ironically, on its narratability. Its “difference” from those events that precede it is so dramatic that it demands to be narrated. At the same time it introduces problems of representation precisely because of the dramatic rupture between it and the past and future. For Artie, the oxymoronic narrative of meaninglessness or silence becomes necessary.

Just as Vladek’s romance plot is contradicted and invalidated by the true events of the Holocaust, however, Artie’s narrative of failure and insufficiency is contradicted by Vladek’s experiences. Even as Artie repeatedly throws up his hands at the impossibility of recapturing history, his transmission of Vladek’s account allows some of history’s truths to “bleed” through its mediation. The narrative of insufficiency is belied by Artie/Spiegelman’s intense preoccupation with rendering the past accurately. In fact, Spiegelman highlights the amount of re-construction in his father’s account not merely to indicate the inevitable distortion involved in any depiction of the past, but also to supplement Vladek’s version of events with more accurate alternatives. Nowhere is this clearer than in the depiction of Vladek’s recollection of his daily departure from the work camp. Artie’s research uncovers that an orchestra “played as [Vladek] marched out the gate,” while Vladek asserts that he remembers “only marching, not any orchestras.” Spiegelman visually depicts the musical instruments anyway (Maus II 54).

Spiegelman is willing to express Vladek’s perspective, but not at the expense of a more fully documented referentiality.[11] James Young comments on how this dual narration, Vladek’s oral and Spiegelman’s visual, allows us a view of “two stories being told simultaneously” (“Holocaust” 676), and how we might read these “two stories” as a competition between a “narrative” strain that tells the story and an “antinarrative” one that “deconstructs” the first (“Holocaust” 673). In this case, however, the deconstruction not only questions the narrative, but gestures towards a greater historical accuracy.

In this, there is some similarity to Rushdie’s use of disnarrated errata. A narrative is provided, but is not the limit of the information given, sacrificing coherence for accuracy in ways that invert White’s complaints about narrative historiography. In an interview, Spiegelman describes this dynamic: “Now my father’s not necessarily a reliable witness, and I never presumed that he was. So, as far as I could corroborate anything he said, I did—which meant, on occasion, talking to friends and to relatives and also doing as much reading as I could” (Brown 93). Similarly, in Maus, Artie asks Pavel, also a survivor, for corroboration of details after Vladek dies (Maus II 47) and includes representations of Vladek’s sketches to clarify oral testimony. Vladek’s sketch of his family’s “bunker” in Srodula, built to avoid capture, fulfills the purpose of Holocaust testimony according to Stern and others: to prevent the event’s repetition. Vladek wants to show Artie “exactly how was it—just in case,” implying that the drawing is not merely a “reality effect” for Artie’s book, but might be needed in case he too has to hide for his life in some nightmare future (Maus 110). While Artie may not be able to present all of the events accurately, the fragments of his account that are true may become lifesavers someday.

If Vladek tries to emplot the Holocaust as Romance, then Artie tries to emplot it with an ironic tropology “in which the author signals in advance a real or feigned disbelief in the truth of his own statements” (White, Metahistory 37). Certainly, the scenes in which Artie expresses the insufficiency of his ability to represent the Holocaust, or Françoise, fall into this category, as do the variety of scenes wherein he discusses the difficulties he is having in writing the second volume. Vladek’s accounts of the camps, however, succeed in making these events present to the reader in ways that belie the claim that the past is irretrievably passed. The mere fact that Vladek’s romance can be invalidated by the brute intractability of the events he describes indicates their autonomy and actuality despite Artie’s construction of a narrative of insufficiency.

In fact, Maus insistently and visually resists the notion that the past is not present. As various critics have illustrated, Maus continually highlights not only Artie’s frustration at his distance from the past, but also the insistent presence of the past in the narrative present. Erin McGlothlin, for one, details how Vladek is commanded to “Face Left!” by Dr. Mengele in the camps and re-enacts his movements for Artie’s benefit (Maus II 58). The reader sees four panels in a horizontal “strip.” The first three show Vladek demonstrating to Artie in the present, with the fourth showing Vladek in the past being commanded by Mengele. As McGlothlin notes, “This last panel effects a visual break in the block of panels, for it suddenly transports the reader from a visual depiction of a present of verbal narration of the past to a visual depicton of the narrated moment of the past itself” (178). While at first the distinction between past and present seems clear from the visual disjunction between the third and fourth panels, in fact there is more temporal continuity between the four panels than it initially appears. McGlothlin observes that Vladek occupies the same space in the fourth panel as he does in the first three, and the place of the observer, Artie, is replaced by the Nazi, Mengele, who, like Artie, records Vladek’s movements and responses. McGlothlin argues that this establishes a “visual analogue between the original scene of victimization and trauma and the retelling of the event, insisting that the two are not distinct, mutually exclusive processes (179). Beyond this, however, it is possible to see Maus’ resistance to a narrative form that relies on some version of chronology, recounting what is past in the present. Instead, the past is present, not merely in the psychological scars born by both Vladek and Artie, but also in the material body of Vladek. This series of panels insists on our seeing that the same body in the camp “selection” process is the one recounting his story to his son, and as long as that body is present, the past is materially accessible, written upon it.

Indeed, the comics form is inherently suited to such an observation since it is the only medium in which time is both linear and spatial. One must read temporally to progress from panel to panel, but at the same time, a reader can view the pictures in several panels (or in a whole page) simultaneously, allowing her to see both narrative past and narrative present in her own present while reading.[12] Doing so indicates how a model of narrative in which time progresses forward and that separates the past that occurred from the present that explains is unsatisfactory. Here, Spiegelman subverts temporal expectations, by placing the “past” in the far right of the series of panels. In a medium wherein the reader is expected to assume that the panel to the right will take place in the “future” of the panel to its left, this inversion of expectation brings the past momentarily into the future. As Joshua Charlson writes, in Maus “[s]tory is never a smooth, self-contained progression […]; it is interrupted by the present, just as the present is continually assaulted by the past” (107). Maus consistently illustrates the continuity between past and present in this manner, often subtly sliding from Vladek as (present) narrator to Vladek as (past) character with visual cues (McGlothlin 182), allowing the reader to see both past and present simultaneously and experience the relays between them.

Even within the single panel, Spiegelman refuses a simple separation of past events as contrasted with present narration. In particular, when Vladek recounts the hanging of four young girls who were friends of Anja, they are depicted not in their “past” environment in the camps, but as hanging from the trees in the Catskills while Vladek and Artie drive by (Maus II 79). As Rick Iadonisi points out, “temporal seepage” is a crucial element of the text, in which events in past time “bleed” into the present. Most typically, critics see these moments as narratological metalepses and as evidence of the psychological impact of the camps on both Vladek and Artie. At the same time, however, these moments must be read as resisting Artie’s narrative of historical belatedness. While Artie quite frequently expresses despair at the impossibility of recapturing the past, at other times it impresses itself upon the present with such force that it can be seen and heard. Whether it is in the rotating body of Vladek or in the legs of the hanging victims, the material past is embodied in these panels and exceeds the notion of the past as a mere ghost or trace in the shadow of present signification. The poststructuralist narrative in which past experience disappears and is transfigured into non-referential representations is challenged by this version of anti-narrative, wherein the procession from past to present is replaced by a page, and a world, in which the two exist simultaneously.[13]

“A Problem of Taxonomy”

In focusing on the ways in which Vladek’s reliance on narrative ultimately de-forms or distorts the truth of his historical account, Spiegelman may be seen, like Derrida, to be deconstructing the division Nora, Hawlbachs, and others erect between memory and history. If history is a belated instrument that relies upon representation to reconfigure the past, then surely Vladek’s own engagement with the compromised tools of signification indicates how memory may be defined in precisely the same way. Derrida’s claim that the distinction between writing (absence/history) and speech (presence/memory) is “barely perceptible” is particularly apt in this case. To say that the distinction between memory and history is nonexistent is not, however, to merely say that there is no such thing as memory, and that all we have is history, signification, and belatednes. On the contrary, to say the differences between memory and history are imperceptible is to suggest that the attributes typically applied to history must be applied to memory, but also that the attributes typically applied to memory may be applied to history. While the former is the route typically taken by poststructuralist philosophy, this is largely a result of the Cartesianism that Ankersmit challenges.

If, as Derrida asserts, the danger of writing, from Plato’s point-of-view, is that it threatens the interior and the immanent with infection from the outside, then the permeability of external signification with the interior world (of memory/of presence) is established. This merely shows that Plato’s effort to separate speech from writing, and memory from history, is a lost cause, because memory already partakes of the tools of signification. At the same time, if one adopts Ankersmit’s notion of experience impressing itself upon the mind, this permeability works both ways, wherein experience may not only impress itself upon mind/memory, but it may also be transferred to more prosthetic means of representation, like writing, and historical texts. That is, if representation can get in, then surely (past) experience can get out, both into the texts regarded as “documents” for historical research (or first person accounts like those of Vladek) and into the texts that arise from those texts (or third-person historical accounts, like that of Art Spiegelman). (…)

Footnotes

[1] For further discussion of photographs in Maus, see Charlson (109-111), Hirsch, Hatfield, and Elmwood. [back]

[2] The contrast of Maus to more traditional funny animals necessarily rests on the distinction between the Disney capitalist/corporate machine that exploits everything and anything for profit and Spiegelman’s text which either draws the line between profit and “art” somewhere (at Maus vests, for instance), or, at the very least, expresses some guilt about it. Vladek, portrayed as an amoral capitalist in the pre-war years, believes he is giving Artie a compliment when he compares him to the “big-shot cartoonist” Walt Disney (Maus 133), but Artie obviously feels differently. Nevertheless, Spiegelman does articulate parallels between his own mice and those of Disney in the epigraph to Maus II, which quotes a mid-1930’s German newspaper article’s condemnation of Mickey Mouse and Jews, with both linked to debased amoral capitalism. [back]

[3] Bosmajian notes how the desire to have been present at Auschwitz is not atypical for children of survivors. Bosmajian posits that this “insane wish” comes about as a result of the knowledge that the “gap between the experience of the disaster and any mimetic or symbolic construct of it is unbridgeable” (33). [back]

[4] The division of memory and history is undercut by some versions of poststructuralist theory, as discussed in this chapter, and is made even more problematic by Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of “collective memory” which asserts that no memory is individual, but can only be constructed in relationship to those communities to which the individual belongs. While Halbwachs maintains a distinction between history and memory (85-86), the notion that memory is shaped into a communal consciousness implies a distancing between the direct (individual) experience and its remembrance and, in doing so, pushes history and memory closer together. [back]

[5] In History and Memory After Auschwitz, Dominick LaCapra puts the number of Fortunoff testimonies at 3700 and the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation’s at approximately 50,000 (11). In the ten years that have passed since that book’s publication, at least several hundred more have been added to the Fortunoff testimonies and perhaps several thousand to the Survivors of the Shoah. To link either or both of these collections to a true or transparent touching of the past to the present is, as always, problematic, particularly in the case of the latter, funded by Stephen Spielberg and directed with Hollywood logic and production values (Novick, Holocaust 275-76). [back]

[6] Nancy K. Miller makes a similar claim about Maus when she notes that listening to Vladek’s recorded voice at the Maus museum exhibit gives the listener the sense that “the father performs unmediated—to the world” (55). Miller does acknowledge, however, that although the listeners may get the impression of the unmediated, this impression is problematic (59 n13). [back]

[7] Ankersmit distinguishes between the “description” of the past which aims at truthfulness and the “representation” (particularly narrative) of the past that is an argument for how a particular slice of the past is to be defined. Descriptions distinguish between a portion that is referring to reality and a portion that is a property of that referent. So, in “the cat is orange,” the “cat” refers to a real-world object and “is orange” describes one of its properties. Because of the simplicity of the statement, it can be empirically confirmed or denied and is therefore either “true” or “false.” Nevertheless, because of its simplicity, the statement tells us very little about the cat, its origins, its history, its relationships (Narrative, chapters 1-3). Ankersmit concludes that because history aims not only to tell us the factual “truth” of past events, but also to orient us towards them and to help us understand their complexities, this model has little utility. It is possible, of course, to imagine a more radical response to Ankersmit that would focus on how a single word in this description (“orange”) can only be corroborated within agreed social and linguistic boundaries, making such corroboration not a confirmation of the statement’s “objective” truth, but of social/linguistic agreement. While there is little doubt that “facts” depend on what social groups consider factual, it is also true that the discrepancies between such groups are likely to be more limited when treating such a simple declarative statement. Statements of this kind infrequently create the kinds of social and political problems so central to Foucaultian thinking, for instance. The orangeness of cats has rarely been a significant bone of social or political contention. Other, equally short, statements may be much more difficult to extract from their discursive context, however. Freud’s “a child is being beaten” or Spivak’s “white men are saving brown women from brown men” might seem initially to be the kind of factual statement Ankersmit sees as confirmable, but they are embroiled in larger cultural narratives that circulate power. Ankersmit’s broader point, however, is that these larger discourses are precisely that which we should investigate, both because they create more problems for notions of transparent representation and because they have greater educational potential (Historical 39-48). Ankersmit further argues that narratives/representations can be “true” even if some of their individual statements are false (Narrative 58-78). [back]

[8] Interestingly, as the Complete Maus CD-ROM reveals, these lines are not a direct quote from Vladek, but are edited and re-written by Spiegelman. Vladek actually said “finally I found her. The rest I don’t need to tell you, because we both were very happy” (Bosmajian 41). While the “happy ending” of the story is still palpably false, Spiegelman’s addition of “ever after” emphasizes (even provides) the fairy tale feel of Vladek’s conclusion. [back]

[9] For a discussion of the problems of providing closure in any Holocaust narrative, see Levine (70). [back]

[10] There are, interestingly, some examples of critics relying on outcomes to interpret Maus in ways similar to Vladek’s emplotment. In particular, Tabachnick (“Religious”) suggests that Vladek’s survival is somehow meant to happen by God, something proven by various fulfilled prophecies in the text. While there is an emphasis on prediction and fulfillment in these episodes, there is also an emphasis in Maus on the role chance plays in who survived the camps. Pavel asserts, “It wasn’t the best people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was random!!” (Maus II 45; emphasis in original). Given Pavel’s “wisdom” throughout Maus, it is more likely that we are meant to see the random nature of survival than the fated triumph of Vladek. [back]

[11] For further commentary on the orchestra scene, see Ewert (both sources) and Iadonisi (51-52). [back]

[12] Nearly all comics theorists note this feature unique to the medium. Scott McCloud discusses how comics transform time into space in Understanding Comics. “[I]n comics, the past is more than just memories for the audience and the future is more than just possibilities! Both past and future are real and visible all around us! Wherever your eyes are focused, that’s now. But at the same time your eyes take in the surrounding landscape of the past and future!” (104). The surfeit of exclamation points does not invalidate the claim. [back]

[13] Of course, all of the drawings, regardless of their position on the page are “representations” of the past, not the thing itself, even if they occupy the same diegetic level as the character who purportedly creates them. The blurring of diegetic levels suggests that the past can be made present, but it does not actualize that suggestion unless we are willing to acknowledge that representations can retain some material portion of that which they represent, a possibility I explore in the next section of the chapter. [back]

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Eric Berlatsky is Associate Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He specializes in twentieth-century British and postcolonial literatures, (post)modernism, and, when he can get away with it, comic books. He has published essays in academic journals or collections on Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, embedded and frame narratives, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, Graham Swift’s Waterland, Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. He has also published online essays on Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Swamp Thing. He is currently completing work on the editing of a collection of career-spanning interviews with Alan Moore (Alan Moore: Conversations), which will appear in Fall 2011 or Spring 2012 from the University of Mississippi Press. His first book, The Real, the True, and The Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation is now available from The Ohio State University Press. It includes a lengthy chapter on Art Spiegelman’s Maus, for the comics aficianados.

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