"This Man, This Metaphor!"

The world of comics bloggers has been consumed, of late, by an ongoing debate over the merits of the superhero genre. I've tried to stay out of that - I cancelled the one post I was going to write on it when I realized I was commenting only on other bloggers' methods of argument, not the substance of their arguments, usually a sign that a debate is ready for the mortician. (Although I will note that Dave Intermittent offers a couple of great summations and responses on his site; I especially appreciate the invocation of Pynchon, Rushdie, et al.) Since this topic ultimately boils down to matters of taste, I wonder if there's really any substance to argue at all.

But I have seen one claim, made by both sides of the debate and with increasing frequency, that's worth addressing. It's the idea that superheroes are (or are not) a worthwhile genre because they are (or are not, or sometimes are but often are not) metaphoric.

Which raises the question: metaphoric of what? But it begs an even more important question: do they have to be metaphoric to be good?

The question reminds me of Slavoj Zizek's book on popular film, Looking Awry, which offers a reading of Hitchcock's The Birds that might prove particularly illuminating for all this discussion of superheroes and metaphor. (As an aside, I cannot tell you how much I despise having become one of those academics who begins his comments with a trendy invocation of Zizek. Especially since I'm not even drawn to his work that much. I promise you, it used to be worse; about four, five years ago you couldn't talk to an English grad student or professor without having them mention Zizek in tones once reserved for Shaun Cassidy or Davy Jones. But I do like Looking Awry.)

Zizek notes that many critics interpret the birds' assault as a symbolic reaction against Tippi Hedren's stimulation of the male protagonist's sexuality, awakening him from his stifling, mother-centered family life... or something, it's been a while since I've either seen the film or read the book, okay?

Anyway, the point is that Zizek argues The Birds isn't, from a certain psychological perspective, symbolic of anything at all - the birds' assault is terrifyingly real, a literalization and not a figurative metaphor of the movie's suppressed emotional state. In a tour de force passage, Zizek speculates on what the film might have looked like if the birds were strictly symbolic - if the movie were a Tennessee Williams or William Saroyan play, or some other comfortably tepid midcentury work. He cites, in this Birds that does not exist, the multifarious avian symbols of awakened sexuality and threatened maternal repression that might litter such a movie: the birds bought as a gift (actually in the movie), the taxidermic mounting on the mantelpiece, and so on - none of which ever get around to attacking the humans and giving us BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD.

Zizek's point is that Hitchcock doesn't bury these emotional subtexts in figurative tropes; he makes them real, exploding them across the screen in a torrent of wings. The birds don't symbolize a psychological outburst; they are a psychological outburst unto themselves. And the result is a much more gripping, powerful narrative than the wan middlebrow alternative Zizek imagines.

As in Hitchcock, so in the superhero comics. Superman doesn't symbolize the immigrant's split impulses between assimilation and cultural tradition; he is that split impulse. The Vision doesn't symbolize artificial intelligence and the borders of simulated humanity; he is them. Cliff Steele doesn't symbolize the Western dichotomy between mind and body; he is an extreme test case of that dichotomy, a readymade vehicle only occasionally exploited for that purpose by a Grant Morrison type - but even there, Morrison doesn't make Robotman a "symbol" of the mind/body split because he doesn't need to.

To add another example, Animal Man isn’t symbolic of "animal rights" or any other such thing – at best, he might provide a convenient free-floating vehicle for talking about those issues, but such talk will most likely happen in a surprisingly literal, not figurative, manner. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.)

But he does become a metaphor once Morrison starts using his status as a comic-book character (and a decidedly second-rate one at that) to start wringing out some real ontological tragedy for another class of beings quite different from Buddy Baker. Buddy is a hapless victim of the cruelest, most irreversible of circumstances - he's been created by sadistic, senseless, and ultimately inferior beings who destroy his world and his loved ones for no discernible reason beyond, perhaps, their own amusement. And the author-figure who torments him, like the animator in "The Coyote Gospel," is a stand-in for a particularly bitter vision of God; Animal Man, in other words, becomes a metaphor for us.

That's a particularly rich use of superhero as metaphor, but it's also a fairly rare one. What I'm suggesting is that superhero comics - or fantasy genres in general, perhaps - operate primarily through what Hayden White might term metonymy, not metaphor. They offer a literal substitution or stand-in or test case for the larger idea, not a figurative replacement. And this is potentially amazing, because the genre's conventions - oh, those much-derided genre conventions - allow it to metonymically represent concepts and dilemmas and emotional states normally representable only through figuration, symbol, and metaphor. W.E.B. DuBois had to imagine a veil to talk about double-consciousness and the fracturing of racial self-identity, but most superheroes actually are split identities - and a few shrewd creators have figured out how to use the latter to talk about the former.

Most superhero comics don't do this, of course; many don't even realize they can. And when lesser creators do attempt to locate some kind of larger meaning in their superheroes, they usually botch it up by aiming straight for the metaphor rather than letting these real embodiments work for themselves.

Don't think I'm knocking the hack writers here; the artsy fellows are, if anything, even more prone to this mock profundity. Ang Lee and James Shamus fell for it in their screenplay of The Ice Storm, and I suspect this upcoming Vertigo book about Superman has bitten into it hook, line, and sinker - which is just one reason why I'll be avoiding the godawful thing like the plague. (Said plague being the semi-autobiographical wankery plague that's run rampant through prose "nongenre" fiction and now apparently has its sights set on the spandex.)

I'll take a shlocky, if well-realized, superhero story over that any day, and not only for its more considerable visceral pleasures. Why (to jump back to my Thanos rant) would you try to make a supervillain a metaphor for the death-drive implicit in autocratic conquerers when you could just have him try to fuck Death? On one level, of course, a character named "Thanos" might seem to be just about the most metaphoric one in comics, but on another level he works precisely because the fantastic elements of the genre allow him to embody that death-drive in a horrifically literal manner.

That's why I think some superhero fans are looking to dignify their genre in the wrong places. Don't defend it because it's metaphoric; defend it because it doesn't even need to be.

Comments

[Bruce Baugh]

Hmm. You've goaded me into writing a piece for my own weblog about this. (I mostly agree, by the way, and was just thinking about the metaphor thing last night.)

[Rose]

Marc,

As a very guilty party in the pro-superhero pro-metaphor camp, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I've always had trouble with separating metaphor from metonymy, though it's a personal failing; I just use metaphor as a more expansive term than general use warrants. Still, I think it's useful enough for what I was arguing about superheroes, because what was annoying me was the people who read and enjoy superhero comics and were willing to state publicly that almost none are worthy of critical analysis, and that seemed like nonsense. So I don't take back my comments about the use of metaphor and identification and idealization in superhero comics, but I don't think they had any effect either, and I'm glad you've supplanted and enhanced things.

[ezrael]

Wait... you're not avoiding it because it was written by Steven T. Seagle? Because that's all they needed to do to get me to avoid it, man.

I don't write much about comics, because, well, I don't read them much anymore. But while I don't disagree with you here, I do think that there is a level that doesn't get pointed out much: comic books served a purpose as morality play and wish fulfillment. During the Weisinger period, he would go and ask kids what they wanted to see Superman do, and even if it made no sense, he would give it to them. Superman wasn't a metaphor... he was a stand in for every reader who wanted to be able to just solve their problems with a strong right hand and a determined jaw. Imagine a writer today doing a Superman comic where he flew overseas and grabbed bin Laden and Kim Jong Il? That was the standard for the Siegel and Shuster Superman... they did it so many times that the damn SS felt like they had counter it in their newspaper. ( http://www.onceinoticediwasonfireidecidedtorelaxandenjoythefall.org/merkabah/archives/000673.html if you're interested in the details.)

Superheroic relevance used to come from the fact that they either did the things we couldnt or showed us simple, easily digested moral lessons. While I certainly am glad that comic books have gained complexity since then, there's room for morality tales and wish fulfillment in comics, and that might be the only way to combat the shrinking reader base.

[Dave Van Domelen]

Bravo! I find superhero stuff tends to work best when you concentrate on doing "cool stuff" and let the literary aspects take care of themselves. For instance, in the recent issue of Planetary, the idea of a spaceship that runs by eating information is just cool. The fact that the description of its workings can be taken as a metaphor (or metynomy?) for comics themselves is just gravy. Albeit pretty cool gravy.

[Marc]

Matt sez: "Imagine a writer today doing a Superman comic where he flew overseas and grabbed bin Laden and Kim Jong Il?"

Remember, folks, Matt doesn't read comics anymore, so he has no idea he's just described American Power...

[Dave Van Domelen]

Which has been pulled from the schedule, apparently. Not that I expect Crossgen to survive long enough to publish it if it hasn't. Death spiral....

[ezrael]

Nope, hadn't heard of American Power. But I still think there's a difference between some other comic books doing it, and Superman doing it.

Also, i'm not necessarily saying it would make for good comics, either.

[ezrael]

Here, however, is an interesting thing: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG02/yeung/actioncomics/cover.html

Action Comics # 1 online.

[alex]

this reminds me of a section of nietzche's "birth of tragedy" (and i hope you'll forgive my lack of particular insight, i just read it about fifteen minutes ago, and my presumption of assuming you're familiar with the work since i can barely think about it cogently). he's talking about tragedy being rooted in the chorus (as opposed to the stage and presumably a number of other distasteful theories) and the path of the chorus from active participant to observer (through the mitigating influence of apollonian traditions or... well shit, i'll let him say it, translated: "the stage with its action was originally conceived as pure vision and that the only reality was the chorus, who created that vision out of itself and proclaimed it through the medium of dance, music, and spoken word." at this point, nietzsche is pissed off at people who proclaim "naturalism" the best measure of value in theatre and he furiously references schiller: "while the day of the stage was conceded to be artificial, the architecture of the set symbolic, the metrical discourse stylized..." well, apparently people chalked these things up to poetic license instead of acknowledging it as VERY ESSENCE OF POETRY.)

um...god, i'm having trouble thinking right now, but here's what made me think of this discussion:
"...we may recognize a drastic stylist opposition: language, color, pace, dynamics of speech are polarized into the dionysiac poetry of the chorus, on he one hand, and the apollonian dream world of the scene on the other. the result is two completely separate spheres of expression. the apollonian embodiments in which dionysos assumes objective shape are very different from the continual interplay of shifting forces in the music of the chorus, from those powers deeply felt by the enthusiast, but which he is incapable of condensing into a clear image. the adept no longer obscurely senses the approach of the god: the god now speaks to him from the proscenium with the clarity and firmness of epic, as an epic hero, almost in the language of homer.

[Jon Silpayamanant]

This was a very nice read. Sorry I hadn't commented on it when I first read it a couple of months ago. This might interest you, or not:

The Dark Knight as Japanese proto-types

I had already been thinking about movement (as in non-western theatre) as being more metonymic than metaphoric (w/r/t transmission of aesthetic codes) and the copy/contact idea behind sympathetic magic in anthropology lends some weight to the idea of performance being more metonymic, so what better way to discuss movement than in a genre that re-presents a type of movement?

I personally think that the metonymic depth of DKR far superceeds the metaphorically "flat" narrative...

[Marc]

While we're apologizing for belated responses, I wanted to tell Alex that I think Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (which I wasn't familiar with) fits this discussion perfectly, and I notice that White tries to integrate it into his tropological master plan. And of course, Jakobson and Halle cite Frazer on sympathetic magic in their attempt to sell their (I think overly reductive) paradigmatic/syntagmatic binary; I'm starting to see a point where all these different theories of grammar, art, and tropology converge.

Unfortunately, that convergence invalidates or complicates some of what I wrote two months ago, particularly the parts where I associated metonymy (a figurative trope) with the pre-symbolic "real" of psychoanalysis. In falling into the Jakobsonian trap of using "metonymy" to denote everything that's not metaphor, I confused a linguistic, symbolic construct with the a- or pre-symbolic. (In fact, as Fredric Jameson noted in a 1976 review of White's Metahistory, under White's system metaphor appears to be "the moment of literality in speech," the moment of mimesis when a word directly names its object.)

But while the terminology needs some clarification, I think the basic point stands: comics don't operate on the purely symbolic registers that so many of their literary interlocutors assign them. Nor do I find the concept of metaphor any more apt than before; too few superheroes have that fixed relation to an absent referent - when the referents are there, they're too present, leaving no figurative distance between vehicle and tenor (see Thanos again). However, one particular aspect of comics is absolutely metonymical, defined by its relation of one part to another of equivalent figurative weight: continuity. This is what Rick Moody understands that so many of his peers miss.

Still a lot to sort out on this, but all the thoughtful responses (here and elsewhere) are noted and appreciated.

[Jon Silpayamanant]

I look forward to reading more of your thoughts about this point of convergence you're seeing.

And I very much have to agree with:

"comics don't operate on the purely symbolic registers that so many of their literary interlocutors assign them."

Bringing up Nietzsche is ironic, given some of the Super-Heroes=Fascism discussion...but that's probably best left for elsewhere.