In an essay entitled "The Myth of Superman," writer/philosopher Umberto Eco commented on the narrative dilemma of serialized fiction, using Superman comics as an example. Eco was concerned with delineating the features of a 'closed' text - a classic Superman story is 'closed,' in Eco's terminology, because it is designed to elicit a predetermined response - the mythological iteration of the Superman character. Therefore, nothing can happen in a Superman tale which advances the hero along the life-path: he cannot marry, reproduce or grow old.
Has this held true with Superman comics? Is he still catching bank robbers and stopping trains circa the nineteen forties? Or has he been free from his "closed" environment and allowed to do 21st century deeds?Has his character grown?
39 comments:
Well, I saw him marry, reproduce and grow old back in the 50s and 60s, but they were all either "imaginary" tales or otherwise reversible. Writers have been trying ever since to make him more real, but he always seems to revert to the same old Supes.
Superman was not one of my favorite superheroes. Maybe, because he was too super. The stories I enjoyed most were Superman being affected by the different kinds of kryptonite. Flaws are more interesting than strengths.
Yes, and if he was too Super, why weren't his deeds bigger? Because they were embalmed ideas of what a Superhero would do or to be in keeping with a small town guy? Was it a way of keeping him from getting too big for his britches?
You can ask Phil about "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." You would think that an indestructible alien would become a tyrant. However, Superman's popularity endures: someone paid over a million dollars for the first issue of that Superman comic book.
You have to remember the ferment he came out of, as Michael Chabon hasn't been the only one to remind us, wherein the mass evil seemed insuperable...and also the concern the comics folks had with trying to find a way of Not having a Pax Kal-El thrust upon the fictional universe he inhabits. Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT comics certainly deal with the results of an easily flattered Superman helping the fascists take charge and keep charge...Harvey Kurtzman earlier dealt with a none-too-bright Superduperman having to conquer a more cynical, but also less self-deluding, Captain Marvellous in a story that didn't just parallel the legal wrangling between DC and Fawcett Comics (Fawcett had to content itself with such successes as Gold Medal paperbacks).
wv: unmaxes
I haven't yet read the Eco, but he's not taking into account trickster cycles and A Whole Lot of narrative, it sounds like. Or does he?
My husband is doing a review essay that just alludes to the Eco piece. I have found excerpts online but not yet the whole piece. The idea is fascinating though. And I think he only uses Superman as an example. But the idea that a text can be closed is certainly being tested with the current vampirization of various books.
Is Superman best left as a fairly restricted, by the original author, superhero? Was it the times, the author's imagination or good sense that limited him?
Well, he isn't limited. Commercial concerns limited him...and he, like nearly every "golden" age comics "superhero," was the product of writing by committee or at least by any number of contributors...making him and such progenitors as the dime novel characters by many hands close in all those ways to the largely unchanging folkloric chararcters.
Then omes those characters, such as Holmes, originally written about by only one writer, but which have been taken up by many (and certainly Austen's characters and milieau were...opneed up...by others before the current monster invasions).
Superman has definitely changed over the decades. In the Forties and Fifties, the stories were nearly always short and self-contained, but in the Sixties they began to take on a somewhat bigger scope. It was the reboot of the character in the Eighties that produced the biggest changes, though. Suddenly Clark Kent wasn't an orphan anymore, since Ma and Pa Kent were still alive. Lois eventually discovered that Clark was really Superman, and I think they're married in the current continuity, but don't hold me to that. The stories have become much more epic over the past 25 years, running for many, many issues and sometimes tying in to a multitude of other titles.
Whether or not this is a good thing is, of course, in the eye of the beholder.
I think he's changed, or so it seems to me from mostly the outside. I've never really been a big superman fan. I have enjoyed the Smallville episodes.
I think Eco's comment holds true for all comic book characters in a general sense. Their core personas have to remain the same so they are recognizable generation after generation. That said, what keeps comic books vital is each generation's different interpretations of core personas. The characters also appear in story arcs or graphic novels that take into account current events.
Perhaps what he meant was that certain "texts" (hate that word) should remain closed-that they don't make sense when taken out of their time. Was Superman meant to be a mid 20th century hero? Does he make sense today without tremendous updating? As James says, it's up for debate.
i would point you (and more importantly, your husband) to ComicsResearch.org which does yeoman's work at bringing together the enormous and constantly growing body of academic writing on comics. Despite what many people seem to think, lots of people have written on comics both inside and outside academia (one of the inevitable disappoints of PCA is hearing yet another paper by someone who's assumed no one's ever written on the topic before.
[I should mention the above site is run by my ex who was the first person to bring the Eco essay to my attention back in the early 90s.]
I was hoping for you to turn up-both Gerald and Kate. I will point him there. He wrote an article "Must Utopians Have Perfect Bodies" for a journal and is now besieged with review requests. Yes, the PCA is a challenge. Coming out of political theory, what is new to him is not new to people from other disciplines--and vice versa.
I think Gerald points out something interesting. How to keep true to the original creation and, at the same time, appeal to a new audience.
I think the anxiety that Eco speaks to is a different one from what the publishers deal with -- e.g. the failure of the latest Superman movie and the relative success of the cartoon version. Superman doesn't have the "vulnerable/triumph over adversity and his own doubts" appeal that Spiderman does. We're in a period of distrust in this country. People do not admire those who are better: they hate them. So Superman had to die.
But I've never liked superhero comics and don't read them much.
And I am not making much sense this day: Eco's concern is more with serial literature and its nature which affects any kind of narrative though the superhero narrative has particular complications. Any kind of soap has a lot of the same issues, but you can swap out characters to reinvest the audience attention: with Superman, you can add sidekicks or new villains, but the mainstay is fairly static -- weaseling innovations like Kryptonite in its range of colours, for example, is about as far as you can stretch that inelastic source.
I think that this might be a useful avenue for exploration:
http://www.utoronto.ca/utopia/
wv: diviate
(I always take the "pragmatists" to assume that if we don't have perfect-enough bodies, we don't really matter enough to care about anyway...)
Thanks. I want to completely eliminate bodies and just exist as a free floating consciousness.
Oh, no no no -- can't get on board with that. Bodies are much too enjoyable.
Todd: oh, Utopias -- More was right: nowhere. I used to have my students design their own utopias after reading More. What little fascist paradises they inevitably came up with. Democracy was seldom considered.
WV: cravochu (sounds like an appetizer)
I've never been much of a utopian, either (and I must admit that downloadable bodies, as in John Varley's early work, did sound rather attractive in a distant sort of way...not that Varley was not cognizant of some of the problems)...however, I gather the instigation of all this was an article exploring the utopian...
We are animals...bodies, for good or ill, do come with the package...
WV last: nonsin
wv this time: foodl (cravochu a variety of foodl)
Ah yes, my husband has them create utopias, too and they certainly favor order over any other attributes.
It might be possible to partake of corporeal pleasures without actually being tied to a body. I'm hoping for that.
Society for Utopian Studies is my favorite conference almost. They are truly still in the sixties in attitude.
My relevant grad school adventure: Elise and Kenneth Boulding came along to George Mason University in my semester as a Conflict Management student, and she asked us to devise a brief description of utopian societies...she found, as she usually did in her classrooms, that we tended to rid our societies of currency first. Post-Scarcity Culture perhaps comes easily as a concept to left-leaning middle class classrooms.
Most of my husband's honor students come out of a Catholic high school. I guess order is a particularly favorite virtue of Catholicism. They call themselves Orders, don't they?
Perhaps then it's relevant that Kate teaches at a Catholic college...presumably most of her students had the same sort of drilling that your husband's did...
Without a doubt.
For the first and last word on Superman, read Grant Morrison's "All-Star Superman". Not only does it take place in the here and now, it's touching and moving and epic and intimate all at the same time. Furthermore, Morrison somehow manages to make some of the more idiotic parts of Supes' long history seem cool---like Krypto the Superdog.
The only thing that limits Superman is the same thing that limits any narrative--sorry to destory anyone's grad thesis here--is the laziness of the writer involved. Period.
The new movie failed because it tried to invest way too much Christian imagery into the Superman tale; in a very trite and obvious way that reeked of coffee house philosophizing. It stayed far too tied to the worst parts of the original Superman movie, presenting a Lex Luthor pre-John Byrne update and wasting Kevin Spacey on all but the last 25 minutes or so. Not to mention Lois Lane looked like she was 17 and Supes shouldn't have a kid.
And finally, in defense of the Man of Steel, I leave you with Harlan Ellison:
"If one of the unarguable criteria for literary greatness is recognition, consider this: In all of the history of literature, there are only five fictional creations known to every man, woman, and child on the planet. The urchin in Irkutsk may never have heard of Hamlet, the peon in Pernambuco may not know who Raskolnikov is; the widow in Jakarta may stare blankly at the mention of Don Quixote or Micawber or Jay Gatsby. But every man, woman, and child on the planet knows Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood... and Superman.
He is more than the fanciful daydream of two Cleveland schoolboys. He is the 20th-century archetype of mankind at its finest. He is courage and humanity, steadfastness and decency, responsibility and ethic. He is our universal longing for perfection, for wisdom and power used in the service of the human race.
Of all the literary creations of American fiction, Superman, after all these years, born of a 'dispensable, disreputable' genre, is the only one that seems certain to get Posterity's nod. And that is because, simply put, he is our highest aspirations in human form."
I am constantly amazed at how brilliant you all are and what a great resource. Thanks! People who don't use the Internet's blogs for information, solace, references and camaraderie are missing something important and vital.
@Todd -- I teach at an historically Catholic institution that has since severed its ties (well, many of its ties, not all, as the Sisters of St Joseph of Carondolet are very generous and easy-going).
"If one of the unarguable criteria for literary greatness is recognition..."
If, indeed -- that puts Bella and Edward up there at the same level, then. Far more recognizable to many than Superman. The problems of the ubiquity of Superman as the American ideal of invulnerable superiority should be clear to people of any political stripe.
But I suppose if Morrison has provided the "first and last word" I should just shut up.
I wonder to what extent lone-wolf private-eye or police series hold to this model. I wonder if that's why protagonists of such stories can't maintain relationships or escape from the specter of drinking even if they stop drinking.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Is growth a detriment in a series? Do we want the same characteristics to hold true throughout the series? Or is the acquisition of sobriety or a girlfriend a sign of an expanding character?
Actually, growth helps most series, but not so much the reader who wants More of the Same.
Trickster cycles and similar are among the first literature a society usually developes, and although they continue in all societies' literature I'm aware of, they usually give birth to sagas of change, as well...hello Gilgamesh, hello Odysseus, hello my life-tested pals.
Sorry for the misrepresentation, Kate!
Sophisticated readers want variety...unsophisticated readers often don't. Hence the tendency of bestsellers to run along the same lines...they are often among the few books their readers will read in a given period.
Patti, is Eco's essay book-length? Do you know where it's available?
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Pete-it's in THE ROLE OF THE READER, 1979, Indiana Press. That essay is called THE MYTH OF SUPERMAN. He divided work into open, closed, and open/closed.
Thanks. It's interesting to see that he allowed for an open/closed category. In a discussion over at my site, I've suggested that certain crime series combine elements of the open and the closed. Now I'll ahve to go see what Eco says.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Yes, but he has Superman as a closed text. Very difficult book but you will probably be able to follow his arguments better than I can.
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