Rorschach and Genius

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You don’t see any scenes of Rorschach hitting people and the people hitting back. That is, there are no Rorschach fight scenes. Instead he conducts exercises in violence: he applies violence and obtains a result, such as information, punishment, an end to a threat on his life. For the reader, it doesn’t make much difference if the victim in the scene is helpless; for example, the manacled child killer and pervert whom Rorschach burns alive, or (even more so) poor forlorn Moloch, a cancer victim of 60 whom Rorschach shoves into a refrigerator. His ruthlessness is fun; even more, we like his ingenuity. He’s short, smelly, and socially maladroit, but he’s elegant: he employs a minimum of action to get maximum effect.

Watchmen is by way of being a superhero epic, the way War and Peace is an epic. By “epic” I don’t mean “long, good and important,” I mean it covers the waterfront. War and Peace covers just about every experience that goes into human life, from a girl’s first dance to a battle heaving its way along a battlefield. Watchmen sweeps along different and more narrow territory. Its subject is the superhuman vs the human, superiority vs inferiority. But it covers that subject very well. A big blue man landing on Mars and deciding to create life, an ill-favored runt jumping on a prison cot at just the right moment — Watchmen has it all, and there’s quite a distance from one pole to the other. In most ways Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach couldn’t be more different, but they belong together and that’s chiefly because they’re smarter than we are. Dr. Manhattan’s overwhelming superiority doesn’t take the form of overwhelming strength, as is the case with Superman, Thor or the Hulk. Instead he sees reality at a level the rest of us can’t comprehend; he’s tuned in to the ultimate story, that of atomic particles and their dance. Rorschach isn’t stronger than the underworld types he breaks down in their hangouts. Instead he’s faster, more precise, more resourceful and inventive.

The thing is, a reader of Watchmen is in a similar position to that of a Rorschach victim. Not that we suffer, but we’re in Alan Moore’s hands and there’s not much we can do about it. His technical skill is so great that we don’t stand a chance. His skill takes the form of intelligence and ingenuity; Kirby blasts the reader, Moore manipulates us. This isn’t at all a bad thing, but it’s a very similar thing to what Rorschach does to a suspect, what Veidt does to the world, or what From Hell’s Dr. Gull does to his victims (skillfully applying a few strokes of a scalpel to advance a scheme no one understands but himself). Alan Moore is the only genius to write superhero comics, and I think that fact shows up not only in the quality of his works but in their nature.

Great Book Title

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Things I Know About Kings, Celebrities and Crooks by Tufnell LeQueux

A great byline too, come to think of it. Anyway, he was a reporter for The Globe, a London newspaper, and covered the Ripper killings.

Source: From Hell by Alan Moore

Good Man

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I’m reading The New Yorker profile of David Foster Wallace. In 1990 he was feeling burnt out and low, and he wrote in a letter to Jonathan Franzen that he envied any young literary type who was producing pages: “Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David fuckwad Leavitt.” I like that, the “fuckwad” thing. These literary guys talk just like me!

The thing is, I have nothing much against David Leavitt, nothing sizable. I really liked “The Term Paper Artist.” There’s a lot of good in it, though I admit that I must help the piece across the finish line by invoking the Woody Allen Principle. This holds that any pervasive flaw in a favored work is actually meant as satire. (The term gets its name from Interiors, Allen’s Bergman ripoff, which is as dull and cold and solemn as a night in a parking lot with a stringy-haired girl who thinks she has read Kierkegaard. Confused diehards wanted to think Allen was making fun of dim pretentiousness, a project he has apparently stuck with.) To me, “Artist” makes the most sense as an elaborate fuck-you to Stephen Spender and others who objected when Leavitt hijacked one of Spender’s books in the interest of gay outness. I mean, I think that’s how Leavitt saw the controversy; Spender may just have felt he was being plagiarized. Anyway, “Artist” piles on the proud-out-gay touchstones, right down to the boy who gets in touch with his desires, starts doing it with guys, decides his lifework will be helping HIV patients, and takes his next vacation in Florence. He’s even a Mormon; very Angels in America. [UPDATE: I wrote Stephen “Spencer” first time out and just noticed my mistake. Oh well.]

I haven’t read much D. F. Wallace, just a few of the stories in Girl with Curious Hair. They weren’t my sort of thing, but one had a great line. An unlikable girl in a graduate writing program keeps bugging her professors with elaborately postmoden stories. One has the line “Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival,” which Wallace’s narrator follows with this one-word interjection: “Imagine!” Or so I remember it.

UPDATE: Another thing about that New Yorker piece. It says that when Wallace really hit bottom, he did manage to find one book that perked up his interest in writing. The article identifies this as “Flight to Fear, a teen adventure book.” You might think it was quite a book, given that it helped revive an intelligent young author going thru clinical depression. You might think it deserved a few words of description, or at least a byline. But it gets none of that, I suppose because it was written as entertainment and not as literature. For the record, the Library of Congress says the book’s author is Tom Belina and that it was published in 1979 by Children’s Press.

UPDATE: A fellow who taught with Wallace at Illinois State says he learned “really, really quickly” that when talking with Wallace it was better “not to go beyond the equivalent of ‘How’s the weather?'” Why? Well, because the guy told Wallace he liked one of his essays and Wallace “did this gesture of wiping the butt with one hand and pointing at his mouth with the other.” So maybe this profane, Beavis and Butthead, “fuckwad” style of discourse isn’t so great after all. At least a guy can be polite.

More About Sylvia Plath’s Son

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I posted a while back about the regrettable Plath and Hughes and their poor son, who recently committed suicide. Now the New York Times profiles the son and describes his life as a scientist in Alaska. Given his horrible background, it sounds like he took exactly the steps that were needed for his life to become something good. But in the end, for some reason, things didn’t work out. So it’s a shame.

Bullying

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I’m working on a post about Rorshach, and it reminded me of a thought I had during my seventh or eighth viewing of Pulp Fiction. Jules (Samuel Jackson) tells us that fearsome Biblical quote he uses is just a badass thing to say, a tool of the trade. But there’s no business reason for him to use it. When he’s terrorizing those boys early in the movie, there’s nothing he wants them to do, no lesson he wants to engrave on their minds. Vincent (John Travolta) has found the stolen briefcase and now there’s nothing to do but execute the boys and let their bodies rot. Why torment them? If you think about it, Jules is not a just a thug but a sadist. But we don’t think about it. That’s because he’s going thru the whole rigamarole for our sakes. We enjoy aiming that gun and browbeating that pasty-faced little squirrel. People don’t dream so much about being violent, more about having the complete upper hand and seeing their advantage played out in the face of their opponent.

Personally, I think this fact is a byproduct of office life. On the frontier you might have the opportunity to hit someone but not the guts. We still don’t have the guts, but nowadays hitting isn’t the point; you just want to see the other guy blink. Consider all the perfectly innocent witnesses on Law and Order and CSI who are morally one-upped by the cops and then look at their shoes or try to swallow their lips. Considering that we have to find a killer, who cares if some guy used a fake name on a date? We do because it gives us a chance to see the guy’s face crumple.