On Translation. Part II: I’ve Always Been Very Articulate About Things I’ve Changed My Mind About Later.

On Monday I put forward some pretty big questions as inspired by a dear friend.

“So what does translation “do” to the original text? Furthermore, do subsequent translations compound the impact? Does it matter? If so, how much? If not, why?”

Because her initial thoughts were brought about by our being hip deep in geriatric Greekery, I dove into the early history of Western translation theory, using Aristotle as an example.  Since you’re one of my beloved and diligent readers, you’ll also remember that I spent a lot of time explaining that by the time Aristotle made it to the academic consciousness of Western Europe in the thirteenth century, it was more than likely already translated once, from one dialect of Greek to another.

So?

So, those already distrustful of translation as a rule already have cause for concern.  And it gets worse from there.  See, a translation isn’t a copy.  We’re not dealing with a decay of fidelity like you are with a Xerox machine where a duplication of a duplication is how things fall apart, especially because we’re not dealing with metaphrasic translation (word-for-word). 

There’s no visual comparison here, images are not ideas, excuse me, they absolutely are, but they transcend language barriers so they don’t have this issue (don’t they? Foreshadowing!).  It only takes one translation to completely change a text.  Subsequent translations don’t detach further from the source, rather they can, but if you’re taking an anti-translation stance, it only takes one to blow it, especially because we’re dealing with works out of antiquity as our example, the inexorable march of time juxtaposed with Europe’s favorite hobby (conquering itself and burning shit) is really rough on the paperwork.

See, a lot of old Greek documents ended up as a sort of academic ground zero for Europe, and an arbitrary one at that.  Between guys like Socrates, Plato, Homer, and Aristotle, they already were destined to have a big, swinging dick in Europe intellectual development. 

As if that weren’t enough, there’s the whole Bible thing.  At some point in the first century AD, (I was raised too catholic to adopt CE, sorry), the Old and New Testaments, the latter being fat as hell until an hombre named Athenasius dropped the hammer two hundred years later and limited it to the twenty-seven canonical books we pretend to have read and eagerly misquote to this day, were translated into Greek.  Until a further hundred years or so after Bishop Athenasius made his call and Saint Jerome of Illyria translated his Vulgate (the Latin biblical source text invoked to this day as the source), this was the Bible that took Western Europe by storm. 

So, essentially the source of our secular and non-secular ideologies came from the same spot, albeit untethered from each other, historically speaking.  My layman’s guess would be the latter half has more to do with geography than anything else, but that’s neither here nor there (pun!) at the moment.  Anyway, the convergence of these two major cultural influences, compounded by the lacking original documents, means that in a lot of ways these Greek works, as the oldest examples we’ve got, translations or not, become the arbitrary official works.

Nobody had Aristotle’s original manuscripts.  The oldest known copies of his work date back to around the ninth century, AD, for those not good with math, this is over twelve hundred years past his earthly demise. 

So! 

If you’re going to bestow reverence on a text, be it purely as a work of genius or divine offering, and you don’t have the original, you have to at least unofficially declare a point of origin, which is what Europe sort of did. 

Except, as I mentioned, it only takes once to “screw up” a document.  Especially because, for all we know, the guys that translated The Bible and Aristotle’s stuff into then-modern, Attic-Ionic Greek were problem drinkers with mischievous agendas (or illiterate and screaming what they read from the bottom of a bucket to their put-upon family after a devastating goat-kick to the face.  We can all guess as to why.)

So, why bother?  What’s the point?  I mean, really, if you can’t trust any translation, especially translation from antiquity, is there any point?

Remember that “no dark ages” gag from last time?  The ideas never really died, nor are ideas ever really static, even, to the chagrin of literalists, ecumenical ideas. 

Even when things are at their bleakest, there are still people thinking, reading, and writing.  Sure, you have texts that are lost for centuries, but they rarely return to prominence.  The stuff that really made a splash, stuff like Corpus Aristotle?  None of it ever went away and you can be sure that folks were watchdogging (and bitching incessantly) about translation and interpretation the entire time.  Academics in the third century are academics in the eighth century, are academics in the seventeenth century are academics in the twenty-first century. 

Think about professors you had, the ones that are truly dedicated to scholarship, the ones that don’t complain about publishing but see it as the most important part of their job (the ones I’m complementing right now but won’t read it because they’re far too busy and they’ve had enough of me and my nonsense by now).

These people have always been around and they have always been crawling up each others’ asses. 

Which takes us to Martin Luther and why he thinks translation, up to and including deliberate re-wording for the purposes of maximizing communicability for the target audience, isn’t just acceptable, it is the solemn duty of a translator.

A quick digression: I love Martin Luther.  I really do.  Thomas More, too.  Thundering intellects and bitter ideological rivals, they are my favorite geeks of all time. 

Solemn and sincere men of heart breaking contemplation, men of the God they shared, they probably considered strangulation as a means to win their ongoing epistemological (fancy word for letter writin’) feud, although More probably had a horrible attack of conscience for thinking it, it was his way.  I’ll probably write an entire post on them at some point, likely when I start a week long thing on why science fiction is a genre that, much like the Wu-tang Clan, shan’t be fucked with.

Okay, back on track.

Martin Luther had very, ahem, stern and pointed, thoughts on translation, specifically his translation of The Bible.

He said, in an open letter in 1530:

“I know very well that in Romans 3 the word solum is not in the Greek or Latin text — the papists did not have to teach me that. It is fact that the letters s-o-l-a are not there. And these blockheads stare at them like cows at a new gate, while at the same time they do not recognize that it conveys the sense of the text -- if the translation is to be clear and vigorous [klar und gewaltiglich], it belongs there. I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek, since it was German I had set about to speak in the translation. But it is the nature of our language that in speaking about two things, one which is affirmed, the other denied, we use the word allein [only] along with the word nicht [not] or kein [no]. For example, we say "the farmer brings allein grain andkein money"; or "No, I really have nicht money, but allein grain"; I have allein eaten and nicht yet drunk"; "Did you write it allein and nicht read it over?" There are countless cases like this in daily usage.”

Or, put another way:

We both know you skipped that block quote.  Go back and re-read it, I’ll wait.  Seriously, it’s good stuff.  Luther goes bananas and starts name calling. 

Back?  Great.

Luther’s point is worth considering and it sits at the base of paraphrasic (idea-based) translation.  Language informs psychology of a people and vice versa, Cicero knew this too, which is why he threw a Patrician screaming fit of his own at what he considered the foolishness of metaphrasic word-for-word translation.  See, paraphrasic translation demands that someone shoulder the burden of interpretation.  Luther saw it as a responsibility, one with ethical obligations.  And sure, he had his own political agenda and he couldn’t help but let his own philosophical leanings influence the work, but he felt translation was about accessibility, and he seemed to embrace the idea that metaphrasic (word-for-word) translation, would lead to more interpretation, not less, ironically working as a stopgap against something that was already a hot button issue at a time when the bible was read and interpreted to people, not by people, that the text itself was too dangerous to be in the minds of laymen.  He goes as far as openly and aggressively challenging subsequent independent translations of scripture into German to get the conversation started, something that, as he called them, “jackass papists” could not stomach.

Okay, I hate to stop there, but I’ve gone on long enough for today.  Next time we’re going to get into some side by side examples, the influence of source,  and as you can probably guess, the further validity or invalidity of translated works. 

On Translation. Part I: Strap in, This One’s A Wanderer.

None of you can claim to have never interacted with a translated text. Not one! Not without lying to me. One further, it’s very likely you put quite a bit of stock in a translated text. No single major religious work was composed in English, even those that might have been tend to have a translation legend incorporated because modern English is new and, as I touched upon elsewhere, invocation of the ancient is a quick and dirty way to add gravitas to any idea.

Even if you’re not religious and never were, odds are good you’ve cobbled together some concept of the universe or at least the way human psychology interacts with perceptions and constructions of reality. To do so without drawing on the work of other thinkers (especially those wacky, lebenslustig Germans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) means you’re probably one hum-dinger of a cult leader.

If that’s the case, I’m going to take a second here and talk to you, the be-robed and messianic:

So, you’re starting a cult. I think it’s important you know that, if the price is right, I have zero compunction with using any gift, be it natural or by practice, that I may have for communication to sell your ideas, just leave a message below.

Tonsuring, funny costumes, and even some minor tattooing are not deal breakers.

But castration is.

I bring this all up because of Aristotle. A very dear friend and I are currently wading through his collected works, yes, even Parts of the Animals, arm in arm, sometimes hip deep in recursive logic.

It’s been five months and we’re huge dorks, so it’s a blast. In an email last week, she brought up a very big question. Her intellectual curiosity lead her to ask herself just how much modernity was influencing her reading of the work. This, in turn, lead to questions about what the translators themselves brought to their readings. And this got me thinking.

I mean, this is a very big deal. Translation across different languages cannot exist without interpretation (more on that later), without judgment of the translator being exercised, and judgment of that sort almost always ends in a ear-splitting existential headache over the subjective nature of application of that sort work. (This is, coincidentally, probably why most Humanities PhD programs require you to be able to read and write competently in at least one other language besides your native tongue.)

So what does translation “do” to the original text? Furthermore, do subsequent translations compound the impact? Does it matter? If so, how much? If not, why?

This will be what we’re covering for the next week.

Okay, first the man himself and why he matters: Aristotle is one of the intellectual pillars of the modern world and, if you’ve ever given his work a read, it’s easy to see why. Even when what he’s written is out the back end of bug-shit loony (the food chain is the direct result of human-styled warfare and alliances amongst the beasts, and women are inferior “as points of spirit”), the brilliance flies off the page and blasts you in the face like a can o’ snakes powered by the strut spring off a monster truck.

Even when he’s wrong, he’s right, verifiably so, within the context of his work. While that may not seem like much, not many of the other established greatest thinkers of our past and present can boast that. His reasoning was strong and is, in many cases, even when verifiably inaccurate (space is awfully damp), difficult to disassemble for most people. He simply lacked the accumulated information and data-gathering capabilities we have at our disposal today.

Look at it like this: if the human brain is a thinking engine, available accumulated knowledge is the fuel. Aristotle was trying to reach escape velocity using incombustible tepid sleepy-time tea and he still got startlingly close.

In a lot of ways, the Corpus Aristotle (his surviving body of work) informs modern Western legal codes, doctrines of faith, ethics, morality, rhetoric, art, and every field of academic study in some way or another, so, in a word: everything. While he was himself influenced by his predecessors and the conditions in which he lived, he’s an intellectual nexus point on the timeline of Western culture.

The breadth and depth of his influence is not disputed, nor could it be excised if it was. However, this is where translation anxiety comes in, and this is what my friend was getting at, intentionally or otherwise opening the door for a profound thought experiment bridging multiple disciplines.

[Here’s where I’d post this totally awesome picture I have of her annihilating a turkey leg, except if I did that, she’d gut me, feed me to her dog and, worst of all, refuse to speak to my lingering spectre, no matter how many sassy black psychics or pottery wheels I possessed.]

Onward! While Aristotle’s work never really went away, we’re going to jump in where he started headlining good sized rooms.

First, forget what you learned in high school (actually, you can apply that to everything, but don’t forget where the clitoris is guys, we’re on thin ice as is, and you know it). At least forget what you learned in history: There really was no such thing as “the dark ages.” The instability of the decline of Rome had serious political implications, but the once-civilized did not start biting cows on the feet to cure hammertoes; cow biting was done by pre-established itinerant cow-biters, most of them painted blue and appreciably axe-happy. Ask any medievalist, intellectual advancement never stopped. And while Aristotle lost his rock god status for a good thousand years or so, as early as the thirteenth century, guys like Thomas Aquinas were already banging the drum in support of this brilliant, Greek wack-a-loon. But for our purposes, what’s most important is they were already working with translations.

See, not a lot of what’s referred to as the Corpus Aristotle has survived. Most of what we have is agreed to be lecture notes not ready for the press (or the slave with the burnt stick, however Greeks published, maybe they paid a guy to ride a goat and shout, what am I, Herodotus?), so what there is, lacking official copy, had probably gone through at least one major translation by the time it made its way to Aquinas.

Let me explain. Ancient Greek, as it was under Alexander (Attic-Ionic), was surprisingly robust. While all languages evolve, in addition to democracy, logic, and the unfettered awesomeness of a toga party, the Greeks also figured out linguistic snobbery before most everyone else. This lead to a movement called Atticism, lauding and formalizing Attic-Ionic Greek as the language of publication as opposed to the vulgar (popular dialect) of Greek Koine, the official language of everyone including merchants, therefore subject to external linguistic pressures, loanwords, slang, etc.

The casual nature of the Koine, coupled with the casual nature of the Corpus Aristotle manuscripts means it may well have been the dialect of choice for Alexander’s famous teacher' and the surviving work.

And because any medieval scholar worth his halo and bird-strike related ear wounds could read Greek, what Aquinas knew was likely Attic-Ionic, not the thousand year old incarnation of the informal Koine. So! If Aquinas was reading Aristotle, he was probably reading a Atticist translation. Now, this is where things get tricky.

Translation was a part of Greek literary work from very early on because of this. As such, those uppity jerks got a head start again on translation theory (yeah, but look at them today, now who’s laughing, you goat-eating bastards!) founding metaphrasic and paraphrasic translation.

The former is a direct, word-for-word translation, the latter involves translating the ideas. Both have their weaknesses- metaphrasic being really hard on subsequent users because of contradictions in word order and idiom use (think the occasionally hilarious results you get using on-line translators), paraphrasic because it’s not word for word and generally perceived as more open to loss of original meaning, an interpretation or, put another depressing way, grounds for religious wars.

It’s possible that the Aristotle translations were metaphrasic given how close the two dialects of Greek were at any given time, but this still means that any idiosyncrasies or untranslatable elements were re-arranged in the reader’s head, essentially creating a back-end application of paraphrasic translation.

So, one of the major medieval thinkers, a heavyweight contributor to our modern culture in his own right, was already a layer removed from the original text when he began extolling the wisdom Aristotle had to offer, and the person who did that translation is completely lost to history. We know nothing about them, we have no idea what drove them, and, as such, it’s impossible to understand them and take it into account.

Essentially, the intellectual foundation of Western society made its first step to us by way of a medieval game of telephone.

There’s already potential for interpretation, nuance in grammar alone can shift the meaning of a phrase. So, did we build our house on sand?

Come back Wednesday, we’ll find out what Martin Luther and Gomez Addams had to say about all this.

Interlude. An Exercise in Brevity: Art Finds a Way.

A half-hearted attempt at an op-ed. Fear me, for I am both unqualified and opinionated.

Art finds a way. That’s all there is to it. The landscape of media is changing rapidly, and that’s terrifying, and it’s right to be afraid of that, even afraid of the metaphor: something like a landscape is supposed to change slowly, geologically. If a landscape is changing rapidly it means something catastrophic is happening, a natural disaster or World War I. However, it should not be terrifying to an inhibitive extent for the creative side, only its counterpart, the business aspect, should be stunned to inaction.

No, that’s not right. The salary-men have a right to be stunned to inaction, but they shouldn’t be stunned to inaction, not the good ones. Look, I don’t know about you, but even when I don’t have a lot of time on my hands, if there isn’t some form of entertainment to distract me, I start to vibrate through the walls. If I don’t have a book to read, a TV show or movie to watch, a podcast to listen to, something, I get squirrely. I’m even incapable of writing without music playing. (At this very moment I’m being scolded by Direct Hit! to get pumped). An unintended side effect of mass media is an overwhelming abundance of available entertainment. It has, for large swathes of the population, become an integral part of life, if not a psychological dependency. The demand will never go away, art as entertainment will always find a venue, and people that seek to make money will always find a way to make money with it.

Honestly, what it comes down to is this: if you want to write, draw, paint, sing, dance, sculpt, you should do it regardless of whether or not you’ll make a living with it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to make a living with it, but it shouldn’t be the primary source of your motivation. Frankly, if you’re one of those people with an eye on a creative job thinking it’ll be an easy gig, hang it up and get the hell out of my way or don’t be offended if someone that wants it more (possibly even a nematode like myself with less natural talent than you) steps on your neck at some point and gets the job you want.

Work yourself stupid, hone your interests and talents like you’re a craftsman, and do so with a day job. Everything I’ve ever heard about professional art gigs is that they’re significantly more work than their straight world counterparts, that it’s the passion for the work that keeps people in and excited, that natural obsessive streak for what they’re doing that would probably make them great surgeons if they’d been interested in that.

Anyway, where I was going with all of this is, when it comes to art, the demand is more intense than ever and the supply is, as always, bottomless. Furthermore, that supply comes with a tenacity that means if the proper venue doesn’t exist, it will be created. For examples of this, look at what happened to popular music in the early 1980s.

The concept of indie labels was not always the institution it is now. Television, plays, books, movies, music, the business side of all of these is changing every day, for the most part for the better- lower profits and lower salaries are keeping stakes low and people hungry, two things that are always good for creative endeavors, as are niche markets that create smaller more dedicated audiences.

Ignore the doomsayers. We’re going to be fine, art kids, just keep at it. Oh, and for the snobs out there, just ignore the broad product. Don’t complain, don’t snark, don’t deride, just ignore it. It’s clearly not for you, and nobody is impressed because you don’t own a television. Reality TV, books like Sarah Palin’s, even if you think they’re terrible, they’re often what keeps the lights on for better projects with smaller audiences where profit margins are razor thin and justifying their continued existence to the financial side of broadcast or publishing is incredibly dicey.

This is not a sign of decline, it’s just a new direction and, quite frankly, those of you that talk about the destruction of culture are embarrassing me.

Part III: The Lies That Civilization Tells Its Children Are Incinerated in the Flames of Savagery.

“Let’s go, ready? From the top.”

Batman is not just the man, but also the concept, the idea of Anti-Crime.

The concept gives way to the system. Batman as a legacy, and the nature of the man carrying on that legacy, transitions Batman from both man and concept to man, concept, and system of control.

It’s Monday. Let’s do this.

We’re going to begin with what at first would be a bit of a red herring but, in reality, is the final piece of the puzzle.

Morrison makes flashy, almost crass use of religious references that seam easily dismissible at first—most instances like this, the author is taking a shortcut to Seriousville, attempting to add gravitas to an otherwise frivolous situation (like Wiccans)Essentially, the invocation of the ancient is a fast, easy way to raise the stakes in any story.

Except that’s not what Grant Morrison did. First, he’s too sharp and too consistent for that sort of hackery. Second, the use of religious quotation (as in appropriation of images and ideas, not direct application of bible verse) exists as a conversational metaphor, one used by the characters themselves to frame the circumstances in which they are embroiled, rather than an authorial claim to cosmic implications. It also engages in the psychosis of the antagonist:

The use of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” in this conversation is what solidifies my earlier position that it’s character rather than author invoking the religious elements.

The primary villain of this issue is another Batman. During the course of these twenty-two pages, he was anonymous and deadly: the last surviving byproduct of an experiment done by a man named Dr. Simon Hurt (referred to as The Devil by our antagonist). With the Gotham Police Department and an unnamed branch of the United States Military, an attempt was made to replicate Batman not genetically but psychologically. Trauma victims were taken in, indoctrinated, trained, and who knows what else in an attempt to replicate that which created the original Caped Crusader. To borrow from Patton Oswalt, this is a pretty good example of science (albeit dramatized pseudo-science) being “all about coulda, not shoulda.”

Because the traumatized, evil Batman refers to Dr. Hurt as both his creator and Satan, he fancies himself the son of Satan and makes prodigious use of pseudo-satanic imagery as he rains terror down upon the city. As such, the metaphor is internal rather than authorial.

Almost.

Here’s where the above ceases to be a digression and instead becomes applicable. It all circles back around to Relevant Town if you frame the notion of the biblical apocalypse as a seismic political shift. We’re not talking about a super-majority or a sudden swing in party affiliation, we’re talking about a coup d'état. This also finds support in the notion of Satan as adversary rather than the literal Morningstar—if Batman exists as a concept, within reasonable limitations, it doesn’t matter who is in the suit. The iconography is so powerful, the message is sent. And this is where the conflict representing the final struggle of the Batman System’s final claim of genuine dominance over Gotham City takes on more traditional literary allegory.

The folklore nature of Batman, independent of the private truths of alliances with law enforcement officials and/or the superhero community at large (remember, Batman is a part of a larger schema in which vigilantes operate on a cosmic scale, all in specific uniforms representing different ideals), means that even if someone dressed as Batman behaves wildly out of character for what we, the reader know to be true, it’s not necessarily proof positive of an imposter to the body politic of Gotham. Batman is clenching, brutal mystery in the dark, the avenging angel and psychopathic nightmare made real.

That was a really long sentence.

Even in the “present day” Gotham, Batman is coded to exist independently of the (costume) user, so two rival Batmen means rival ideologies within the same system, and this story takes place a good fifteen years in “our” future.

Pictured below, the antagonist Batman:

This isn’t “I’ll ruin Batman’s good name.” This is “I am Batman just as much as he is Batman. We are Batman.” And, despite what Damien Wayne might have to say about it, he’s right. However, where (our) Batman is Anti-Crime, the antagonist-Batman seems to be (melodramatically) calling for an end to all systems of control, dismissing them as lies and calling for brutality and savagery to pull civilization down and burn it, something reminiscent of Damien’s grandfather Ra’s al Ghul, albeit without his panache, subtlety, or elegance. Still, as far as any onlookers are concerned, he’s Batman: when you look at an image of a soldier from any war with an ideological component, you see what they stand for just as much as you see them as a person, in this case that effect is amplified because the man in the uniform is masked. This notion of soldiering and representation is only amplified by their initial confrontation, in which Damien insists that Antagonist-Batman “doesn’t deserve to wear those colors.”

Further still, the dichotomy expressed between the two opposing Batmen has them functioning on the order of politics, managing to reap the success of their struggle with out actually being independent systems in what eventually becomes a life or death struggle between the two characters; a literal interpretation of a metaphorical phenomenon that Jean Baudrillard describes:

“Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form. All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy.”

Batman will live by killing Batman. (It doesn’t matter which is which at this point, the statement stands). Not only will he live, he will thrive. As such, no matter who wins, the paradigm holds: the mimicry of political self-sacrifice means that through the destruction of Batman, Batman can be reborn, this is only reinforced by the anonymity.

Finally there’s Damien himself. By his own admission, he isn’t his father. He isn’t as good at the job. As such, he makes up for it as best he can, stating:

“I spent my first three years as Batman making the job easy for myself. Turning the city itself into a weapon. The victory is in the preparation. So I booby-trapped every single prominent building in Gotham, including this one.”

No longer content to operate within the city, Damien as Batman, Damien as Anti-Crime, uses the city itself, claiming the venue of operation, turning each into an extension of his will, in the process taking control:

“I Knew I’d never be as good as my dad or Dick Grayson. I promised I wouldn’t leave Gotham without a Batman, so I specialized in cheating.”

While initially a strategic decision-- as I mentioned in the first installment of this meandering bit of academic goofery, Batman is always ready for everything-- it becomes an unnerving lesson in how an unintentional autocracy can be born. His lack of personal strength means he seeks answers. He seeks to make up for his deficiency, and he does so by looking to the example of the previous Batman. His use of the phrase “The victory is in the preparation.” is a narrative callback: he says it earlier when reminiscing about his dead father, he intones it like an aural talisman several times, which actually takes us back to the religious imagery Morrison uses. That voice invoking religion as a dramatic element (remember, it’s the characters, not the author using it in this instance) coupled with the political implications of this apocalyptic conflict within the strata of Batman has primed the audience for the belief-based strength of faith, a faith that Damien exhibits in his father.

So, what does all of my nonsense mean?

Remember, Damien Wayne as Batman is Anti-Crime and Macro-Crime.

Damien-Batman killing Antagonist-Batman ends the contention within the system, a literal and metaphorical final step, one that his entire life has been moving towards; he’s spent a good amount of time preparing for this specific conflict, this Antagonist-Batman has been haunting him for more than a decade. The Batman that was destroyed is calling for destruction and savagery, that which law and order strive to eradicate. With this, Batman’s decision is made, a solution to his existential equation is found. Batman the system has metaphorically purged Macro-Crime from itself and, in the process, Batman the man and Batman the system have unintentionally found themselves in near-absolute control of Gotham City. Despite the lack of forethought, like any good monarch, like any good system of control, he embraces it, it slots into place.

Ah-whut-oh. This is how horses get elected to senate.

Part II: The Demon Star at Its Zenith

Last time, via quick and dirty methods that would never fly in a proper paper, I explained how Batman is the manifestation of a concept, specifically the idea of Anti-Crime. Now we’re going to work on how, in Batman #666, that Morrison is arguing that Batman (as a concept), while a product of the existing social order, exists independently of it as an opposing force and will, in fact, come to subsume or even supersede that order.

I swear, it’s only going to be half as boring as it sounds.

Okay, first a brief explanation of a hallmark of the DC Universe: legacy. The cynical reasoning behind heroic legacy in DC Comics (a tautology that will always bother me: DC stands for “Detective Comics,” meaning the name of the company is Detective Comics Comics), is property maintenance. If a book needs a status quo shake up, you kill the titular hero or have them retire and someone else takes over. That way, you get your story and the title stays active and keeps making money.

It took about ten minutes after the start of the Silver Age of comics kicked off for this idea to merge with the notion of the boy sidekick. While at first it manifested in “what if?” stories set in the distant future in which those sidekicks had taken over their mentor's mantle, as the genre continued and the serialized stories concluded narratively but never as publications, it started to actually happen in the main books, which is why there are now four guys running around arguing over who actually owns the lifetime Chipotle gift card awarded to “The Flash.”

Batman #666 is one of those stories. It’s a bleak future in which the nighttime temperature for a major city on America’s East Coast is one hundred and twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit, overpopulation has given way to plague and famine quarantining continents, and crime is more rampant, combustible, and grandiose than ever.

Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson (Batman and the original Robin respectively) are dead, and the current wearer of the cowl is Damien Wayne, illegitimate son of Bruce and Talia al Ghul, daughter of Ra’s al Ghul.

A brief aside to both summarize for the non-comic fans and save some time:

Ra’s al Ghul, essentially an immortal Moriarty, is a criminal genius on a global and historical scale, Batman’s greatest intellectual rival and his biggest fan (earnestly) who, himself, has risen to the nature of conceptual existence (his name literally means Head of the Demon). He is the bodily manifestation of macro-criminality.

Normally, I’d take the time to define Ra’s al Ghul as living concept the same way I did for Batman, but for the sake of brevity (ha!) I’m going to ask you to trust that it’s pretty much the same process, and that I can do it. If anyone objects, I’ll do it as an appendix after I’m done.

Okay, carrying on:

In Morrison’s Batman #666, Batman persists, although Bruce Wayne is long gone. The man in the cowl keeping Gotham city safe, is the biological son of Anti-Crime, the biological grandson and tutee of Macro-Crime.

Here’s where this starts to have something to do with what we’re talking about.

Within the story itself, Gotham needs Batman. This isn’t just a reader’s perspective or a rhetorical argument, although both are true in those regards as well, i.e. for readers, Gotham wouldn’t be worth a cup of warm piss if Batman wasn’t there, he’s why we pay attention to the city. However, even in the narrative itself, his importance is made clear. If Batman is stuck in traffic, you can set your watch by the amount of time it takes for Commissioner Gordon to activate contingency plan alpha:

Crime is so prevalent in that city, Batman is the only thing that balances it out. Instead of watching TV, its citizens stab old people. His intentionally mythical presence, exemplified by the reason for his costume: “criminals are a cowardly and suspicious lot” is how one gloved, scalloped hand can maintain order in one of the largest cities in the country. When Batman is gone, the city rips its own face off. Now, according to a real lady-killer by the name of Althusser (seriously, dude strangled his wife),

“. . .in Marxist theory, the State Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc., which constitute what I shall in future call the Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the State Apparatus in question ‘functions by violence’. . .”

As such, to acknowledge that Batman is a, if not the, primary enforcer of law and order, he’s definitely a major enforcer of law and order, one who certainly disobeys certain laws, but he does so with the unofficial consent of every one of Althusser’s State Apparatuses, makes him a tacit part of the state.

If you’re a little shaky on that, if Batman’s outlaw status is making you ask questions, I’ll direct you back to Žižek, who remarks:

“We’re talking here of the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence.”

While Batman’s behavior lacks subtlety, beyond it mostly happening in the dark, he is maintaining if not the status quo, definitely a status quo, particularly one that rejects what Žižek calls the subjective violence of the state, violence that exists as a result of the objective violence that maintains that status quo. So, even if he’s not a police officer, he’s playing the part in a unique but fundamental way.

One further, according to- wait, wait, I’ve been emotionally overwhelmed listening to Jay-Z. Damn the incandescent grandiloquence of that big, beautiful bard, it really is a hard knock life.

Okay, we’re good.

One further, according to Althusser, there’s more to controlling people than kicking them in the face, in fact:

“I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions. . .”

I’ll paraphrase because Althusser uses even more unnecessary words than I do (it’s surprising his wife didn’t strangle him, am I right, ladies?), but he goes on to list religions, education, family, legal--separate from enforcement, essentially the social contract-- trade unions, political affiliation, mass media, and “culture” itself. Concepts, ideas. Concepts like, say, The Dark Knight? The Caped Crusader? The Blackguard of Gotham? The Batman. The mythical bodily manifestation of Anti-Crime.

Basically, Batman the idea is both Repressive State Apparatus and Ideological State Apparatus. The idea of Batman dominates Gotham City far more than the man punches his way around it. Morrison’s Batman #666, a twenty-two page glimpse at a volatile, broiling future in which legacy has literally and literarily exhibited how Batman will continue regardless of who is in the suit, creates a systemic lineage.

This goes off into “holy-fucking-Moses” territory when you realize that the person that is in the suit is essentially a Plantagenet with a batarang, the product of a union of Anti-Crime and the house of Macro-Crime, carrying on the work and the power not as an obsessive man fighting down the emotional devastation wrought by an anonymous gunman one night twenty years prior, but as an heir to two impossibly complex and thunderously powerful ideological dynasties, the brutal king of a burning kingdom.

Man, that’s so dramatic! If only the artwork supported my lunacy!

Damn skippy.

Tune in next time for our startling conclusion. Faustian bargains, Keats, religious imagery as red herrings (maybe), and a finally, a monkey dressed as a clown.

Man, I hope you’re having fun. I’m having a blast.

Part I: Madmen of Gotham! Bring Me Batman’s Eyes!

So, still don’t like theory? Too bad, I’m going to show you how it works, and I’m going to do so with an issue of Batman written by a Scottish nutcase by the name of Grant Morrison.

Depending on where you’re standing, What’s next is either good or bad news: I’m trying to keep it under two thousand words. This means two things, narrow scope (although with lit-crit, that does not necessarily mean a shorter end product) and I’m going to break some rules.

First, the scope. Grant Morrison has, in one form or another, been the creative voice behind Batman for the past couple years. When he wasn’t writing the eponymous book, he was writing Final Crisis, a DC comic event, or he was writing the book that spun out of the semi-infamous Batman R.I.P., a story in which not only did Batman fail to get any R, very little about his life over those few issues was I.P.

So! There’s a lot of ground that could be covered, especially given the nature of Morrison’s work. It’s convoluted and multi-tiered with a fanatical affection for commentary on storytelling itself, he has a jovial (and mischievous) love for anything everyone has ever put in a comic book about Batman.

This means he ignores the admittedly ill-defined boundaries of consensual canon—the stories in which fans and DC editorial agree “happened” over the past seventy years or so—and he uses whatever he likes, making its justification part of a larger plot. Pictured below is the result of an attack on Bruce Wayne via psychological terrorism and “weapons grade” narcotics, resulting in an emerging redundant psyche Batman created because Batman is ready for everything.

Because of all that, we’re going to limit ourselves to one issue of his (still going) run on Batman, focusing on a story that at least, in theory, is also self-isolating, based on its narrative tropes- it is an alleged stand-alone issue, placed in an unnamed but specific future. That said, we’re going to have to go a little wide to define Batman, first.

Next, the rules breaking. Usually when you “unpack” a quote, it should be a good four times as long as the quote itself, but the informality of blogging and the relative ubiquity of the Caped Crusader means I’m going to play fast and loose with this. Do you mind?

Okay, let’s do this.

Right, the most important part is the argument we’re trying to make. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to say, using structrualist and Marxist support, that Morrison is using his run to argue that Batman (as a concept), while a product of the existing social order, exists independently of it as an opposing force and will, in fact, come to subsume or even supersede that order for two reasons: First, we’ll use a guy named Althusser to explain that a force that strong cannot exist independently of a governing social order without becoming another social order and second, because the previous system that created him is imperfect, and Batman does not tolerate imperfection.

We’ll also cover some tangents and red herrings via comparitivism (Yeats comes up more than you’d expect in a single issue of a comic book), and intertextuality—the notion that texts interact with and influence each other both before and after they’re written—via commentary from Roland Barthes.

As I mentioned yesterday, this is not to say that Morrison is actually arguing any this. If he read what I have to say, he’d probably laugh it off, and rightly so. I have no idea what was in the man’s head. This is meant to entertain and to educate, albeit in an informal and amateur-ish sort of way. I’m simply demonstrating how the application of literary theory can turn even the most oft-dismissed form of literature into a challenging and stimulating exercise.

Yee-haw.

First, we’re going to define Batman himself, and we’re going to do so with the intent of plugging that definition into the final argument. There are innumerable ways to frame him for a theoretical paper. We’re going to use a guy named Slajov Žižek today and something he said in his essay Violence.

Žižek says that, at a certain point, a wrongdoing becomes so difficult to understand on any level, that forgiveness is as absurd as revenge, essentially that:

“When a subject is hurt in such a devastating way that the very idea of revenge according to ius talionis [an eye for an eye] is no less ridiculous than the promise of reconciliation with the perpetrator after the perpetrator’s atonement, the only thing that remains is to persist in the ‘unremitting denunciation of injustice.’”

Okay, that gets us half-way there. At a young age, Batman watched his parents die in front of him at the hands of an anonymous thug and it was, to say the least, traumatic. Žižek continues:

“here, resentment has nothing to do with the slave morality. It stands rather for a refusal to ‘normalise’ the crime, to make it a part of the ordinary/explicable/accountable. . . after all possible explanations, it returns with its question: ‘Yes, I got all this, but nevertheless, how could you have done it? Your story about it doesn’t make sense!’ In other words, the resentment. . . is a Nietzschean heroic resentment, a refusal to compromise, an insistence ‘against all odds.’”

Sound like anyone you know? While the perpetrator has been given different names and faces over the years, for the most part, the gunman that took Thomas and Martha Wayne’s life is a stand-in for violent crime itself, a manifestation of the sort of violent crime that was bringing Gotham City—another anonymous stand-in for any major American metropolitan area (sorry, Marvel apologists, this is just as valid for storytelling)—to its knees, it was at that point that crime itself created its opposite number, an obsessive mega-ego in his own right that could find no closure on what happened because 1. it was still happening every day and 2. again, according to Žižek,

“the only way to truly forgive and forget is to enact a revenge (or a just punishment): after the criminal is properly punished, I can move forward and leave the whole affair behind.”

Except the perpetual nature of serialized storytelling that is comic books, coupled with the inherently mythical nature of genre fiction (absurd, unrealistic tropes used to commentate on “real” issues), further amplified by the representational nature of the Wayne’s assailant, means that Batman will never stop. That level of inexhaustibility is inhuman, his obsessive dedication and his great personal wealth are the two things that help him compete in Superman’s world. This transforms him into a concept, like crime itself. He becomes, in a quest for justice outside of justice, anti-crime.

So that’s Batman, a concept, albeit a concept that, while not necessarily condonable, is understandable within the parameters of Žižek’s description of crime and violence.

Okay, that’s going to wrap it up for this entry. Next time, watch me try to explain how Batman morphs into a system via an intrinsic pattern laid down in the bedrock of DC Universe narration, who the pants Damien Wayne is, why he matters, and maybe we’ll see a monkey dressed as a clown wielding an axe.

Thank You for the Flowers and the Book by Derrida

You don’t have to like literary theory. Hell, I understand not enjoying theory. It’s an arcane subset of the humanities, and it sometimes feels like an attempt to dress up itinerant musing with the scientific method. In other fields, theory is the safe playground to explore new ideas with out actually altering anything, but with literature, it only takes one read of an article to potentially permanently impact your point of view, even if you disagree, especially if you disagree. It’s hard to do well and it’s easy to use it poorly. However, not liking it is not the same as disliking it, and disliking theory is somewhere between superstitiously avoiding carwashes and being a vehement supporter of magnet therapy. If you dislike literary theory, I want you to give me a chance to turn that around.

Ready?

Dismissing or disliking theoretical texts as a whole is a lot like having a beef with hammers. They both have a specific use, and a skilled craftsman can find a particular love for the different types and their varied idiosyncrasies and applications, and improvising with them can be anything from a stroke of genius to a booze soaked felony, but without a user, they are heavy and cumbersome, but easy to pack away and ignore, easy to forget.

Most of these aren’t great examples, but for the most part, the really good stuff I’ve got is in PDFs or pirated binders assembled by kind-hearted PhDs (yarr, ‘tis true).

Each deadlier than the last.

As you can see, it can show up in many forms, from broad cultural critique (serving as the support texts: philosophical works, religious tracts, classical thought, political diatribes, sociological position papers), to specific piece critique, an essay written about a particular work.

There’s a third big category, the latter that also serves as a former, one in which texts of the second are so groundbreaking they become used as the former, but that’s more rare than most theorists’ ego may like. S/Z, pictured above, is a pretty good example of this, as are most of Umberto Eco’s greatest hits, although he does his dance through an extra layer of difficulty, using allegory, weaving fiction and theory together, essentially applying his work with semiotics as he goes, creating his evidence.

Anyway. Essentially, works of the first category are used to leverage open a story to allow for the creation of the second category.

The second category is what many of you were exposed to in lower division English classes in college, and maybe a little bit in AP English classes in high school. These are the stereotypes, the works that everyone thinks of when they hear the words “literary theory,” photocopies of chapters out of books you’ve never heard of telling you what an author Is Really Saying.

Now, here’s what almost every English teacher forgets to tell you: “what the author/piece is saying/means” is shorthand.

Proper theory isn’t about prescription, it’s about description, it is, more often than not, an invitation to have a conversation about a piece and what it can and/or does mean to a specific group of people in a specific socio-political context. While the field is, as far as popular opinion knows, dominated by wet, gay, French Marxists who are wildly comfortable speaking as if God farted genius bubbles into their amniotic wading pools, it really is just shorthand.

Why teachers forget to preface theory discussion with intro-students boggles my mind.

And that’s probably why there are so many different schools of theory. There’s Marxist (the most popular, but not because people are Marxist, it’s devotees are just incapable of shutting up for five minutes, although to be fair, in many ways, they popularized the field), Structuralist, Post-Structuralist, Feminist, Historicist, New Criticism (getting old), Comparative, Post-Colonial (my favorite, but this bias might be because I have more of it in my background than any other), Romanticism, Queer studies (exactly what it sounds like), Psychoanalytical (this overlaps with a lot of the others), just to name a few, each with their own critical lens, their own way of evaluating a text, with something to say about what it says to each of them.

Which is what it’s all about, really. Literary theory is an academic framework to describe what a story means to someone, which, in turn, hopefully reveals what we’re thinking, how others receive what we’re thinking, and what it will mean for our legacy.

Critical literary theory is somewhere between introspection on a massive scale and artistic appreciation, both done by way of archeological exploration of a society before that society is dead. It's a way to turn reading from a passive method of passing the time to an active, aggressively stimulating exercise in critical thinking. If anything, it manages to do so while still preserving literature as a pleasurable past-time. It’s difficult, and it takes passion, and I happen to think it’s a lot of fun.