FINAL CRISIS, Pt. 1: The Modernist Background

There's a tension at the heart of Final Crisis that ultimately undermines it.

On one side of that tension is the explicit, running celebration of superheroes, particularly their stories. Over and over again, superhero stories (and I do mean the stories themselves) are depicted as wonderful and literally powerful:

(Final Crisis #1)

(Superman Beyond #1)

(Superman Beyond #2)

(Batman #683)

(Final Crisis #7)

I don't read any of that as ironic. It strikes me as entirely sincere, and centrally important.

The other side of the tension is something Dr. K perceptively identifies as Morrison's borrowing of certain Modernist techniques, and perhaps even a broadly Modernist approach to the whole event. Andrew Hickey discusses Morrison's modernism too, and Morrison himself has explicitly embraced the label of modernism or "neo-modernism." Anyway, here's Dr. K:

One, readers found the series dense and confusing. I have to say that, while I don't agree with this assessment, I do have sympathy for it. Part of that sympathy comes from the fact that my area of specialization is British Modernism, and I've watched my own students struggle with the unconventional narrative experiments in Joyce, Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and others. Morrison has done similar narrative experimentation with Final Crisis, playing, at times, with a nonlinear structure without cueing the reader to the time shifts and intentionally leaving gaps in the narrative that the reader must actively fill in.

But often when I teach Modernist texts, students react with a sense of antagonism, as if the writer is trying to trick the reader and hide meaning in a text that should otherwise be straightforward and transparent. This is similar to the negative response that Final Crisis received, exacerbated by the fact that superhero comics tend to follow pretty standard narrative conventions and present fairly passive reading experiences (though continuity in superhero comics tends to require some level of active reading). Such a sense of antagonism led Final Crisis haters to claim that Morrison was using the series to express his own hatred of superhero comics--an evaluation that proved to be wrong in the end.

Dr. K tries to refute the "haters" and dispel that "sense of antagonism" provoked in some by Final Crisis, by making essentially the same claim I illustrate above, that "the final message of the series is optimistic." He points to Rachelle Goguen's moving argument that Final Crisis genuinely celebrates superheroes:

What I really love about Grant Morrison is his optimism. Final Crisis had a happy ending. Morrison had to pretty much literally take us to Hell and back to give us that happy ending, but in the end what we got was an incredibly beautiful ode to heroes and heroism. Morrison loves superheroes, and it shows on every page. He likes to torture them, but it's always so we can see them overcome and triumph in a way that always makes me want to cry because why can't Superman be real?! WHY?!

Things got as bad as they could possibly get, and not everyone made it out alive, but nothing happened that I would consider pessimistic. And there certainly wasn't anything snarky. This was not a series written by a disgruntled old scribe who was sick of superheroes and just wanted to make them all suffer for their own sick pleasure. We've seen enough of that in plenty of comics. This was a story of hope. And it was delightful.

It's not that simple, though. The sense of antagonism with which Dr. K's students respond to Modernist authors is not at all misplaced; to the extent that Morrison borrows Modernist techniques or adopts a Modernist approach, the sense of antagonism with which some readers respond to Final Crisis might not be misplaced either, whether or not that antagonism is intentional on Morrison's part.

Modernism in the arts has always been polarizing because it is, after all, founded on the establishment of a whole new division to be polarized about--that between High Art and mass culture. Steven Pinker describes the social and material conditions that gave rise to it:

In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became desperate because of the economics of mass production and the affluence of the middle class. As cameras, art, reproductions, radios, records, magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.

Consequently:

All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy Art, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions. In architecture, ornamentation, human scale, garden space, and traditional craftsmanship went out the window (or would have if the windows could have been opened), and buildings were "machines for living" made of industrial materials in boxy shapes. Modernist architecture culminated both in the glass-and-steel towers of multinational corporations and in the dreary high-rises of American housing projects, postwar British council flats, and Soviet apartment blocks.

Modernism is, in large part, a systematic eschewal of whatever makes art most broadly and immediately appealing or even accessible, and an embrace of features that remove it further into the exclusive province of those who have been not so much educated as initiated.

In terms of content, that means literary Modernism generally rejects the heroic and romantic. Exhibit A is Joyce's replacement of the hero Ulysses with antihero Leopold Bloom. Marvelous adventures of larger-than-life figures give way to glum, tepid realism. This, of course, makes Modernism a strange aesthetic to adopt for a Big Two crossover event thematically devoted to celebrating superhero stories.

But a potential source for an even more fundamental and problematic tension is literary Modernism's hostility toward story itself (because what makes literature more broadly or immediately accessible than story?). In his Encyclopedia of Fantasy, John Clute suggests that one way to distinguish fantasy from Modernist varieties of nonrealism is the attitude toward story embodied in the text:

One of the most useful distinctions between the fantastic as a whole and fantasy, considered as one of the literatures of the fantastic, is that fantasy texts are most easily understood as the telling of Story in this sense; other categories of the fantastic--some, like surrealism, of Modernist lineage--may well treat the telling of narrative as an act that warrants corrosive disparagement, deconstruction or dismantlement.

In Retelling/Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times, Karl Kroeber writes:

Modernism was the first aesthetic system to ask whether excellent art did not require the exclusion of traditional narrative . . . It is almost impossible to find favorable comments on (let alone celebrations of) narrative among the great modern artists--D. H. Lawrence's advice not to trust the teller being among the kinder and gentler. T. S. Eliot proclaimed that Joyce, anticipated by Yeats, had found a means for superseding the "narrative method entirely."

In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster characterizes story as the ugly, regrettable substratum beneath everything that's really worthwhile in literature:

Yes--oh, dear, yes--the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different--melody, or perception of truth, not this low atavistic form.

For the more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growths that it supports, the less shall we find to admire. It runs like a backbone--or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary. It is immensely old--goes back to neolithic times, perhaps to paleolithic. Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. . . .

When we isolate the story like this from the nobler aspects through which it moves, and hold it out on the forceps--wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time--it presents an appearance that is both unlovely and dull.

Note Forster's invocation of "melody"--not as a nifty, innovative approach to telling stories, but as a longed-for literary alternative to story. If story seems a necessary evil to Forster, melody holds out the hope of a literary model that might render it unnecessary. Similarly, Kroeber remarks that the Modernist "disdain for narrative" is "already implicit in Walter Pater's dictum that all arts aspire to the condition of music." I wonder if Morrison was aware of this history of that notion when he described his approach to writing Final Crisis this way:

I found myself wondering what it would be like if comics’ storytelling stopped aping film or TV and tried a few tricks from opera, for instance. How about dense, allusive, hermetic comics that read more like poetry than prose? How about comics loaded with multiple, prismatic meanings and possibilities? Comics composed like music?

In any case, we can draw an important distinction here. Audiences--yes, even mass audiences--come to tolerate, expect, and even demand greater levels of novelty and complexity as they grow familiar and increasingly savvy with a genre, form, medium, or whatever. By now it should be clear that literary Modernism is no simple extension of this, but something else entirely. The fundamental discontinuity comes down to diametrically opposed values regarding what counts as signal and what counts as noise in literature. The savviest reader of popular fiction will still inevitably misapproach a Modernist text like Ulysses and find it a frustrating experience; that reader will try to struggle through all the formal shenanigans, esoteric allusions, etc., to get to the story. But as Forster makes clear above, all the stuff that this reader experiences as noise is actually the good stuff, the signal, from a Modernist perspective--the "finer growths" and "nobler aspects." It's the story that's the noise, and much Modernist experimentation aims to dial it down to zero. In an excellent article on story, Michael Blowhard puts it this way:

Though I now marvel at this attitude, I confess that I once shared it. During college, grad school, and for a few years after -- when else? -- I thought of storytelling as a kind of unfortunate necessity that, perversely, fiction required. In this view, story is the clothesline you hang your artistry on; further, the "art" in a given work is to be found in deploying the artistry, not in creating the clothesline.

On the other hand, it's silly to point to popular fiction of any degree of craft, originality, or sophistication, and expect readers of a Modernist bent--which means most establishment critics and academics--to be impressed. It's still just storytelling. Just noise. Just clothesline. There's no signal. No artistry. That would be like expecting a Modernist art critic to be impressed with a representational painting, no matter how pretty (such painting lacks that "something crucial" which the art critic recognizes as signal--a "persuasive theory").

Sometimes it happens that a popular creator, in an effort to stretch as an artist and/or rise to the demands of an increasingly savvy audience, will reach into the Modernist toolkit, heedless of the fact that most of those techniques weren't devised as snazzier, jazzier ways to tell stories, but on the contrary were devised precisely not to tell stories--to avoid as far as possible the supposedly low, vulgar business of storytelling.

And in fairness it must be said that, amazingly, sometimes an extraordinary achievement in storytelling results.

Consider nonlinear narrative. Lots of popular creators dabble with it as a cool, zingy approach to storytelling. Nothing could be further from its original purpose. That's plain once we see how Modernists viewed story. Forster again:

The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him. We can estimate the dangers incurred when we think of the career of Scheherazade in somewhat later times. Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense--the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages. . . .

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else--there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other literary judgments are ludicrous. And now the story can be defined. It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence--dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms.

On this understanding, nonlinear narrative is not an interesting approach to storytelling so much as a device for minimizing or neutralizing story in literature. Nonlinear narrative is an effort to kill the "tapeworm" that is story by chopping it up. The original point of nonlinear narrative is to render moot the question, "What happense next?", thus freeing creator and audience from the degrading demands of brute curiosity and suspense, so they may focus on the more refined and elevated stuff that makes for High Art.

And yet! Quentin Tarantino turns nonlinear narrative to great storytelling purpose. In Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, he doesn't just fragment the narrative. By presenting the major story beats out of sequence, he gives each of them the weight and impact of a self-contained story, which they wouldn't have if they were presented in order and subordinated to the flow and logic of the overarching story. He evokes an anthology experience--the impression of a collection of stories, each packing its own distinctive punch. The apparent wholeness of each episode creates a fun "shared world" effect as the links and connections are noticed and absorbed, until they all delightfully resolve into the larger story. Ultimately, the effect isn't that the overall story has been chopped into parts, but rather that a collection of stories adds up to a bigger one.

So Morrison's epic celebration of superhero stories isn't necessarily doomed by his Modernist approach to Final Crisis. I don't think, however, that he harnesses Modernist techniques to his purpose anywhere near as deftly as Tarantino. Based on my reading of what Morrison is trying to accomplish thematically in Final Crisis, my sense is that he doesn't fully understand the nature of these techniques--the attitudes and theories that gave rise to them, and the purposes they were devised to serve--and therefore doesn't have full control of them, with the consequence that they undermine his project in a very fundamental way.

Of course, that can only be established by looking closely at the techniques Morrison employs, what makes them Modernist, how they operate in Final Crisis, and what effects they have. Long as this post has been, I'm afraid it has all been merely preliminary. The real work of digging into Final Crisis remains to be done, and that's what I'm going to take up in my next post in this series.