How do you like it? How do you like it?
The juicy ongoing discussion of improvised vs. highly structured narratives and Alan Moore’s alleged (by me) excesses in the latter direction continues. First, Bruce Baugh writes in again, regarding my claim that Moore’s intricate plotting doesn’t say much about the human experience:
It’s certainly possible that the thoroughly structured sort of storytelling Moore does has a special appeal to people who have seriously marginalizing circumstances. Dealing with a difficult-to-diagnose, difficult-to-treat set of immune disorders, for instance, means a lot of puzzle solving, and a lot of approaching routine life situations as if they were James Bond-style traps. So stories about characters in exotic fictional circumstances who have to deal with that kind of notional maze carry some extra resonance for me. It’s a more intensified version of the appeal of straightforward metaphors (vampirism as dangerous lust, for instance). It’s not just the exercise of cracking the code, it’s engaging with the experience of life as a puzzle along with the other appeals of a good story.
Not everyone’s life resonates that way, of course, and furthermore not everyone whose life does chooses or wishes to get some entertainment with that sort of shape around it. I’m just sayin’ that sometimes it really is a thing that speaks a useful symbolic truth.
That’s a good point. I can’t put my finger on where, but I feel as though this point has been made explicitly by certain works of fiction involving ill or shut-in children who unlock various secret worlds or mysteries in puzzle-solving fashion. What am I thinking of here? Anyway, clearly that’s one way to approach books like these. It’s also entirely possible that I’m not giving Moore enough credit, and that the message of the ostentatious symmetry of, say, Watchmen is not the in-my-opinion inaccurate argument that life has a great and secret design, but that the way random things frequently come together in a way that ascribes meaning to their connections is, in fact, evidence of the universe’s meaninglessness. The proverbial monkey who types up the Gettysburg Address isn’t supposed to be taken as evidence for destiny, after all. The final scene of Watchmen, with its emphasis on chance and choice, might bear that out somewhat.
Attacking the issue from the opposite direction is T Hodler of the great comics publisher PictureBox Inc., who challenges the very notion that art should be reflective of how life works. As he says in the post, he and I aren’t really as far apart on this issue as it initially seemed. When I busted Moore’s chops, I wasn’t objecting to its artifice-iality per se, but its specific brand of artificiality, that cryptogram structure that, to me at least, enables one to exhaust the possible meanings of the work.
Meanwhile, my blogger from another mother Jon Hastings offers a pair of posts which, in their exploration of topics tangential to the Moore Question (from the perils of “big idea” comics to the vital role Moore’s of artists in undermining the potentially stultifying effects of his deterministic scripting), appear to lump Grant Morrison works like Seven Soldiers and Seaguy into the clockwork-narrative camp. I’ll cop to being one of the bigger Morrison fans on the block, but I don’t see those works in the same way I see Watchmen or From Hell. Despite its interlocking themes and tropes and plotlines and so on, Seven Soldiers is a gigantic sprawling thing, especially compared to the diamond bullet that is Watchmen. Its seven very different approaches to its genre, coupled with the way each is wrapped around the talents of one of seven (or eight or nine or ten) different artists (talk about a project where the art mitigates against the sense of an omnipotent, omniscient writer!), gives the thing a lot more room to breathe. (As does, in some fashion I can’t quite articulate, its wide-open optimism. You don’t really feel like you’re locked in a room with that book.) As for Seaguy, maybe I’m uncomfortable labeling it a decodible narrative simply because I am completely unable to decode it–but isn’t that fair? Each time I read it I feel like I’m trying to get a foothold in a perfect sphere, leaving me to slide off the surface of it a different way each time.
Finally, a quote from Andrew Dignan’s latest Lost recap at The House Next Door that resonates with what we’ve been talking about:
One of the problems with Lost‘s flashbacks has always been the way they reduce its characters into a series of cause and effect scenarios, distilling every action into a result of a single event from their past, like placing a thumbtack in a map…. It’s amazing how much more human these people feel when they’re not reduced to walking algebra equations.
It’s funny: Lost is in many ways the anti-Sopranos; it’s a show where the writers are forever promising the audience that everything has been planned out from the beginning, and that they’ll do an even better job at planning everything out from now on, honest! Unsurprising, given co-creator Damon Lindelof’s frequently expressed love for Watchmen. That said, I still enjoy the living shit out of the show, in part because the game of the narrative has been so much fun to play, in part because of the beauty of the images and sounds (overlooked just as often as the art in Moore’s comics, fittingly enough), and in part because the sheer scope of the thing makes it harder to tie it all up and be done with it. Also, no one’s arguing it’s the greatest graphic novel of all time, as it were, although as with Watchmen, the unsuccessful imitators already abound.