Fiction is a dictatorship. If you think it’s not, then it has you right where it wants you. Full stops check your pace as you shuffle along its lines – an en-dash prodding you along when you’re losing interest; sometimes a semi-colon, the Gestapo of punctuation, arrives to quietly order things, make detailed lists, bump off a wayward interpretation. Think that lines of text are gateways to another world? They’re work-queues, patrolled by gas-masked commas, to the workhouse of forced comprehension.
But we enjoy it so it’s fine. This is the key to a successful dictatorship: it keeps us safe from our own thoughts. We’re given everything we need. We can see it all, it says, this whole little universe, so it’s hard for us to know that fiction, taking us along line by line and word by word, only permits us one path along which to look. Real life isn’t like this. We can look in all sorts of directions and perceive and miss all sorts of things. Surely fiction which is in some way able to address this formal absence in novels would be of unique value.
Some call them ‘graphic novels’ but this was just an inability to face reality. They’re comics. Even when arranged into a book, they’re comics. A less accurate name this may be, because often they’re not at all funny, but it does speak to how long they’ve been around as a medium, since everyone grew up with the term ‘comic’, even if they had no direct experience of Dennis the Menace’s psychopath dog or, for the aspiring military dictator, General Jumbo and his army of remote control toys that fought crime. That one was my favourite. But while imagining the bloody miniaturised coup I was one day to stage I never thought about how these stories present themselves, what’s unique about it, and what it could mean for a new kind of storytelling.
Deep focus
Fiction is linear. Even when it’s content is non-chronological, its presentation is in straight lines, word after word. But in a narrative of pictures, our eye is free explore different sets of details.
In The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins describes it as a key moment in the history of cinema when deep-focus lenses were first used to present the viewers with a range of things to look at in a single shot. Many of the early adopters were Japanese, for instance Kenji Mizoguchi, and Cousins speculates that the rebelling of these directors against hierarchical Japanese society and the elitism of samurai narratives caused them to seek a framing that was more egalitarian, bringing out the subjectivities of the characters, who in Mizoguchi’s case were typically office or factory workers, students, and often working women. This technique later came to Western audiences via auteurs such as Orson Welles.
It seems so normal to us now that it’s difficult to understand how radical it was; it turned viewers into editors, switching their role from passive absorbers to thinking participants – who can be detectives, voyeurs, anything.
Comics bring this idea of viewer-as-editor to a very different sphere: reading. They remain within the literary domain because just like books they require effort on the part of a reader in order to happen at all. A film will keep playing with or without your attention but literature is hand-cranked, and this act of work gives the imaginative effort necessary to read something a different and perhaps deeper sort of power, exercising and developing brain networks related to empathy and social cognition. (Research certainly indicates this in terms of the brain’s response to stories and narrative, while studies comparing the neurological effects novel and filmic mediums seem rare at this point.)
Thatcher’s children
Occupying a middle ground between film and novels means that comics had the potential to offer something different, not just a hashing of these mediums but something new in terms of how they work the reader’s mind. But the pulpy mass-production nature of comics’ growth through the 1940s and ’50s meant that formal experimentation was rare and generally stymied.
By the ’80s, however, the achingly slow realisation among publishers that comics could be more mature in content meant that some loose-cannon writers and artists were given space to innovate. While comics had been a very American form, much of this innovation happened in the UK, where the clean-cut superhero never had quite the same mythological space to play in as in the US. Darker, grimmer worlds emerged, with none of America’s square-jawed moral certainties – or in the case of Judge Dredd personifying this precisely, but as a satire, a quasi-fascist antihero whom readers might perversely root for while in truth associating with the slum-rats he strode above, and sometimes purged. This was Thatcher’s Britain and the iconic publication was 2000AD.
Emerging in this time was a man from Northampton called Alan Moore. He was one of several important figures, but if you have to single someone out for changing comics not just in content but in form then it has to be the Rasputinish man-giant of comics and his dauntingly clever series Watchmen.
Sneaking symbols
Looking like a roadie who also does magic, Moore turned the superhero paradigm inside out and with artist Dave Gibbon made words and pictures together do things that stir perhaps dormant parts of the literary brain. Generally these are variations on one approach: two things happening at once. Some examples…
What’s important about this is that, where to read is in some degree to be told, Moore and Gibbon used visual clues working in parallel to the text does not simply illustrate the words but changes and builds on their meaning. ‘Reading’ in this way uses faculties largely untouched by straight fiction or film, and we are at this point moving into a symbolic perception of what’s before us. A seemingly inconsequential but meaning-laden detail can here stow away from us more deftly than it can through text alone. It steals up the shores of our consciousness in a stranger way.
As fan of artist-magicians from Blake to Crowley, Moore knows his symbolism and scatters little semantic triggers everywhere. Watchmen’s main visual motif, a smiley-face badge marked by a distinctive smear of blood, pops up relentlessly, occurring variously as a smudge across a rainy window, a blip across a radar screen, debris across Mars’s Galle crater, ketchup across a T-shirt design, an icicle across rising bloodied vapour, and over twenty other ways.
He traces his inspiration for this to a perhaps unlikely source: beat nutcase William Burroughs. As the character Ozymandias says over a thoughtful page:
Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs’s cut-up technique. He suggested re-arranging words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through… An impending world of erotica, glimpsed only peripherally. Perceptually, this simultaneous input engages me like the kinetic equivalent of an abstract or impressionist painting… Transient and elusive, these must be grasped quickly…
In conjunction with massive forecasted technological acceleration approaching the millennium, this oblique and shifting cathode mosaic uncovers the blueprint for an era of new sensibilities and possibilities. And era of the conceivable made concrete… and of the casually miraculous.
Burroughs’s affiliation with comics is not well known but he did write a short-lived strip called The Unspeakable Mr Hart (later becoming the novella Ah Pook Is Here, later still the incredible, hellish vistas of a comic of the same name, sadly unfinished). Moore was strongly influenced by it and, as he says, ‘the way that the word and image are used to control, and their possible more subversive effect’ – through symbolism and codes that our eye picks up even if our conscious mind doesn’t. The freedom in comics to negotiate different sets of details when reading is what creates the space within which the symbols can sneak.
The constant echoes conjured by Moore – the ‘animal urge’ and the ape-mask, as above, the ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ and the staring owl calendar in the background – are not mere coincidence (one of the lower-rent narrative tactics, although I won’t be burning my bridges to it any time soon); Moore might instead call them synchronicity, and this points to another influence, one which takes Burroughs’s subliminal symbology and gives it a more studied, more scientific edge, sort of: psychoanalyst nutcase Carl Jung.
Weird science
Synchronicity is to attest that causally unrelated things can be related in meaning, and this meaningfulness hails from an underlying framework of existence of which incidents of synchronicity are little ruptures perceivable to us. Jung discussed this at length with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, a central figure in the development of quantum physics, and together they saw parallels between synchronicity and the experimental physics of the time, broadly in the sense that, as a synchronous connection needs the context of a given perceiver in order to be meaningful, so too physical phenomena can be altered through the fact of their being observed, as described by quantum theory.
Beyond Pauli, synchronicity has never been taken seriously by scientists, but it certainly found its place in art, as did a great deal of Jung’s ideas on dreams and symbolism. Moore talks about Jung as an influence and to my mind there are parallels in the ways they explain their ideas. Both are articulate, calm, have an excellent turn of phrase that’s without bombast, are self-critical to a degree that’s unusual and reassuring, and they will expound in this sort of way for a while and all is well – and then they’ll say something utterly, utterly mad.
But bear with them and you may arrive somewhere interesting. Moore, for instance, says he’s a magician. He makes magic. This is off-putting until you see that he’s using quite a specific definition of the word ‘magic’ which really refers to art and the effect it has on us. This is not necessarily a scientifically definable effect but we all know it, and so Moore calls this magic, and therefore he is a magician.
Rabbit from a hat
Robert Anton Wilson, one of the leading intellectuals of the 1970s counterculture and another fan of Jung and Crowley, and himself a High Magus of Synchronicity, also speaks like this. Again the nuttiness yields treats. He used synchronicity to talk about Finnegans Wake, in which he claims synchronicity (the book predates the concept, but Jung was a huge fan of it, if not of Joyce himself, whom he thought needed therapy) is frequently used as a form of precognition, where yet-to-happen events are winked at the reader through a sort of omnidirectional, linguo-pictorial symbology. He says, for example, that in Finnegans Wake there is a recurrent them of
the atoms and if’s, which goes back to the first sentence of the book, “Riverrun past Adam and Eve’s”. Eve And Adam are the male and female archetypes that dominate the book, and become all the different male and female combinations. And they’re like the Yin and the Yang in the I Ching, they’re also a river and a mountain as well as a woman and a man, and they seem to be complementary cosmic principles. And the ‘atoms and the if’s’ is a pun on the ‘Adam’s and the Eve’s’, the basic Yin and Yang duality, but it also refers to the uncertainty principle in atomic physics, atoms and if’s, everything is uncertain on the quantum level, and Joyce has all these quantum puns running through the chapter, not only atom’s and if’s, but ‘blown to atoms’, which takes you back to Garden of Eden again, and there are “sullied bodies all atom’d”, and then there’s a reference to “nokie-soakie”, followed closely by a reference to “lipinese long-wage” which is the Nipponese language, which is followed by “Sayonara Poke-hole son” which is Nipponese language for “Farewell Honorable Pookah”, the pookah being a six-foot tall white rabbit who resides in County Kerry and is well-known in Irish folklore.
The hopping Pookah of County Kerry is of course no relation to the Mayan-death-god Pook of Ah Pook is Here. Or is it? No. But rereading some of the transcript from that interview just now I see Wilson saying that Joyce saw himself as an ‘alchemist, taking all the gross matter of the world and turning it into sublime, eternal art’, as Wilson puts it. Perhaps Moore’s art-magic is not so unusual and perhaps, since more broadly we’re talking about synchronicity (and its informing the stylistic method behind Watchmen), my just happening to read that Joyce viewed his artistry in strikingly similar terms, of all the sentences I could have scanned over in that very long transcript, this may be considered synchronicity.
Or coincidence. A certain generosity of interpretation is required to see higher or hidden forces at play, sure. But this generous spirit is perhaps something endemic to the artistic method, an optimism required for the leaps that must be made if an idea is to be given reality.
Moore noted that even in the process of making Watchmen occurrences like this were constant. For instance, there are more examples of the hidden smiley-face motif than were intentionally put in. ‘The little plugs on the spark hydrants,’ says Moore, ‘if you turn them upside down you get a smiley’. Innocuous enough on its own but as the examples build up it can (from my own experience of it in writing) get a bit odd, even to the point that you can rely on it happening, to point you to connections to develop and accentuate.
Watching stories
So Burroughs’s symbolism and Jung’s synchronicity are realised by Moore in his formal approach to Watchmen, I believe, and he achieves this using the space provided by comics’ having both film’s scattering of visual detail and fiction’s demand for imaginative effort. We don’t simply read Watchmen, we ‘watch’ it too. But can this idea be applied to other forms? Can two separate and parallel narrative lines be made to happen at the same time in something purely text-based, percolating through each other to get those hidden nether-gears going, firing connections?
IN September of 1880, a few months after the demise of my
AND the things she reads, a clumsy novel, in a cheap edition
father, I decided to give up my business activities, transferring
besides, but you wonder how she can get interested in things
them to another house in Jerez whose standing was as solvent
like this. To think that she’s spent hours and hours reading tasteless
as that of my own; I liquidated all the credits I could, rented out
stuff like this and plenty of other incredible things…
This passage, beginning a chapter in Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch which proceeds in the same way, at first seemed like gibberish to me. I then saw that they are two passages in alternating lines (the above quote won’t render properly if your window is small), and thinking myself clever I read through every odd line then every even line to comprehend the two different passages. Later I realised how profoundly I’d missed the point. I tried, slowly, to read it properly, switching my mental picture back and forth at the end of each line.
The ‘clumsy novel’ of the odd lines and the thoughts of the man reading it in the even lines came to occur together in real-time, like the boy reading The Black Freighter as the street continues around him in Watchmen. I saw that the man’s thoughts were shaped as he read each line of the novel – these connections had completely eluded me when I read the two passages separately. Reading it became less difficult as I went on: I was learning to read in a new way, allowing connections to form from disparate material. I was almost watching it.
Put in a perhaps reductive but fleshier way, it seem that a lot of this comes down to the strips of muscle around the eyeball, how they twitch and judder the pupil and how we’re able, or not, to organise the information springing inwards.
People have been toying with this for a long time. In poetry, Apollinaire, the zaniest wordsmith in the trenches, created his calligram poems, in which the words and lines are reshaped to form pictures or strange scatterings, encouraging the reader to dart around and make decisions as to the order of reading (see the beginning of ‘Cotton in your Ears’. An example in cinema could be Mike Figgis’s 2000 film Timecode, which divides the screen into four with events overlapping and characters switching between, the viewer largely directed between them by the soundtrack but free to look anywhere.
Parallel stories, stories which are in a sense created through the arc of the viewer’s attention, are not new, and in a sense much of art could be seen like this, but what Moore’s approach to Watchmen tells us is that the connections between the parallel elements and the interplay these encourage in the reader/viewer’s mind are a gateway to something more. Burroughs’s popularisation of the cut-up technique is arguably an early sign of this, a first blip on the smiley-face radar. Burroughs’s weapon (aside from his arsenal of actual guns) was chance: shuffling lines around to create new landscapes of meaning. But Moore doesn’t play semantic bingo in the same way; his method in the frames is to engineer the environment in which the connections can be fired.
The ‘megasavant’ Kim Peek, on whom Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man was based, could read two pages of a book at the same time, one with each eye. One wonders what kind of art-perceptive gears could be put into motion by writing specifically tailored to abilities like that, what form the writing would take and the sensorial complexity of the connections that could be made. Peek’s abilities were innate, yes, and arguably his feeling for poetic thought was greatly reduced or at the very least different, but there’s no reason why new modes of reading – and watching – can’t be learned.