A TASTE FOR SUPERHERO DECADENCE, part 3

Sez Dirk Deppey, superheroes are "a genre created for children."


Obviously, anyone who's scanned my essays on this blog knows that I favor a "big-tent" approach to the analysis of the superhero idiom.


But let's put aside (after carefully listing them) all the counter-arguments I might make to Deppey's statement.

Put aside any observations about the later reception by adults of costumed heroes in other media, principally the two audiovisual media that most unite American culture in terms of cultural referents.


Put aside the question of previous iterations of the superhero idiom, be they medieval knights or pulp-magazine heroes.


Put aside the fact that long before SUPERMAN was published, "supermen" had appeared in print media aimed at adults, and that some of the supermen tales were reasonably sophisticated (Wylie's 1930 GLADIATOR, Stapledon's 1935 ODD JOHN).


Put aside even the observation that SUPERMAN was crafted as a comic strip by Siegel and Schuster, and so was directed (in their minds, at least) at a general audience of both kids and adults, even though the authors failed to sell their product to any comic-strip syndicates.


Let us take as given that all these qualifications have less importance that the historical fact that the costumed comic-book hero, as published in the US for several decades, was dominantly marketed to children. It was not, even during the heyday of Marvel Comics' popularity on college campuses, regarded as a regular source of entertainment for adults.


No one can dispute this aspect of the history of the superhero genre in the U.S.


But does that fact mean what Deppey wants it to mean?

Even subtracting all the qualifications to Deppey's pronouncement, it still has a tremendous logical flaw in that it presumes that the form of a genre predetermines its scope and function as a source of narrative possibilities. There may be some debate in the world of architecture as to whether or not "form follows function" as architect Louis Sullivan claimed it did. However, in the world of literature-- where written words or words in combination with pictures can conjure forth any form an author pleases to conjure-- there can be little doubt that the authorial function comes first, and designs the form to match it. An audience in a given era may project expectations onto a given form and decree that it must always be (say) a juvenile form. But that is far from proving that the expectations cannot be modified or overcome completely.

Since the issue Deppey presents is whether or not a genre "created" to be juvenile must always be juvenile, a parallel is suggested by the example of prose boys' books, most of which are written with young protagonists who usually do not age to manhood within the narrative (unlike, say, Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD). In his magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL, Leslie Fiedler observed that Twain's TOM SAWYER was essentially just another boys' book like many that had been produced in nineteeth-century America, notably Thomas Aldrich's STORY OF A BAD BOY. Based on my own recollections, I would agree that few adults could read SAWYER for any reason save for nostalgia or academic study, and I suspect that the same is true for most of the novels in this genre, both before and after SAWYER. The "boys' book" genre, then, could be easily characterized as intrinsically juvenile because the readership was dominantly juvenile.

Incredibly enough, however, less than ten years after SAWYER was published, the same author wrote another book with a juvenile protagonist, which book *some* would consider eminently readable for both adults and juveniles. At least among that number one would have to include Ernest Hemingway, who said of it:

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

So, if one goes on the assumption that "all modern American literature" might be a cultural concern for adults more than children, then it should be logically demonstrable that the form of HUCKLEBERRY FINN-- a "boys' book"-- did not keep it from being of cultural concern to many if not all adults.

Thus, the form of FINN follows (authorial) function.

Now, I don't want to be mistaken as falling into the facile elitist equivalence of equating all adult concerns with those of "canonical literature." Adults, perhaps more than children, may be more enculturated to desire "instruction" as a means of coping with the world, but adults too have (to pursue the Horace/Dryden dichotomy) a fundamental desire for *pleasure,* including pleasure unalloyed with instruction, and the getting of that sort of narrative pleasure is no less an adult concern than knowing what's what in the world of "real" literature.

Thus, the development of HUCKLEBERRY FINN from a genre that was (and still broadly is) deemed juvenile is not important simply because HUCK is better canonical literature than TOM SAWYER or other boys' books. In terms of showing how an adult sensibility can transform a juvenile one, HUCKLEBERRY FINN is no better or worse than the grandaddy of all cowboy-western novels, Owen Wister's THE VIRGINIAN (1902).

Though I'm sure Wister's novel has been taught in no small number of college courses, it probably wouldn't meet many (if any) of the criteria of intellectual rigor usually laid down for canonical literature, as HUCK FINN does. Yet, simple though it is in some respects, it is not really a juvenile novel, even to the extent that HUCK still is. Before Wister, the subject matter of cowboy adventures was mostly known through dime novels which played to an audience much like that of later pulps and comic books: to juveniles and to (occasionally) adults whose tastes were considerably less than literary. But Wister's novel took that subject matter and raised it to a new level that might have been juvenile in tone but was adult in the concerns it addressed. This narrative level, in fact, is the one on which I believe most adults then and now tend to read, as opposed to consciously-literary fiction. Thomas J. Roberts calls such narratives "plain fiction," but I have a better name for them: Adult Pulp.

It should be obvious that Adult Pulp does not have to have been published in the pulp magazines, nor is it confined to any particular medium. Indeed, when I pointed out how a couple of generations' worth of adult audiences had validated the modern FX-film as potential adult entertainment, I would view most of these films-- whether good or bad, popular or unpopular-- as belonging within an Adult Pulp aesthetic. From THE VIRGINIAN to THE TERMINATOR, Adult Pulp is essentially simple in its thematic and dramatic aspects, but often possesses an archetypal power in its symbolism that cannot be easily dismissed, even though a lot of elitist critics have tried to do so. The majority of Adult Pulp is consumed and forgotten the same way most food is consumed and forgotten, but on occasion an outstanding Adult Pulp concept rings as deeply with its audience as any literary masterwork. From such works, however contradictory it may sound, a "canon" of Pulp is born.

Such a canon, however, is made up of works read by many diverse coteries who would never dream of reading in one another's subliterary bailiwicks. The readers of "romantic suspense" novels surely have their choice works, as do the readers of "paramilitary adventure," but I suspect never the twain shall meet. And the same holds true for the world of mainstream comic books, even though its readership numbers only the tens of thousands on its best day.

I stress the concept of Adult Pulp and its potential canons because it seems obvious to me that even though the American superhero comic began as children's entertainment, it has undergone fundamental changes-- both aesthetic and economic-- that have made it into a genre of Adult Pulp.

There is no turning back to an idealized time when kids were the mass audience. For the foreseeable future, kids will still like superheroes, but by and large they will pick up on them from film, television and video-game versions of the genre. A few will continue to seek out American comics despite all the economic hassles of doing so, and it may be that there won't be enough to keep the superhero genre viable in future generations.

If so, one may be able to critique the latter-day superhero comics for not being good enough at being Adult Pulp, which would, unlike Deppey's criticism, be a fair one. But if superheroes die out it will have nothing to do with their having failed to remain true to some notion of their inherently-juvenile nature.

As for why the superhero genre's conversion to Adult Pulp could be a good thing, I'll address that in the next essay, regarding the topic of "decadence" itself.