ECO LOCATION

Is there such a thing as a "good elitist?"

Having resisting the obvious old joke re: "the only good Indian," I'll admit that it's true that, in contrast to superficial intellectuals like Roland Barthes and Theodor Adorno, there exist scholars whose basic program seems elitist in nature but who are broadminded enough that their observations prove useful to pluralist aesthetics. Of course, some concepts may require a lot of reworking.

I've not read a biography of Umberto Eco, but he seems beholden to many of the same reductive intellectual influences-- Marx, Saussure, Levi-Strauss-- that helped make Barthes whatever he was. In contrast to Barthes, however, Eco shows a phenomenal ability to think outside the reductionist's box; an ability seen to impressive effect in his 1962 essay, "The Myth of Superman."

Thus roughly three years before Dial Press commissioned Jules Feiffer to sum up his remembrances of his GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES of the Golden Age, Eco devotes an essay, in part, to the study of the then-current Superman comics of the early Silver Age.

I say "in part" because contrary to the title Superman is not the real focus of "Myth of Superman." Eco's essay is largely about his semantic take on the phenomenon of serial fiction, of which Superman is one example, and not even the only one pursued at length in the space of the essay. Eco's readings of serial fiction are complex and not amenable to being summarized in a blogpost, so I'll address just one aspect of the essay.

Eco is remarkably accurate about the mythos of Silver Age Superman-- Lois Lane, Mxyzptlk, "imaginary stories"-- given that in the early 1960s almost no one was writing about comic books. However, about the other half of his title, "myth," he's not much more accurate than his predecessor Barthes. I don't know if in other works Eco offered a working definition for his usage of the term "myth," but here he does not, and his few defintions-by-example are severely flawed. Whether they undermine the logic of the essay is a question I won't try to answer here.

Among Eco's first pronoucements on traditional archaic religious myth-figures, he writes:

The traditional figure of religion was a character of human or divine origin, whose figure had immutable characteristics and an irreversible destiny... a Greek statue could represent Hercules or a scene of Hercules' labors; in both cases, but more so in the latter, Hercules would be seen as someone who has a story... Hercules has been made real through a development of temporal events.

A few paragraphs later Eco will contrast this notion of the traditional myth-hero's "irreversible destiny" with that of the modern serial-hero, whose tales lack "the possibility of any development." And many critics since Eco have followed up on his comments by decrying the static nature of a hero like Superman, whether in contrast to the myth-heroes of tradition or the protagonists of literature. However, though the comparison may be fair in the latter case, the former comparison fails.

First, myth-heroes are not possessed of "immutable characteristics." They have dominant characteristics, but even these are far from immutable. To take Eco's example, even in the culture of ancient Greece portraits of Hercules varied, ranging from the bumptious brawler revered by the common folk to the sort of hero favored by intellectuals, such as the "Hercules" of Euripides' ALCESTIS, whose courage has a more moral dimension than most of the stories of his Labors.

Second, although myth-heroes have their lives ringed by a birth and a death, even as mortal men do, "Mister In-Between" is not the same for a myth-hero as for a mortal. How can one speak of a "development of temporal events" in the life of Hercules if some stories claim that Hercules began his Labors to expiate his guilt for having slain his wife and children, while others (notably Euripides' own HERACLES) claim that he killed them after completing the Labors (which were presumably begun for some other reason)?

In truth, myth-heroes bear a strong resemblance to modern serial-heroes in that between the span of their births and deaths each hero has access to an infinitely-expanding "middle portion" of his life, in which he's always pretty much the same, with no commonplace causality to get in the way. It's true that there are some myth-heroes who don't accrete a lot of stories to add to their legends, as with the hero Roland, whom Eco also mentions in the essay. But these can be viewed as the "B-listers" of the myth-world, whereas the "A-list" features heroes about whom the populace just couldn't stop telling tales-- Hercules, Arthur, or even figures who possess numinous names that hop from identity to identity, as "Jack" hops from beanstalk-climber to giant-killer to vegetable deity.

Late in the essay Eco talks further of how a reader must lose "the notion of temporal progression" when faced with a "massive bombardment of events which are no longer tied together by any strand of logic." Unintentionally he has defined the true status of archaic myth-narrative quite as much as that of the serial-hero. Indeed, in the wake of Marvel's soap-operatic twist on the superhero, it's possible to say that the myth-hero may at times possess less "temporal progression" than the serial hero. One knows that Heracles' first Labor must be to kill the Nemean Lion, because the hero is so often pictured running around in the lionskin. But do the rest of the Labors possess "temporal progression?" Even by the time of the Silver Age, Superman's ongoing encounters with Luthor may have stayed closer to the concept of an "ongoing continuity" (though one easily abandoned whenever it might prove convenient for writers to do so).

Eco finally concludes that Superman lives in a universe where "causal chains are not open" to one another linkages, but are discontinuous. But again, this is as true of Hercules as Superman, as seen by the ease with which Euripides changes the traditional order of events in the hero's life. Other examples from other myth-systems could be multiplied so as to render the same verdict, for myth-cycles are generally cobbled together from many sources, and so must always betray the disunity of their sources.

On the whole Eco's essay remains interesting despite this flaw. His diverse writings on popular culture seem to defend it more often than they stigmatize it, which shows a certain pluralist leaning, even if some of the tools he uses are the products of elitist minds. (For all Eco's subtlety on other matters, "Myth of Superman" can't resist tossing in a de rigeur Marxist mention about "means of production.")