SUPERHUMAN, ALL TOO SUPERHUMAN

At the end of GENRE-GENDER WARS PART 3 I said I'd pursue my dichotomy between "static" Sadean cruelty and "dynamic" Nietzschean cruelty with respect to "contemporary comic books." However, I'm changing up two things:

First, henceforth I'll substitute "violence" for "cruelty," since even in fictional narratives violence of some sort (even of the mental kind, such as Nietzsche imagines his great artists using to torment their lesser natures) is the act through which the relevant emotion is expressed.

Second, my last essay on WONDER WOMAN persuades me that the original William Moulton Marston iteration makes a better example of transformative Nietzschean violence than almost any other work in the comic book medium. I'll do a separate essay on an example of static violence, focusing on one of Marston's contemporaries, but for this essay, I'll address only the narrative articulation of Nietzschean violence.

A further prelude a quick summary of GGW #3 seems worthwhile. In that essay, I contended that Camille Paglia was wrong to bracket the "amoralism" of Nietzsche with the different amoral outlooks of Sade and Freud. I didn't say much about Freud in that essay and still won't in this one, for the main thrust of the static/dynamic argument began with my comparison of Sade and Nietzsche quotes and so will continue with them.

(Parenthetically, the static characterizations of Freudianized violence would be better compared to the dynamic ones of his old nemesis Carl Jung. But I digress.)

The first works to which I applied my dichotomy were two of the works Paglia analyzed in SEXUAL PERSONAE: Spencer's FAERIE QUEENE and Shakespeare's TITUS ANDRONICUS. Belatedly I'll admit that while Paglia did devote a whole chapter to the works of Spenser, her analysis of ANDRONICUS is only a page or two. Still, given her knockabout approach to the Bard-works which she does analyze in greater detail-- AS YOU LIKE IT and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA-- I think a long analysis of ANDRONICUS would have still made the mistake the short one did, of applying a Sadean model to something closer to the Nietzchean idea of spiritualizing violence.

So, continuing with my chosen Spenser/Shakespeare dyad, one may ask what separates, in a narratological sense, the characters of FAERIE QUEENE and ANDRONICUS. I said in GGW #3 that Nietzsche's concept of spiritualized cruelty "seems to involve a deeper mental transformation than anything a Sade protagonist might contemplate." This "deeper mental" propensity I will call *interiority.*

Now what does *interiority" mean? Not that the characters of that nature sit around pyschoanalyzing their problems a la Woody Allen's film INTERIORS, but only that the interior status of such a character plays a clear narrative purpose in the character's story. Again, this has nothing to do with a character's "depth." Shakespeare's Titus is not much if at all "deeper" than Spenser's best character Britomart. But Titus' internal workings are far more important to the story of ANDRONICUS than Britomart's are in her tale. To pursue the Sade/Nietzsche parallel again, Britomart largely stays as static as any Sadean protagonist in terms of internal reflections, while Titus must transform himself much as Nietzsche's ideal artists did, as Titus goes from blustering, bloody-handed general to a sly trickster whose "mad act" anticipates Shakespeare's later and more often-lauded Hamlet.

Of course, a new problem for judging the presence or absence of interiority is created when one turns to a character who, unlike Titus or Britomart, was conceived to be a serial character, one who never substantially changes. How can such a character express interiority, given that he or she cannot change her situation even to the extent that Spenser's Britomart does?

The answer is simple: interiority is projected onto "guest stars" who can be changed in line with the author's ideals, and can do so with as many variations as one can conceive, even though the main character remains essentially the same.

In conceiving this projection, William Marston wasn't precisely doing something no one had ever conceived before. Long before the comic book was launched anywhere, serial fiction had coped with this problem, notably with Sherlock Holmes, whose entire raison d'etre involved bringing order to London lives by detecting plots and villains. Superman and Batman simply adapted this pattern into a purely altruistic venture, as the heroes continually played Mary Worth to orphans and sweet young things. However, the closest these two heroes usually got to "transformation" was to get bad young boys back on the road to being good boys.

In keeping with his psychoanalytic training, Wertham further adapted this pattern to bring sinners back into a much more quixotic fold than anything Superman ever dreamed of. "Ya beat me, but hang me if I didn't like it!" says one bully-boy (quote approximate) after Wonder Woman outpowers him, but contrary to the Sadean paradigm, the victim of Wonder Woman's benevolent violence is having his eyes opened to intruiging new possibilities. Nor is Wonder Woman herself in a Sadeaian position of unquestioned power: in one sequence, being outpowered herself by a hyped-up Steve Trevor, she reflects that she finds the sensation of submission thrilling but still prefers being a "top" to a "bottom." However, throughout the Marston years the author's credo remained consistent. To rephrase the old Dean Martin song:

"Everybody's Someone's Bottom-- Sometime!"

What made all this dominance and violence transformative was the attitude with which Marston colored it, placing it all as much in the realm of "non-body" as "body." This attitude Marston called "lovingkindness," and even in the most slapsticky examples of violence-- the Holliday Girls and their butt-paddles come to mind-- Marston always projects this superheroic version of *agape.*

Now, Wertham may not converted any readers to his belief-system. It's quite possible that much of the readership supported the book, as Gerald Jones asserted, in order to ogle scantily-clad Amazons-- though to be sure, there were a lot of "good girl art" books that played more to that desire than did the art of H.G. Peter.

Nevertheless, Marston's WONDER WOMAN is probably one of the few serial works in any medium that manages to put across a psychically-dynamic concept of violence. Most serial works, including the aforementioned Sherlock, hew pretty closely to the static model, though not all of these, contrary to Gerson Legman, are especially sadistic in tone.

Being a work of static violence is, to be sure, in no way inferior to being a work of dynamic violence, or vice versa. In fact, the counter-example I'll address in my next essay is one of the Golden Age's most well-esteemed features-- though it does happen to be part of its charm that it IS pretty deep into a Sadean universe.