“THE ANSWER IS, ‘BECAUSE HE DOESN’T HAVE SUPERPOWERS’”

Q: “Why isn’t Batman a superhero?”—many many comic-book message-boards
As a pluralist critic, I value any form of criticism—naïve as much as sophisticated—that contains or at least leads to a greater insight. Sophistication itself is no guarantor of insight. This should be obvious to anyone capable of following the logic of this blog’s previous demolitions of such highbrow low-downers as
Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, and, most recently, Tzvetan Todorov.

Like the Todorov book I’ve recently critiqued, the naïve critic’s assertion, “Batman isn’t a superhero because he doesn’t have superpowers,” contains a fundamental insight despite being essentially wrong. The latter also takes a lot less time to refute. The naïve critic has chosen to view the adjective “super” in “superhero” as meaning one thing and one thing only: the possession of powers, giving one the ability to perform “super” feats that human heroes cannot perform. However, “super” clearly does not connote this, either in dictionaries or in the opinions of many readers who do consider Batman a superhero—usually for an equally simple reason, because he wears a costume.

One message-board refinement [see ENDNOTE], with which I partially agree, stated that a simple athlete-type hero like Batman should be deemed a superhero if he demonstrated the capacity to take down super-powered menaces, as Batman does regularly in JUSTICE LEAGUE if not so much in his own feature. However, the same poster didn’t think that a costumed, non-powered hero who fought nothing but common crooks would be a superhero. I see the logic of this distinction but I can’t dismiss the fact that most fans would put the label “superhero” to pretty much any figure in long underwear. As an additional complication, I’ve also seen the term applied to quite a few characters not clad in leotards, such as Flash Gordon and Doc Savage.

I toyed with the idea that one might look upon the costume as an indicator of metaphenomenal status. One approach might be the degree to which the costume makes the wearer look suprahuman. Even though Batman is just a skilled man armed with various weapons, the costume makes him look like a bat-human hybrid. However, many costumed heroes don’t look like anything but costumed humans. Zorro, one of Batman’s ancestors, doesn’t look the least like a fox, Spy Smasher just looks like a man wearing flight togs and goggles, and so on. Therefore if the costume is a signifier of metaphenomenality, it can’t be simply in terms of what it makes the hero look like.

Todorov, however, helped me out with his categories of the Uncanny and the Marvelous.
As noted in earlier essays, Todorov’s ruminations on fantastic literature are confined almost entirely to stories in a horrific mode. In Chapter 3 Todorov says:
“…we generally distinguish, within the literary Gothic, two tendencies: that of the supernatural explained (the “uncanny”), as it appears in the novels of Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe; and that of the supernatural accepted (the “marvelous”), which is characteristic of the works of Horace Walpole, M.G. Lewis, and Mathurin.”

A parallel to the first naïve classification seen above suggests itself. The fan that disallows Batman as a superhero is insisting upon a narrow definition of the superhero as one that has “marvelous” powers, like Lewis’ devils and Mathurin’s immortal wanderer Melmoth. Going by Todorov's original schema, Batman, who merely gives the impression of something marvelous, is explicable by rational laws of nature and would then be “uncanny,” like the fake Gothic horrors of Ann Radcliffe. (The particular example of Batman is however complicated by diverse factors, as I've already touched in on here.)

Now, for Todorov, once a spooky story decreed that there were no real ghosts, that story fell into the domain of the merely rational. But if that’s not logically true—if uncanny stories don’t belong to the realm of the rational—then the same should be true for “uncanny heroes.”

Again returning to naïve systems of classification, it’s evident that a popular reference-work on horror films, such as Phil Hardy’s OVERLOOK HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA, certainly doesn’t bother separating “uncanny” films from “marvelous” films. A movie about a real vampire, like the 1931 DRACULA, is as much a horror film as a film with a fake vampire, like 1936’s MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. This may sound identical to Todorov’s willingness to identify both “rational” and “irrational” tendencies within the greater category of the Gothic, but the difference is that Todorov continually inveighs against using the emotional frisson of the horror-story as a common ground. He does so because he’s exclusively concerned with the cognitive side of fantasy-fiction: “is the supernatural explained or accepted?” This provides a neat parallel to the naïve critic who insists that “superhero” must be defined in a similar cognitive manner, in terms of whether the hero has powers or not.
But Todorov’s emphasis was an error, just like that of the naïve critic. In my category of the metaphenomenal, the affective holds as much significance as the cognitive. If the reader gets the frisson of horror from a “phony vampire” story, then the story is on the same affective plane as the “real vampire” story, however different their cognitive aspects.

The same holds true, then, for stories of fictional heroism, “super” or otherwise. All heroic stories appeal to the emotional dynamization I’ve termed “invigoration,” which I borrowed from the myth-ritualist Theodore Gaster. But some heroic stories are clearly meant to take place wholly in a “realistic” world, and the heroes of those stories offer only that invigorative feeling one gets from seeing a “common man” with some degree of pluck and fighting-skill succeed. This would be in contrast to the dominant image of the superhero like Superman or the Human Torch, for whom invigoration resides in the demonstration of “marvelous” powers.

However, in between these two extremes lies the domain of my version of “the Uncanny,” and unlike Todorov I don’t think it belongs to the domain of pure natural law, even when both the hero and the hero’s combatants are mere mortals. Within this metaphenomenal domain I situate the hero who is only one step removed from the “common man” in that he wears a costume. Batman is not truly uncanny in this sense, given that he not infrequently battles super-gorillas and madmen with freeze-rays. But the aforementioned Zorro fits quite well. Possibly no one would deem Zorro or any similar masked swashbucklers as superheroes per se, nor would I try to convince them of it. But I do think that Zorro’s uncanny appearance puts himself within the realm of the metaphenomenal, and thus within the superhero idiom as well.
I’ll be covering other applications of my “Uncanny and Marvelous” categories in future essays.