The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  But what is “escape”? If it means a temporary psychological and intellectual disengagement from the tensions and problems of “real” life, the type of entertainment referred to above will not serve. For “pop romance” (a term that will be used throughout this paper to designate television programs, films, and comic strips in the adventure category) is typically replete with tensions and problems, and those not usually very far removed from present reality. A few years ago it might have been argued that the frequent threats and acts of violence to be found in pop romance made the genre escapist by virtue of sheer hyperbole, but our growing awareness of how violent our reality actually is weakens that case.

  It might better be argued that the “escapism” of pop romance resides paradoxically in the security it generates: we know, deep down in our hearts, that Batman will not be turned into a human shish kabob by “The Joker,” that Steve Canyon will in the end foil the attempt of the Chinese Reds to defoliate Central Park. If this argument has some validity, it follows that the “escapism” provided by pop romance involves not only emotional catharsis, the purgation of pity and fear, but also what might be called “value satisfaction,” that confirmation or reaffirmation of our value system which results from our seeing this value system threatened, but ultimately triumphant. For at least one of the things that happens when a hero like Batman or Steve Canyon wins out in the end—and not the least important thing—is that we experience at some level the defeat of Evil (as we imagine it) by the Good (as we have learned it). Even though we consciously are aware that such victories do not always occur in reality, there is a part of us which very much wants them to occur. We are of course unwilling to have such victories take place too easily, as the epic poets well realized, for an easy victory not only lacks dramatic force but paradoxically cheapens the value system the victory is to affirm by making it almost irrelevant.

  “Escapism” then, connoting a retreat to a state of mindlessness or euphoria, may well be the wrong term to use to justify or to attack anyone’s involvement in pop romance. Though adventure films, television programs, and comic strips (Cahiers du Cinema and Roy Lichtenstein notwithstanding) may be only pseudo- or semi-art, they need not be more “escapist” than “true” art. Or, as W. R. Robinson claims in his defense of films, “escape” (into the higher reality of moral truth) can be seen as a function of all forms of art:

  The most persistent and unjust criticism leveled at the movies has been that they are sui generis “escapist.” But this critical term, the nastiest epithet conceivable within a very narrow-minded aesthetic of truth which sprung up alongside realism, absurdly distorts our sense of what art is or should be. It implies that only an art as grim and dour as the realist thought life to be under the aegis of materialism can qualify as serious aesthetic achievement. … Yet even in the dourest realistic view truth is a human triumph; through it man transcends suffering and determinism. Nikolai Berdyaev saw this clearly when he argued that all art is a victory over heaviness. It is always escape.1

  Even popular art forms, Robinson continues, “are a part of man’s intellectual armament in this war to liberate himself from heaviness …,” for “by incarnating the Good, a spiritual entity, in a concrete form, art frees it to be.”

  That even pop romance is concerned with moral truth—by “incarnating the Good” in its hero figures—is easily shown. The more primitive films, television programs, and comics—those produced mainly for children—explicitly purport to be morality tales: The Lone Ranger is identified as a “champion of justice,”2 for example, and Batman is plainly if infelicitously described as “fighting for righteousness and apprehending the wrong-doer.”3

  In more sophisticated pop romance the same process is handled more subtly and may even result in the establishment of fairly complex levels of meaning. Steve Canyon, for example, is clearly an incarnation of moral Good, but he is also the means by which Milton Caniff, his creator, idealizes and glorifies the military, devalues civilians and civilian life, advances a Dullesian posture on international affairs, and in general espouses a conservative sociopolitical philosophy. Though Caniff is hardly less didactic than Spenser or Milton, and the thrust of his didacticism is such that he too invariably alienates some readers, he, like these poets, makes complete rejection of his “art” almost impossible by incorporating his specific socio-political views within the general framework of the Judeo-Christian value system. Left with a choice between desiring a victory for militantly militarist Steve Canyon (and Western Civilization) and a victory for The Other Side, only the most resolute radical has a real alternative.

  There is still another level at which pop romance, both primitive and sophisticated, incarnates the Good. This is the level where personal ethics and ego meet to define individual spiritual and material aspirations. We tend to admire and identify with Batman, for example, not only because he is clean, upright, reverent, etc., an adult Boy Scout, square but undeniably good—all the things we should be—but also because he is handsome, athletic, intelligent, and rich—all the things we would like to be. He is the fulfillment of our fantasies as well as of our moral sense. And though Freudian psychology may lead us to expect that the former function is more crucial, this does not seem to be the case: a hero figure may be ugly or poor (and some are) but he can still be acceptable; if he should fail to honor his father and mother or if he should covet his neighbor’s wife he will not be. Whatever different values may be stressed in various heroes of pop romance (and there is some variation), they tend to have the basic values of our culture in common. Thus their repeated triumphs, whether we are fully conscious of it or not, can help to reinforce our confidence in our value system and to encourage our conformity to it.

  Clearly, his readers’ conformity to the values he anatomized in The Faerie Queene was one of the main effects Spenser hoped to achieve through his art. But if the Instruction that effects moral conformity was his main purpose, Spenser, like all makers of fiction, also recognized that “the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for the profit of the ensample”; therefore, as he explained to Raleigh, instead of having “good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large,” he wrote an epic poem, in which the Instruction was “most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction. …” It is of course far more likely that Delight rather than Instruction is the main conscious intent of most of the creators of pop romance. It is Delight that brings in the dollars. But to succeed in delighting a whole culture or even a sizeable portion of it is neither automatic nor easy. The chances for such success for example are diminished considerably if the Delight comes at the expense of the culture’s value system. Thus neither epic poets nor the creators of pop culture are true cultural revolutionaries. (Even devout Royalists could accept Paradise Lost.) Whether Delight or Instruction then is uppermost in the mind of the creator of the fiction, if the fiction is successful the results will likely be the same: the culture will find reiterated in that fiction most of the values it passed on to the creator in the first place. It is almost inevitable therefore that pop romance, for example, instruct in spite of itself.

  Milton Caniff has said: “The American hero lives in all of us … and if we are not all heroes, we are all hero ridden. Descendants of a legend, we persist in identifying with it.”4 To summarize the argument of this paper, if today’s students can be made conscious of this truth about themselves by having their attention called to their involvement in pop romance, and if, by analyzing the nature and functions of the hero in pop romance and epic poems, they can begin to perceive significant esthetic and intellectual parallels between the popular and the classic, then their heightened awareness of the unity and the relevance of all art will help to make their study of literature easier, more enjoyable, and more pointed. To some extent Marshall McLuhan has made even the ordinary student more receptive to such an approach than he might have been a few years ago, and Northrop Frye of course has done eve
n more for the well-read student. And Frye, in addition, is helpful in providing some guidelines by which such an approach can to an extent be systematized.

  ONE

  In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye classifies five types of fictive hero, each type being determined “by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.” (Frye’s fourth type, the hero “superior neither to other men nor to his environment” and his fifth type, the hero who is “inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves,” do not concern us here, though they would if the limits of this essay extended beyond the literary epic and the pop romance.)

  Type I. “If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god.” Frye adds that “Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories,” but as we shall see, Paradise Lost is a noteworthy exception to this rule, as is, less obviously, The Faerie Queene. The pop hero who best illustrates Type I is Superman, who to all intent and purposes is absolute in his power, his glory, and his goodness. Superman, like other such mythic figures, is not only perfect, but is capable of donning imperfection—of voluntarily assuming a human role, in the playing of which he suffers what Jules Feiffer has called his “discreet martyrdom.”5

  Type II. “If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended. …” The fact that these laws frequently seem to be suspended by the hero himself gives the Type II figure a semi-divine aura even though he is of earthly mold. Though limited, he is still overwhelmingly powerful and overwhelmingly virtuous. He is, however, capable of error (though seldom of crime or serious sin) and ultimately he is vulnerable. In pop romance Batman is a familiar example of this type.

  Type III. “If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours but … is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.” Although a number of pop heroes are of this type, Steve Canyon is fairly representative. He is a leader, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, passionate about the U.S. Air Force, the U.S., and—occasionally—a female (in that order), but what he does is sometimes criticized (most often by ignorant or malicious civilians) and the jet planes he flies are subject to the laws of physics. He is vulnerable, not only physically but also intellectually and psychologically, and he is capable of, though not prone to, error.

  The Type I hero is what we would all like to be (“faster than a speeding bullet,” having “X-ray vision,” capable of flying), but outside of our dreams of wish fulfillment, we recognize that we could not possibly be him. The Type II hero, being more human than superhuman, is a more attainable ideal, but again our conscious selves will acknowledge that we can never have all the powers and virtues he possesses nor have them to the degree that he does. The Type III hero is also greater in the sum total of his powers and virtues than we could be, but because he shares with the rest of humanity certain limitations upon his embodiment and exercise of these powers and virtues, some of them are at least theoretically within our reach and in a few we could even exceed him: we could conceivably fly airplanes as well as Lt. Col. Canyon; we might even become generals.

  All of these heroes are larger than life; some are merely larger than others. But what the hero is and does in terms of objective reality are less important than what he represents to our inner reality. The local man who saves a child from drowning is of less enduring interest to us than our fictive or historical heroes: the former wants symbolism, and unless local mythopoeia provides him with it, we tend to displace him in our consciousness with the more value-charged heroes we seem to need. The heroes of the great English epics represent attempts by poets of genius to fulfill that need for their own times. In our time, supposedly the age of the “anti-hero,” the writers of pop romance knowingly or unknowingly fulfill the same need. Thus, what Northrop Frye claims about popular literature in general is particularly true of pop romance: it is “literature which affords an almost unobstructed view of archetypes.”

  Specific illustrations of how the analogies between epic and pop heroes can be used to provide one kind of approach to Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost comprise the next three sections of this paper. The focus will be on the hero figures and the value systems in which they are involved rather than upon structure or imagery or the like. Nor will any attempt be made to justify on esthetic grounds the examples of pop romance considered. Whether primitive or slick, they seldom even approach the threshold of what is generally regarded as “art”—although they do qualify if we accept Norman Holland’s definition of art as that which exists for our pleasure, requires us to suspend disbelief in order to experience that pleasure, and gives us that pleasure by “managing” or “controlling” our fantasies and feelings.6 But whether they are regarded as “art” or not, pop romances can shed light on art and on our responses to it, as both Holland and Frye have suggested.7 The same conclusion is arrived at by a student of the comic strip phenomenon, Kenneth E. Eble, even though he rejects the comics as an art form:

  The comics fail badly as art despite their pretension to seriousness—or perhaps because of it. They have about the same relation to serious art that a tract like Pierce Pennilesse has to Paradise Lost. … As objects of serious study, they rank considerably higher. They will offer much information to future historians as to how we lived, how we acted, and, in a large sense, how we (the thickening mass) responded. … As factors in shaping a nation’s emotional and intellectual responses, they deserve much more study than they have yet received.8

  TWO

  In his consideration of “The Primitive Heroic Ideal,” E. Talbot Donaldson says: “put most simply, the heroic ideal was excellence. The hero-kings strove to do better than anyone else the things that an essentially migratory life demanded … “9 Fighting was of course the primary activity, as it is so often in pop romance, and it is on those few violent hours in Beowulf’s life when he wins his three great victories that the Anglo-Saxon scop concentrates rather than upon his youth or years of kingship. Violence, it might be added, is also a preoccupation of Spenser in The Faerie Queene, and it gets its due in Paradise Lost as well, in spite of Milton’s intention to frame a “higher Argument.” Pop romance is frequently attacked for its own preoccupation with violence, but its critics do not always recognize that violence is seldom gratuitous; as in epic poems it is usually if not always effectively moralized: the resounding “Pow!” as Batman’s fist connects with the Joker’s jaw signals not only retribution but the reestablishment of moral order.

  The plot of the first section of Beowulf-—the bringing of order to the chaos that is Heorot through the deeds of the stranger-hero, and thus bringing stability and security to a community near collapse—has been utilized so often as to seem formula by now. The Western, of course, employs it over and over again.

  In a popular television series of a few years back, Have Gun, Will Travel, this formula shaped almost every episode. The hero, a gun-fighter-knight-errant (appropriately named Paladin), continually rode out to rid a variety of communities of a variety of Grendels. A typical episode begins in San Francisco, where Paladin lives like royalty, surrounded by retainers male and female. When the call comes, however, he abandons his sybaritic life without hesitation and exchanges his foppish apparel for a basic black Western outfit symbolic of his deadly role. Although he usually rides alone, he is often joined by a decent citizen or two who serve as his temporary retainers. Upon these retainers and the community he succors Paladin bestows something of the courtesy that Beowulf shows to Hrothgar and the Geats. The rewards Paladin receives for his victories are, like Beowulf’s
, commensurate with the grave risks he takes, but he too is capable of exercising his talents for violence on the strength of a friendship or a principle, receiving for his victories only renewed fame.

  The series which fixed the stranger-savior most firmly in the imagination of mid-twentieth century America was of course The Lone Ranger. Conceived for juveniles, this series was so well received that it has appeared in all of the popular media. It is possible that the messianic overtones of the formula which The Lone Ranger so obviously played upon were partly responsible for its wide appeal: in times of crisis we look for a deliverer, a Beowulf or a Lone Ranger. The vague origins and the sudden departures of such heroes also serve to enhance their legends. These legends in time take on almost religious status, becoming myths that provide the communities not only with models for conduct but with the kind of heightened shared experiences which inspire and unify their members.

  The final sequence of Beowulf, the hero’s fight with the dragon, embodies still another formulaic plot, that of the resident-hero who champions the community in its struggle for self-preservation. This hero may or may not be the titular leader of the community, but he is always the present exemplification of the primitive kingly ideal (Hrothgar’s heroism was in the past). “Dodge City,” the archetypal community of the television Western Gunsmoke has a mayor, but it is the city’s marshal, Matt Dillon, who guarantees its stability and security. “Gotham” not only has a mayor, but a police commissioner, a police chief, and squads of officers, but it is Batman who defeats the city’s dragons. The ineffectuality of the forces of law and order and of the law itself seems almost a basic assumption both of epics and of pop romance.

  The law frequently appears to be too complex or too cumbersome to deal with crises, so the hero, whether he is a real or titular king, becomes a law unto himself. Ian Fleming’s “James Bond,” a true primitive hero updated to espionage agent, is “licensed to kill.” He is above the law not only of his own community but of the international community as well. So too are the agents featured in the television series, Mission Impossible. Unlike the individualistic Bond they operate in concert (the committee-as-hero?) and their numbers include the mandatory black man (a modern Tonto?) and the mandatory beautiful woman (a modern Britomart?). In their adventures these organization-man-heroes so frequently and blithely violate not only laws but human rights that they are warned before every mission that, if captured, they will be disavowed by the very national community which sends them forth. The legal and moral assumptions behind their activities are seldom questioned because these heroes, like Beowulf, are understood to be “on God’s side,” i.e., the community’s. (It is only in the “low mimetic” and “ironic” modes that the question of whether God is on our side or on that of the big battalions can be entertained.)