>SUPERVERBOSE

Spoilery essays are my game
I spoil without cessation
Watchmen and Moore, and Bester for sure
For this post’s entire duration

SPOILERS AHEAD for Watchmen and for many works of Alfred Bester, particularly The Stars My Destination. I also spoil the overall arc of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Sometimes I swear these web annotations are just free-associating. Take this comment, about the “Here be tygers” panel I discussed in the first Blake post:

Given Moore’s allusions-within-allusions, I wonder if the Rorschach=Tyger material is also a back-door reference to Alfred Bester’s Tyger, Tyger!, a.k.a The Stars My Destination, with its terribly flawed protagonist Gully Foyle and the telepathically ignited super-explosive pYre. Foyle also has time-and-space teleportational adventures like Dr. Manhattan.

I’m not sure what’s meant by “allusions-within-allusions”, unless we’re talking about an allusion to something that itself is an allusion to something else. If that’s the case, I think the annotator has it backwards. If Moore had referenced the Bester book in Watchmen, then we could see Blake inside that reference, given that the UK title of The Stars My Destination was Tiger! Tiger! (with an “i”, not a “y”), and it uses Blake’s “The Tyger” as an epigraph for its first section. Instead, I think there’s no encapsulation — both works just reference Blake, like a whole bunch of other works do.

However, the entire premise of this project is that Watchmen exists in a complex intertextual web, enabled by Moore and Gibbons’s considerable cultural erudition, allowing this comic book superhero story to touch Greek myth, The Bible, ancient Rome, rock and roll songs, and all sorts of points in between. The free-associating annotations have led us down some blind alleys before, and even those trips found something worthwhile, so there’s likely plenty of value in checking out the connections between Bester and Watchmen whether or not Moore was aware of The Stars My Destination.

Lucky for us, this is one awareness we don’t have to guess at, because it turns out that Moore directly referenced the novel in an earlier work. Starting in 1980, Moore (under the pen name “Curt Vile”) wrote and drew a comic series for Sounds, a UK music weekly, and the name of that comic was The Stars My Degradation. Lest we think this was just a silly riff on something he’d seen on a bookshelf, Moore includes an element in every strip to let us know he’s a little more familiar with the book than that.

See, at the beginning of Bester’s novel, our protagonist (the aforementioned Gully Foyle) finds himself stranded in the destroyed spaceship Nomad, barely eking out an existence for one hundred seventy days and counting. In this state, “occasionally his raveling mind leaped backward thirty years to his childhood and remembered a nursery jingle:”

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation.
Deep space is my dwelling place
And death’s my destination

(The Stars My Destination, pg. 11)

This variation on an identifying book rhyme recurs like a leitmotif through the story, and you will probably not be surprised to learn that by the end, it finishes with “the stars my destination.” Moore’s work, on the other hand, carries the following rhyme in its weekly title masthead:

Dempster Dingbunger is my name
Sputwang is my nation
The depths of space gob in my face
The stars my degradation

So, yeah, the tone here is very different — intentionally zany and a little gross. The comic strip doesn’t really pertain much to Bester’s work or to Moore’s subsequent career, but at least it establishes that Moore would definitely have been familiar with TSMD by the time he was writing Watchmen.

Inoculation Via Fixation

With that connection firmly established, let’s move on to examining The Stars My Destination, in search of lights to shine on Watchmen. We know that Gully Foyle starts the book stranded in the Nomad, struggling to stay alive, so what happens next?

A ship appears! It’s the Vorga, seemingly ready to save Foyle’s life, and he sends up distress flares that the ship can’t miss, but despite his obvious need for rescue, the Vorga sails on by. He is abandoned once more. At this point, Foyle’s desperate drive to survive becomes a burning need for revenge, which consumes him so completely that he becomes capable of amazing feats in pursuit of that goal.

He rescues himself from the shattered starship. He escapes an asteroid colony of bizarre primitives, but not before they tattoo his face in a tiger pattern (hence the UK title and epigraph.) He makes his way back to Earth and gathers resources to find the ship in its dock and attempt to destroy it. The attempt fails and he is captured, but his captors also fail in their attempts at interrogation. They are interested in finding the Nomad, but no method of questioning can pierce Gully’s monomania — he exists only to destroy the Vorga.

So he is sent to a deep underground prison in France, called the Gouffre Martel. The French connection is apropos, because here the novel moves into a long riff on The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Edmond Dantès, Foyle finds a friend in prison, who educates him and helps him to escape. Like Dantès, Foyle becomes impossibly wealthy, and uses this wealth to assume a different identity, carrying out elaborate plans for revenge upon those who wronged him. In doing so, he evolves from a dangerous brute into an even more dangerous trickster.

Foyle’s story up to this point resonates strongly with two Watchmen characters: Rorschach and Ozymandias. Gully the brute, who takes up the first 30% or so of the book, is very much like Rorschach — resourceful and violent — and once he gets tattooed, he also has patterns on his face like Rorschach.

There’s a scene during his interrogation where the questioners have set up an elaborate ruse to make Gully think that his actual identity is that of the uber-wealthy Geoffrey Fourmyle, and that his life as simple spaceman Foyle was an escapist dream. His questioners know, though he doesn’t, that the Nomad had valuable and important cargo, so they want to trick him into revealing its location. “Reconstruct this false memory of yours in detail,” says the questioner, “and I will tear it down.” (pg. 56-57) Foyle wavers for a moment, then catches sight of his reflection in the questioner’s spectacles. The sight of his tiger-patterned face returns him to himself, and he overcomes the false narrative.

Just so, Rorschach finds himself trapped and questioned in prison, called by a name he rejects. He has been stripped of what he considers his face, but Malcolm Long keeps putting Rorschach blots in front of him. Those blots, rather than helping him create a path to the “healthy” identity to which Long wants to lead him, continue to bring him back to himself as Rorschach, because to him, those blots are his face. Just as Foyle sees his stripes in his adversary’s glasses, Rorschach keeps being shown his own reflection.

Foyle eventually gets surgery to conceal the stripes, and his tormentors are worried they won’t be able to recognize him. “We’ve never seen his face…” they say, “only the mask.” (pg. 94) This too is like Rorschach, who considers the mask his real face, and who can move through the city unidentified once he removes it.

The two characters resonate through their external patterning, but their deeper kinship is their shared single-mindedness. As Foyle is tortured, this time with nightmarish images of hell and monsters, he just keeps repeating, “Vorga. Vorga. Vorga.” The book’s omniscient narrator steps back for moment to comment on him, saying, “He had been inoculated by his own fixation. His own nightmare had rendered him immune.” (pg. 54) Rorschach, too, has been branded by his trauma, and it has turned him into a fixated machine, devoted only to his own goals, even in the face of Armageddon.

Foyle’s interrogator inadvertently reveals that the Nomad was carrying an enormous fortune in platinum bullion, and the moment Foyle hears this, his obsession has a new focus. He sees that money as “a broad highway to Vorga” (pg. 59), and from that moment, he is determined to recover it. And he does! He escapes from prison, makes his way back to Nomad, obtains its cargo, eludes his pursuers, and returns to Earth with limitless wealth.

With these resources in hand, Foyle goes full Count of Monte Cristo, or in Watchmen terms, full Ozymandias. He actually adopts the identity of Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres, “a wealthy young buffoon from the largest of the asteroids.” (pg. 111) With his Four Mile Circus, he travels around to various places causing delightful chaos, dazzling the locals. But what he’s really doing is setting elaborate plans in motion, in service of his revenge.

He’s moved beyond the notion of destroying the Vorga itself, realizing that it is simply a physical object, Instead, he hunts down the crew who were on the ship the day it abandoned him, ceaselessly searching for the reason why they left him alone, and for the most part unbothered by any conscience in how he seeks that information. He also becomes an “extraordinary fighting machine” (pg. 115) like Ozymandias, but rather than undertaking intense training, Foyle simply buys himself a suite of cybernetic physical enhancements, which allow him to increase his strength and speed to superhuman proportions.

Here is Foyle after these changes: a devastating fighter, possessed of unbelievable resources, who makes plans lasting months and years to achieve his ultimate goal. He’s a lot like a superhero, except that he is no hero — he’s perfectly willing to torture and kill in order to get what he wants. Sound familiar? Geoffrey Fourmyle is to Ozymandias as the initial Gully Foyle is to Rorschach, and that draws an interesting line between the two Watchmen characters.

Veidt and Kovacs, alone among the book’s cast, are the two who cannot and will not be swayed by anything. Dan is diffident, Laurie reluctant, Jon indifferent, and Blake mercenary, but Ozymandias and Rorschach are monomaniacs, relentlessly pursuing their own goals and stopping at nothing. A character says to Foyle, “You can’t accept life as it is. You refuse. You attack it… try to force it into your own pattern.” These words could as aptly describe Rorschach, railing in his journal at the city’s filth and corruption, or Ozymandias, authoring his own apocalypse to resolve the unbearable tension between the world as it is and the world as he wishes it to be.

Yet there is one more stage for Foyle, beyond his Rorschach phase and beyond his Ozymandias phase. He falls desperately in love with a blind girl named Olivia, only to discover later that she was in fact the captain of the Vorga that day, and that the ship passed him by because it was in the midst of a despicable criminal operation: picking up desperate refugees from war-torn planets, collecting their belongings, and ejecting the people into space. She is an utter nihilist, driven by pure hatred to ravage and destroy all of humanity. She sees in Foyle someone who is just as powerful and — she thinks — just as amoral, and falls in love with him too, wanting him to join her in her campaign of ruination.

Gully kisses her, and then he recoils. She says:

‘What is it, Gully darling?’
‘I’m not a child any more,’ he said wearily. ‘I’ve learned to understand that nothing is simple. There’s never a simple answer. You can love someone and loathe them.’
‘Can you, Gully?’
‘And you’re making me loathe myself.’
‘No, my dear’
‘I’ve been a tiger all my life. I trained myself… educated myself… pulled myself up by my stripes to make me a stronger tiger with a longer claw and a sharper tooth… quick and deadly…’
‘And you are. You are. The deadliest.’
‘No, I’m not. I went too far. I went beyond simplicity. I turned myself into a thinking creature. I look through your blind eyes, my love whom I loathe, and I see myself. The tiger’s gone.’ (pg. 195)

This is the moment when Foyle transcends his idée fixe, transcends his Rorschach and Ozymandias personas, and leaves childhood behind. He acknowledges that there’s never a simple answer. Adrian Veidt, by contrast, sneers at Dan, “Do grow up,” but he’s scarcely less of a child than Rorschach. His prank on the world, as complex as it was to engineer, remains an attempt at a quick fix, a simple answer. He deludes himself that he has engineered a happy ending, only to be reminded that nothing ever ends.

The application of violence or trickery to exert control over the world has a fundamental quality of tantrum, and thus of monstrosity — a force beyond rationality and beyond compassion. In Watchmen, Moore subtly suggests that this childish fantasy sits behind all superhero narratives. In The Stars My Destination, Foyle sees these qualities in himself, and chooses to leave them behind. Rather than hoard and hide the most destructive power in the universe (the pYre explosive mentioned in the web annotations), in the belief that he knows better how to apply it, he instead distributes it across the spectrum of humanity.

Will they destroy themselves with it? Possibly! But Foyle rejects the argument that people must be controlled, again deploying the imagery of adulthood and childhood. “Stop treating them like children and they’ll stop behaving like children,” he says. “Let ’em all grow up. It’s about time.” (pg. 235) Where Ozymandias would use secrets and lies to guide the mass of humans where he thinks they should go, Foyle opts for radical truth, and radical faith: “I believe in them. I was one of them before I turned tiger. They can all turn uncommon if they’re kicked awake like I was.” (pg. 236)

What leads him there is the moment he sees himself in Olivia, and realizes that he loathes what he sees. In that moment, he is faced with fundamental questions: How can we move through this world without loathing ourselves? How can we find our way out of monstrosity? No one in Watchmen ever asks these questions. “This relentless world,” muses Rorschach. “There is only one sane response to it.” But what? To Rorschach, the answer is, “Become just as relentless.” But Foyle, and Bester through him, shows us another way: allow the world to be itself, speak and live the truth, reject the simple answer, and lift up your fellow creatures where you can.

Maturation Via Irritation

Rejection of the simple answer, and demolition of hoary clichés, were hallmarks of Bester’s career. As he made his way into the field in the early 1940s, Bester quickly began taking aim at science fiction tropes that even by then had become entrenched, such as the “Adam and Eve” story. In case that doesn’t ring a bell, it’s a story about some kind of apocalypse or post-apocalypse in which only two people remain, and it turns out those two people are named — dun-dun-DUNNNN! — Adam and Eve. Or some variation thereupon. Or they may not even have the heavy-handed names, but nevertheless are called upon to repopulate the world, which often turns out to have been Earth All Along.

From a 1974 comic adaptation of Bester’s story “Adam and No Eve”

Bester roasted this trope in a couple of 1941 stories. “The Biped, Reegan” is told from the viewpoint of an ant, who misunderstands the humans it watches — the story depends on our knowledge of the cliché to understand what’s happening, treating it as a joke rather than a portentous twist ending. “Adam and No Eve” goes even further, with the last man finding himself alone on a ruined earth, no Eve in sight. Eventually he gets himself to the ocean and dies, at which point — the story strongly implies — his decomposing body will provide the raw materials in a primordial soup that leads to our own existence, a hundred million centuries later. With this stroke, Bester both points up the absurdity of the Adam-and-Eve plot (you don’t get a healthy and genetically diverse population from a starting point of two organisms) and twists it into something genuinely surprising.

In later stories, he went on to skewer other SF shibboleths — Asimov’s laws of robotics in “Fondly Fahrenheit”, the notion of predictive psychology (also Asimov) in “The Push of a Finger”, time-travel power fantasies in “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” and “Of Time and Third Avenue”, and so on. TSMD itself is a pointed denunciation of the “one man to save the world” trope common in the works of Heinlein and others — and for that matter, superhero comics. In fact, Bester did work at DC Comics for some time, tutored by Batman co-creator Bill Finger. Some of Bester’s DC comics creations and co-creations have had a lasting impact, such as Solomon Grundy, Vandal Savage, and most famously the Green Lantern oath (“In brightest day, in blackest night”, etc.)

In any case, in his campaign to jolt SF from its adolescent moorings, he even published essays having a go at the notion that science fiction was growing up, such as his famously combative “The Trematode: A Critique of Modern Science-Fiction” in 1953, in which he outlined what he saw as SF’s “Three Immaturities” — intellectual, emotional, and technical. Literary critic Jad Smith explains the title:

A trematode infests a mollusk and either spoils it or forces it to produce a pearl. From Bester’s standpoint, only time would tell whether SF would yield a lustrous gem or turn to rot, succumbing to what he personally saw as its own self-incurred immaturity. He had his doubts but, for his part, hoped for the pearl. (Alfred Bester, pg. 11)

The parallel to Alan Moore is clear. Like Bester, Moore came into his field with a healthy contempt for the ossified concepts that had become ritualized in the superhero genre, even those that were wildly popular at the time — we can see a great example of this in his parody of the X-Men around the middle of The Stars My Degradation. Much of his work wasn’t so goofy, though. He savagely dismantled a “Shazam!” style hero in Miracleman, (literally) took apart and rebuilt Swamp Thing, and interrogated the fundamental concept of costumed violence against the status quo in V For Vendetta, along with an incredible abundance of other superhero and science fiction stories in the five years following Degradation, all leading up to the magnum opus of Watchmen.

I’ve mentioned before that Moore saw the DC heroes as one-dimensional and the Marvel heroes as two-dimensional. Watchmen was the pinnacle of his project to add a third dimension to superheroes, and to critique the entire genre. But why did he make this his project in the first place? Perhaps, like Bester, he wanted to be the irritant inside the oyster of a genre, hoping for a pearl.

Moore, like Bob Dylan before him, and Alfred Bester before that, was engaged in a quest for redemption. These artists sought to take the forms and tropes that spoke to them as children and make them meaningful to adults. Bester addressed this aim directly in a plot outline he sent to the editors of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine for his story, “5,271,009”:

I want to preach a sermon (as usual) in this story, and the theme is an attack on the adolescent wish-fulfillment-type dreaming which blocks us from becoming adults if we indulge it wihtout recognizing it for what it is. It is this same adolescent wish-fulfillment which science fiction so shamelessly exploits; and if SF continues to indulge it, SF will never become an adult form of literature. (pg. 126)

There is it is again, that metaphor of adult vs. child. The same imagery crops up in the story itself, in which the supernatural being Solon Aquila takes a protagonist through a variety of wish-fulfillment scenarios, all of which were familiar tropes from SF of the time, all of which are fatally flawed in ways the protagonist discovers, escaping the scenario whenever he finds the flaw. Finally, Aquila reveals that he has been trying to forcibly mature the character, by showing him the shallowness of “baby dreams”, in an attempt to prompt “adult dreams.”

The March 1954 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, featuring Bester’s story “5,271,009”

What to make of all this focus on growing up? I would speculate that Bester, and artists like him, seek to mature their art forms as a way of maturing themselves, but without losing the fundamental qualities of childhood that so enraptured them to the art form in the first place. In doing so, they create art that speaks to all of us who are ambivalent about the socially inscribed lines between childhood and adulthood, who seek to integrate the younger parts of ourselves with the older parts.

Unlike Moore and Dylan in their fields, Bester did not have a lasting and fruitful career in SF. He created two universally acclaimed novels, TSMD and The Demolished Man, which won the very first Hugo award. He’s also remembered for a handful of classic short stories, of which I’ve mentioned several. But he drifted in and out of the field, and when he returned to it once more late in life, his work didn’t captivate SF audiences anymore.

Fascination via Saturation

In his monograph on Bester, Jad Smith brings in a concept from literary theorist Roland Barthes, of the “writable text” — “writable” implying a level of reader engagement beyond simply “readable”. Smith summarizes the concept, taken from Barthes’ S/Z, as a kind of surfeit of meanings, possibilities, and connections within a text that holds both danger and promise for the reader’s experience. Writers in this style are

not only consciously fostering a certain level of meaningful indeterminacy in a text but also engaging in a kind of knowing parry-and-thrust with readers’ expectations for a particular genre. This excess within the text was a risk for the writer — it recognized the reader as a free and individual agent in resolving narrative ambiguities — but it also served as a possible source of heightened pleasure for that very reason. (pg. 14)

Smith argues convincingly throughout his book that Bester’s greatest works derive much of their greatness from this “writable” quality, and it seems to me that this is a very useful concept for Watchmen as well, not to mention much of Moore’s work, such as the incredibly oversaturated League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series.

I would argue that Watchmen fulfills this concept of a “writable” text in a few ways. Certainly the “knowing parry-and-thrust with readers’ expectations for a particular genre” is all over the book, starting with the fact that it’s a DC comic that doesn’t use any of the established DC characters. Add to that the ways that the Watchmen characters darkly reflect their Charlton counterparts, with whom some segment of the readership would have been familiar.

On top of these points of engagement, or of “meaningful indeterminacy”, there are all the ways in which Moore contravenes established superhero narrative expectations, from the fact that superheroes are illegal in the story’s world, to the fact that they are incredibly flawed, broken human beings who behave in anti-heroic or outright villainous ways, to the fact that good, arguably, does not triumph in the end. In fact, pure good and evil don’t really show up in the story at all — just a bunch of moral gray spaces whose rightness is always up for debate.

In addition to all this, let’s consider that Moore mixes the mystery genre into the superhero genre, and that mysteries themselves are among the most “writable” works, consciously involving the reader in a puzzle to be solved, in the resolution of narrative ambiguities. However, though we do find out in the end who killed The Comedian, Watchmen doesn’t resolve like a traditional mystery, with the clever detective piecing the clues together and bringing the killer to justice. Instead, our detectives are overpowered by the killer, who then explains his crime and how, by his lights, it and its attached scheme have just saved all of humanity. “How… how can humans make decisions like this?” sputters one stymied would-be crimebuster.

Even at this, we as readers are not done exercising our agency to solve narrative ambiguities, as the ending of the story lands on a series of very fragile notes, culminating in its final words: “I leave it entirely in your hands.” Diegetically, that remark is addressed to Seymour (who may, in fact, be on the precipice of “seeing more”), but in a larger sense, it is addressed to us as readers, who must determine in our own imaginations what happens next.

There is yet another dimension to writability, according to Smith, and that is the aspect of narrative saturation. Many of Bester’s works were heavily engaged with not only the science fiction tropes of their day, but a much larger domain of literature, such as TSMD‘s conscious evocation of Blake, Dumas, Joyce, and plenty more antecedents. Take a look at Smith’s explanation of Bester’s cultural pastiche in the story “Hell Is Forever”, and see if it doesn’t ring any bells:

He playfully referenced and appropriated various texts to create a saturated intertext, one open to more than just one reading protocol. A reader need not get all the allusions or understand how Bester’s approach takes in elements of decadent and modernist aesthetics to enjoy the story or even to feel the effect of narrative oversaturation, but this other level of meaning does produce writable moments capable of enhancing a reader’s experience of the text.

Yeah, that’s Watchmen all over, and I’ve been working to unearth those moments for the last 12+ years. Every time I dive into one of these references and appropriations, trying to crystallize a bit of precipitate from Moore and Gibbons’ heavy saturation, it opens new avenues of pleasure available from the text. This is true even when the connection seems weak, down to outright free-association, and the fact that Watchmen continues to reward such close and varied analysis, from dozens of different directions, places it unambiguously on the highest shelves of literature.

Previous entry: Bringing Light to the World

WARNING: These posts are still bringing Watchmen spoilers to the world. Or, I guess, to you, if you keep reading. I also discuss some details in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, various Greek myths, and the ending of Alan Moore and J.H. Williams’ Promethea.

On page 21 of Chapter 5, Bernard the news vendor chats with Joey the cab driver, asking, “How’s the Promethean? Still bringing light to the world?” He’s referencing the company she works for, the Promethean Cab Company, and we know this because it’s been mentioned or shown a few times already. On page 10 of Chapter 3, Laurie says about New York on a Saturday night, “Sometimes the cabs just disappear and getting from A to B takes forever.” The technician from the Gordian Knot Lock Company responds, “Incidentally, Lady, I heard what you said about cabs. Why don’t you call my brother’s company, the Promethean?”

In fact, Laurie has already taken a Promethean cab, just a few pages earlier, and one driven by Joey herself. She gets in at the bottom of page 6, and gets out at the top of page 7, where we can see part of the company’s name above the cab’s door. We first glimpse the company’s sign as a tiny detail in panel 2 of page 11, and can see it more clearly in panel 1 of page 22, just enough to be able to read its slogan: “Bringing Light to the World”. In any case, it’s Chapter 5 where the web annotations take notice, and draw our attention to both a classical and a Romantic allusion:

Prometheus was the Greek character who brought fire to mankind and, in some versions, created mankind. For this he was punished by the gods. Mary Shelley subtitled her novel Frankenstein as “The Modern Prometheus”.

The annotations leave it at that, not delving into why Moore might be referencing Prometheus — classical or “modern” — in Watchmen, but hey, that’s what I’m here for. So let’s talk about the mythological level first, beginning with the notion of bringing fire to mankind.

And I Bring You… FIRE!

In Greek mythology, Prometheus was from the race of Titans, powerful entities who were the predecessors to the Olympian gods. In fact, those gods — led by Zeus — battled the Titans for supremacy in a ten-year war called the Titanomachy, and Prometheus was the only Titan who sided with Zeus in the battle. Thus he escaped the punishment of the rest of the Titans, who were exiled into the underworld of Erebus, but his relationship with Zeus soon became fraught as well, due mainly to Prometheus’ loyalty and beneficence to humanity.

There are a few different stories about Prometheus and humanity in the myths, but all of them cast him as a benefactor, and in some cases a creator. Today, his name has become synonymous with the concept of stealing fire from the gods. Even this myth has a few different versions, which may or may not fit together. Edith Hamilton, who says she’s paraphrasing Hesiod, tells a tale in which Prometheus both creates humanity and gives it the gift of fire:

Prometheus, then, took over the task of creation and thought out a way to make mankind superior. He fashioned them in a nobler shape than the animals, upright like the gods; and then he went to heaven, to the sun, where he lit a torch and brought down fire, a protection to men far better than anything else… (Mythology, pg. 48)

Hamilton later characterizes this action as “stealing fire”, but it doesn’t seem like much of a theft — he simply lights a torch from the fire already burning in the sky, and brings it to his creations. There’s no sense of defying anyone’s will in doing so, and in fact Hamilton says in the same paragraph that in this story, the creation of humanity was “delegated by the gods to Prometheus”.

However, elsewhere in Hesiod, Prometheus becomes more of a trickster figure. As gods and humans were deciding how meat should be divided between them, Prometheus served as an arbiter, since he was neither of the race of the gods nor of humans. But Prometheus favored humanity, and thus devised a ruse to sway the decision in its favor. An ox was slaughtered, and Prometheus prepared two portions: one of the ox’s meat concealed by its hide, and another of its bones concealed in its glistening fat. He then invited Zeus to select which he preferred. Because the fatty portion looked larger and richer, Zeus chose it, and was then enraged to discover he’d left the more nutritious meat to humanity. In his anger, Zeus decided to withhold fire from mankind. Classicist and folklorist William Hansen explains the repercussions:

The immediate consequence of this act was to render useless the abundance of meat that men had acquired through Prometheus’s deceit, for without fire men could not convert the flesh into food suitable for human beings. Indeed, without fire men were deprived even of the ability to manufacture utensils and tools, for they could neither fire clay pots nor smelt metals, nor could they employ fire for warmth and light. In short, humans would live no better than animals. (Classical Mythology, pg. 62)

These stories might have happened in sequence — Prometheus creates humanity and grants it fire, then that fire is revoked by Zeus after Prometheus’s trick. On the other hand, stories in mythology often ignored or contradicted each other’s “continuity”, so they may just be opposed or unrelated. In any case, after Zeus’s punishment, Prometheus once again restored fire to humanity by bringing it to humans hidden inside a stalk of giant fennel, whose pith burns slowly and evenly, thus allowing fire to be transported from place to place. Zeus, upon discovering this second trick, chained Prometheus to a rocky crag, and created a giant eagle who feasted daily on the Titan’s perpetually regenerating liver.

In all of these stories, fire is a boon to humanity — a “protection” in Hamilton, and in Hansen both a facilitator of tools and a tool in itself, to convert flesh into food. It is a gift from Prometheus that enables civilization. Aeschylus takes this notion even further, making Prometheus into a culture hero and crediting him with “introducing the arts of shelter-building, agriculture, mathematics, writing, animal domestication, and navigation.” (Classical Mythology A to Z, pg. 95) Nowhere in the Prometheus myth do we see the other side of fire, its danger and destructiveness.

By contrast, while fire shows up often in Watchmen, it’s most often either a harmful force or a sexual symbol, and several of the major characters have important scenes based around fire imagery:

• The Comedian uses his lighter to burn Captain Metropolis’s display at the Crimebusters meeting, and the flames licking upwards are meant to represent both the destruction of Nelson’s intention and the potential nuclear devastation of the world. That same lighter crops up again after the Crimebusters meeting, offering to light Laurel Jane’s cigarette. In addition, we see him using a flamethrower in Vietnam, a sadistic grin on his face.
• Nite Owl II‘s fire symbology alternates between fire-as-destruction and fire-as-passion. He’s installed a flamethrower on the front of Archie, which is first accidentally set off by Laurie, causing destruction that must be extinguished. Later, that same flamethrower ejaculates rapturously above the city, as he and Laurie make love just after rescuing the tenants of a burning building — destructive fire followed by passionate fire. In the aftermath of their lovemaking, he says, “I feel so confident it’s like I’m on fire.”
• Silk Spectre II is a partner in all these fire scenes, and she’s also seen smoking throughout the book — in fact, she sets off the flamethrower hoping that it’s a dash lighter for her cigarette. Her smoking annoys her mother in Chapter 2, illuminates a quasi-sexual afterglow following the alley fight in Chapter 3 and an overtly sexual afterglow at the end of Chapter 7, underscores her confusion on Mars in Chapter 9, and creates a brief moment of intimacy between her teenage self and The Comedian.
• Rorschach finds a different use for a lit cigarette, stabbing one into the eye of a bully in a childhood flashback. He uses flames to attack the police in Chapter 5, becoming the bright-burning tyger of that chapter’s epigraph, and (somewhat related) burns a threatening inmate with hot cooking fat. On an even larger scale, he burns down Gerald Grice’s building with Grice inside. Nearly all of Rorschach’s uses of fire are violent, with the exception of the flames that heat his scissors when he’s shown cutting out his mask, on page 10 of Chapter 6.

There’s no Promethean fire in any of these scenes. While some of these characters may imagine that they’re facilitating civilization, or at least acting as forces for good, they’re not using (or stealing) fire to do so. Even Rorschach burning Grice’s building is an act of punishment, not protection or creation, and his use of fire to heat his scissors is at the human level, not the Promethean level.

Remember, though, that the Promethean Cab Company’s motto references light, not fire, and there are two major characters missing from the list above, each of whom brings light to the world in his own way. Though absent of fire imagery, Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan are the most Promethean characters in the book.

And Turn Instead Towards The…

Adrian Veidt certainly believes himself to be humanity’s benefactor, and in fact the spark hydrant technology he patented is fundamental to the Promethean Cab Company’s business. “Bringing Light to the World” is a strange motto for a taxi service, but it might have an explanation in the fact that these are electric cabs rather than gas-burning vehicles, and thus closer to light than to fire.

For that matter, given Veidt’s fascination with antiquity in general, and with the Gordian Knot in particular, it’s worth asking whether he in fact owns the Gordian Knot Lock Company, and if so, might he also own the Promethean Cab Company as well? There’s no direct evidence of this in the text, though the labyrinthine corporate structure diagram that Dan examines in Chapter 8 suggests that Adrian’s reach extends to many different companies, beyond the ones we know about like Pyramid Deliveries.

In Watchmen‘s world as in ours, it’s quite a superpower to own a mega-corporation with a highly diversified portfolio. For the purposes of his plans, I can see the advantage to Adrian of being able to know where people go, what they receive, how to unlock their houses, and so on. Of course, he still violently kicks open The Comedian’s door, and true to their metaphor, Gordian Knot locks never get picked, only smashed apart by Rorschach.

In any case, Alexander the Great taking violent action to undo a knotty problem inspires Ozymandias to do the same, setting into motion the plan that drives Watchmen‘s plot. There’s a tradition in which Prometheus is the one to smite Zeus’s aching head with an axe, allowing Athena to leap fully grown and fully armed from the cleft in his skull. (Classical Mythology, pg. 118) Surely this is what Adrian believes himself to be doing — splitting the existing order open so that a powerful new wisdom might leap into the world, already whole and complete.

Prometheus’s name means “foresight”, and we can certainly argue that Adrian’s plans require quite a lot of this. Even Doctor Manhattan says so, on page 11 of Chapter 12:

Ozymandias doesn’t predict every outcome, and in fact his response to The Comedian’s unintended discovery of the artists’ island eventually allows the other characters to uncover his plot. Still, as he explains in Chapter 11, he’s been anticipating world events and scheming ways to influence them for decades by the time this happens. In doing so, he becomes a trickster figure like Prometheus, seeking ways to benefit humanity through clever deceptions. Unlike the mythical Titan, he’s achieving his aims not by tricking the gods, but by fooling humanity itself.

When it comes to foresight, though, it’s hard to beat Doctor Manhattan, who doesn’t have to guess what the future holds because he’s already experiencing it. Through this lens, Dr. Manhattan stakes a much stronger claim to Promethean forethought, while Ozymandias begins to look like Prometheus’s unwise brother Epimetheus, whose name means “afterthought”. After all, for all the planning Adrian does, it’s left to Jon to remind him that nothing ever ends.

For that matter, Ozymandias’s claim to the Promethean gift of light(ning) that the cab company’s chariots bring to the world wouldn’t be possible without Dr. Manhattan first synthesizing the lithium that their batteries require. Jon’s gift is truly godlike — the creation of something from nothing, or at least the alchemical transmutation of one form of matter into another — whereas Adrian simply finds a way to systematize it. Even if Adrian might see himself as ascending to a divine mantle through his “salvation” of humanity, his power will always be overshadowed by the titanic capabilities at Jon’s command.

These capabilities create a direct connection between Dr. Manhattan and the Titan Prometheus, but in the skeptical mode of Watchmen, scrutiny degrades the connection a little. Like Prometheus, Jon knows the future… for the most part. Like Prometheus, he uses his supernatural powers to benefit humanity… at least at first. And like Prometheus, he’s inclined to create new life… but from what we know of him, we might well doubt that this life would compare to the complexity and grandeur of humanity. Jon tends to prefer simpler constructs — the hydrogen atom, the perfect checkerboard grid of gold molecules. He tires of being caught in the tangle of our lives. Part of the horror inherent in his character is the question, “What if our benevolent god became indifferent to us? And what if it was our fault?”

These questions don’t come up in the Prometheus myth — only the notion that he cares for us, and is punished for that. Just as Zeus’s eagle tears apart Prometheus’s liver, so does Adrian’s machine take Jon to pieces once again, along with the sacrificial Bubastis. And just as Prometheus’s liver always regrows, so does Jon reconstitute himself, and significantly, it’s at this moment that Moore, Gibbons, and Higgins show Doctor Manhattan explicitly embodying the cab company’s motto:

Adrian doesn’t get to finish his sentence, but we know the word that’s coming next, and both the coloring and the heavy-inked shadows finish it for us. Doctor Manhattan always glows a little, but in his giant form he blazes fiercely, casting harsh shadows on this page and the next. Bringing light to the world.

And then he shrinks down again, and the coloring changes to dark blue and gray hues again. Adrian turns on his bank of televisions, and the incoming news transfers the glow to him, until he is illuminated in a clear, round spotlight at his moment of triumph:

As he stands illuminated before the painting of Alexander and the Gordian Knot, it seems that it is the trickster Ozymandias after all who has brought the light, but in the very next panel that light seems to be gone. Everyone is in muted blues and purples once more. We see Dan and Laurie strangely lit near the pool a few pages later, their shadows casting up huge behind them like the graffiti of embracing figures that has appeared throughout the book. Then there’s one last, looming shadow, cast not by Doctor Manhattan but perhaps by the glow of Ozymandias’s orrery, a bright light behind him as the Doctor vanishes, off to create some new life.

And Pour a Torrent of Light

And that brings us to the other reference cited in the annotations: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Mary Shelley’s novel is, as literary critic Charlotte Gordon asserts, “the story of what happens after the act of creation.” (Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, pg. xv) To the extent that Watchmen follows in its footsteps, the creation in question is the creation of the superhero, both at the “costumed adventurer” stage of Hooded Justice and Nite Owl I, and at the godlike level of Dr. Manhattan. Certainly the regretful tone of passages in Under The Hood resonates with the words of Dr. Frankenstein, who laments:

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. (pg. 41)

Aspiring to become greater than their natures will allow is what many of the Watchmen characters do when they don their superheroic identities, and they are often brought down by the limitations they try to transcend.

Still, Frankenstein’s bitter regret at gaining knowledge seems to have more in common with Pandora (or for that matter, Eve) than Prometheus, so what makes Frankenstein “the modern Prometheus”? We may get a hint in the language he uses for the crucial scientific discovery that allows him to bestow animation upon lifeless matter. He describes the epiphany: “from the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon me…” (pg. 40). He compares himself to a buried man who finds “a passage to life aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual, light.” (pg. 41) He says, “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” (pg. 42)

But beyond all these metaphors about bringing light to the world, Frankenstein is Promethean simply in his ability to create life, just as Prometheus does in the myths recounted by Hamilton. And in his bringing light to the world through reanimating dead matter, he too is punished — not by being chained to a rock and tortured by a bird, but by having everyone he cares about systematically stripped away from him at the hands of his creation.

The closest analogue to Victor Frankenstein in Watchmen is, once again, Ozymandias, who directs the creation of a monstrous creature, stitched together by geneticists and implanted with a human brain. The text of Watchmen is a little unclear about whether the creature is in fact given life, but we know Adrian is capable of creating new life forms — the evidence walks around beside him in the shape of Bubastis. Like Frankenstein’s creature, Ozymandias’s monster causes numerous deaths. The difference is that, unlike Frankenstein, Veidt absolutely intends for those deaths to occur.

What punishment is there for this costumed Prometheus? We know he has bad dreams, but beyond that, all we see after the creature’s catastrophic arrival is a world united, if tenuously. We are merely left to imagine what negative consequences might later flow from his actions. Where Frankenstein concerns itself with what happens after the act of creation, Watchmen ends shortly after the creation of its monster. The other Promethean character in the book, Dr. Manhattan, also announces an intention to create human life, but the book ends before that act of creation can even begin. What happens after that act? Will he be punished? Will Ozymandias? We can only speculate.

Even without knowing what happens beyond the ending, we may take one thing more from Shelley’s Frankenstein, because it isn’t just the story of a tormented creator. It is the story of a tormented creation as well, and the source of that creature’s pain is the meaninglessness of its existence in the absence of a benevolent creator. In this, it can find common ground with many Watchmen characters.

Just as the creature rages at the lack of love in its universe, so does Walter Kovacs make himself into a monster as a response to a hostile mother, a hostile world. Just as the creature reacts in horror to its own existence, so does Milton Glass experience “a feeling of intense and crushing religious terror” at the notion that Jon Osterman, his rather hapless former employee, has become an increasingly apathetic American God. Just as the creature at last finds pleasure in evil deeds, exacting revenge upon his own cowardly god piece by piece, so does The Comedian play along with the joke, through murder, rape, and terror. He never said it was a good joke.

Finally, I probably shouldn’t write a whole Watchmen/Promethean post without mentioning that Alan Moore went on to create a major — and quite personal — character called Promethea. This was in the ABC line of comics he created for Image in 1999, so it’s very doubtful indeed that he had her in mind while writing the Promethean Cab Company into Watchmen, but a word or two about her might still draw a line between the works.

Despite the character’s name, she doesn’t evince many clear connections to the Prometheus of myth, though an awesome splash page in the first issue has our heroine shouting, “I bring you FIRE!” Instead, Moore is up to something in this series much bigger than Greek myth. Promethea is imagination personified, and therefore encompasses all myths along with all other fictions, as well as creativity at any level. As the book goes along, Moore and artist J.H. Williams dazzle us with all kinds of comics fireworks, and if the bulk of the series is a bit more of a lecture than a story, they give us lots of treats to wash the medicine down.

What makes Promethea personal is that she embodies Moore’s own beliefs about magic and creativity. Through her, he gives us multiple tours of the symbology of magic, a belief system to which Moore converted (so the story goes) on his fortieth birthday in 1993. He explicitly draws the connections between magic and imagination, making creativity into a kind of superpower, or perhaps more accurately a kind of goddess. At the climax of the series, Promethea causes an apocalypse… in the R.E.M. sense. She allows all of humanity to see beyond the illusion of time, to understand how story and self meld, to transcend our perceptions of separateness in time and space.

Ozymandias brings his light to humanity through a trick, but Doctor Manhattan, in his timeless state, can see how that trick will one day stand as just another colossal wreck in the desert. Promethea, on the other hand, changes humanity forever. Life goes on after her revelation, but nothing will ever be the same again. Where Ozymandias tried to bring light, she brings enlightenment to the world.

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