Tag: superhero Page 1 of 6

Behold, if you read this post, you shall be stricken with Watchmen spoilers, and also analysis of the biblical book of Job from a secular perspective, if you view that sort of thing as an affliction.

A few posts ago, I tried to catalog all the symmetries I could find in Watchmen, but as we pass into Chapter 7, I realize I missed a big one: the structure of the book itself. As the web annotations document, each issue of the comic has a focus, and that focus is either advancing the plot or exploring a character. Now, it’s hardly cut and dried — all the chapters do both — but I think we can fairly say that some chapters delve more deeply into a character than others. Stepping back, when we look at how those jobs are divided up, a symmetry reveals itself:

Issue	Focus
1	Plot
2	Character: The Comedian
3	Plot
4	Character: Dr. Manhattan
5	Plot
6	Character: Rorschach
7	Character: Nite Owl II
8	Plot
9	Character: Silk Spectre II
10	Plot
11	Character: Ozymandias
12	Plot

In other words, rather than simply alternating between plot focus and character focus, the book reflects along an axis between Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, so that two character chapters are adjacent, and plot chapters bookend the story. We’ve now crossed that axis, and are opening Chapter 7, “A Brother To Dragons”, which explores Nite Owl II. As always, the chapter title derives from its epigraph, in this case a quotation from the biblical book of Job:

There’s quite a bit to unpack here, even before we get to the somewhat startling choice of linking Dan Dreiberg with Job. Let’s start with the language.

Set Your Words in Order Before Me

Moore quotes the King James Version (KJV) of The Bible, and its imagery of dragons and owls feels rich with mythological weight, tying in well with the classical allusion and illustration that appears on the next page, Dan’s article “Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas.” However, I’ve defaulted in this project to using the English Standard Version (ESV), and scripture citations in this post will come from that translation unless otherwise specified. The ESV renders this epigraph quite differently:

I am a brother of jackals
and a companion of ostriches.
My skin turns black and falls from me,
and my bones burn with heat.

It turns out that Job is quite a challenge to translators. As the American-Israeli bible scholar Edward L. Greenstein details in Job: A New Translation, there are multiple layers that make the text difficult to interpret: its highly poetic vocabulary, its culturally referential use of words, its idiosyncratic idioms with technical meanings, and even the condition of the text itself, which was originally circulated among an elite group, had only a few copies in existence, and may have sometimes gotten its papyrus sheets shuffled. Subsequent scribes and scholars have all strained to make sense of the original Hebrew, and “Specialists tend to agree that the ancient translators often resorted to guesswork, to the substitution of words they knew for words they did not, and to loose paraphrase.” (pg. xxviii – xxxi)

In the case of the epigraph text, the KJV is an outlier in how it translates the Hebrew citations of animals in this verse. Most versions substitute “jackals” for “dragons”, with the occasional “serpents”, “snakes”, or “monsters”. “Owls” enjoys a bit more popularity, but is still a minority choice, with most translators using “ostriches” or “daughters of the ostrich.”

How can there be this much slippage between very different beasts? Well, it goes back to the rather obscure Hebrew. The sense of the passage follows from the previous line, “I stand up in the assembly and cry for help.” The idea is that Job’s mournful cries connect him with other animals that make such sounds, jackals and ostriches being the consensus choice, though there is room to render them otherwise.

All that observed, within the Watchmen context, it still makes the most sense to just stick with the KJV images, since Moore and Gibbons find various ways to evoke them in the chapter. As usual, the authors are quite ingenious at creating moments for the epigraph to resonate. Let’s break it down a little:

I am a brother to dragons,

• The title appears under a 3-panel-wide image of Archie “breathing fire”
• That fire-breath happens again on page 27, while Archie is aloft
• Rorschach also spews flame, as we saw in Chapters 5 and 6, and Rorschach is clearly very present in Dan’s mind throughout the chapter, in a way that suggests a brotherly relationship
• The idea of brotherhood comes up for Dan both in connection to Rorschach (“I feel we have certain obligations to our fraternity.”, pg. 28) and to Hollis (“like part of a brotherhood or something…”, pg. 8)
• Both dragons and owls align with Dan’s passion for flight, as well as for mythology
• Laurie calls it “knights-in-armor fantasy stuff” (pg. 7), a descriptor that very much includes dragons
• “Archie breathes smoke as well as fire” (pg. 22) — and in fact does both on page 27, creating a smokescreen and then gouting flame from within it
• Laurie’s smoking is another kind of fire-breathing, themed initially as an accidental firestarter and finally as the fire’s denouement

and a companion to owls.

• Dan’s friendship with Hollis is obviously companionship to a (Nite) Owl
• The Twilight Lady also calls herself a “Night Bird” in her signed picture (pg. 5), and while Dan isn’t exactly her companion, he is also reluctant to dispose of the souvenir
• As Dan explains, his ship Archimedes is named after Merlin’s pet owl in Disney’s The Sword In The Stone (pg. 7)
• Owls are also his intellectual companions, as we see in his writing for ornithological journals

My skin is black upon me,

• Archie is covered with soot after the fire is extinguished — an exterior blackening
• Laurie asks for her coffee “black as the devil” (pg. 11), and it steams up in front of them while they watch TV, continuing the imagery of smoke and mist
• “During Hiroshima Week, I read an article in Time magazine, with pictures: kids’ bodies, skin burned black.” (pg. 12)
• In Dan’s dream, he pulls the black skintight costume off the Twilight Lady
• The tenement fire victims pointedly include very dark-skinned Black people

and my bones are burned with heat.

• All the fiery dragon imagery recalls this line as well — being a companion to dragons makes for a close affiliation with burning and heat
• Dan burns with another kind of heat in this chapter, desiring Laurie more and more until they consummate their relationship in a blast of fire
• “It’s just disturbing that, faced with such heat, people remain so cool” (pg. 12)
• The skeletal couple in the nuclear blast literally have their bones burned with heat
• The tenement fire victims are also burned with heat
• Not only do fire images recur (Archie’s flame, nuclear blasts, the burning tenement), but Dan also invokes hell multiple times throughout the chapter
• “I feel so confident it’s like I’m on fire.” … “I didn’t know you could smolder.” (pg. 28)

Now, all this flashy mythology isn’t what’s happening in Job at all — as I mentioned above, this section in the Bible story has more to do with Job’s mournful wailing and physical afflictions. For those unfamiliar with the Job story, let’s sketch out a very high-level overview. For what it’s worth, I’m not a believer, so this won’t be the most reverent summary, but it will align to the text.

In true folk tale fashion, the book begins, “There was a man in the land of Uz”, and goes on to describe Job, who is wealthy, respected, pious, and blessed with a large family. High above, the Satan (in Hebrew “adversary” or “accuser”) taunts God with the claim that Job is only faithful because he is fortunate. God takes the bet, and allows the Satan to lay waste to Job’s “possessions”, which means not only his numerous livestock but also all his servants and all ten of his children — they’re all gathered for a party when the house falls in on them and kills them.

Job stays faithful (“The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away” 1:21), but the Satan continues to goad God, and another round ensues, in which Job’s health is afflicted, and he ends up on a trash heap, scraping at his sores with a shard of pottery. Still he remains faithful, but with no explanation for why such calamities have befallen him, and no relief from them either. Three of his friends show up, and at first just sit with him silently, but then sanctimoniously lecture him after Job starts lamenting the day of his birth.

They insist that he must have sinned badly to be so punished, which we and Job know is not true, but they have no other way to explain to themselves what is happening to Job — he must have deserved it. They even go so far as to start inventing sins Job must have committed. Job, meanwhile, keeps insisting on his innocence and demanding an audience with God, a kind of trial where his alleged sins can be enumerated and he can defend himself.

William Blake – Job Rebuked By His Friends

After several rounds of arguments between Job and this trio, a fifth voice pipes up: the younger man Elihu. Elihu berates both the friends and Job, but overall his arguments are not radically different from the trio’s. He does, however, add another dimension, suggesting that because God is unquestionably good, Job’s suffering must have a benevolent purpose that mortals are too limited in their perspective to understand, and that this purpose may involve teaching lessons. He also berates Job for complaining, and for demanding an explanation from God, saying that he suffers in part to be purified of these sins. (Though of course these so-called sins wouldn’t be occurring had Job not been afflicted with outrageous misfortune in the first place.)

Finally, God himself steps on stage, speaking to Job “out of the whirlwind”, but not for the reckoning of justice that Job craves. Instead, he spends several chapters cataloging all the wonders of the world and the universe, while periodically directing sarcastic zingers at Job, like so:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements — surely you know! (38:4)

God goes on like this for four chapters, devoting long descriptions to enormous creatures like Behemoth (a land beast) and Leviathan (a sea beast), constantly heckling Job by pointing out his lack of power over these monsters. For instance, with regard to Leviathan: “Will he make many pleas to you? Will he speak to you with soft words? Will he make a covenant with you to take him for your servant forever? Will you play with him as with a bird, or will you put him on a leash for your girls?” (41:3-5) This last question is particularly harsh, given that Job’s girls are dead.

Finally, Job abases himself completely to God, saying, “I have uttered what I did not understand… therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (42:3-6) God then rebukes Job’s friends, and Job successfully intercedes for them so that they may escape punishment. Finally, God “restores” Job’s fortunes, giving him twice as many animals as before, and ten new children — not that new children can replace dead children.

This is obviously a great simplification of a book so complex and nuanced that millennia of scholars have argued over it, but even this bare framework exposes moral questions that can be brought to bear on Watchmen, as it has chosen to directly invoke this particularly dramatic and fraught part of the Bible.

Him Who is Righteous and Mighty

In his bestseller When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner analyzes the Job story, and identifies a trio of beliefs that cannot all remain standing in the face of Job’s suffering:

God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world. Nothing happens without His willing it.

God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.

Job is a good person. (pg. 36)

As Kushner points out, when Job suffers, we can only affirm any two of these statements by denying the third. The friends are ready to stop believing in #3, arguing that Job must not be a good person after all. Job is ready to reject #2, arguing that God is in fact unjust, though the way he rejects it transforms over the course of the book. At first he simply accuses God of unfairness, but by the end he believes that God transcends altogether mortal concepts of justice and fairness, that we are too limited in our understanding to comprehend the cosmic scale of goodness upon which God works. (Kushner himself rejects #1, and argues that the author of Job does too, but that’s a path I won’t try to tread here.)

When God addresses Job with a blizzard of rhetorical questions about how the universe works, he amplifies points made earlier by Elihu, who sometimes rattles off a similar series of questions, for instance:

Do you know how God lays his command upon [his works]
and causes the lightning of his cloud to shine?
Do you know the balancings of the clouds,
the wondrous works of him who is perfect in knowledge[?] (37:15-16)

The essential argument here is: who are you to question me, when I have so much power? When the text hammers over and over at God’s extreme capabilities, we begin to understand that in this moral calculus, power is standing in for fairness. Might makes right, and Kushner’s proposition #1 looms so large that it swallows #2 — as Job comes to believe, we simply cannot judge such a powerful being on our own terms. God is by definition righteous, even if his actions are well outside our understanding of good and justice, and all the pain he brings is meant to help on a cosmic scale we cannot see.

Ozymandias, it seems to me, would make all the same arguments about himself. Not that he would claim to be all-powerful, exactly, but he is exercising power on a level beyond any of the other characters besides Jon. Neither is he all-knowing, but he does believe that he sees a greater perspective than everyone else. Clearly, Rorschach is not the only one in this book who has concluded that God is absent, and that in this absence it is the strong who must decide what is just.

There is no Satan to goad Adrian into testing his beliefs by inflicting suffering and death upon others — that incitement comes entirely from within him. When it comes to slaughter, in fact, Adrian quite outdoes the Satan in Job’s story. Rather than causing the killings of some servants, ten children, and thousands of animals, Adrian’s plan kills millions of New Yorkers, with no differentiation between the wicked and the honorable. Dan speaks in a rather Jobean mode when he wonders how anyone could tell if the world’s smartest man has gone crazy.

And yet, while Adrian might believe in his own godlike perspective and power, we know better, especially when we witness his interactions with Dr. Manhattan. His experiment to eliminate Jon with another intrinsic field subtractor fails (and he sacrifices his majestic pet for nothing), and his bid for reassurance about whether “it all worked out in the end” draws a gently scornful reply. Doctor Manhattan himself is a walking refutation of the notion that transcendent power automatically implies righteousness, as he’s more of the Nietzschean god, indifferent or distant to human affairs.

The book of Job aims to teach or convince us that God’s power is proof of his goodness. The superhero genre, on the other hand, rests on the foundation that power is not automatically equivalent to justice, but rather that using power in the service of justice is the fundamental choice of the hero. These heroes — and their villains — are not above our judgement in the way that Job’s God wants to be. Rather, we judge them precisely for how they use their power, not for the sheer fact of power itself. In this, I would argue that superheroes (speaking generically) represent a better moral example than Job’s mocking God.

Of course, Watchmen sets out to deconstruct superheroes, so it presents two different perversions of the “using power for justice” foundation. The first is that its only truly invincible figure has become detached from the concept of justice, and in fact the book strongly implies that this detachment is a result of extreme power.

The second is that powerful characters differ in their definitions of justice, and in how they weigh the concept against other moral goods. Our characters are mighty enough to cause huge events to happen. Does this power exempt them from being judged by us? Watchmen‘s answer seems to be a pretty clear HELL NO.

The Pinions and Plumage of Love

In chapter 1 of Job, the Satan observes that God acts as Job’s protector: “Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side?” (1:9-10) In response, God withdraws his protection, and one of the book’s major lessons is that personal goodness does not entitle you to divine protection. God isn’t, as Kushner puts it, “a kind of cosmic vending machine” (pg. 40) that spits out rewards in exchange for good behavior. Instead, blessings are to be viewed as a gift from God, one that may be withdrawn at any moment based on the deity’s own inscrutable designs.

This moral framework, if we can even call it that, again differs greatly from the ethos of the superhero, who may be faced with hard choices, but who is always trying to protect the innocent and punish the guilty, usually in that order. The trope of protection appears elsewhere in Job, including one passage that jumped out at me because, at least in the English Standard Version, it includes the word “watchman”. In chapter 27, Job declares, “Let my enemy be as the wicked” (27:7), and from the context it’s clear that he means the trio of his slanderous would-be comforters. From there, he rattles off one of the book’s many conventional catalogs of bad things that happen to bad people, including the following:

[The wicked man] builds his house like a moth’s,
like a booth that a watchman makes.
He goes to bed rich, but will do so no more;
he opens his eyes, and his wealth is gone. (27:18-19)

In Job: An Introduction and Commentary, Francis I. Andersen explains this “booth” as “the temporary shelter erected by a watchman in the fields” (pg. 238), in other words a ramshackle structure built for harvest time, to provide a little shade for someone whose job it is to make sure that the yield of the crop isn’t stolen. This temporary structure is like the moth’s cocoon — made for a brief purpose and later destroyed, just as Job claims (or hopes) the houses of the wicked will be destroyed.

Moore, as we’ve established, is using the KJV, which doesn’t employ the word “watchman” here, rendering it instead as “keeper”, but it’s worth noting that at least in this part of Job, the protector has very little protection himself, and is seemingly not valued highly, just as is true of the characters in Watchmen sidelined by the Keene Act.

Dan Dreiberg is one of these characters, brought low despite having the best intentions and trying to do good in his world. When Laurie asks Dan what got him into the adventuring business, he at first self-deprecates (“I was rich, bored…”) but eventually lands on his true reason: “Hollis was my hero.” (pg. 8) Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, was one of those rare costumed vigilantes for whom the superhero life was “a goodness thing.” Dan follows that same flight path, fighting crime until his services are rejected by his society.

What are we to make of invoking Job in Dan’s chapter? Is he a Job figure? As we’ve established, he’s someone inherently moral who is cast aside, not by a supernatural manipulator, but just by the changing culture of his time. When the book begins, he has very nearly (but not quite!) given up all things Nite Owl in despair, sinking into endless cycles of nostalgia, not even writing ornithological articles for months. But, like Job, he is uplifted and redeemed by the story’s end. He solves the mystery, survives the apocalypse, and gets the girl. Rorschach accuses him of quitting, but in fact he never does throw away all the “engagement presents,” (pg. 7) instead bringing them out into glory again as he regains his mantle.

So no, Dan doesn’t endure horrific suffering anywhere near the scale of Job, but he does follow a similar, albeit greatly reduced, arc of loss and redemption. He also shares with Job a sense of disappointment in some of the companions he hoped would uplift him. He tells Laurie that he wishes the Crimebusters wouldn’t have fallen apart, so that he could have been part of “a fellowship of legendary beings.” (pg. 8) Instead, he is ignored and frightened (by Doctor Manhattan), mocked and disdained (by The Comedian), and ultimately beaten and betrayed (by Ozymandias). And yet, as the epigraph foregrounds for us, Dan is also the book’s greatest example of brotherhood and companionship.

Job is structured around a central character — first we see him “from above” and then his dilemma is outlined in broad terms. From there, we see his relationships strain and fray as his friends turn on him, until the group of them are upbraided by an external party, and then God comes in to scold everyone, after which our hero is restored and we pull back again to the “from above” POV. The book chronicles the breakdown of his bonds to both God and his friends, until reinstating them at the end. Prior to that, where Job invokes brotherhood and companionship, it is to the wailing animals, not to the deity or the humans who have collectively failed him.

Watchmen has no such central axis — instead its relationships are more like a cloud or web, with stronger or weaker interlinks binding a group of single points. And there are plenty of broken bonds. But of them all, it is Dan who creates or affirms personal connections. Even as his ties to many of the would-be Crimebusters are broken, he seeks to reinforce the bonds that remain. Aside from his strong allegiance to Hollis, established from the very beginning, this chapter shows us his blossoming romantic love for Laurie, and ends with him pledging to help Rorschach, sustaining and strengthening that partnership in the name of the superhero “fraternity”.

In fact, there’s a moment of parallelism in these two attachments — Dan’s reluctance to release Laurie’s hand on page 6 of Chapter 7 foreshadows Rorschach gripping Dan’s hand on page 11 of Chapter 10. Both of these moments happen inside the environment Dan created — the Owlship. Unlike Job’s friends, Dan comes to Rorschach’s aid unconditionally and without judgment. Rorschach sees this and acknowledges it eventually.

In the final chapter of Job, he steps up to help his friends, despite having been treated so shabbily by them, thus restoring not only his relationship to God, but his mortal friendships as well. At the close of the book, Job becomes a symbol for brotherhood and companionship too, and has that trait in common with Dan.

In his suffering and redemption, in his brotherhood and companionship, we can see Nite Owl II as a distorted reflection of Job, in a world without the divine authority that unquestionably exists in Bible stories. So if Dan is a small-scale Job figure, does Watchmen have a small-scale God figure?

I would argue that it has several. The obvious one, of course, is Doctor Manhattan, who shares God’s ability to perform miracles. The difference is, Jon has no interest in performing those miracles on behalf of humanity. He watches impassively while The Comedian shoots his pregnant lover, and until Laurie can convince him otherwise, is more than happy to build sand castles on Mars while the humans of Earth destroy each other. Even when he finally arrives at the story’s climax, his behavior is characterized by preventing change rather than causing it.

The supernatural intercession in human affairs comes instead from Ozymandias. In fact, if the creation and command of Behemoth and Leviathan is God’s closing argument for why his moral authority must be respected, then Ozymandias has a counter-argument. He too created a “monstrous animal” as the signifier of his power, at least to the other characters, if not to the world at large.

And yet, Ozymandias is not the only one to create a titanic creature, for Archimedes partakes of both Behemoth and Leviathan, with a good dose of archangel thrown in, as he is at home both in the sky and beneath the waves. Besides Adrian, Dan is the other major creator in the book, and unlike Job, he does control his enormous creation, at least until the power of nature overcomes it.

When the tenement is burning, one of its residents cries out, echoing Job: “Oh God, please save us! We ain’t done anything!” (pg. 23) And in response to this prayer, who emerges? Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II, borne aloft by the great beast he has made. A child asks, “Mom? That guy in the space rocket, is that Jesus?” And while God and Jesus are absent from Watchmen, there are saviors present at that moment, and one of them is Daniel Dreiberg, the brother to dragons and companion to owls.

Previous Entry: New York Stories

Those who do not spoil themselves by reading Watchmen will have Watchmen spoiled for them by this post.

Some of these Bestiary entries deal with fairly contained topics — say, a movie, or an opera, or a rock and roll song. Then there are topics like this one. As we step into Chapter 6 of the web annotations, we’re immediately greeted with the source of this chapter’s title quotation and epigraph, which the annotations summarize as: “Nietzsche.”

Nietzsche is a huge topic! Entire books, indeed entire shelves of books, entire careers, have been devoted to exploring the life, philosophies, and works of Friedrich Nietzsche, and although I do my research for each of these entries, I cannot possibly claim to be any kind of authority on such a vast domain of knowledge. So from the very start, I want to be upfront about what I know and what I don’t know. I read three books to prepare for this post:

• Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche
• Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by Walter Kaufmann
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also by Nietzsche

I also watched my fair share of YouTube videos, read some encyclopedia entries, short essays, and online resources, brushed up on Philosophy 101, and spent a little time lurking on the Nietzsche subreddit. In the process, I’ve become fairly well acquainted with the broad outlines of Nietzsche’s life and the major themes of his work, but I’m certainly no expert. I generally give these posts the tone of a lecture (albeit a fun one, I hope), and this post will be no different, but the nature of this Watchmen project leads me to be a dilettante on its subjects, and I’m really a dilettante on this one. I just felt like I should make that very clear at the outset.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s start with the broad outlines of Nietzsche’s life, and look at how his works and ideas have taken on a life of their own since his death. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor. His father’s profession matters, because Nietzsche spent most of his life railing against Christianity, in case that wasn’t clear from Kaufmann labeling him an “Antichrist”. He was a bit of a prodigy, admitted to the prestigious Pforta grammar school as a child, and becoming at age 24 the youngest ever professor of classical philology at the University of Basel. After encountering the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche began incorporating more and more philosophy into his philological lectures.

Unfortunately, he also suffered from ill health starting in early adulthood as well. Just 3 years into his professorship, he took his first leave of absence for health concerns, and in 1879, at 35 years old, he retired on a pension from the university due to sickness. However, the next ten years would find him extraordinarily productive as a writer. He had published various books, lectures, and maxims during his years in academia, but from 1879 to 1889 he produced his greatest works: The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On The Genealogy of Morals, and Twilight of the Idols. In 1889, he suffered a mental collapse, and spent the rest of his life hopelessly insane, dying in 1900. Deborah Hayden and others have argued convincingly that both Nietzsche’s ongoing ill-health and his eventual madness were the result of an early and untreated infection with syphilis.

We call Nietzsche a philosopher, but his work can take forms that don’t exactly feel like philosophical tracts. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is in fact a sort of story, about a prophet who comes down from the mountains (then goes back up, then down again, several times), has various encounters with people (often allegorically framed), and declaims his thoughts through the entire thing. As J. Keeping points out in Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test:

Zarathustra resembles an epic poem as much as it does a philosophical treatise. Nietzsche’s contemporaries were used to the dry disseminations of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel and had no idea what to think of it… The language is florid and evocative; to many readers, it sounds like the Bible. (pg. 59)

Nietzsche also writes actual poetry, and is drawn to what scholars tend to call “aphorisms” — brief-to-middling discourses that can be angry, funny, rambling, pointed, or any number of other moods and approaches.

These styles, elliptical and sometimes obscure, exaggerated, or self-contradictory, lend themselves to varied interpretations. Add to this the fact that his poetic German offers a wide range of translation options, and that these translations can often differ from each other dramatically, as we’ll see later in this post. These traits would work much to the detriment of understanding Nietzsche after his insanity and death, when his sister took possession of his works and estate.

According to Kaufmann, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took on the German nationalist and antisemitic views of her husband (who committed suicide after the failure of their eugenicist Nueva Germania colony in Paraguay), and edited Nietzsche’s works in accordance with her prejudices. Consequently, Nietzsche came to be identified with what became the Nazi Party, and the Nazis for their part cherry-picked his philosophies to underpin their racist, autocratic, and imperialistic Reich.

Nietzsche, meanwhile, had frequently proclaimed himself an implacable enemy of State power, and a devoted “anti-anti-Semite.” (Kaufmann pg. 44. I’m using the modern styling of antisemite and antisemitism except when quoting sources that use the old styling.) It wasn’t until the 1950s that Kaufmann and other scholars rehabilitated Nietzsche’s image, placing him “in the grand tradition of Western thought” (pg. xxi) and leading the Nietzsche renaissance that allowed him by 1986 to be quoted uncontroversially in a literary comic book.

The Abyss Also Gazes

Which brings us back to Chapter 6 of Watchmen. This issue focuses entirely on Rorschach, framing his biography through interviews with a prison psychologist, along with present-day scenes of the psychologist at home and Rorschach interacting with the other prisoners. The chapter is called “The Abyss Gazes Also”, and ends with this epigraph:

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster,
and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

That quote comes from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil, specifically a section called “Maxims and Interludes”. BG+E as a whole consists of 296 aphorisms (and a little poem at the end), most of which range from a half-page to several pages. However, the aphorisms in the “Maxims” section are much shorter, generally just a sentence or two. In this way, they’re reminiscent of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” — a set of pithy thoughts encased in a more discursive work. Similarly, Nietzsche’s desire to transcend binaries with a title like Beyond Good and Evil brings to mind Blake’s joy in the tension of opposites, his desire to marry heaven to hell.

Unlike Blake’s work, though, Nietzsche only comes to us in English through translation, and as I mentioned, those translations can change the meaning of a passage pretty dramatically. This aphorism is a case in point. The translation I read, by R.J. Hollingdale, rendered it as follows:

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. (pg. 102)

There’s no doubt that the Watchmen translation is more poetic, with its Biblical “ye” and its Yoda-esque “Battle not”. “The Abyss Gazes Also” is surely a more evocative chapter title than “The Abyss Also Gazes”. And yet, there are significant differences in meaning here that make the more poetic version feel also like more of a disservice to Nietzsche.

Watchmen‘s version exhorts us to “battle not with monsters”, warning of the consequences that the battle could bring. But Nietzsche’s core philosophies involve exercising power and overcoming one’s own limitations — he wants us to battle our monsters! Sure, he has some advice about what to watch out for when doing so, but he would not be on board with the forbidding “battle not”.

Similarly, in the abyss sentence, the “if” of Watchmen‘s translation stands in contrast to the “when” of Hollingdale’s, as well as Hollingdale’s addition of “long”. For the Nietzschean, it is not a matter of whether we gaze into the abyss — it cannot be avoided forever. Eventually, we all find ourselves gazing into it, and when that gaze lingers, the darkness we see there touches the darkness in ourselves.

What is that abyss? Like many things in Nietzsche, it’s open to interpretation. For Malcolm Long, the abyss seems to be Rorschach himself. Long’s story provides the most straightforward context for this chapter’s epigraph, as he seems both to battle Rorschach as a monster, and to gaze into him as an abyss. That abyss gazes back, as the chapter explicitly calls out. On the very first page, Long writes about Rorschach, “I could stare at him for hours… except that he stares back, which I find uncomfortable.” And again, at the top of page two: “I just wish he wouldn’t stare at me like that,” just above the chapter title, bold black capital letters on a white background.

“No problem is beyond the grasp of a good psychoanalyst,” Long writes to himself in his notes, and thus he sets himself in opposition to Rorschach. He sees Rorschach as the monster that has taken over the innocent Walter, and he hopes to banish the former, thereby saving the latter. Naturally, he opposes Rorschach’s self-identification, insisting on calling him Walter, a name that Rorschach might call his deadname, were such modern parlance available to him.

That dichotomy plays out throughout the chapter. Gloria says “Rorschach,” and Malcolm corrects her: “Not Rorschach. Walter Kovacs. Rorschach’s an unhealthy fantasy personality.” Rorschach himself battles back against the deadnaming: “You keep calling me Walter. I don’t like you.” And indeed, as Long learns more about Rorschach’s life, and about Rorschach’s behavior in the prison, the distinction between Walter and Rorschach becomes no longer quite so, well, black and white. In writing about the cooking fat attack, he catches himself: “He’s getting worse. So am I. Just read back what I’ve written above. The sixth line down should read, ‘Kovacs spoke to the other inmates.’ Kovacs. Not Rorschach.” We also see his diction start to slip just a little — “Just read back” rather than “I just read back” — edging slightly into Rorschach’s own terse, clipped mode of speech.

Long’s slippage continues the next day: “Alright, Ror… Alright, Walter…”, and moments later Rorschach himself acknowledges that at one point in his history, the distinction wasn’t so clear for him either, that he was “Kovacs pretending to be Rorschach.” He speaks of Kovacs in the past tense: “All Kovacs ever was: man in a costume.” And Malcolm comes to see it the same way, writing of “what turned him into Rorschach.” The next day, Long’s resistance has faded. “Hello, Rorschach,” he says. During their session that day, Rorschach makes explicit the moment of his own metamorphosis: “It was Kovacs who said ‘Mother’ then, muffled under latex. It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again.”

Rorschach’s story devastates Long, and in Long’s notes from that night, he sounds more Rorschach-like than ever: “Ignored him. Bought paper.” He looks at the blots and, like Rorschach, sees gore. Then that gore slips into emptiness. Malcolm Long has been transformed.

Has he, though, become a monster? He’s certainly become more like Rorschach, and not just in his mode of writing. In Chapter 11, he heads towards Joey and Aline’s fight. His words to Gloria — “It’s the world… I can’t run from it” — echo what Rorschach tells him in Chapter 6: “We do not do this thing because it is permitted. We do it because we have to. We do it because we are compelled.”

The question, then, turns on whether Rorschach himself is a monster, and this chapter gives us plenty of material to consider on that point. I would argue that while the Malcolm Long reading of the epigraph is the most easily available, Nietzsche’s words apply as much or more to Rorschach himself, because this chapter is as much about Rorschach’s transformation as Long’s.

In his childhood flashbacks, we see the experiences that guided Walter Kovacs’s decision to battle with what he saw as monsters: his teenaged bullies, “scum” like the murderer of Kitty Genovese, organized crime bosses. He battled those monsters, but he did not become them. From the perspective of later Rorschach, that version of the battle was “naive” and “soft”. However, even in these early days there is an exception: when he stabs the bully’s eye with a lit cigarette, he has escalated well beyond anything that was being done to him, though there were certainly threats in the air at that moment that could have turned into more.

That moment of fiery wrath foreshadows the inferno that will consume Gerald Grice. Here is the ultimate monster with whom Kovacs does battle in this chapter, and here is where he becomes Rorschach. Kovacs has promised Blaire Roche’s parents that he will return her unharmed, but when he sees (what he believes to be) her bones chewed by dogs, that promise cannot be kept, and that impossibility is so intolerable that Kovacs himself must be banished, replaced by Rorschach. Rorschach, who believes that there is good, and there is evil, and evil must be punished, sets about to punish the evil that he has witnessed here, first by murdering the dogs, and then by giving Grice the grisly choice of dying in a fire or sawing his own arm off.

His story ends with a long gaze into flames and the darkness he feels all about him — the “dark planet” beneath him, the “cold suffocating dark” of the sky. The abyss. In doing so, he describes the feeling of that abyss staring back: “The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them.” From that moment, he saw the world as morally blank, and himself as the agent who could mark it. Walter Kovacs had been transformed.

Thus Malcolm Long in this issue really gazes into two abysses: the abyss that is Rorschach, and the abyss that made Rorschach. Similarly, while he may see Rorschach as his monster to battle, he is finally made to see the monsters Rorschach himself has battled — mother, bullies, crime, indifference, horrific murder.

But none of this answers the earlier question: have they become monsters themselves? It’s not an easy question to answer. Long is changed, but he does not create a costume, adopt a new identity, and fight crime. He does not invent another personality to repair his fundamental failure. Kovacs is changed, and he is now capable of horrific murder himself, as well as brutal bullying, such as breaking men’s fingers in sleazy bars. Yet in other places, we see him adjusting his crusade so as not to hurt a child (when confronting his landlady), or fervently grasping Dan’s hand despite his assertion that it was Kovacs who had friends.

The question of whether we can apply the label of “monster” brings us to concepts of moral valuation, concepts that were very important to Nietzsche. It is also an enormous domain, one whose exploration could spawn a huge project of its own. I’m not going to attempt to put Long or Rorschach on trial against Nietzsche’s — or anyone’s — tables of moral values, if those tables could even be clearly defined. There is, however, a central concept by which Nietzsche tries to unite the values of varying cultures, and I’ll return to it later as a part of outlining Nietzsche’s most important precepts and how they relate to Watchmen overall.

Before that, though, there is one specific value I’d like to interrogate a little further: the value of truth. In Philosophy 101, Peter Gibson asserts: “Truth is at the center of human life, and at the center of philosophy… Truth may even be the supreme value of philosophy.” (pg. 24) From there, however, he goes on to detail some of the objections to this centrality, and mentions that Nietzsche “challenged the reverential aura around truth.” (pg. 27) And so he did, as in this excerpt from the very first aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil:

Granted we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? — The problem of the value of truth stepped before us — or was it we who stepped before this problem? Which of us is Oedipus here? Which of us sphinx?

Long seeks the truth about how Rorschach formed his identity, and the process of discovering that truth changes him so profoundly that his marriage falls apart. The man who once proclaimed, “I’m too fat and contented for anything to ruin my disposition,” finds himself sitting alone in a darkened bedroom, deep in an existential crisis. He’s far less contented, knowing Rorschach’s truth. Might he be better off in uncertainty, or ignorance, still believing himself very good with people?

Similarly, Rorschach himself militantly asserts truth as an unqualified good, even in the face of armageddon. Knowing of Ozymandias’s vast trick, “evil must be punished” means to him that “people must be told.” This purist stance is completely consistent with his character, but as we see in the other characters, its value assertion is subject to question. Why not rather untruth in this situation? For Rorschach, truth is good and good is truth, and that tautology is all he needs. As readers steeped in the Western tradition against which Nietzsche rails, we might be inclined to agree. But Ozymandias has everyone else convinced of a different morality, in which ignorance (at the mass scale) is in fact a greater good than truth.

Veidt’s untruth creates the possibility of peace in a world that seemed on the edge of self-destruction. But that untruth also called for millions of sacrifices — is there any justice in their deaths serving a lie? In Ozymandias’s eyes, if the lie were unraveled, those deaths would be in vain, and billions more would likely die. Does that belief really justify falsehood? It’s a rich set of questions. In Watchmen and Philosophy, Alex Nuttall uses it to explore utilitarianism and Kant’s categorical imperative. For our purposes, we can call it the first resonance of Nietzsche and Watchmen beyond the words of the Chapter 6 epigraph. There are many more.

The Table of Overcomings

There’s a world of Nietzsche beyond the monsters and abysses aphorism, and his views have so permeated modern consciousness that any given 20th century work of literature is likely to have echoes of them. Let’s take a look at some of his most important concepts, and how Watchmen reflects and refracts them.

“God is dead”

If there is one phrase associated in the popular imagination with Nietzsche, this would have to be it. The idea appears first in 1882’s The Gay Science, framed in an aphorism about a madman who cries “I seek God! I seek God!”, and then turns on his bemused onlookers, saying, “We have killed him — you and I.” (Kaufmann pg. 96-97) The notion reappears quite early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, when Zarathustra encounters an old, saintly hermit in the forest, who continuously praises God. Zarathustra later muses to himself, “Could it be possible? This old saint has not yet heard in his forest that God is dead!” (pg. 41)

Rorschach shares the same revelation in his climactic story: “Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone.” The transformed Malcolm, staring at an ink blot in the dark, agrees: “We are alone. There is nothing else.” In this way, perhaps Rorschach functions as a kind of Zarathustra to Malcolm, a mysterious and powerful teacher whose lesson bends the mind into seeing the darkness and emptiness around it.

And yet! In the Watchmen universe, the God may be absent but a god is very much present in the form of Dr. Manhattan. With his seeming omnipotence, and near omniscience, Dr. Manhattan represents a version of divinity alive and incarnate on earth, but missing both the benevolence and the vengefulness of the traditional Jehovah, and therefore perhaps more terrifying than the notion of a dead God ever was. What would Zarathustra make of this ultra-powerful being? He probably wouldn’t recognize him as God, or even a god, but might see in him the apotheosis he seeks: the Superman.

Übermensch

Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet comes down from his mountains for the first time, and speaks to the people of the nearest town:

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? (pg. 41)

TSZ is a book that loves its recurring refrains, and “I teach you the Superman” becomes one of them, in this section and future sections. Nietzsche is, of course, using a German word — Übermensch — which Hollingdale translates as “Superman“, Kaufmann prefers as “Overman“, and Keeping just leaves untranslated. For my part, I’m sticking with “Superman” because it feels closest in tone to the subjects of this post. (I’m also noting, but not engaging with, the oppressive gender assumptions that underpin this and a whole lot more of Nietzsche’s work.) For Zarathustra, who is more or less a stand-in for Nietzsche, the Superman concept is inextricably tied up with the death of God.

It’s hard to overstate how profound an impact Darwin’s theory of evolution had upon Western thought. For centuries upon centuries, the veracity of Christian scripture was largely unchallenged, and the bulk of social and political structures were formed around that set of beliefs. That authority started eroding midway through the 1600s, and scientific inquiry and scientific thinking reached a peak with Darwin’s theory that fundamentally threatened the notion that humans were created by God, and in turn, threatened religious belief overall. Thus it was that On The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and a mere 23 years later we find Nietzsche proclaiming the death of God.

But in the absence of a divine overseer, what guides us? For Nietzsche (via Zarathustra), the very idea of evolution points towards the answer, as in the passage immediately following the previous quote:

All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.
[…]
Behold, I teach you the Superman.
The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman shall be the meaning of the earth!

If evolution has taken us this far, far enough to recognize the falsehood of our long-preferred explanation for ourselves, we are free to become the very creator whom we always believed was external to us. In overcoming our weaknesses, becoming the ultimate version of ourselves (or in Nietzsche’s framing, “becoming who we are” [Kaufmann pg. 159]), we may take evolution into our own hands, and learn to be as superior to humans as humans are to apes. On an earth rendered meaningless by the death of God, human beings can become the architects of their own meaning.

We can read the superhero genre as an extended meditation on this concept, starting with Siegel and Schuster’s Superman himself. Here is a being that is indeed far superior to humans, but in the end, Superman/Kent is an alien — he is among humans, but not of them. He does not represent an overcoming. The next major hero to come along, Batman, is much closer. Bruce Wayne, driven by childhood trauma, perfects himself physically and uses the enormous economic and intellectual power he already possesses to craft technologies that elevate him above the rest of humanity.

These archetypes repeat over and over through the genre — Thor and Iron Man are a couple of Marvel examples — and they cover most of Watchmen as well. Most of the costumed characters in the book are in the Batman mold, Nite Owl II most of all. Through various combinations of technology and training, they have elevated themselves above what Nietzsche would call “the herd”, attempting to create something beyond themselves, to become who they are. (Or, in Laurie’s case, who her mother wants her to be.) Doctor Manhattan, on the other hand, has become fundamentally something other than human — a Superman, an Overman, an Übermensch, and a creator of sorts, but one who is not the architect of his own destiny, trapped instead in a single jewel of time.

The Eternal Recurrence

Zarathustra has an abyss of his own. In a chapter called “The Convalescent”, he springs out of bed, crying:

I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle — I call you, my most abysmal thought!
Ah! you are coming — I hear you! My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth into the light! (pg. 233)

What is this abyss? It is his disgust with the triviality of humanity — “Alas, that his wickedest is so very small! Alas, that his best is so very small!” (pg. 235) — combined with this knowledge, spoken by his abysmal thought: “The man of whom you are weary, the little man, recurs eternally… Alas, man recurs eternally! The little man recurs eternally!” (pg. 236)

Upon hearing his outpouring, the animals he lives with reply to him. (Yeah, he lives with talking animals.) They say:

Sing and bubble over, O Zarathustra, heal your soul with new songs, so that you may bear your great destiny, that was never yet the destiny of any man!
For your animals well know, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is now your destiny!…
Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves with them, and that we have already existed an infinite number of times before and all things with us.

If you’ve been reading this Bestiary series for a while, that refrain ought to sound awfully familiar. For one thing, this stance outside of time, treating it as an object, evokes both Doctor Manhattan’s point of view and the reader’s. For another, this specific idea of eternalism has become, well, a recurring fascination for Alan Moore, reaching its quintessential expression in his novel Jerusalem. There, and elsewhere, he talks of time as a “glass football” — big bang at one end, big crunch at another. In between exists all time in one great “hypermoment”, only ordered into linearity by our conscious minds.

Alma Warren, Moore’s self-insertion character in Jerusalem, does not experience this concept as an abysmal thought. Instead, she is greatly relieved by the notion that “…every miserable wretch is one of the immortals. Every clearance area is the eternal golden city.” (pg. 1262) Nietzsche’s self-insertion character Zarathustra, too, eventually finds ecstasy in eternalism. In the section titled “The Seven Seals”, each aphorism ends with, “Oh how should I not lust for eternity and for the wedding ring of rings — the Ring of Recurrence! […] For I love you, O Eternity!” (pg. 244-247)

For Nietzsche, the idea of eternal recurrence seems to be a sort of thought experiment — how would you live your life if you knew that you’d re-experience your every action, over and over again for eternity? If your actions are small and worth little, this might be a horrifying thought. If your actions are grand, if you are constantly in the process of becoming more and more a Superman, such repetition might be amazing. For Moore, the glass football seems to be pretty much what he views as the actual truth of the universe. Both of them, though, come to embrace a block universe absent of free will, ruled over by fate.

Amor fati

Nietzsche frequently reiterated that amor fati — the love of fate — was his “inmost nature”, and central to his philosophy. He idealizes this stance in his final book, Ecce Homo:

My formula for the greatness of a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. (quoted in Kaufmann, pg. 243)

Kaufmann, in explaining how this greatness implies an affirmation of the present moment that extends beyond the present, frames our current moment as a point in an infinitely complex web:

That I am here, now, doing this — that depends on an awe-inspiring series of antecedent events, on millions of seemingly accidental moves and decisions, both by myself and many others whose moves and decisions in turn depended on yet other people. And our very existence, our being as we are, required that our parents had to choose each other, not anyone else, and beget us at the precise moment when we were actually begotten; and the same consideration applies to their parents, and to all our ancestors, going back indefinitely. (pg. 282)

He was very likely not on the surface of Mars when he wrote that, but he sounds an awful lot like someone who is:

This speech was Jon’s explanation to Laurie of why her life isn’t meaningless, and in fact, Laurie finds her own amor fati by the end of the book. Whereas on Mars she despairs that her life is a big, stupid, meaningless joke, by the time she visits Sally in Florida, she no longer wants anything to be different:

People’s lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and… well, sometimes they can’t talk about them. I know how that is. I love you, Mom. You never did anything wrong by me.

She also embraces the legacy of both her parents. Adventuring in costume is now something she wants to do, not something forced upon her. And she wants to do it in leather armor and a mask, with a gun, just like The Comedian. She is becoming herself at last, overcoming her nihilistic and frightened thoughts, choosing power.

Self-Overcoming and the Will To Power

As I mentioned above, concepts of moral valuation were very important to Nietzsche. Through his philological studies, he found that different cultures asserted different moral codes, and that in fact unique moral codes are part of what defines a separate culture and prevents it from being subsumed by others. And yet, as a philosopher, he sought a unifying theory that successfully places all these codes under a single rubric. As he so often did, he put the results into Zarathustra’s mouth:

No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbor evaluates.
Much that seemed good to one people seemed shame and disgrace to another: thus I found. I found much that was called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honours.
One neighbour never understood another: his soul was always amazed at his neighbour’s madness and wickedness.
A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power.
What it accounts hard it calls praiseworthy; what it accounts indispensable and hard it calls good; and that which relieves the greatest need, the rare, the hardest of all — it glorifies as holy. (pg. 84)

Kaufmann calls this “nothing less than a generic definition of morality, an attempt to crystallize the common essence of all moral codes.” (pg. 211) For Nietzsche, the concept of will to power — the constant strengthening of humans by overcoming each other, their environment, and most importantly themselves — was a crucial counterpart to the other aspects of his philosophy. If God is dead, we can only become our own creators by exercising the will to power necessary to attain the level of the Superman. If we recur eternally, it is imperative that what repeats is our constant improvement through self-overcoming, embracing our circumstances in order to transcend them.

Because of its very encompassing nature, will to power is inevitably at work in almost any story, and Watchmen is no different. Chapter 6 plays out as a long power struggle between Long and Rorschach, each trying to overcome the other. In the end, it is Rorschach who prevails, and how does he do so? By telling the story of how Rorschach overcame Walter, triumphing over his squalid origins by exerting the power of his own moral code. By scrawling his own design on the world.

Laurie and Dan will themselves to power as well, stepping back into their costumed identities to change the world, both before and after New York’s apocalypse. Even Doctor Manhattan, who frequently seems to be all power and no will, has moments of self-overcoming — his epiphany about thermodynamic miracles, or his decision to create life rather than just observing it or being tangled in it.

But the ultimate expression of will to power in Watchmen is surely Ozymandias, and it goes back to his origin. I don’t just mean the character’s life story, though that plainly is an example of self-overcoming as well, at least in Veidt’s own telling. I mean the character’s origin as an adaptation of Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt. Peter Cannon’s stories, indeed his superpower, revolved around his willpower — it’s through his strength of will that he unlocks the potential of his brain and body. Ozymandias, too, has continually overcome his own limitations, honing himself physically and mentally while reaping the economic benefits of selling that selfsame concept to the masses.

Under this moral umbrella, the question of who is and isn’t a monster appears in a different light. Just as one neighbor is always amazed at the other’s madness and wickedness, so too do the different characters in Watchmen alienate each other with their own versions of self-overcoming. Long sees Rorschach as a monster until he sees what Rorschach has overcome, and begins the journey of overcoming himself in the same way, a journey we see expressed in his last moments on Earth. Has he become a monster? It depends on where you stand. What has happened, though, is that he has found his will to power.

The plot of Watchmen revolves around a grand exercise of Adrian Veidt’s will to power, and it asks the question: is that exercise monstrous? Each character has a different answer, but the world cannot answer, because at least as of the end of the book, the truth behind that power is cloaked. Disguised. Masked.

Masks

Aphorism 69 of Beyond Good and Evil begins, “Everything profound loves the mask”. Nietzsche’s point in this aphorism seems to be that the most “fragile and valuable” parts of ourselves require the protection of a thorough disguise, and that in fact our most delicate truths and extravagant loves cannot help but constantly grow masks, due to the world’s ongoing misinterpretation of our greatest thoughts, words, and actions.

Unlike the death of God, the Superman, the eternal recurrence, or the will to power, the mask motif is not central to Nietzsche’s thought, but it comes up several times in BG+E, and certainly seems quite relevant to the themes of Watchmen. Aphorism 223 expands the metaphor to include costumes, framing European culture as a series of affectations — “romantic or classical or Christian or Florentine or baroque or ‘national'” (pg. 152) — all of which fail to fit and must be discarded. He suggests for a moment that this may be a sort of evolution, but lands finally on the notion that nineteenth century European culture has become at last a comedy:

Perhaps it is precisely here that we are discovering the realm of our invention, that realm where we too can still be original, perhaps as parodists of world history and God’s buffoons — perhaps, even if nothing else of today has a future, precisely our laughter may still have a future!

This is the realm of invention belonging to The Comedian, isn’t it? As the character with the clearest sight in Watchmen, he has discarded the ill-fitting personas of crimefighter, savior, and legendary being. Instead, in Rorschach’s words, “He saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection, a parody of it,” and he did so precisely because of his belief that nothing of his day had a future. But is there anything profound hidden behind that mask, or is it just another abyss?

Aphorism 270 argues that suffering is what necessitates the mask, and that the more one knows, the more one suffers, and thus the more one requires a disguise to shield that suffering from an ignorant world: “sometimes folly itself is the mask for an unhappy, all too certain knowledge.” Rorschach certainly believes that this portrait describes The Comedian: “No one else saw the joke. That’s why he was lonely.” As readers, though, we don’t see The Comedian suffering due to his superior understanding of modernity. Instead, his anguish comes from having gazed long into the abyss of Adrian Veidt’s world-saving plan. It is an unhappy, all too certain knowledge, but it is what breaks Blake’s mask of folly rather than creating it.

Perhaps Rorschach may have been projecting onto Blake, because we certainly see in Chapter 6 that he has endured great suffering himself. Nietzsche claims in this aphorism that “profound suffering ennobles; it separates”, and that “there are free insolent spirits who would like to conceal and deny that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts”. Rorschach has suffered profoundly, but it’s hard to make the case that it has ennobled him — he hovers instead between monster and abyss. But looking at his tear-streaked face at the end of Chapter 12, echoing that same face in childhood having been brought to tears by his mother’s blows, it’s not hard to see him as a broken, proud, incurable heart.

The Poets Lie Too Much

That poignant image, of a helpless Rorschach superimposed upon a helpless Kovacs, may lead us to question what “will to power” even means for this character. Free as he may have felt to scrawl his own design upon the world, Rorschach eventually reaches the limits of his capability when confronted by a true Superman. Yet it’s worth remembering that for Nietzsche, will to power didn’t simply mean always getting one’s own way. Instead, what he emphasized about it was its evolutionary character, combined with the unique human ability to reflect and decide upon one’s actions. Kaufmann puts it thus:

Nature is not perfectly rational and does not efficiently fulfill her own longing for perfection. Recognizing this, Nietzsche speaks of the will to power; but he leaves no doubt that this drive is an Eros and can be fulfilled only through self-perfection. (pg. 256)

This Eros, for Nietzsche, derives all its power from human creativity, and the self-overcoming for which he strives is a profoundly creative, generative, artistic expression. It doesn’t matter that Rorschach can’t rule the universe. What matters is that he has taken the wretched raw materials of his past and applied his imagination to them, creating for himself a new version, one which looks on the last one as a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment.

And yet, I don’t think Nietzsche or Zarathustra would gaze upon Rorschach and proclaim him a Superman. Yes, he has overcome himself, but he has done so by embracing an absolutely Manichean worldview, insisting that there is good and there is evil, with no shades of grey. But Nietzsche, as his title keeps reminding us, wants to move beyond good and evil. In aphorism 56 of that book, he refers to the “spell and illusion of morality” and pronounces it “world-denying”.

Against this, he sets “the ideal of the most exuberant, most living and most world-affirming man”, whose joyous amor fati embraces everything that is and was, and wants it to recur eternally. In my view, this stance is not relativism. It’s not nihilist, it’s not passive, and it’s not even amoral.

Look, there is obviously a tension between the idea of amor fati and eternal recurrence on the one side, and will to power reaching towards the Superman on the other side. We might want to ask Nietzsche to make up his mind here — should we embrace everything (including ourselves) just as it is, recurring over and over, or should we strive to overcome ourselves and reach towards Superhumanity? I think the key to this seeming paradox is in the idea of being world-affirming and life-affirming.

For Nietzsche, the truest and best manifestations of will to power are not about prevention, but about production. They create rather than destroy, begin rather than halt. This is what’s so ironic about his philosophies being adopted by the Nazis, who sought to wipe out entire categories of humanity and to impose by totalitarian force a single will upon the world. The world-affirming, life-affirming man idealized by Nietzsche does not try to make the world over in his own image — he tries to make himself over in the image of what he loves the most, purging his weaknesses in the process. To again invoke a modern phrase, he tries to become his “best self”. In doing so, he asserts values that may indeed transform the world, but that transformation is simply a side-effect of the essential act of self-perfection.

Thus it is that Kaufmann calls Nietzsche’s philosophy “a sustained celebration of creativity — and all genuine creation is, as we have tried to show, a creation of new values and norms.” (pg. 414) By these lights, the reinvention and/or extension of one’s own identity into a super-heroic alter ego may be seen as fundamentally an act of extravagant creativity, allied with an event of self-overcoming, a combination which brings one close to Nietzsche’s idealized Superman. However, as we see with Rorschach and the other Watchmen characters, that self-creation may ultimately be limited by all-too-human desires: revenge, money, sex, and above all an attachment to simplistic, straightforward solutions and moral codes. The spirit of Nietzsche would not necessarily celebrate these creations as the type of overcomings he seeks.

I wonder, though, if he might celebrate the creativity of Watchmen in its entirety? The “Of Poets” section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra deals with creation and creativity itself, and Zarathustra implicates himself within it, speaking to a disciple:

“Yet what did Zarathustra once say to you? That the poets lie too much? — But Zarathustra too is a poet.
Do you now believe that he spoke the truth? Why do you believe it?”
The disciple answered: “I believe in Zarathustra.” But Zarathustra shook his head and smiled.
Belief does not make me blessed (he said), least of all belief in myself.
But granted that someone has said in all seriousness that the poets lie too much: he is right — we do lie too much.
We know too little and are bad learners: so we have to lie. (pg. 149)

As J. Keeping noted, TSZ reads like an epic poem, with Nietzsche as the poet and Zarathustra himself speaking through most of it in poetic cadences. From within that work, Zarathustra asserts that the poets lie too much, and includes himself in that judgment. Of course, Zarathustra is simply the voice of the actual poet, Nietzsche — in fact the “Z” of Zarathustra is just a rotated “N”. Thus Nietzsche, from within his own story, confronts the limits of storytelling.

Watchmen, too, can be read as a meditation on fiction, what it can and cannot do to change reality. We’ve looked at how each character’s superheroic alter ego is a kind of creative fiction, meant to change themselves and make them more capable of changing the world. Each character discovers the limits of those changes as the story progresses, often finding that they know too little and are bad learners.

There are also actual writers within the book, such as Doug Roth from Nova Express and Hector Godfrey of the New Frontiersman. Each of these men works to advance a point of view through their own versions of journalism, and neither is aware of the larger forces directing and circumscribing their efforts. Closer to a poet is Max Shea, the comic book writer whose Black Freighter work echoes the themes of Watchmen‘s plot, and who in working for Veidt finds himself authoring a much more real tale than he understands. Hira Manish is in the same boat, as it were, her paintings and designs stretching from the canvas to actual, biological creation.

None of these creators understand that they are being treated as characters and story beats by the grandest author within Watchmen: Ozymandias. Veidt’s apocalypse, as I’ve written before, operates as an act of authorship within the story, an attempt to rewrite reality into a form he could tolerate. And yet, as we see on the final page, a competing narrative looms on the horizon, and if it rushes into the space vacated by Hector Godfrey’s column, it may twist the world’s plot once more.

All of those possibilities swirl within the world created by Watchmen, which of course is an act of authorship itself, with Moore as its Shea and Gibbons/Higgins as its Manish. I can see Watchmen‘s creation as an expression of will to power within comics, looking on its predecessors as laughing-stocks or painful embarrassments. And yet, just like the creations within it, Watchmen itself has had its share of unintended consequences, from helping to usher in the Dark Age of Comics to the fact that its ongoing popularity exploded the contractual assumption that Moore expected would return his characters to him.

There’s also the fact that Moore claimed that he was hoping Watchmen would “scare a little bit so that people would just stop and think about their country and their politics”, but much like Elvis Costello’s attempts to unseat Thatcher, Watchmen didn’t exactly halt the Cold War. Was Watchmen itself, like Veidt’s hoax, a grand yet likely futile attempt to get humanity to recognize itself? Perhaps.

What seems beyond dispute is that Watchmen created new values and norms for the comics medium, and that they continue to resonate today. Just as DC continuity can be split into “pre-Crisis” and “post-Crisis“, so can superhero comics themselves divide into pre-Watchmen and post-Watchmen. That impact was the result of a will to power among its authors, and made it into an elevated version of the Superhero comic, a sort of Überbuch. We have gazed long into it (certainly I have!), and in turn, it has shown us things in the genre and ourselves that we would not have known without it.

Next Entry: New York Stories
Previous entry: Expectations and Destinations

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.

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.”

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.

Next entry: Gazing Into Abysses
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.

Next Entry: Expectations and Destinations
Previous Entry: Utopia Cinema

NOTE: Spoilers for Watchmen are included in this article, by design.

Starting in the mid-17th century, the authority of religious revelation began to come under unique and increasing threat. The enthusiastic inquiries of naturalists were uncovering disturbing geological and fossil evidence that the earth was much older than anyone had previously believed. Skeptical treatises from philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume challenged the foundations of what we think we know and what is possible to know. At the same time, scientists (who up until the 19th century were called “natural philosophers”) kept learning more and more about the laws of nature, solidifying a worldview in which everyday occurrences are based on those laws, rather than the commonplace intervention of a deity.

Into this breach stepped William Paley, a Cambridge graduate who was ordained in 1767 and spent decades combining the pulpit with the pen, authoring several influential works of mainstream Christian argument. His health began to decline around 1800, but he still was able to finish and publish his greatest and most famous work, Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, collected from the appearances of nature, which understandably tends to get referenced as just Natural Theology. The book was published in 1802 and was immediately an enormous success, finding a large audience eager to reconcile scientific discoveries with received religious teachings.

Who Makes the World?

Paley’s essential argument in Natural Theology is this: given the vast array of biological adaptations which are analogous to human-made machines, there is no other plausible explanation for them but a designing deity, a “contriver” as he often puts it. The opening sentences of his text are his most famous encapsulation of the argument (with 1802 punctuation and spellings intact, though with some of the 1802 wordiness abridged):

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to shew the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone? […] For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the several parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use, that is now served by it. […] This mechanism being observed… the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

This watchmaker analogy would have been back in the news while Alan Moore was writing Watchmen, thanks to the efforts of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In 1986, Dawkins published The Blind Watchmaker, which began with Paley’s analogy and then proceeded to thoroughly dismantle it via explicating the natural selection theory of that other Cambridge man, Charles Darwin. Darwin, for his part, had not only studied Paley’s books, he in fact lived in the very same set of Cambridge rooms that Paley had occupied seventy years prior. (The Watch on the Heath: Science and Religion Before Darwin, pg. 20) Darwin quite admired the clarity and force of Paley’s arguments, writing in his autobiography:

The logic of [an earlier Paley book] and as I may add of his “Natural Theology” gave me as much delight as did Euclid. … I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.

Later, of course, Darwin could no longer take Paley’s premises on trust, having found in natural selection a much more convincing and satisfying answer to biological phenomena than Paley’s “argument from design”.

Chapter 4 of Watchmen is entitled “Watchmaker”, and in it Dr. Manhattan ponders the same question that moved Paley and Darwin: who makes the world? The web annotations quite rightly recognize the link to Paley:

The title of this issue, “Watchmaker,” refers also to the famous “argument from design,” saying that the universe as a complex creation must have a creator. The metaphor was first proposed by William Paley in Natural Theology; his example was that of finding a watch somewhere, and that its complexity implied a watchmaker. This term has come to symbolize an intelligent creator, and thus is particularly appropriate to Dr. Manhattan, as is “The Judge of All the Earth.”

Note the connection to Linette Paley, a very minor character who appears later in Watchmen.

(Linette Paley, for those keeping score, was an avant-garde composer who was among the artists recruited and then killed by Adrian Veidt. Aside from the name, it’s hard to see any connection to William.) Leslie Klinger also connects the creator reference to Dr. Manhattan, noting that “Jon calls the universe a ‘makerless mechanism’… Yet he ultimately chooses to move on and become a maker himself”. (pg. 140)

Now, there’s a lot to dig into here, but I want to take a moment for something I rarely spend much time on in these essays: sheer appreciation. Moore’s use of clock, watch, and time imagery throughout this book is simply astonishing. Let’s take stock:

• The title Watchmen in one sense implies guardianship, but in combination with all the clock imagery can’t help but evoke timekeeping as well.
• The early years of the Watchmen universe feature the Minutemen, whose name also implies both guardianship and timekeeping.
• There are twelve chapters, corresponding to hours on a clock.
• Each chapter ends with an image of a clock, ticking down towards 12:00.
• That clock not only counts down toward the story’s climax, it also resonates with the nuclear anxiety of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, first cited in the newspaper on Veidt’s desk in Chapter 1.
• Large clocks appear at various key locations in the story — Veidt’s Antarctic stronghold, the exterior of Madison Square Garden, Jon’s clock-like Mars ship.
• The art is full of circles with an indicator of position, like clocks — Dr. Manhattan’s symbol, The Comedian’s blood-streaked badge and its many echoes, and the Vitruvian Manhattan that ends this chapter.
• Let’s not forget about those melting clocks in the art on Dr. Manhattan’s wall.
• Jon is constantly mentioning seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years — with an awareness that (allegedly) encapsulates all of time, he cannot stop talking about pieces of it.
• Jon’s father repairs pocketwatches — he too is a watchmaker, albeit one who stops believing in his craft. We see the pieces of his work fall to earth as he rejects them, linked with the meteors that fall at the end of the chapter.
• A broken watch precipitates Jon’s accident.
• Shortly before the main events of the plot, Jon and Laurie buy an issue of Time magazine, whose cover is a stopped watch.
• A denizen of the newsstand intersection, who berates Malcolm Long and dies from Adrian’s attack, is a street vendor of watches.

It all meshes together with soft precision, and it’s just… beautiful. Exquisite. Crafted. It leaves absolutely no doubt of a contriver. One of the ironies behind Dr. Manhattan’s question is that we know exactly who makes his world: Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins. For our world, at least the biological parts of it, the answer seems clear as well: evolution. Dawkins leaves us no room to doubt that.

William Paley, though, was without the benefit (or challenge) of having On The Origin of Species at hand, let alone The Blind Watchmaker. That said, he certainly wrestled with its precursors, including the work of Charles’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who argued that biological diversity proceeded over enormous spans of time from a single “filament”, in some ways anticipating the gene-centric view that Dawkins would later champion. But for Paley there was simply no way for that filament’s progression to explain the incredible array of phenomena he catalogued in Natural Theology. His reaction to human anatomy was essentially the same as my reaction to the clock motifs in Watchmen: an intense aesthetic rapture, followed by the desire to inventory and analyze.

Genesis Sui Generis

Most of Natural Theology consists of Paley rolling out example after example from anatomy, zoology, botany, and like biological fields. His reasoning, over and over, proceeds along this line:

1. Here is something we know about anatomy. (Or a similar field.)
2. This really reminds me of a machine! There’s often an analogy offered here. For instance, he might compare the operation of an eye to the operation of a telescope.
3. Doesn’t it remind you of a machine?
4. This thing in the body, not made by humans, really reminds us both of things that are made by humans. Therefore, God exists.
5. (optional) He will often follow this up with a sentiment along the lines of, “After that example, no further examples should be necessary.” He will then give many more examples.

I’m being a bit flip here, and with what we know today it’s awfully easy to see the gaps and flaws in Paley’s thinking, but before the notion of natural selection had been articulated, Natural Theology had a pretty sound argument! It is quite seductive and intuitive to see a designing hand in biological details — I know people even today who learn enough facts about the human body that they dare anyone to know that much about it and not believe in God.

For the inhabitants of the Watchmen universe, the problem is even knottier due to the existence of Dr. Manhattan, an existence which appears to steamroll Darwin’s founding assumptions. The theory of natural selection rests on four pillars:

1. Variation — individuals within a species vary.
2. Genetic inheritance — traits are passed down via reproduction.
3. Super-fecundity — organisms can produce more offspring than necessary to replace themselves over their lifetimes.
4. Filtering — environmental and genetic factors prevent populations from increasing geometrically.

Combined, these factors tell us that only those best equipped to deal with the filters survive, and that those survivors pass their traits on to their progeny, who have been naturally selected for the best chances of survival.

None of these pillars apply to Dr. Manhattan! He was created artificially and accidentally. He is unique, irreproducible, and invincible. He exemplifies the notion of a massive change happening instantly rather than Darwin’s notion of gradual changes over millions of years. Yet I suspect Paley would find little comfort to his Biblical beliefs if he were aware of Jon Osterman’s sudden transformation.

William Paley, detail from a portrait painted by George Romney

For one thing, Paley’s “contriver” is nowhere to be found in Dr. Manhattan’s genesis. Instead, Jon assembles himself into a sui generis species which indeed does have a “watchmaker”, but not the creator reported in Paley’s Bible. Dr. Manhattan, in fact, fits the category of god better than the category of organism. Janey Slater says as much on page 11 of this chapter: “They say you’re like God now.” Jon replies, comfortingly, “I don’t think there is a God, Janey. If there is, I’m not him.” But then he tells her he’s still the same person, and that he’ll always want her, and in his self-narration he describes this moment starting with, “As I lie…” So is he lying too when he says he’s not God? Perhaps, but given his “makerless mechanism” remark at the end of the chapter, I suspect not. He might (eventually) think he’s a god, but never thinks that he’s the God.

Still, Jon’s near-omniscience and near-omnipotence would certainly be terrifying to Paley, a feeling shared by Milton Glass at the end of the chapter. But even more terrifying would be Jon’s overwhelming indifference to human life. Paley, it’s important to note, felt he not only had to prove the existence of the Christian God, but the goodness of that God as well — remember that the second part of his title specified that he would provide “Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity”. For Paley, God is not just a force who set the clockwork in motion, but one who did so out of love for humanity.

In the final quarter of Natural Theology, Paley abandons his litany of examples arguing for a contriver, directing his rhetoric into chapters with titles like “Of the Personality of the Deity”, “Of the Natural Attributes of the Deity”, and of course, “The Goodness of the Deity”. To support this final claim, Paley contends that “in a vast plurality of instances in which contrivance is perceived, the design of the contrivance is beneficial.” (pg. 237) He proceeds to back this up by explicating the overall pattern in which a creature’s abilities are well suited to its needs, a relationship we now can see clearly as owing to natural selection. Even without that lens, though, the question must be asked: beneficial to whom?

The Shark and the Herrings

Paley wasn’t unaware that nature could be red in tooth and claw. A plant or animal’s abilities are certainly beneficial to itself, but not to its adversaries, and those adversaries sometimes include us, the purported beloved of our creator! The tiger’s teeth, claws, and powerful frame are to its own benefit, but the distinct detriment of the lamb. Despite the New Testament’s exaltation of the meek, and of turning the other cheek, Paley “proves” divine goodness in part by pointing out the effectiveness of killing machines. What kind of “good” deity would frame such fearful symmetry? Well, that’s a question for next time.

Paley does try to address this dilemma, devoting a substantial portion of “The Goodness of the Deity” to the question of “animals devouring one another”. (pg. 246) There is much reference to “the natural order”, and an argument that being killed fast is better than dying slowly, framing predators as agents of mercy. Paley’s moral calculus is deeply utilitarian, based in a larger philosophical movement of the late eighteenth century which held that as long as good things outweigh bad things, the universe must be good. It’s an approach to morality that Watchmen readers may find familiar — an approach that depends heavily on who we see as the hero of the story.

Super-fecundity, later to become a pillar of natural selection, is for Paley an amelioration of misery for prey species: “In rivers, we meet with a thousand minnows for one pike; in the sea, a million of herrings for a single shark.” (pg. 250) Whether this is a valid defense of God’s goodness in the face of devouring animals depends on who you see as the protagonist of their interaction. If you’re the shark, plenty more herrings will be along later. If you’re the herring, you only have the one life!

In Watchmen, Ozymandias is the shark, and the shoal of herrings gathers throughout chapter 11. (And maybe a few guppies, according to Joey the cab driver on page 9 of that chapter.) Adrian sees himself as the hero of the story, and if a few unfortunates have to die along the way, it’s all for the greater good. Like Paley’s version of God, he rests on the rationale that if his actions benefit the “vast plurality”, the universe he aspires to make must be a good one.

Part of the genius of Watchmen, though, is that we understand many of those “herrings” as unique, irreplaceable lives. The two Bernards. Joey. Her girlfriend Aline. Malcolm and Gloria Long. Steve Fine and his partner Joe. Ralph the Gordian Knot locksmith and his brother Milo, of the Promethean Cab company. The watch seller who berates Malcolm. None of these people are protagonists in Watchmen, and we don’t spend a whole lot of time with any of them, but we know them as people, with their own lives, emotions, and agendas. They are not anonymous prey, and when they die, more of them will not be along later.

Reading Paley’s utilitarian moral arguments in his context as an 18th-century Englishman, it’s easy to see how this notion of disposability propped up the logic of colonialism. If the goodness of God is axiomatic, proven by the happiness of the person writing about him, then surely those Englishmen must be the heroes of the story, the sharks to all those savage herrings in the lands they were bravely “discovering”.

Paley, attempting to justify the goodness of God despite the existence of evil, invokes a colonial analogy directly, making the case that, “A West Indian slave, who, amidst his wrongs, retains his benevolence, I, for my part, look upon, as amongst the foremost of human candidates for the rewards of virtue.” Now, it’s arguable whether Paley’s mention of “wrongs” carries within it a critique of slavery itself — if so, it’s quite submerged, as it would have to be given the general audience for whom he was writing. In any case, Paley trots out in the very next sentence “the kind master” of this slave, stating that this master “is likewise a meritorious character; but still he is inferior to his slave.” It’s a “noble savage” trope, similar to what we see in “Gunga Din” — seemingly uplifting the victim of a system while taking the system itself as just a part of God’s plan. In general, Paley’s justifications for what he calls “civil evil” (aka the evil that humans do) are redolent of what today we’d call unexamined privilege.

Seeing Ozymandias deploy that same utilitarian logic, reciting his hero’s journey narrative to his Asian servants as they die from the poison he’s given them, prompts us to examine the privilege and colonialism embedded into superhero stories themselves. “With great power, there must also come great responsibility” can be read as a recasting of the White Man’s Burden, a missionary notion of rescue in which one who assumes himself superior decides that it’s his job to save his subalterns from themselves, no matter the cost to them. By generally remaining reactive, most superhero stories cling to a moral high ground, a version of protection which responds only to external threats. Ozymandias shows us how thin is the line between that version of goodness and that of Paley’s God, insisting that we believe in a universe whose violence and death are mere byproducts of goodness and love.

This is the craft of Watchmen. While Paley’s watch on the heath uses regulated motion to point out the hour of the day, the object created by Moore, Gibbons, and Higgins uses intricately meshed narrative to point out the uncomfortable truths within its genre, and to highlight the broken versions of humanity we sometimes exalt as heroes. It’s less like a watch than a pair of spectacles, bringing a familiar world into a new focus, and revealing what was always there, if only we’d had eyes to see it.

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