1 WIP (Work in Progress) Postgraduate Conference 2009 School of English and Humanities Birkbeck, University of London Saturday 7 February 2009 Archive of the Future: Watchmen as Historiographic Narrative Tony Venezia Figure 1: Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, chapter XII: page 32 (excerpt). © DC Comics.1 The final panel frame from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen (figure 1) shows a disorganised pile of papers, documents and envelopes with a journal tantalisingly and prominently displayed. This provides a visual index of an archive. Scattered documents that demand to be sorted, arranged, and catalogued. Jared Gardner in a recent essay proposed that archives and archival narratives saturate contemporary comics. Gardner’s approach draws from Walter Benjamin in examining how fragments of the past intrude onto the present, and speculates that comics are in many ways uniquely capable of composing these archival narratives not just by making use of patterns of verbal-visual representations, of allusion, quotation and parody, but also by inscribing the subculture of collectors within their narrative structure: Archives are everywhere in the contemporary graphic novel, although almost inevitably not the ordered collections of the academic library or a law firms records. These are archives in the loosest, messiest sense of the word – archives of the forgotten artefacts and the ephemera of American popular culture, items that were never meant to be collected. Indeed, it is their ephemeral nature, their quality as waste products of modern mass media and consumer culture, that constitutes the perverse pleasures for those who collect, organise and fetishize them.2 Gardner focuses on alternative comics by Ben Katchor and Kim Deitch, but this approach, the use of the archive as a model to explore history and historiography, is suggestive and can be extended to a reading of Watchmen, a more mainstream text. Watchmen is composed of a variety of textual elements that 1 Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 1987). All references show chapter then page number. 2 Jared Gardner, ‘Archives, Collectors, and the New Media Work of Comics’, in MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 52.4 (2006) 787-806. 2 foreground the archive, most notably the use of prose insertions that complete each chapter – supplements from (auto)biographies, diaries, interviews, news reports, police arrest sheets, psychiatric reviews, marketing statements. The narrative also incorporates embedded modes of representation; photographs, television screens, computers, and other comics. Comics are associated historically with the genre of the superhero and Watchmen draws on the submerged assumptions of the genre, of authoritarian ideology and utopian gesture, to compose a historiographic metatextual narrative, a revisionary parodic world where the publication of superhero comics inspires a craze for masked vigilantes. Figure 2: Rorschach’s journal, I: 11. © DC Comics. 3 Figure 3: ‘At midnight, all the agents...’; Rorschach investigates, I:6. © DC Comics. Moving from the last panel, to the opening page (see figure 2). I want to look closely at this page drawing on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, a work of comics autocriticism. McCloud’s organising principle is that of ‘closure’ – not to be confused with Umberto Eco’s theory of open or closed texts. Closure is a cognitive process of perceptual completion.3 The reader plays an active, collaborative part in bridging the gap between comic panels by interpreting the separate moments as a continuous and unified whole. McCloud also allows that closure operates within the panel, usually the perception of images derived from fragments. With this in mind, we can look at this page, reading left-to-right, top-to-bottom. The page has a kind of cinematic grace, starting with a close-up and pulling further out panel-by-panel to widen the perspective. This gradual momentum utilises what McCloud calls a moment-to-moment transition.4 The close-up of blood in the gutter tracks back to reveal the street, the inhabitants, the panoptic perspective from a window in a skyscraper – the vertiginous scale emphasised by the widescreen panel at the bottom of the page. Closure also occurs on a semantic level in the association of word and image. The verbal narration runs parallel to the visual sequence, but separation of text and image is far from straightforward. Typographic elements are emphasised. Rorschach’s journal is a recursive intradiegetic text, the yellowed, torn pages indicating a fragmentary textual materiality. This is contrasted and differentiated from the other typographic elements – the word-balloon uttered by the man at the top of the building, and the placard declaring that ‘THE END IS NIGH’. Then there is the matter of what is being said, the verbal narration framing a right-wing, absolutist perspective: ‘Now the 3 Scott, McCloud Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins, 1993): succinctly defined as ‘observing the parts but perceiving the whole’, p. 63. The term is derived from Gestalt psychology rather than literary theory. Following McCloud, it is now common practice to refer to ‘comics’ as a singular noun. (p. 4). 4 McCloud pp. 70-4 for an almost Barthesian model of how visual narrative transitions work. 4 whole world stands on the brink, staring down into the bloody hell, all those liberals and smooth talkers and all of a sudden no one can think of anything to say.’5 The blood is that of ageing masked vigilante Edward Blake, The Comedian. The smiley badge is his ironic symbol and a recurring visual motif in the text (as we saw in figure 1). Blake has been murdered, thrown from the window of his apartment. We later learn that the man with the apocalyptic hoarding is in fact Rorschach himself. Blake’s murder initiates the narrative of Watchmen. His body provides an absent presence, a gap that requires closure. Rorschach commits himself to solving the murder, his clothing signifying his status; the fedora and raincoat of the hardboiled detective, supplemented by his mask, an ever- changing emblem that both disguises him and gives him his name (see figure 3). There is a dual motion to crime narratives – the detective moves backward to uncover past events as they move forward. Typically, this is ideological, a double movement to contain disruption, followed by recovery leading to reinstatement of order.6 The detective resembles the archivist recovering fragments of the past to constitute a coherent narrative. This is narrative as historiography, the process of writing history from remnants and traces, and this process is problematised. The detective constructs a narrative in which they also participate, a partisan procedure. Rorschach pieces together the plot that leads to and beyond The Comedian’s murder. This investigation opens up the generic archive inscribed within the narrative. The superhero genre is a hybrid, a confluence of crime fiction with its emphasis on recovery, and science fiction with its accent on projection. Watchmen presents an alternate history, retroactively enacting this projection, presenting an archive of the future. The science fiction sub-genre of alternate history dramatises moments of divergence from recorded history, and the consequences of that divergence.7 Rorschach disappears into the text, subjected to textual reframing in the form of a psychiatric report. It falls to the reader to map these divergences. Figure 4: Manhattan on Mars, IV:1 (excerpt). © DC Comics. 5 Watchmen, I:1. Coincidentally, McCloud’s chapter on closure and transitions is titled ‘Blood in the Gutter’, McCloud, pp. 60-93 (60). 6 See John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (Routledge: New York, 2005), pp.46-7. 7 See Andy Duncan, ‘Alternate History’, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.209-19: ‘[A]lternate history reminds us that we all change the world.’ (p. 219). 5 Figure 5: Semiotic chaos, X:8 (excerpt). © DC Comics. There is a mobility of focalisation in Watchmen and Rorschach’s perspective of moral absolutism can be contrasted with those of two other characters. These suggest other figurative methods of closure. Dr. Manhattan (see figure 4) is the only genuine superhuman in the narrative. As Jon Osterman, nuclear physicist, his physical presence is dissolved in a freak accident. He is able to reassemble his body and subjectivity becoming Manhattan. His existence is crucial to the narrative world as he represents a point of divergence in the narrative. The only ‘real’ superhuman, he is capable of manipulating matter at an atomic level. His appearance renders the masked vigilantes superfluous. He is an embodiment of the science fiction trope Darko Suvin identifies as the novum, the new thing, a fictional component that dramatically alters its environment.8 Manhattan’s presence ensures that America wins the Vietnam conflict, and that the US has the edge over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Because of this, Nixon is able to change the constitution and stay on for a fourth term. The second contrasting perspective is Ozymandias (figure 5), the superhero as an intellectual man of action. In Watchmen, superheroes are feared and loathed, rather than worshiped as implicitly authoritarian idols. Public pressure leads to legislation outlawing their activities. Manhattan and The Comedian continue as government sanctioned agents, Rorschach operates illegally, while Ozymandias reverts to his real name of Adrian Veidt and becomes a successful businessman. It is Veidt who orchestrates the masterplot of Watchmen, murdering The Comedian, and driving Manhattan into exile. He initiates an elaborate conspiracy by faking an alien invasion, which results in the death of millions to frighten the world powers into peace, creating a utopia on the foundations of the dead. Rorschach refuses to conceal this manipulation of history from the public and is executed by Manhattan, but not before mailing his journal to a libertarian newspaper.