Old Ghosts: Deconstruction of our Superhero

When the first costumed heroes arrived they were quite simple, honorable action men and women of uncuestionable morals and a selfless sense of duty going in colorful, strange and exciting adventures each week with concise dialogs and with an almost minimalistic art style. Superman could fight giant robots one week and become a monkey the next, there were no limits as long as the readers were still entertained. Throughout the years, comic books got progressively more serious, the crazy nonsense decreased considerably and the focus on riskier topics that were socially relevant like racism, discrimination or even drug abuse increased. Nonetheless, the medium was still considered a mere entertainment for young people and no one really pay much attention to the real potential that comic books had. 

That was until 1986 when DC Comics published the miniseries Watchmen, written by Alan Moore with art by Dave Gibbons. The main story revolved around the mysterious death of a former hero and the dark implications that it might have. One of the aspects that really got the attention of the readers is how incredibly flawed all the characters are, they have fears, insecurities and needs while being constantly portrayed as morally grey. Bleak characters like Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan & Ozymandias  immediately resonated with an audience that was living through the worst part of the cold-war, when a nuclear menace seemed more than possible. The world was a different place and there was no place for the harmless optimism that heroes like the Flash or Wonder Woman perpetuated.

Superheroes were a reflection of the American culture of the 1930’s, meaning that  the modernist ideals leaked through the speech bubble like Batman and Robin. Moore took this archetypical heroes and turned them upside down, he took this vision of the American Dream and adapted it to modern times where paranoia and fear ruled the world. If Superman was the embodiment of the American Way in the thirties, now we had The Comedian, a sadistic and abusive guvernamental “hero” who represented the new wave of superheroes.

To get his point across even further, Moore introduce Hollis Mason, the original Night-Owl, and the rest of the Minutemen as the representation of the Golden Age of comics and all the ideals and morals that that era represented. Mason looks his days as a vigilante with fondness and misses a past that at least seemed simplier. Since the character works as a  direct stand-in for Dan Garret The Blue Beetle, his brutal death is even more symbolic when one night a mob of people just invades his place and takes him out because of his connection with costumed heroes. The postmodern views destroy and annihilate the spirit and values of modernism, opening the path for a darker and less hopeful vision of world. 

Moore’s iconoclastic behavior is what destroyed and put back together the comic book industry. After Watchmen all the heroes had to be humanized, so we killed Superman and Flash while breaking Batman and driving Green Lantern to insanity. Terms like graphic novel started to be used to make a clear distinction that comic books were no longer a child’s thing. Now everything had to be dark and gritty focusing on bleak storylines and damaged characters. What Moore envisioned as a satire and a postmodern critic to a genre became the norm. This is mainly why in the recent years he has been very vocal about his opinion regarding the medium. In an interview to The Guardian he stated that “I hate superheroes. I think they're abominations. They don't mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it's nothing to do with them.” (Moore, 2013) Those are really hard words from the man who reinvented the genre, but he has a point, until we finally embrace the Neo-Modernism that people like Grant Morrison have been trying to impulse in the last few years, superheroes are dead. 

 

The beauty of simplicity. Chinua Achebe's Things fall apart.

Is is impossible not to be reminded of Hemingway while reading Achebe's 1984 interview published in the Paris review. The reason being Hemingway's famous thinking of the novel as a testimony of truth.  Moreover, this focus enables the reader to notice the small details and apparently simple facts, although once connected, we see a universe.

“until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” 

To begin with, this is exactly the case of the Igbo people once the British arrived, and things began to fall apart. Messing with their identity, replacing custom with theirs,  the 'correct' ones.  But they did not realize the damage -hopefully-, nor the beauty and wisdom of the simpleton savages they were conquering.

“(..) no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us. But at the same time I know that an important message is not a novel. To say that we should all be kind to our neighbors is an important statement; it’s not a novel. (…) it is not just the message, but also the way that message is conveyed, the arrangement of the words, the felicity of the language.” (The Paris Review, 18)

Achebe stresses enough this fact, nonetheless, that was not what written tradition on the Africa(ns) subject presented, but one of the 'good white man', who’s intelligent and most likely, fair, arriving at rough diamond lands, craving for salvation. These inhabitants were savages, stupid and ugly people whose portrait will remain with the Colonial novel. 

On the one hand, the novel seemed to be rather difficult to follow, due to its constant odd-to-pronounce lexicon, the underlying meaning was the complete opposite.  In particular, character's names were the most difficult, thus, making the story hard to grasp. Ironically enough for me, Okwonko is one of the most common names, meaning "The sun of Monday", as a result of an Ibo tradition of naming children after one of the four week days. 

On the other hand, something which is complex, is conveyed in the simplest words, the construction of characters and their lives, all of them projections of complex tradition's influence and their logic background. Luckily, the author relies on lbo speech and proverbs, which are “ the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” (Achebe, 3), for some things which cannot be translated without losing its original meaning.

Egwugwu dress. 

“The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan. He looked terrible with the smoked raffia "body, a huge wooden face painted white except for the round hollow eyes and the charred teeth that were as big as a man's fingers. On his head were two powerful horns.” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart 1858)

Troughout the book, we follow Okwonkwo and his fears, goals, behavior and so on. 

Nevertheless, it is not just him, is the tribe, and the relation between them, and their handling of the British arrival; they represent something far more complex, religion, power, even roles and duties within the tribe. But there is not much complexity on the ordeal or understanding of these, it is actually quite easy to follow, the book is so well written that nothing leaves hanging.

To illustrate the above, is the hierarchy of the tribe. A man can aspire to as many titles as big feasts he can offer the tribe. Sounds simple, right? Likewise, higher influence means, accumulated wealth -crops- hence, a man will not have the power to rule over the land, since the richer he gets, the higher the title, the bigger the banquet.

In summation, this is just one of the brilliant aspects  from the book. Achebe’s commitment to truth, without forgetting complexity, yet, making it easy to read and dive into the uniqueness of the Ibo culture.  Unluckily, many things are lost due to the conquering era. For example, missionaries created the Ibo-standard language, so that dialects fade away.
Last but not least,  I  wonder, how many other beauties have we missed in order to assimilate into canons, denying our truest self?  (to us and the world) Is it really worth it? 

Works Cited.

Henry James: Literary Criticism: Vol. 1: Essays on Literature. "Chinua Achebe"  by Jerome Brooks.The Paris Review, 1998. Print

Achebe, Chinua  Achebe. Things fall apart. City of Publication: Publisher, 1958. Print.

Into the darkness, chaos is accepted

Long Day's Journey Into the Night is basically a play that makes clear how addictions can destabilize a complete family, an objective analysis of O'Neill's own life captured in words as a search for self-explanations to understand his own former family. Every member of his family is included and represented by a character during a normal day in their lives. The addictions of each member has broken their connections as members of a same family unit.
We can notice that there is a truth related to the mother's addiction that is well-known by the other members of the family, but that is a topic that is hard to deal with, being this the biggest evidence of the chaos about the communication that a normal family is expected to have. This addiction acts as a an infection that affects to every member of the family producing, especially on their sons, more
addictions and a feeling of disconnection (or search of it) from reality. This situation is usually confronted by the father, but we can infer that he tries to channel his feelings of rage and worry through his sons, instead of his wife.
It seems to be that through this play, O'Neill tries to understand through daily routine the reasons of why his house is just a house and not a home, since a place full of omissions and addictions cannot be a secure place for a family.

Things fall apart: the conflict of the change

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist and author of Things Fall Apart, a work that relies on family conflicts, the strong role of female gender, and the heritage of the African culture and traditions. However, what I highlight from this novel is the constant conflict of the characters to deal with changes. In the novel, there two main conflicts related to this.

The first one is the fight between the colonization and the desire of the people from Umuofia to keep their traditions and beliefs. On the one hand, language “gives them a sense of belonging and they also use it as a means to preserve their culture and heritage” (Maatla, 2013) that is why parents of the village refuse to send their children to school. What is more, Ibgo society seems to ignore the rest of the world since they never talk about the lands outside their borderlines. On the other hand, the imposition of the Christianism makes characters as Nwoye to reconsider his faith, which was somehow easy because he used to criticize or disagree with some aspects of his culture and also the Ikemefuna’s death on his own father’s hands. “Okonkwo ends up disowning his son, Nwoye after he abandons the Igbo religion.” (Maatla, 2013)

The second fight presented in the novel is Okonkwo´s internal conflict. His unwillingness to express his feelings due to his fear of seeming weak in the eyes of his fellow clan members caused Ikemefuna’s death and by consequence the exile of the entire Okonkwo’s family. What is more, this rough attitude and obsession to refuse his soft (or female) side deprived him of being an important leader in his clan.

I personally believe this novel shows us how changes are part of life and maybe their effects could be whether beneficial for our lives or a devastation, nevertheless, we can only accept them and learn how to cope with them because no matter how much we fight, life will to put our world upside-down anyway.

Bibliography

Maatla. L. (2013) Things Fall Apart: An Analysis of Pre and Post-Colonial Igbo Society

Unknown. Chinua Achebe Biography Retrieved from <http://www.biography.com/people/chinua-achebe-20617665>

Unknown. Things Fall Apart: Cultural Changes after African Colonization - Retrieved from <http://schoolworkhelper.net/things-fall-apart-cultural-changes-african-colonization/>

A mouse that does not feel as a mouse.

Throughout history, human-beings have used violence in order to bolster their power, but the entire world has never observed such a planned and brutal as the Holocaust. This event has been captured in the graphic novel “Maus”, exposing the cruelty of the Nazis and its effects not only on the survivor’s life, but in the following generations.

Maus seems to be just a story about war and anti-Semitism, but it is an analysis about cultural aspects and an introspection that the author does regarding his father and his relationship with him.

The victims, the Jewish, are represented as mice. If we scrutinize what a mouse represents, we would understand that it has two interpretations. The first one, the perspective that was usually shown by the Nazis, is that a mouse is somehow a parasitic. That animal goes over everywhere stealing what they found for eating and carrying infections for their “perfect society”.  The second interpretation could be that, as mice, the Jews have been rejected by the world so that they have been forced to run away from one place to another trying to survive by contributing in their own way in different societies.

 

This situation seems to be changed by the Holocaust, since this event modifies the vision that the entire world had in regards to the Jewish, including themselves. This is maybe one of the aspects that are most thought-provoking about Maus, the fact that Spiegelman and his father elaborate a cooperative autobiography in which the perspective of Vladek is captured in the story itself, but the vision of Artie about his father is expressed in the drawings of their present. The contrast between the old Vladek, loving and brave, and the one from the present, cantankerous and distant, is the most special of the story, how the Holocaust can change your personality and your entire life. It can even change the manner in which you establish relationships with others, especially with Artie. His relationship with his father is based mostly in Vladek’s desperate desire of empowering himself and showing to his son that he is a survivor. The problem is that, unintentionally, Vladek limited Artie during his all life by disparaging Artie’s capacities and skills. Artie was not treated as his son, but as a witness and a proof of his own survival. Vladek seems to be, as Mala said in page 93 from Volume I, more attached to things than to people, and that is one of the most serious consequences of the Holocaust on Vladek, he values more the objects than the relationships with other considering the difficulties and scarcities that he experienced just to survive during the massacre. Because of this, Artie has not been able to construct an personal identity as he expected to have, since the vision of himself that he has developed is result of the circumstances as, for example, the suicide of her mother and his feelings of guilt, his vision of himself as a not complete Jewish since he has not suffered what the previous generation of Jews experienced, or his distant relationship with his father that finds a balance at a late point of their lives and only because of establishing a dialogue as a “journalist”, as Spielgelman declares (Hofstra University, 1998).

It is not possible for Artie Spiegelman to feel as a mouse because of all this events considering that it represents a pain that he has not experienced and that destroyed the lives of a whole generation of Jewish people, and because he was raised in a different world without knowing the complete truth about his origins. 

At the beginning of the first volume, Spiegelman introduced a Hitler's quote that said that the Jews were undoubtly a race, but they were not humans. After the Holocaust, some of the children of the Jewish victims were not even able to completely recognize thelselves as members of a community.

Bibliografía

Hofstra University. (1998). True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Greenwood Publishing Group.

The importance of Anja Speigleman in Maus

One of the characters that caught my attention on the graphic novel Maus was Anja, the mother. Probably because of her life story which was marked by terrible events such as the Holocaust, the death of her son, and her suicide in 1968 and also by the image that she projected to her son and husband.

 In one hand there was her husband who saw her as the perfect woman. Vladek always felt that Anja bring out the best of him something that no one had done before. Maybe the fact that in front of his eyes she was perfect right after her death he burn all of her diaries maybe as a way to perpetuate this perfect image.

In the other hand, for her son Art she was a weak mother since he felt that she needed to feel loved and contained by the people who surrounded her.This emotional crisis was deepened with the death of Anja’s first son because she start doubting about her role as a mother.

For these reasons she is one the most attractive character of the comic, since we would never get to know her story from her point of view. But from two different perspectives and we will have to mixed both to create our own image of Anja Speiglman

Modernity and identity: a generational dilemma

Look Back in Anger is not only one of the greatest English plays ever written, but it is also an iconic and influential piece of arts that changed British theatre culture. Since the country developed in various political shades, the attitude towards post-war political changes -liberalism and classicism- evolved, and people started being more conscious about class differences, that were bigger before the fifties, and gained a new concept of a working class increasing its power and social status.

Context: censorship and post-war problems

During the fifties, people lost interest for British literature, since the topics treated were no longer appealing to the population; mostly because of the break up of the British Empire and its economical results, thus it was needed to focus into this new economical and social position to heal and move forward to a new beginning . The “Angry Young Men” -a group of middle-class English writers who belonged to a movement upon this new need of showing the reality to the world and to express the general feeling of the population of a dissatisfaction because of hypocrisy- deliberated the concern of everyday problems that society was having, and the necessity of defeat laws, rather than focusing on economical matters, trying to be more open-minded and leaving behind the Victorian hints. (Suleiman, 2012)

Unfortunately, British society was not prepared for bigger changes, and when the play was opened at the Royal Court Theatre, the Lord Chamberlain Office (which were the official censors of the London stage at that time) censored Osborne’s work due to the new social and political base that they were trying to avoid to not disregard the old traditional background -and if we think of the characters; Jimmy has a strong political viewpoint and a social and intellectual sense of superiority; Cliff who is quite fond upon Alison (a married woman); Alison, Jimmy’s wife, deals with being constantly teased by her husband who makes fun of her and her family because her socio economical background and has to face with a dead baby situation, and Helena, who convinces Alison to leave Jimmy; they would not represent an image of values and traditions of what they would like to publish- therefore, since that would not encourage people to well-behave, from the Lord Chamberlain’s point of view, it was performed anyway, but the play’s director had to change some parts from the original script. (Aldgate, 2005)

Jane Asher (Alison Porter), Victor Henry (Jimmy Porter - white shirt),
Martin Shaw (Cliff Lewis) at Royal Court Theatre London - Great Britain,
October 1968. The interesting thing about this revival in 1968 was that it
was the first since the Lord Chamberlain’s office had been abolished.

Drama as a way to express your thoughts

The main topic of Look Back in Anger is a social revolution. Since the plot is about a married couple and a friend sharing an apartment -and also, sharing insults and unrespectful scenes- we understand that these personal relationships do not only scream to be fixed, but also to be heard.

As Kaufmann (2010) states: “It can simply show what is going on in the society in turmoil at the same time that it allows more than one emotional response to these intellectually unprocessed human facts. It is by nature ironic. Drama is thus ideally the medium of social as opposed to individual negative capability, it can resist irritable reachings [sic.] after fact and theory; and thus carry forward the uneconomical dialogue of self-interpretation that is, the cultural role of art which is not merely upholding and disciplining received attitudes.” Therefore, we can conclude that the genre used by the author is totally working, as drama aims to represent, both political and social poles.

Finally, understanding the importance of angry as an emotion -”a feeling, experienced when a desired goal is blocked. According to the frustration-aggression hypothesis when a negative affect is stimulated it elicits an experience of anger.”- and as an expression -”the expression of anger is commonly defined as aggression. According to the frustration- aggression hypothesis, people aggress instinctually in order to reduce the angry feelings mainly aroused by frustration.”(Berkowitz, 1962)* cited by Tecimer (2005), do you think that the expression of a context and a social dilemma can be well-represented with emotions?

References

Aldgate, James (2005). Censorship in Theatre and Cinema. Edinburgh University Press.

Berkowitz, Leonard (1962). Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis. New York, Toronto, London, San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Kaufmann, R.J. (2010) On the Newness of the New Drama. University of Rochester.

Suleiman, Waad (2012). The Political and Social Reality of Post World War II in Britain as Reflected in the Novel Room at the Top by John Braine. Middle East University. Ankara, Turkey.

Tecimer, Emine (2005). The Analysis of the Theme of Anger in John Osborne's Plays: Look Back in Anger, Inadmissible Evidence, Watch it Come Down. Middle East Technical University. Ankara, Turkey.