You would think so, wouldn’t you? I’m using "posthuman" to indicate a sensibility which accepts the artificial, inorganic, even the repugnant. Hopefully, it does not completely disdain the aesthetics of humanism–grace, depth, proportion, perspective, etc.–but it does not fetishize theses qualities when it encounters them, and it recognizes the explosive potential of their opposites –awkwardness, surface, obsession.
Superman–the superman I knew as a kid, who was not so different from superman of the 1940's–is, as I reckon, very much caught up in the discourse of the human, this despite being conceived of explicitly as "the man of tomorrow." He is fundamentally a man who fights to maintain order when is threatened; whose invulnerable body epitomizes an Apollonian ideal of manhood. Though an alien to this world, he is in no way alienated from it; born out of the despair of the depression, a time when many in America were touting the advantages of benign dictatorship, he is the aristocratic shadow of the blue collar Clark Kent, defending his land in the tradition of noblesse oblige. His project is fundamentally hygenic; as crime in a monarchy is an injury against the body of the king, so Superman extends the invulnerability of his body to protect social body. So yes, he certainly represents a version of the posthuman, but an elite, delimiting one.
Batman I’m not so sure of. The patrician Batman lampooned in the TV show of the 60's was, well, campy. Camp changes everything. His metamorphosis into "The Dark Knight" of the 1980's–machine gun wielding wildman–is almost certainly at least a symptom of the posthuman.
Wolverine certainly is an embodiment of the posthuman. His body, able to withstand virtually any bleeding, trauma, or opening, implicitly defies the connection between inner and outer; it represents a kind Dionysian ideal. Because of this genetic superpower, he has another one: the "adamantium" skeleton laced throughout his body, including retactable claws. He is a cyborg.
These and other like thoughts came to me as I reading Austin Grossman’s Soon I will be Invincible, a book I picked up for entertainment value, but which actually got me to thinking less than a third of the way through. Written in alternating chapters between a supervillain, Doctor Impossible, and Fatale, a new-to- the-superhero- game female cyborg created by a supersecret corporation (which turns out to have been one of Doctor Impossible’s front corporations that he forgot about for a time), Invincible is surprisingly true to the superhero/supervillain drama. Grossman himself is a graduate student (comp. lit, at Berkeley), and he manages to enliven his villain with the angst of a graduate student.
I’m reasonably sure the author is as aware as I am of Donna Haraway’s take on the Cyborg archetype. This made me look for added depth in the character of Fatale, which while not completely missing, is not really the point–she is the one serves as the reader’s reliable narrator, questions such as "what is a human?" and "what is a woman?" register on her consciousness, and she is very much a supporter of the idea of coalescing around shared interests that is at the core of Haraway’s social extension of the cyborg image. Nonethess, she is not the character who captures the reader’s attention. Dr. Impossible is.
Impossible’s story (we never learn his full name) draws mostly from Dr. Doom, with a little bit of the pathos of Lex Luthor. A science nerd, a sufferer of "malign hypercognition disorder" (brilliant touch!), he competed as an undergraduate with a football jock who somehow always managed to keep up with him in class, he designed an experiment with exotic energies that went horribly wrong. The result was the creation of CoreFire, who basically has the powers and mentality of Superman. Impossible himself gained some limited strength and reduced vulnerability, but nothing comparable. His raison d’etre is to humble CoreFire, a man he resents even for his ability to resist gravity "as if the rest of us had just buckled under."
The central premise of the novel is that CoreFire has disappeared. Following the Superman parallel, this suggests a land disowned by God or the King or both; a Justice League-like group of superheroes has reunited to find him, convinced that Impossible must be behind it. He wasn’t, but the interrogation of him gives him the opening to escape and try once more to take over the world.
This time, he’s convinced it will work, precisely as a gambling addict approaching an array of one-armed bandits must be convinced that this time will be different. The author treats the world domination commonplace of supervillainy with a degree of psychological depth, accepting the compulsion on its own terms. Doctor Impossible is smart enough to understand the frustrations that entail if he actually succeeded in ruling the universe, but he’s going to try. His elementary school teacher once told him he was a genius, and he’s still driven to prove that judgement right, to prove himself against the natural aristocrats of the world. In a drama peopled by an elite posthumanity, he is the voice of the marginalized human.
Even in his moment of triumph, as he is beating the re-emergent CoreFire senseless with a weapon he has rescued from a deceased supervillain, one of two he considered a friend, he triumph goes unacknowledged. He unmasks himself, to CoreFire’s complete bewilderment, before CoreFire’s super friends escape from their cages to beat him senseless. His victory goes almost completely unremarked.
I kept thinking as I read this is that it was not so different from reading the novelization of a real comic book. Better written, more depth, more background, but not significantly better than the best superhero comics; not quite on the level as something by Neil Gaiman, but that’s the neighborhood. This is no knock against him, rather an acknowledgement that the genre has grown up some.
Superman–the superman I knew as a kid, who was not so different from superman of the 1940's–is, as I reckon, very much caught up in the discourse of the human, this despite being conceived of explicitly as "the man of tomorrow." He is fundamentally a man who fights to maintain order when is threatened; whose invulnerable body epitomizes an Apollonian ideal of manhood. Though an alien to this world, he is in no way alienated from it; born out of the despair of the depression, a time when many in America were touting the advantages of benign dictatorship, he is the aristocratic shadow of the blue collar Clark Kent, defending his land in the tradition of noblesse oblige. His project is fundamentally hygenic; as crime in a monarchy is an injury against the body of the king, so Superman extends the invulnerability of his body to protect social body. So yes, he certainly represents a version of the posthuman, but an elite, delimiting one.
Batman I’m not so sure of. The patrician Batman lampooned in the TV show of the 60's was, well, campy. Camp changes everything. His metamorphosis into "The Dark Knight" of the 1980's–machine gun wielding wildman–is almost certainly at least a symptom of the posthuman.
Wolverine certainly is an embodiment of the posthuman. His body, able to withstand virtually any bleeding, trauma, or opening, implicitly defies the connection between inner and outer; it represents a kind Dionysian ideal. Because of this genetic superpower, he has another one: the "adamantium" skeleton laced throughout his body, including retactable claws. He is a cyborg.
These and other like thoughts came to me as I reading Austin Grossman’s Soon I will be Invincible, a book I picked up for entertainment value, but which actually got me to thinking less than a third of the way through. Written in alternating chapters between a supervillain, Doctor Impossible, and Fatale, a new-to- the-superhero- game female cyborg created by a supersecret corporation (which turns out to have been one of Doctor Impossible’s front corporations that he forgot about for a time), Invincible is surprisingly true to the superhero/supervillain drama. Grossman himself is a graduate student (comp. lit, at Berkeley), and he manages to enliven his villain with the angst of a graduate student.
I’m reasonably sure the author is as aware as I am of Donna Haraway’s take on the Cyborg archetype. This made me look for added depth in the character of Fatale, which while not completely missing, is not really the point–she is the one serves as the reader’s reliable narrator, questions such as "what is a human?" and "what is a woman?" register on her consciousness, and she is very much a supporter of the idea of coalescing around shared interests that is at the core of Haraway’s social extension of the cyborg image. Nonethess, she is not the character who captures the reader’s attention. Dr. Impossible is.
Impossible’s story (we never learn his full name) draws mostly from Dr. Doom, with a little bit of the pathos of Lex Luthor. A science nerd, a sufferer of "malign hypercognition disorder" (brilliant touch!), he competed as an undergraduate with a football jock who somehow always managed to keep up with him in class, he designed an experiment with exotic energies that went horribly wrong. The result was the creation of CoreFire, who basically has the powers and mentality of Superman. Impossible himself gained some limited strength and reduced vulnerability, but nothing comparable. His raison d’etre is to humble CoreFire, a man he resents even for his ability to resist gravity "as if the rest of us had just buckled under."
The central premise of the novel is that CoreFire has disappeared. Following the Superman parallel, this suggests a land disowned by God or the King or both; a Justice League-like group of superheroes has reunited to find him, convinced that Impossible must be behind it. He wasn’t, but the interrogation of him gives him the opening to escape and try once more to take over the world.
This time, he’s convinced it will work, precisely as a gambling addict approaching an array of one-armed bandits must be convinced that this time will be different. The author treats the world domination commonplace of supervillainy with a degree of psychological depth, accepting the compulsion on its own terms. Doctor Impossible is smart enough to understand the frustrations that entail if he actually succeeded in ruling the universe, but he’s going to try. His elementary school teacher once told him he was a genius, and he’s still driven to prove that judgement right, to prove himself against the natural aristocrats of the world. In a drama peopled by an elite posthumanity, he is the voice of the marginalized human.
Even in his moment of triumph, as he is beating the re-emergent CoreFire senseless with a weapon he has rescued from a deceased supervillain, one of two he considered a friend, he triumph goes unacknowledged. He unmasks himself, to CoreFire’s complete bewilderment, before CoreFire’s super friends escape from their cages to beat him senseless. His victory goes almost completely unremarked.
I kept thinking as I read this is that it was not so different from reading the novelization of a real comic book. Better written, more depth, more background, but not significantly better than the best superhero comics; not quite on the level as something by Neil Gaiman, but that’s the neighborhood. This is no knock against him, rather an acknowledgement that the genre has grown up some.
Yes, I think superheroes are posthuman. But the posthuman is not necessarily "better." It IS a position of relative strength, but this novel reminds one of the pathos of the human.
2 comments:
I found this post fascinating as I do many of your posts. I enjoy your blog very much.
Thank you for sharing it.
Thanks for the kind words. I'm trying to figure out what I have to say about Octavia Buther, so I'll be blogging about her for the next week or so.
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