Too Close to the Heart?

Steven Berg's look at The Dark Knight Returns introduces us to an interpretation of Miller's Batman as a figure of the sublime (and here I am using the term in the Kantian sense of an object that taxes the rational mind beyond its' capacity to judge...) I think it's more complicated than that. If you want a book that deals in a straight-forward manner with the idea that we are not competent to judge "Marvels", good ol' Busiek & Ross are the men for you! Of course, I like Marvels much less than DKR (as this post makes fairly clear)--Miller has the courage to show us that the sublime is horrific and nothing but; he doesn't ornament the face of apocalypse with simpering traces of pseudo-beauty, as B & R do...

However, Marvels does give us a spectator-narrator (Phil Sheldon) who fills the role played by Marlow in Conrad's Heart of Darkness... In DKR, on the other hand, we are most often positioned within the sublime, which is the one place that a human subject can never be!

It starts with panel one, in which Bruce Wayne begins his first-person account of one of his habitual runs at a "good death". Contrast this with the opening of Heart of Darkness: "The Nellie, a crusing yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest." Both stories are headed in the same direction, towards a date with "the horror"; but Miller's tale begins in psychotic flux, Conrad's in the eye of the storm--"at rest". Is that really such an important disctinction? Well--for me--yes!

All of those layers of narration around the core of nihilism in Heart of Darkness are there for a reason! Critics usually interpret Marlow's failure to dash "the Intended's" hopes against the rocks of the plain, unvarnished "Truth" as some kind of failure of nerve--like Conrad's whole book is just a mealy-mouthed indictment of "hypocrisy". I, on the other hand, believe that Marlow's fabrication, at the last moment, of a "noble lie" that he knows he'll never forgive himself for telling, is the only authentic human response to this existential crisis (and, in bestowing this gift upon "the Intended", at the cost of his own integrity, Marlow anticipates "Grant Morrison"'s act in Animal Man!) By giving us Batman's world primarily through the eyes of Batman himself, Miller robs his narrative of a great deal of the complexity that it might otherwise have possessed... I don't know why he chose to do this--is it just the effect of an addiction to hard-boiled, Hammett-style prose? aping Red Harvest's style without grasping the significance of the style? I'm not sure... There may be reasons for it that are not yet apparent to me. Is Clark Kent left in the Marlow-position at the end of DKR? Maybe so, but that wink looks even lamer then, doesn't it?

Here perhaps I ought to direct your gaze Blogfonte-ward, where Mitch H. has joined our Dark Knight/Heart of Darkness disccusion...

Mitch, I've never read Heart of Darkness as a "cautionary tale"... I think it's one of the best accounts we have of a subjective encounter with the sublime. Personally, I find The Dark Knight Returns far less rewarding, because, in treating the sublime as an "abyss of nothingness" that the subject can dive into, if he/she so chooses (and Batman surely does), rather than an absolute barrier, that will either make or break the person who runs into it, Miller's book offers nothing to a reader interested primarily in the relationship between self and Other (or self and world)...

DKR is almost entirely given over to a Nietzschean quest for solipsistic "mastery" (quite unneccesary, and, in my opinion, soul-destroying--because the soul cannot feel itself at all if it cannot feel the pull of another). I say "almost entirely" because I'm on the verge of coming up with a reading of this book that places Superman at its' center--it may not come to much, but I think it's the best point of entry for a person with my Kantian/ Kierkegaardian/ Edwardsean understanding of the sublime! I'm gonna sleep on it!


"It's like this Bruce--sooner or later, somebody's going to order me to bring you in."

Okay: I'll admit that I began discussing Miller's Dark Knight Returns as a kind of stunted version of Heart of Darkness, but I'm changing my tune... I still believe that it's instructive to think of Batman as a Kurtz-figure (with Robin in role of the "Russian Harlequin", or vice-versa), but now I'm ready to toss Superman-as-Marlow and Gotham/the world-as-"the-Intended" into the mix! Clearly though, the later work is no mere "remake", or redeployment of the same archetypes in the same way... For one thing, in Miller's work, we get most of the events through Kurtzian eyes, and that makes a huge difference.

Bruce asks us to accept his version of things: he's just a man, ready to battle God ("There's just the sun and the sky and him, like he's the only reason it's all here.") if he must, in the pursuit of justice. But I think that there's a way to enter this text in the guise of Superman (through Clark's "nuclear epiphany; or, how I learned to cease striving for the sun and love the earth", in Bk 4)--and it's a reading which offers a very interesting critique of Batman's Promethean/Ahabian project...