I love it.
I do take issue, however, with Shaviro's (approving) characterization of Morrison as "a sly hipster" bent upon replacing "the old book's naive earnestness with [a series of] tongue-in-cheek provocations" aimed squarely at "stability, normality, conformity, and everyday boredom" (the real enemies, according to Shaviro)... Frankly, I don't see it. I can't address anything after Animal Man & Doom Patrol (this is a situation I plan to remedy over the course of the summer and fall), but the Morrison that I'm familiar with is no mere trickster. In fact, I would argue that he (perhaps along with Mark Gruenwald) is the most earnest person ever to have written a superhero comic. Morrison never deconstructs for deconstruction's sake, nor does he take cynical pleasure in shocking "dull normals". His work is strange, certainly, but not any stranger than it has to be in order to convey the genuinely eerie aspects of human existence. And no way is Morrison the kind of yay-saying postmodernist that agrees with this statement:
We aren't interested in duration or preservation; we devour and squander at a frantic pace, latching on to one thing only to throw it aside in favor of something else the very next moment. Everything is negotiable, everything is available for exchange. So let yourself go. Don't be a good citizen. Don't produce, expend. Be a parasite. Consume images and be consumed by them.
Forget about the way the guy presents himself in interviews! The concept of the self may be an illusion in Morrison's mind, however, precisely for this reason, relation, morality and "otherness" become even more important in his work. This is where postmodernity and radical protestantism meet. Perhaps I am projecting too much of myself onto the author of Animal Man & Doom Patrol, but I don't think so...after all, I got to be this way largely because of him (along with Capra, Dickens, Hawthorne, and one very important ex-girlfriend).
I'm running out of time here, so I'd better make some kind of point quickly! Let's begin with a very important difference between Borges' Tlön & Morrison's Orqwith, and then take it from there tomorrow.
Okay, here's Borges' take on expansionary metafiction:
Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön's rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already Tlön's (conjectural) primitive language has filtered into our schools; already the teaching of Tlön's harmonious history (filled wih moving episodes) has obliterated the history that governed my own childhood; already a fictitious past has supplanted in men's memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain--not even that it is false.
Tlön is a totalitarian episteme, it literally forces everything to make sense. And the takeover is insidious.
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