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...
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Fascinating if complex. Thanks David!