TRÁMITES PARA OBTENER LICENCIAS Y PERMISOS DE FUNCIONAMIENTO

As described in detail in chapter 2, superhero comic books are the product of various historical circumstances that in combination closely produce the thought and aesthetics of an oral culture. As I begin this chapter, it is essential to note what may seem obvious: that the visual components of superhero comic books are produced by these very same

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stances. This fact is noted because the orality of superhero stories might be readily accepted when comic books are discussed somewhat more abstractly as pure stories (as in chapter 3).

After all, work has already been done on the persistence and reemergence of oral charac-teristics in written texts in various periods throughout human history (with practitioners who sometimes lack and sometimes possess an awareness of oral culture). Nevertheless, one of the most significant motivating factors in the excitement shared by creators, publishers, and the audience of comic books was the ability to easily reproduce images to accompany the text. Unavoidably, the visual art of comic books is the product of advanced printing technology, but it should be remembered that visual art can be produced with other tech-nology and was often part of oral cultures; techtech-nology, in general, is not the opposite of orality and neither is advanced printing technology. The concerns expressed by scholars of oral culture about the visual have much to do with the way the emphasis on visual experience replaces the use of the other senses (especially the aural experience and the psychology tied to it). However, I intend to reveal that the general design of art within the early (and later) history of superhero comic books is traditional in the sense that it activates a psychology very much like that of primary orality (or at least an orality that still predates the widespread dominance of literacy). As technology, distribution, and audience sensibilities have allowed wider stylistic diversity in superhero comic book illustration, the traditional style of illus-tration not only has persisted but also has been advocated by many of the most well- respected practitioners in field. I believe that those creators recognize some sort of connection between the medium and this style of illustration, and, though they might not recognize it as such, this forms the oral- visual praxis of superhero comic books. Since orality and visuality are related in superhero stories and yet seem to represent different fields, another term would better serve the discussion in order to characterize the visuals that work in ways consistent with oral tradition. With this in mind, we will be referring to the traditionality of comic book illustration.²Such terminology is useful as this chapter is concerned with not only the illustration style but also the other elements within the illustrated content of superhero stories (and the way comic book visuals work to form certain formulae in line with oral tra-dition).

To begin, it is important to establish the reasons why visual culture (or a bias toward the visual) has been understood to necessarily work against the dynamic operation of oral culture. In a continuum of the human sensory experiences, Ong lines up touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight in that order. Although we are primarily concerned with hearing and sight, it’s worth noting that Ong states that the move from left to right on the continuum means a move from concreteness to abstraction, from subjectivity to objectivity, and from existence to idealism (Interfaces 136–137). Within the literate world, words are no longer

“spoken things — writing transposes language to a spatial medium” (Ong, The Presence 3).

The end result of this is what Ong refers to as a “hypervisualism,” a tendency that is prob-lematic because it ignores that language is an aural experience before it is a visual experience.³ As words become increasingly understood as an alphabetic construction, individuals have more distance from what was “said,” as language exists less as an experience immediately taken inside one’s self and more as an abstraction that can be studied objectively.⁴ “To become intelligible, what we see has to be mediated, in one way or another, through verbal formulation, which as such cannot be reduced to a visual presentation” (Ong, Interfaces 125). Within his extensive study of Peter Ramus, Ong is able to show how thought, in an age of literacy, became spatialized with schemas developed in visual terms of two and dimensional maps (the general evolution being from sounds to picture writing to alphabetic

representation to diagrams and maps). The implication of Ong’s observations is that the textual is the visual, and it exists in its own terms and serves as the preferred substitute for images of the human lifeworld; now that language is textual, sight is not used in the way it had been previously: “Primitive man has keen eyes, and in many ways observes more acutely than does technological man: a primitive hunter sees all sorts of things happening in the woods about him of which his urbanized visitor is completely unaware. But he cannot expiate them or describe them accurately to any appreciable extent” (Interfaces 129). In fact, after discussing George Berkley’s refutation of René Descartes (“who had wholly abstracted the visual sense from the interaction of the other senses”), Marshall McLuhan would go so far as to suggest that “the suppression of the visual sense in favor of or the audile- tactile complex, produces distortions in tribal society” (The Gutenberg 53). Since the visual expe-rience of the “human lifeworld” is deemed lesser by literate culture, this expeexpe-rience of the literal is downplayed, and illustrations typical in the hand- written manuscript begin to dis-appear in the printed text (Ong, Orality 116–119); the technology needed to represent the human lifeworld would be slow in coming, and illustration did not distract from the truly important visual: the words. From this overview, it should be evident that I consider the visual orientation that clearly precludes the thought characteristic of oral culture to not be a general consequence of the visual; instead, it is an orientation toward typographic repre-sentation that distances one’s thought from the experience and processes associated with all other senses.

Moreover, oral cultures are not strangers to the process of image- making in either epic poetry or the visual arts. To be more specific on the image- making that takes places within oral culture, it is worth mentioning the visual references made extensively with oral epics.

While I realize that these references are not the same as telling stories with materially repro-duced pictures, it nevertheless reinforces the idea that oral storytelling is not the antithesis of pictorial storytelling. Oral storytelling tends to include exhaustive visual detail (intricate word- pictures) because corresponding visual media forms do not exist within most oral cul-tures to the same degree that they do within most literate culcul-tures. Stories will focus on extensive details of a knight’s armor and the intricate movements of a warrior in battle, and the stories will eschew discussions of abstract ideas that cannot be tied to literal plot points.

The description of Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad is one of the most famous examples of visual detail communicated in an oral poem: ekphrasis (or a description of the visual in another work of art). “Oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld” (Ong, Orality 49). In turn, Eric Havelock would suggest that the visual sensibility of the epic pushed the narrative of the epic forward, event to event (in my esti-mation, much like a comic book):

[Act and events in the epic] had to be presented visually, or as visually as possible ... [a]

method of suggestive leading- on of the memory could be supplied by visual resemblance between the items of record; that is if one agent looked something like another one or one performance looked something like another. The picture of an angry man leader to the picture of a man drawing his sword; but the drawing of a sword may link to the picture of someone else holding on to it from behind.... The Homeric epithet can be seen to have a double function. It fills in a portion of the rhythm by automatic reflex, and this saves the bard effort. But equally it visualizes the object more keenly [Havelock 187].

In addition to reinforcing the idea of the visual as paramount within the oral epics, Havelock identifies the visual as a necessary component that carries both the creator and the audience

forward to the next event. Since this emphasizes narrative momentum, the visual serves as an element to close the gap between what is already said and what is later said. Thus, we have the sense that oral poetry works with what would come to be called the imaginary in order to fully activate and cement the story in the mind of the audience. Although based illustration would not cease in the language- based stories of literate culture, the atti-tude toward illustration would change significantly. As McLuhan suggests, “To the oral man the literal is inclusive, contains all possible meanings and levels.... But the visual man of the sixteenth century is impelled to separate level from level, and function from function, in a process of specialist exclusion” (The Gutenberg 111).⁵And as Ong indicated, illustrations (like diagrams) become a means to the end of more fully understanding the printed text and the concepts beyond the text (to which the text points).

The sort of image- making characteristic of epic poetry has been separated from the experience of the literate mind in the Western world (with only a few significant exceptions) even longer than might be implied by Ong’s above- mentioned work. Within Preface to Plato, Havelock addresses one of the components of Plato’s Republic that contemporary critics often find problematic: Plato’s rejection of poetry and image- making. Based upon Plato’s doctrine of the forms, art is an imperfect imitation of the real world and the real world is an imperfect imitation of the formal world (where all things exist in perfection).

With this notion in mind, art takes thinkers in the wrong direction, away from an appreciation of the forms: all that is good and true. Havelock argues the crucial point in understand -ing Plato’s vehemence against artists is to whom he refers in that those artists practice poetic mimesis; they are epic poets and epic poetry is separate from Plato’s project.

[J]ust as poetry itself, as long as it reigned supreme, constituted the chief obstacle to the achievement of effective prose, so there was a state of mind which we shall conveniently label the “poetic” of “Homeric” or “oral” state of mind, which constituted the chief obsta-cle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in sequence of cause and effect. That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch- enemy and it is easy to see why he considered the enemy so formidable....

He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the “sub-ject” who stands apart from the “ob“sub-ject” and reconsiders it and analyzes it and elevates it, instead of just “imitating” it [Havelock 46–47].

As Havelock argues, the thought of oral culture is founded upon principles that work in ways nearly antithetical to Platonism (a highly refined version of the thought of literate culture). Where oral culture would seek to maintain culture through the immersive expe-rience of epic poetry, Plato would seek to question culture through the systematic analysis of the individual mind (Havelock 102–103). In fact, Plato’s most famous deployment of imagery, “The Allegory of the Cave,” uses the visual as a metaphor, an abstracted means to an end (much like a diagram). The end would be to understand things in conceptual terms and leave behind the shadows cast on the wall; by extending Havelock’s argument, it could be said that these were the things to which participants in oral culture had devoted them-selves.

In estimating the influence of Platonism and literacy (which is undeniably extensive), one of the crucial elements to keep in mind is that Plato refers to mimesis and making as something done by epic poets.⁶However, in rough historical reckoning, the rise of Platonism and literacy in ancient Greece would coincide with what is often referred to

as the Greek revolution in art: the movement away from the flattened representation of Grecian urns to the perspective- driven representation of Grecian realism. Consequently, what Plato called mimetic may not be what the literate world calls realism (the aesthetics that far- gone literates have in mind when thinking of how to represent the human lifeworld).

In Art and Illusion, E.H. Gombrich makes a compelling case that cultures outside the reach of Platonism have a psychology that causes them to make art differently and subsequently, argues that an artist is always more influenced by what is known than what is seen. Since the distinction between these two categories may be slippery, Gombrich examines the ancient Egyptian art that preceded Platonic philosophy and the art of the Greek revolution and makes several points.⁷Despite having the intelligence and technical skill that allows artists to depict figures realistically, these artists chose to emphasize aspects of their culture much closer to the ideals of orality (my contention, not his); these include the use of narrative, stereotype (cliché), relative time line, and repetition (Gombrich 103–107); moreover, the art departs from rules that might govern the realistic depiction of objects in space in order to present the object holistically and connect the viewer with all aspects of the object. While acknowledging that every culture is different, certain generalizations can be made about traditional art, whether it is the visual arts of Paleolithic caves, ancient Egypt, or medieval Europe. Although subsequent civilizations have often tried to reduce such art to the level of the functional or decorative, it is rarely just one or the other. The images in these works are almost always tied to a story that may be made clear in the course of the work but usually does not need to be (as the story is a preexisting and indelible part of the culture).

Selective exaggeration calls attention to details and emphasizes story points, and, sometimes, images will be set in sequence in order to indicate narrative development. In addition, the figures are drawn from the human lifeworld but are stylized in such a way as to avoid par-ticulars that would fix the art within a limited time or place. Employing what may be rudi-mentary tools for image- making, these stylizations become standards by which characters within the works are readily known (visual clichés or stereotypes used to designate the king, the warrior, the enemy). Concomitantly, these stylizations also are suggestive beyond the repre -sentation itself, symbols known to the culture familiar with the general practices of art. By often working outside the strict rules of three- dimensional representation, this art avoids the limitations of surfaces; this allows the individual to experience the thing depicted as a whole, to penetrate the image in a way that some have speculated enables identification and participation. Ultimately, the recipient of the art is regularly participating in a reality of culture already well known and long taught and that experience of the art is additive rather than a suggestion for radical change. The stylistic tendencies of the artist are passed from one generation to the next (and with cave paintings, artists often trace over previous paint-ings) suggesting a worldview unlike that of Plato who wants to move beyond the status quo.

In addition to Gombrich’s arguments, McLuhan would cite Kurt Seligman in his dis-cussion of the mnemonic memory manifested in the manuscripts of the medieval period that contained appeals to oral culture in their illustrations (readable by illiterate and literate alike) (McLuhan, The Gutenberg 108–109).⁸Also, Ong’s account serves well to indicate what shortly preceded the Renaissance and the rebirth of Platonic ideals in the Western world:

The greater visualism initiated by script and the alphabet is given more and more play in the West through the Middle Ages and then suddenly is brought to a new intensity in the fifteenth century and thereafter with the invention of alphabetic typography ... for at approximately the same time that alphabetic typography appears, painting is being swept by a revolution in its treatment of perspective [Ong, The Presence 8].⁹

Similar to the other scholars already mentioned, Ong implies that there is a conceptual con-nection between the rise of print texts and not only the decline of book illustration but also the rise of realism and naturalism in the visual arts (Orality 116–119).¹⁰In any case, with the Greek revolution, the characteristics of realistic art would differ from the ideals of traditional art, (realistic art being nonnarrative, individual, grounded in time, and unique); moreover, realistic art adheres to rules that govern the realistic depiction of objects in space in order to present surfaces separate from the viewer, surfaces to be studied. Nevertheless, even though such art is much more clearly in line with Plato’s vision of the world, Gombrich points out that pictures can’t fit into a logical framework as true or false, fiction or nonfiction (59, 109); tied to the human lifeworld, realism is still something problematic (and may be used in the service of epic storytelling). Therefore, this necessitates Plato’s extreme stance against all image- makers, as even realistic art is a disruption within the Plato’s world. While visual art may not be banned from Plato’s world, it occupies a status that is clearly secondary to that of the written word.

With this in mind, it is worth noting that the criticisms against early comic stories have much to do with its emphasis on the pictorial (for instance, Annie Russell Marble’s

“The Reign of the Spectacular”). In addition, those who argued against early comic stories did so with Platonic anxieties toward the psychology of oral culture at the forefront their arguments. Associating comic strips and comic books with other elements of “mass culture,”

Irving Howe would articulate fears that these new media experiences were leading to “the depersonalization of the individual” (44); comic stories promised diversion but merely rein-forced the worker’s “semi- robot status,” and the ominous movie theater was “like a dark cavern, a neutral womb” (44, 45), a space like that of Plato’s cave. Again, in their relatively uninformed ways, these early critics actually see some of the truth of the matter. Since oral culture in general and oral poetry in particular contain visual information that does not crowd out but furthers the oral sensibilities of the story, my goal then becomes to identify how we “see” this in superhero comic books as well. But before proceeding to my explanation

Irving Howe would articulate fears that these new media experiences were leading to “the depersonalization of the individual” (44); comic stories promised diversion but merely rein-forced the worker’s “semi- robot status,” and the ominous movie theater was “like a dark cavern, a neutral womb” (44, 45), a space like that of Plato’s cave. Again, in their relatively uninformed ways, these early critics actually see some of the truth of the matter. Since oral culture in general and oral poetry in particular contain visual information that does not crowd out but furthers the oral sensibilities of the story, my goal then becomes to identify how we “see” this in superhero comic books as well. But before proceeding to my explanation