The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  The hero’s antagonists, on the other hand, are depicted as being unresponsive to the community and the community’s values, even if they happen to be residents. The antagonist may represent an alien community or only the community of the self, but the fact that he acts as a law unto himself is not glossed over. The Beowulf-poet stresses this: Grendel is of the exiled race of Cain, he inhabits that no-man’s land where the influence of the community ends and what is in effect the jungle begins, and from that dark region he peers at the community and envies its happiness. Though he comes within the pale of the community by gaining control of Heorot, if only during the night, his natural element, his means of doing so puts him beyond the pale. The rules therefore need not apply to him: the only good renegade is a dead renegade.

  Primitive heroes do not, however, have carte blanche. Although the community may be quite willing to waive all of its laws to ensure the defeat of its enemy, the hero cannot, for otherwise he loses face and his force as the repository of the community’s values (which supposedly he is struggling to preserve). For heroes there seems to be a law of diminishing legal returns. He can violate some laws—against illegal search and seizure, for example—but he cannot violate others, particularly the unwritten laws of the community: killing the villain can eliminate the expense and delay in the community’s vengeance entailed by the observation of due process, but the execution must take the form of a sword point or a bullet in the villain’s chest, not in his back. It is to such a “code of the West” that Beowulf conforms when he undertakes to battle Grendel with his bare hands and Grendel’s dam with a sword (a compensation for the disadvantage of fighting under water). This form of chivalry only allows for “equalizers”—in the “shootdown” it must be .38 against .38. Of course this code is binding upon heroes only; it is one of the crosses they bear but without which they might be difficult to distinguish from their codeless antagonists, the merely instinctual Grendels and cattle-rustlers.

  In spite of the fact that the community itself is usually inferior in the quality of its collective life to the life of the hero, it is still in some sense above him. Its survival is the summum bonum, and the issue of community survival is one which can conveniently be invoked in any crisis in order to justify its actions, even the sacrifice of its best, the hero himself. For the community in both epic and pop romance is not only a social unit but a quasi-religious one. It is that which nurtures, controls, and protects the non-heroes who comprise it: the community giveth and the community taketh away. Its wars are holy wars and its champions, as noted above, become quasi-religious figures. Thus the Unferths or the cowardly shopkeepers whose action or inaction undermines the hero (and thus the community) come close to being not only traitors but apostates.

  Invariably this community religion becomes cosmic: in Hrothgar’s view Beowulf has been divinely sent to deliver his people from a monster who is “at war with God” (although he appears to give real trouble only to the Geats). And Beowulf himself feels that he is under God’s protection. His status as a messiah-figure receives the heaviest stress in the poem’s climactic sequence, the fight with the dragon. This “worm” that flies by night, that is associated with fire, that lives somewhere below, shares at least in the archetype of Satan, whom Milton (in the “Nativity Ode”) called “the old dragon underground.” Beowulf’s determination to save his people singlehandedly, his going-forth with a band of twelve, one of whom initiated the chain of events which will lead to his death, and the scop’s final description of him—“of world-kings the mildest of men and the gentlest”—all suggest an imitation of Christ. The image of the hero as gentle man which seems almost an afterthought in Beowulf is close to the formula in pop romance. “Clark Kent” is always “the mild-mannered reporter,” and Steve Canyon’s pipe-smoking is an obvious clue to his character. The image thrives too in the Western, the classic example being the mild hero (played by Gary Cooper) of the film High Noon.

  Heroes cannot, however, remain lambs: crises call for lions. And whether they take place in epics or in pop romance, crises usually require violent solutions. Violence indeed seems to be the reality of their worlds, and it is in violent situations that the heroes are defined. Superman is somehow more “real” than the mousey “Clark Kent,” Batman more “real” than the do-gooder “Bruce Wayne.” Indeed, in this “civilian” alter ego, each of these heroes is suspected of being, like the youthful Beowulf, “slack, a young man unbold.”

  Beowulf must, in spite of his divine aura, be classified as a Type II hero. He is “of mankind … the strongest of might,” a prestigious swimmer, a supreme fighter, yet if you cut him, he bleeds. He belongs to the company of Batman and Paladin. One significant difference, however, between Beowulf and romance, pop or otherwise (and to some extent between Beowulf and The Faerie Queene), is the distinction between mortality and vulnerability. Spenser’s heroes, like Batman and Paladin, are always being threatened with death but never die (or even age), whereas Beowulf not only ages but dies. And, unlike these other heroes he is intensely aware of fate and almost preoccupied with death. Transiency is his reality and this gives his story an additional dimension. The world of The Faerie Queene and, frequently, of the American Western is largely static, a version of pastoral. “The Wild West,” which existed for only a heartbeat in history, in fiction seems to exist out of time. Marshall Dillon’s Dodge City resembles the town on Keats’s Grecian urn, fixed forever. (This is very much the case with Spenser’s “Faerie Land” and Batman’s “Gotham” as well.) Though populated, these places do not change nor does their populace. Only their heroes seem quite alive—and their villains also, who come and go and occasionally die. This tendency moves a romance-epic like The Faerie Queene and pop romance toward comedy while Beowulf approaches tragedy. And even though Paradise Lost involves tragic action in its story of Satan, the to-be-continued story of Adam and Eve takes the shape of elevated tragicomedy, and the poem as a whole, with its promise of good coming out of evil, takes on the form of a history-play which is also a divine comedy.

  THREE

  In spite of the New Morality, the New Theology, and all of the other forces which are said to be radically altering American society, it is possible to question whether real changes have taken place on all of the levels at which that society responds to art. If, for example, a social scientist were to perform a study to determine which are the twelve moral virtues of most importance to Americans, is it necessarily the case that he would come up with a list that would differ significantly from that of Edmund Spenser? The answer would seem to be “No,” if one can trust the impressions one receives from editorials and letters-to-the-editor, from high-circulation magazines ranging from Life and the Reader’s Digest to Playboy, from pulpits and from the soap boxes of television news and documentaries. Additional evidence to validate this hypothesis can be extracted from an examination of the heroes of pop romance, in whom the virtues treated by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, for example, live still.

  While the main task of these heroes is to insure that justice is done (American justice, community justice), in the process of doing so they, like Sir Calidore, exhibit Courtesy (in the narrow sense of chivalric manners and in the broad sense of integrity); they exemplify Friendship’s highest ideal, agape, by being willing to lay down their lives for their friends; and finally, although some might deviate slightly from Temperance conceived of in terms of wine and women (though even this is not usual), the life of moderation is generally their way of life. Even the virtues of Chastity and Holiness, whose very naming can elicit smiles from the God-Is-Dead, Sexual Freedom generation, seem deeply rooted in the consciousness of even the young. Holiness may perhaps be redefined in terms of Zen or drug-expanded awareness or Peace Corps-type service, and Chastity in terms of “I-Thou” relationships for sexual partners, but the spirit of the ideal still moves among us.

  In pop romance, it is true, Holiness is something of a negative virtue. Men of the cloth and other pious folk are treated de
ferentially by a Superman, a Batman, or a Steve Canyon, but these heroes do not themselves espouse patently ecclesiastical causes. Churches remain sacred places and church-goers are often depicted as that segment of the populace which requires and merits secular as well as divine protection. Villains in pop romance, on the other hand, not infrequently appear as false religious figures (heirs of Archimago and Duessa), whether they be the phony parsons of Westerns, the leaders of obscure and evil cults in modern adventures, or atheistic Communists of the type that Steve Canyon battles. Thus, although the heroes of pop romance appear to be essentially secular figures—and their creators take pains to avoid obvious religious controversy—they are in fact modern exemplars of Holiness, in the broad sense of having respect for religion, of being virtuous, and of being “on God’s side.” While they are not Christian militants, for the Word they spread is not the Gospel but “Justice” or “America,” many pop heroes are not very far removed from the Puritan heroes of the seventeenth century. They are by implication and by default Protestants—there are rarely any Catholics, Jews, Muslims, or atheists in the foxholes of the fictive war against evil. And in his dogged and irresistible militancy on behalf of his cause, each pop hero resembles a one-man New Model Army.

  Although their Chastity, like their Holiness, is more often implicit than explicit, the majority of the heroes of pop romance are still in the Spenserian tradition. Some viewers of Gunsmoke have long suspected that Miss Kitty, proprietress of the Dodge City saloon that Matt Dillon frequents, is no better than she should be, but the sexual overtones of their relationship remain muted. It is a standing joke among cinema buffs that the “Code of the West” permits the cowboy to kiss only his horse, but even today, in an era of attempts at making “realistic” Westerns, the hero is seldom permitted to be a rake. A really strong interest in sex is, in Westerns as in The Faerie Queene, usually reserved for villains.

  Spenser’s heroes are attractive to women, good and bad, and are sometimes attracted to women as other than objects of chivalric fulfillment. They are not professional virgins, even Britomart, but sex without full ecclesiastical and social sanctions is denied them. This is likewise the case with many of the heroes of pop romance; here as in most pastorals, sex is often portrayed as an intrusive force, leading the hero to unaccustomed excess and interfering with his performance of his duties. The male hero’s dilemma is perfectly symbolized in the plight of Superman, who is forever having to rescue Lois Lane and forever rejecting her advances, but who, as “Clark Kent,” degrades himself by making advances which she always spurns. Spenser’s creation of the magnificent Bower of Bliss and his ruthless destruction of it show hardly more rigor than the tendency of the creators of pop romance to condemn their heroes to a largely sexless and even loveless existence. An exception to this tendency is to be found in recent “swinging” versions of the espionage-romance genre. Spy-heroes like James Bond and “Napoleon Solo,” title-figure of the television series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., who, as noted above, are already to a great extent outside both the law and the culture, apparently have licenses to fornicate as well as to kill. They are hedonist-heroes of the New Morality. Yet their popularity, enormous for a year or two, already seems on the wane, which may indicate that Spenser’s ideal of Chastity is still operative beneath the surface of our supposedly liberated culture.

  Spenser’s very idealism makes the classification of his hero-types difficult. The deliberately non-realistic world he creates complicates the establishment of correspondences with our own world by which the hero is partially defined. The world of The Faerie Queene, being itself supernatural, is sometimes superior to the heroes and sometimes not. Since this world does not operate according to natural law in the first place, it seemingly cannot accommodate the Type III hero at all. Furthermore, Spenser’s heroes themselves, informed as they are by so many levels of allegorical meaning but so little characterization, cannot readily be distinguished from each other. “Ordinary” human characters (like Colin Cloute perhaps), who might establish some kind of norm by which the heroes might be measured, are relatively few and far between; “Faerye Land” seems to be populated mainly by heroes and villains. The majority of the former are clearly Type II heroes; in a few cases, however, there is another possibility.

  As Spenser’s letter to Raleigh explains, Prince Arthur is “perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised.” Such perfection, summarized in the supreme virtue of Magnanimity, makes him “superior in kind” to even the other great heroes in the poem, and he is also superior to them in that he possesses a shield whose powers go beyond even the supernatural. This being the case, he is also superior to his “environment,” the supernatural land of Faerie. Spenser does not call him a god, for this would compromise the Christian level of his allegory, but he gives the impression of being one. He is the deliverer, one who comes in glory, and will come again. Thus, along with his beloved, “That greatest glorious queene,” Gloriana, the descendent of “either spright/Or angell,” Arthur can be considered a Type I hero.

  Two other possibilities for this classification present themselves. Although Talus, the “yron man” of Book V, is Artegall’s squire, like God he is “Immoveable, resistlesse, without end” and like Christ he “thresht out falshood, and did truth unfould.” In his inhumanity—or more precisely, his a-humanity—he foreshadows Superman, whose human traits really emerge only when he is “Clark Kent.” In Talus and in Superman the deus ex machina has become “the machine god,” but in the case of the latter a poetic fantasy has been replaced by a technical fantasy; Superman, the man of tomorrow, “is the promise that each and every world problem will be solved by the technical trick.”10

  The mechanical savagery of Talus in some respects has its counterpart in the “natural” savagery of Calepine’s rescuer [the Salvage Man in Book Six of The Faerie Queene]. Although he is, like Talus, a minor character, the “salvage man” is very close at least to being a Type I hero for he is quintessentially good, invincible, and rendered invulnerable through “magicke leare.” A Superman sans cape and leotards, he is also a “Clark Kent,” capable of being “enmoved” to feel compassion. Without losing his god-like powers or his identity he can exhibit “milde humanity and perfect gentle mynd.” His case is an example of how in its smallest as well as its largest developments Spenser’s poem moves toward unity and identity whereas Superman’s story illustrate what seems to be the schizoid tendency of twentieth-century imaginings.

  Although a Redcrosse or a Britomart is so far above us that we may be lulled into thinking of them as gods, if we remain responsive to Spenser’s descriptions and his narrative, it is evident that they are Type II heroes. Like Batman they are vulnerable and capable of error, though Batman’s errors tend to be tactical, theirs human or moral; they can be overpowered by human, natural, or supernatural forces (technological forces in the case of Batman). Their human weaknesses get them into difficulties from which neither their physical nor their moral strength can extricate them. Unlike Adam they are not “sufficient”: all Type II and Type III heroes are in fact fallen men. Being fallen and thus incomplete they frequently need assistance. Indeed, assistants are a fixture of Type II heroes: as Redcrosse has his Una, Britomart her Glaucé, and Artegall his Talus, so Batman has his Robin. Assistants come in handy for purposes of plot: they can be separated from the hero and become involved in sub-plots of their own, from which they may need to be rescued by the hero, or the separation, which weakens the hero, can create a crisis in his own plot from which the assistant can extricate him. An assistant can serve as confidant or as foil to the hero. As foils they are both like the hero and unlike him—Una’s Revealed Truth complements the Holiness of Redcrosse as Robin’s boyish exuberance complements Batman’s mature energy. In general assistants are inferior both physically and mentally to the Type II hero, but together, as a “dynamic duo,” they approach the perfection of the Type I hero. Nonetheless, they still lack his invulnerability. […]
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  FIVE

  There can be little doubt, among scholars at least, that Milton, Spenser, and the scop of Beowulf believed that their epics were relevant to their times, and in the case of Milton certainly, Spenser probably, and the Anglo-Saxon poet possibly, relevant for all time. While the intentions and assumptions of the creators of pop romance may be less evident, there can be little doubt that a part of the vast popularity their efforts enjoy must be due to the special kinds of relevancy that they have for their audiences. If the present generation of students is to be introduced to Beowulf, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost mainly because of their esthetic and historical importance, that introduction may be facilitated and perhaps even enriched if these students can be brought to recognize that our western values have persisted remarkably down through the ages to even the present time through a variety of literary forms and through diverse media; that on this level alone the great English epics can speak to them and to their condition; and that they can speak in language and in modes to which the popular forms so familiar to them sometimes aspire, but seldom achieve.