Comiccon paper, as requested by many lovely people who came to my talk. Thank you all!!!

The Hole in things”: Ambiguity, Apophenia and Negative Capability in Batman R.I.P.

It is an enduring feature of mankind, perhaps the defining feature, to strive for total meaning, for the fullest comprehension of human life and the world in which it exists. This aspect of the human condition arguably reached its apogee during the eighteenth-century enlightenment project which was an attempt to create a ‘rational, progressive and cultivated society based upon the empirically discovered and/or logically deduced laws of nature and human nature’. Its dynamic spirit was a critique of accepted values and a search for objective truth as evinced by more empirical, rational means.

In literature this facet of humanity has perhaps been celebrated most notably by the character of the detective. From Edgar Alan Poe’s C. August Dupin (The Murders at La Rue Morgue ) to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and all the way up to television characters like Columbo and, dare I say it, Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher the detective has endured and is arguably the apotheosis of the belief that the application of reason will solve even the most seemingly impenetrable of mysteries. In this sense it is not hard to view Batman, The Dark Knight Detective, as possibly the greatest practitioner of this art, by way of his unparalleled deductive reasoning.

In his constant antimony with the Joker (Conceivably his karmic alter-ego, embodying the chaotic and irrational, if not the even more frightening, Foucault-esque notion of the a-rational, the un-reason-able) Batman has rarely (if ever) failed to pit method against madness and thus foil the madman’s plans. In this application of strict empirical reasoning to even the most abstruse of situations Batman embodies the aforementioned strive for total meaning, for full comprehension.

However, in the modern (or should that be post-modern?) world, an all too regular recurring stumbling block to such a process is the inevitable realisation that many (if not all) aspects of human existence are subject to a plurality of meanings , of irresolvable ambiguities. In a post-structuralist, ‘decentred world’ the old belief that there is any true objective meaning is proving harder and harder to maintain. Critic John Gray calls this problem, Enlightenment’s Wake. Where once there appeared to exist certain ‘objective truths’ (as in the Enlightenment’s belief in the death of the ‘subjective’) there now appears to be a fracturing of such perceived absolutisms and an acceptance of the “feasibility that simultaneities of different meanings persist in the things of cognitive concern.” Essentially, one could argue, far from an golden age of absolute, objective truth, we are now living in an age dominated by uncertainty.

It is my contention that in Batman R.I.P. Grant Morrison ushers Batman headfirst into this age of uncertainty and asks the question can the Dark Knight Detective survive when faced with the limits of reason

Other literary ‘detectives’ have faced similar problems with often horrifying results. Charles Dexter Ward is but one example of learned, intelligent men in H.P. Lovecraft’s work who, while searching for absolute truth or knowledge, are instead confronted with the utterly unknowable (in the form of beings like Cthulu and Yog-Soggoth.)and driven insane. Similarly, in post-modern detective fiction like Paul Auster’s acclaimed New York Trilogy, writer turned detective Quinn descends into madness after taking on a mysterious case. As Quinn gets deeper and deeper into the case all vestiges of identity and reality start to crumble.

This paper will examine how, through an engagement with concepts as diverse as Negative Capability (Poet John Keats’ theory that any great artist has the ability to ‘exist in uncertainties, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.’) and Apophenia (a psychological condition whereby the sufferer sees patterns and links that are not necessarily present), Morrison deconstructs the great detective in a similar manner and thus illustrates the dangers of adhering to absolute, objective reason in a world that can no longer be experienced in these terms. In doing so Morrison raises serious questions about art’s ability to ever exist outside of this particular ideology of Reason.

As previously mentioned one could argue that we are living in an age of uncertainty.( If you excuse the digression I’m going to go into this a little bit, to set the scene as it were, as this is the background against which Batman R.I.P. is set. )

This assertion has been borne out by a number of developments in almost every facet of human endeavour. In the sciences, for example, the perceived absolute truth of Newtonian physics has been fractured by developments in quantum physics, wherein bodies in the sub-atomic plane are seen to operate outside of these long held laws and principles. Moreover the traditional mandate of science for defining objective truths of nature (as espoused by many during and since the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the primacy of reason), has been weakened by the fundamental ambiguity suggested by the aforementioned developments, that is that the nature of the observed can depend greatly on the conditions of the observer , that essentially far from locating ‘objective truths’ Science now finds itself accepting the viability of ‘subjective truths’(Schrödinger’s cat being the typical example of this).

Similarly in the ‘soft’ sciences there has been considerable rejection of ‘objective truths’. From Freud’s ‘third blow’ to the human ego (the first two being Darwin and Copernicus), whereby after realising that the sun does not revolve around us and that we are not special among ‘God’s creatures’ but merely evolved from the same primordial goo as the rest of them, we are now faced with the realisation that far from being ‘rational’ beings we were revealed to not even be ‘masters in our own houses’ subject to the whims of our subconscious, to psychology’s acceptance of an irreversible separation of self and other, we have seen the same process of rejecting former ‘truths’ and their replacement with more ambiguous systems.

Congruent with this are developments in the field of cultural theory, wherein we have seen the death of the author as the primary artificer of meaning. In Barthes’ seminal 1968 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ he effectively signalled the end of the practice of determining meaning from the author’s intent or any associated context, and in its stead there is a ‘declaration of radical textual dependence.’[1] Our time has been characterised by what Jean Francois Lyotard calls an ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’:

“Grand Narratives, of progress and human perfectibility, then, are no longer tenable, and the best we can hope for is a series of mini-narratives, which are provisional, contingent, temporary, and relative.” [2]

It has been said that that what we are living in can be typified as being ‘post-ideological’ or, perhaps more accurately, as an era dominated by what cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek terms ’the ideology of cynicism’. What Zizek means by this is that though we may know that what we are following is in fact an illusion, we are never the less still following it.

The inherent paradox of this statement is indicative of a problem that has surfaced since the beginning of writing, that is to say, that though creators and artists are aware of the irreconcilable plurality of meanings or indeed the lack of any significant truth there is still a tendency , as Zizek terms it, to fill in the ‘gaps’...or to paraphrase Dr. Hurt “the hole in things.” Essentially then, life is chaotic and arational and, to return to Lyotard, provisional, contingent, and relative. Most dominant media will try to convince us that the opposite is true and that everything is coherent, objective and ultimately knowable. It does so by ‘filling in the gaps’.

Filmmakers such as David Lynch, Nicolas Roeg, and Richard Kelly have all bucked this trend and offered us dreamlike (and at times nightmarish) films that revel in ambiguity and the subjective. But what of the comic book? Mainstream comics have traditionally followed in the footsteps of other media and generally adhered to the ‘anthropocentric fallacy’ of the grand narrative. What I mean by this is the false belief that human experience can be accurately described or rendered in art via a linear narrative structure with a definite beginning, middle and end, characters that remain consistent and absolute in their actions and personalities.

Indie and experimental comics have often experimented with distorting and subverting the codes and tropes that allow for such a facile reading of human experience just as indie and experimental films have blazed a similar trail in cinema. In recent years mainstream cinema has adopted many of these experimental tropes. Critic Jeffrey Sconce has Identified a group of loosely connected films which have done so that he terms the new American ‘Smart Film’.
As a genre ‘Smart’ Film, though nebulous in definition, is almost synonymous with a rejection of the objective. Films include Donnie Darko and its follow up Southland Tales , by Richard Kelly; Pi, The Fountain, and more recently The Wrestler, by Darren Aronofsky; The Sweet Hereafter by Atom Egoyan; Election by Alexander Payne; No Country for Old Men by the Coen Brothers; the films of writer/director Charlie Kaufmann and regular collaborators Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche New York); and A Scanner Darkly by Richard Linklater, as well as many more. The latter, adapted from a Philip K. Dick story, is a particularly good example of this as not only does it revel in the same fractured narrative of the book, it also adds an extra ‘layer’ as it were to the already rich palimpsest by rendering the action as ‘animated reality’.

It is possible to argue that writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and in particular Grant Morrison have followed a similar path by infusing mainstream comics with similar sensibilities. Indeed Alan Moore, in his book on Writing for Comics called for comics to take the cue from the type of filmmakers that have influenced the new American ‘smart’ Cinema:
“Why is there no attempt to understand and adapt the work of contemporary pioneers like Nic Roeg or Altman or Coppola…?”[3]

Books by the aforementioned writers and indeed less mainstream creators like Bryan Talbot, writer/artist of Luther Arkwright (Fig 4) and The Tale of One Bad Rat, have succeeded in transposing these techniques to comics, and while I would be loath to dub these comics as ‘smart comics’ (the term is insulting to talented writers like Peter David, Joss Whedon, Joe Kelly and J.M. Strasczinski who also craft exceptional superhero stories) there is certainly a lot of crossover. It is my contention that this (sub)genre, if it can be described as such, much like its cinematic cousin, engages with the ontological fallacy of the objective, not through a nihilistic abdication of meaning, but rather through Negative Capability, that is ‘an ability to exist in uncertainty without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.’ The poet John Keats believed that great people such as Shakespeare have this ability to accept that not everything can be resolved. Keats was a Romantic and believed that the truths found in the imagination allow one access to holy authority. Such authority cannot otherwise be understood, and thus he writes of "uncertainties." This "being in uncertainty" is a place between the mundane, ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully understood existence.

This concept has been employed in much literary criticism, and fiction – Philip Pullman uses it as an important plot point in his Golden Compass trilogy – and even in psychology, particularly British psychoanalysis, as a suspension of critical rationality coupled with calm and unquestioning acceptance of uncertainty and doubt.

There is a case that Grant Morrison’s Batman R.I.P. engages in such a practice and by doing so forces the reader to become aware of their need to impose some sort of linear, objective meaning to the text, often manifesting in what can only be described as a kind of ‘narrative apophenia’, whereby the viewer searches for links and patterns that add up to what they expect from a mainstream comic in terms of narrative. The absence of many of the conventional codifications of linear, closed narrative forces the reader to actively seek to impart such a form and thus forces awareness of the subjectivity of such action.

Through the course of the story Batman is placed in a similar situation to the reader as, when faced with a seemingly unfathomable mystery in the form of the overall Black Glove conspiracy and, more bafflingly, the identity of Dr. Hurt, he strives to once again discern a pattern where none seems to exist. In this respect Morrison seems to be playing devil’s advocate (excuse the pun) as he deliberately provides us with clues to several possible yet often contradictory possibilities without ever yielding entirely into truth, thus rendering a multiplicity of meanings possible. He is existing in uncertainty.

Figure 5: Thomas Wayne? The identity of Dr. Hurt is one of the central mysteries of the book and even by the end of the story it is not satisfactorily resolved. Again this is accomplished by blocking conventional access to the events of the story by what critic David Bordwell calls ‘incompatible and insufficient cues’[4]. In the case of Batman R.I.P. these cues had been planted throughout Morrison’s lengthy run on the Batman title. The suggestions range from the subtle (Hurt taking Thomas Wayne’s Halloween Bat-costume from The First Batman, a story first published in 1956 and one that would be unfamiliar to the average comic reader) to the overt (Hurt exclaiming "I am your father!")and leave the reader with the possibilities that Hurt may indeed be either Dr. Thomas Wayne or his double Mangrove Pierce. There are also a number of suggestions that Hurt may in fact be the Devil, though whether this is the common or garden variety Christian devil or a more abstract entity is not clear . Indeed there is a case to be made that he could be anyone of these or none of the above.

I would argue that it is actually in this capacity as an unknowable quantity that Hurt cements his place as Batman’s most terrifying nemesis.

“I am the hole in things, Bruce. The enemy, the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning. Would I bring you all this way and not deliver the killing blow? ” - Dr. Hurt

If Hurt is indeed ultimately unknowable, as he is to the reader, then he represents the limits of reason. No matter which identity the reader believes to be the real one we must accept that there are others that are equally possible. it is a subjective reality and one contingent on many extra-textual elements.

There is no Meta-Narrative here.

His identity is contingent, subjective and temporary. Morrison, it would seem, is quite happy to not deliver the ‘killing blow’, to exist in uncertainty as it were, as the identity and indeed the fate of Hurt is never fully revealed. Conversely, Batman’s inability to ‘exist in uncertainties’ and instead his attempts to force a totalising truth or meta-narrative on events, much as the reader does, eventually causes his demise (symbolically if not physically). Such attempts to organise the random, and the chaotic through narrative are examined more explicitly in Final Crisis, particularly Superman 3D wherein as the DC universe is taken apart and Superman laments that it has become “corrupted by narrative. “.

The Joker himself makes explicit reference to Batman’s unwillingness to cross the ‘void of subjectivity’ and embrace the random, chaotic unknowability of the universe.
“You think it all breaks down into symbolism and structures and hints and clues. No Batman, that’s just Wikipedia.” - Fig 4.

The Joker, for his part, somewhat inevitably holds the opposite viewpoint to Batman and seems quite comfortable in a world that is more chaos than reason. Indeed Le Bossu makes the point that he is “so perfect, so complete...a product of random circumstance. Precision adapted to thrive in this ugly, high-pitched century.” Joker is a character so entrenched in ambiguity that even his origin is open to interpretation. In Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke the Joker muses on his origins:

‘I'm not exactly sure what happened. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!’
Batman, simply put, has not adapted to thrive in such a world...at least not in the same way. Though if the Joker stands for someone who has this may not be a bad thing.When faced with the unknown he looks for patterns, for clues, as any detective would, a search that leads him ultimately to Arkham.

Arkham in many ways acts as an exaggerated microcosm for this decentred, postmodern world and is a place where reason may as well be an alien concept. This is stated explicitly by Bat-Mite (see fig.2. again) and echoes the thought of that most famous of post-modern theorists Michel Foucault. Foucault’s first book, Madness and Civilisation: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason details how, in the Enlightenment, madness came to be seen as the obverse of reason, that is, characterising mad men as having lost what made them human and become animal-like and therefore treated as such. Previous to this madness was tolerated in society because people could not ‘get close to God’s Reason’. Batman’s entering into this madhouse, this bastion of what Foucault would term un-reason, is in many ways symbolic of the reader’s entry into a text like Batman R.I.P. The rules have changed, nothing is certain, there are no absolutes anymore. How does one cope with this?

On the surface two choices face the reader and each presents their own problems.
The first is to embrace the chaos and try to exist in the ‘uncertainty’ without any ‘irritable reaching after reason’. This is obviously dangerously close to a nihilistic abdication of meaning and the inherent dangers of moral relativism that come with it. If we the reader/Batman accept that there is no overall meaning anymore, that, as Nietzsche would have it, God (as synonym for absolute, objective meaning) is indeed dead, then where are we? Dostoyevsky’s ‘God is dead, everything is permitted? Or Camus’ ’If God is dead then I am God?’ As in, we make up the rules and decide what is reasonable?

The second option is to try, as we have been taught to by the dominant culture of our time, to organize the madness into a more coherent narrative or reality. I would argue that the reader, like Batman, will almost certainly elect to enforce their own totalizing narrative on events and to do so we must look for the reason, for the narrative that we have been taught to expect. This leads, in the case of Batman at least, to what is known as Apophenia.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness" [5]
Figure 8. Joker: literally in.sane.Postmodern novelists and film-makers have reflected on apophenia-related phenomena, such as paranoid narration or fuzzy plotting (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols", Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and V., Alan Moore's Watchmen, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, James Curcio's Join My Cult, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas, The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, and the films Darren Aronofsky's π, A Beautiful Mind, The Number 23 and The Nines). The character of the Question is characterised as suffering from Apophenia in Justice League Unlimited.

Morrison makes explicit reference to Apophenia within the text as the Joker explains how Batman has driven him insane’ trying to get him to loosen up. However it is Batman’s own apophenia that leads to his downfall as the Joker sets up a series of apparently arbitrary clues and patterns for the great detective to put together. The most immediate example of this is the red and black motif favoured by the Joker. Even before the events of Batman R.I.P. the Joker is seen teasing Batman with potential clues like the Deadman’s hand that he deals in DC Universe #0, knowing full well that the Batman will see it as significant. Inevitably he is proven correct and Batman comes up with a plethora of patterns.

Just like the identity of Dr. Hurt there are several things that this could allude to within the story, and many readers came up with their own theories on forums involving everything from the new Batmobile (red and black), to Harley Quinn (red and black costume)to Robin (also wears Red and Black and had been angry at Bruce over the appearance of Damian) to Jezebel Jet, Bruce’s love( Red hair, Jet means black). The latter had some relevance but it wasn’t the whole picture. The Joker later admits it was in fact an arbitrary motif that he picked based on the tiles in his cell. The real joke as he sees it is Batman’s belief that the pattern would add up to something meaningful that would shed light on everything, the whole Black Casebook, and all the strange things that had happened in his career.

“The Real joke is your stubborn, bone-deep conviction that somehow, somewhere, all of this makes sense!”

This to me is the real death of Batman. His ‘defeat’ at the hands of the Joker is one based on the Joker’s random, chaotic, un-reasonable nature finally proving stronger, more dominant than Batman’s empirical, reasoned deductive skills, perhaps due to his suitability to this era.
In this respect the Joker fulfils much the same role for Batman that Morrison does for the reader. Just as the Joker lead Batman a merry dance so too did Morrison the reader, setting up clues and hints that the reader could use to construct their own ‘truths’ as it were. This obviously allows for many often contradictory yet productive readings of the text but, vitally, no one ‘true’ reading. The reader that is open to the subjective interpretations of the climax, of Hurt’s identity/identities, the ones capable of existing in uncertainty as in Keats Negative Capability will be rewarded but those who, like Batman, need to find a one, true solution to everything, will be in many ways defeated by the text. Morrison makes explicit, if utterly facetious reference to his approach early on in the book where he has a two-bit, wannabe costumed vigilante, the Green Vulture, looking directly at the reader, while outlining his plan for criminal glory.

“Leave ‘em crazy clues they’ll never work out! Get me some hot psycho groupies with bells in their hair. Bodycount!Bodycount” –The Green Vulture

However Morrison himself, despite seeming to be in on the joke, and for all his deliberate and well-crafted ambiguousness seems to be unable to fully escape the need to fill in the gaps. This is borne out primarily by the decision to render all of Batman’s crazy adventures, even the demented sci-fi 50’s stuff, as being in continuity. There is no denying that this is achieved with considerable skill and intelligence but by tying all of the disparate, idiosyncratic elements of Batman’s past into one coherent narrative is Morrison not guilty falling into the same trap as Batman?

This is arguably the real joke as, having gone to such lengths to show the ambiguity and uncertainty of this post-ideological world, he does so by constructing a story that is so reliant on filling in these ‘gaps’ in Batman’s continuity. This is typical of what Slavoj Zizek calls the ideology of cynicism. For Zizek, we are not so much living in a post-ideological era as in an era dominated by the ideology of cynicism. Adapting from Marx and Sloterdijk, he sums up the cynical attitude as "they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it". Ideology in this sense, is located in what we do and not in what we know. Thus just as the Joker is forced to realise that every time he tries to “think outside Batman’s toy-box” he builds another box around him, Morrison is forced to accept that to articulate the chaos and uncertainty of the postmodern world it is exigent to on some level, impose order on it.

One could argue that this then is how Batman ultimately turns defeat into success, and in fact thrives in this universe...even overcoming death. If we can never truly exist outside of ideology, in the pure ether of subjective culture then clearly it is the ideologies that we impose that are important. Post modern literature (and indeed Smart Film) with its shifting notions of Identity and meaning are often accused of being nihilistic, of revelling in the fact that there is no meaning as if to say, nothing matters anymore. The term nihilistic is a difficult term here as, while it has become shorthand for an abdication of authorial responsibility for meaning making it can actually be a positive thing. Nietzsche, often accused of inspiring everything from Nazism to Fascism, was in fact quite the optimist and believed that if we could rid ourselves of the need for outside ‘powers’ (like god)telling us what is right or wrong and decide for ourselves then we would truly be ‘The superman’. Negative capability, this being in uncertainties, forces Batman to decide his own path. He does not accept the one given to him by Dr. Hurt and instead, adheres to his own strict moral code. Again, for Nietzsche, “he has truly found himself, he who says this is my good and my evil.”

In conclusion, this is arguably the great success of Batman R.I.P. : Batman, having faced a world of unreason, one without rules or certainty, is doomed by his inability to just give in to the uncertainty. However it is a heroic demise as the reality or narrative he enforces to organise his life is the concept of Batman. When Bruce Wayne is stripped away, brutally, what remains is his ideals, his beliefs, in the form of the Batman of Zur-en-arrh. Batman has decided his own good and own evil and in this way survives beyond his physical death, as a symbol. This is made explicit in Batman’s ultimate ‘death’ in Final Crisis, where Batman dies at the hands of Darkseid but lives on, in some form as a symbol. This is the great victory of Batman, as though the dies in postmodern world, a world devoid of reason, one of unreason, or dare I say it, one of anti-life he rejects it unreservedly. Unlike other superheroes Batman is just a man but through the course of R.I.P. AND Final Crisis he has shown that when faced with the nihility of a world without reason he chooses his own good and evil and becomes something even greater. As we face our own cultural final crisis it is worth remembering how Batman does not crumble and instead creates his own meaning where none appear to exist.

To paraphrase Nietzsche once again: “ Batman is dead, I teach you the superman.”

[1] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. P.66
[2] Lyotard Jean Francois ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’ Manchester University Press, 1979.
[3] Moore, Alan; Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics. Avatar Press, 9 Triumph Drive Urbana, Il p.4.
[4] [4] Bordwell, David Narration in the Fiction Film
[5] - Klaus Conrad, A Cognitive Approach to Situation Awareness: Theory and Application, 1958