Nihilism may be more expressing my own feelings on the situation; though I do dislike the term because it implies to me a certain sense of camp petulance and post-parental rebellion. Nihilist is probably the wrong word. Technically I feel it fits, in that I've seen it defined as a doctrine that "maintains that religious and moral truths are entirely irrational". I think Morrison's work bears this view out, but comes to different conclusions than traditional nihilism might - that is, that embracing and using and amplifying that irrational state of the world is not just inevitable, but useful if handled with grace - and destructive if not handled responsibly.
I've never found Morrison's work more cogent or more affecting than I do with his latest stuff, from 7 Soldiers to ASS to this. It seems to me, as he gets older, that he draws more attention to the fundamental contradictions in what people might call mystical world-views in his stories. He embraces more powerfully and, even highlights, that these things don't make certain sense, that they're allegorical, and they have their real roots as extensions of very simple, base, human experiences in our world - a world that doesn't make much sense a great deal of the time.
From Greg Feely joining a day-glo fantasy-fascist super-agency that expresses his desperate need for sense and significance in a miserable existence where he can't make positive change in his own life, to the simple fact that the central conceit in 7 Soldiers (that there are 7 extraordinary warriors chosen for special destiny to survive great trials) doesn't hold water in its own narrative. Anyone can be one of these soldiers, even the reader - which, if I understood correctly, Haus has asserted is part of the allegory behind the Spoils of Annwn. I could have mistaken his meaning, I'm certainly not a scholar of any kind.
These breakdowns of sense or structure in his work (however unavoidable they are for him as a writer) aren't an accident.
It's possible (likely, even) that what I respond to in his work these days is my own continually dawning sense of senselessness without creating a network of grander personal metaphors to cope.
A film like The Seventh Seal (which hangs heavy over so many of Morrison's stories) illustrates the same point, where the Devil is fear, the only survivors are a family of actors who love God against all sense, and the Dance of Death in the closing images implies that all art, commerce, religion, politics, and love are motivated by the inevitability of death.
Not to say that Morrison's comics are massively profound as a rule. I've been hugely moved by many of them, but I think they're thoughtful, well-considered pop entertainments that simply have a very human world-view like this somewhere behind them.
Despite atmosphere and way sweet and hilarious ninja beatings and bat-rockets, Morrison's Batman is struggling with fears of inadequacy, guilt, anxiety over the absence of his own parents in his life and his own implied absence in the face of his wards, his own wayward son, and the unexpected responsibilities of adulthood - and this gently fatalistic kind of view of struggling to keep up with (let alone overcome) life's random tragedies runs through the themes of each of the admittedly few arcs in his run.
My very personal interpretation, surely, but I think it holds some water when examining his comics, and his Batman run in particular. |
