A RAGE OF ANGELS 1.1

Narrative Art: A Rage of Angels 1.1

Introduction

A Rage of Angels is a series of essays about narrative art and its unique potential as a medium for human expression. This tradition, which thrives around the world under a variety of guises (including comics, manga, bande dessinee, quadrinhos, tebeos, fumetti, etc) has roots that stretch back to pre-history but has flourished in reaction to the tenor of these times in particular.

To appreciate the fullness of narrative art’s potential, it would seem only natural that one might first seek to understand what it is and, second, what differentiates it from the distilled forms of its components, namely storytelling and image-making. Regrettably, there has been yet little consensus to be found in the body of critical writing on Narrative Art (or any of its dialectic expressions) that is extant on even this most fundamental of questions, "What is narrative art?" resulting in a general state of confusion in all quarters. If there is to be progress beyond the current stand-and-point-in-wonder stage of criticism, willful misperceptions and likeable myths alike must be recognized as such and dispelled accordingly.

The purpose of this culling is not to create an inflammatory polemic work of criticism, destined by design to inspire more rancor than debate, but to synthesize a number of thoughtful but seemingly contradictory theories about narrative art into a context that takes the full range of the medium’s expression into consideration while elevating none of the individual traditions in importance above the others. This approach may alienate more provincial critics, convinced beyond debate that their tiny corner of the map is, in fact, the totality of the landscape, but, narrative art only reaches its fullness of potential through the consideration of its many traditions bound together in an expression of one phenomena.

Comics is not comics.

Throughout A Rage of Angels, I will refer to the subject at hand by the name that I believe suits its study best, namely narrative art. I am not the first comics theorist that I know of to embrace this term as a superior signifier to the multifold variations on an old theme that even in discussing narrative art produced exclusively for American audiences through the years might still include a gaggle of fun terms like comics, comix, comic books, comic strips, funny books, graphic novels, and the list goes on and on. I picked it up as an object of study from narrative artist Eddie Campbell who may reveal, in time, from what leg of the road he swiped it himself.

Regardless, as we progress, the reader can expect a full defense of narrative art as the most reasonable and flexible tool we have presently in our bag of critical matrices to best understand the subject at hand. To appreciate that argument, though, we must open our discussions with something quite different: brains and lots of 'em!

Human brains are quite unique among all the creatures of the Earth. Dr. Leonard Shlain, neurosurgeon and author of THE ALPHABET VS THE GODDESS, describes our singular achievement, noting that:

"All vertebrates, beginning with fish, have a bilobed brain. And each of these anatomically mirror-image hemispheric lobes perform the same type of tasks. The human brain lobes, while appearing symmetrical, are functionally different. This specialization is called hemispheric lateralization. There is evidence of this feature in some other vertebrates, but its manifestations in behavior (speech and handedness) are far more striking in humans than in any other species. A bridge of neuronal fibers called the corpus callosum connects and integrates the two cortical lobes so that each side knows what the other is thinking." (Shlain, 17)

While Shlain's elegant restatement of a fact known to most participating in civilized culture may otherwise lack in profundity, it does demonstrate the importance of hemispheric lateralization and how it goes about shaping the ways in which we think. Nature, though, is very plain-spoken in its message that humanity in its present state of development needs both brains in order to function harmoniously. Both are lavish in their gifts they bestow upon us. From the right brain, we know emotion that imbues everything we see with values alien to the physical world but essential to our identity as conscious beings. From the left brain, we perceive time and from that perception of time comes order, quantity, and the linear thinking skills that are the cornerstone of Civilization itself. From the right, we perceive and interpret images that impact us immediately within our interiors. From the left, we perceive and interpret codes that impact us cumulatively within our interiors.

The burden of these gifts grafted upon a once-animal mind is substantial. Because of the urgency of the information they provide, the two hemispheres of the brain are in constant conflict with one another for primacy of the mind. As a result, we are host to a litany of mental discomforts for which the natural world of plants and animals has little appreciation. Our various cultures live in perpetual conflict with one another and segments within those cultures and factions within the segments and so on until we reach the individual who is, of course, conflicted foremost with his or herself. It is human nature to war endlessly with itself upon abstractions and it is not a learned behavior that we imported from our animal forebears. It is the curse that mirrors the blessing of our bicameral consciousness.

It is not only our social and political institutions that bear the imprint of our schizoid nature. We commonly speak of Art as a unified body of human achievement; the nine arts standing shoulder-to-shoulder like so many players on a baseball team, each with its own specialized function but all expected to step up to the plate and bat as equals for human imagination when the time comes. A more discriminating look at Art and its earliest forms reveals, however, deep schisms in the ways that human minds gather and interpret the information obtained by experiencing it.

THE WORD

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was not written but spoken. Our first creation, the spoken word, was and is one of our finest, partnering both hemispheres in a complex and furiously paced dance that leaves neither with the time to consider which might be leading. The positive benefits of speech related to the development and sustenance of human civilization are so many as to seem innumerable. Yet, the shortcomings of speech, evidenced by the fact that other forms of communication have usurped its primacy within culture to varying degrees over the millennia since its invention/discovery, are plain as well. While its effects can be lasting and, in some cases, permanent, speech, like music, is an ephemeral expression that, until the onset of the recorded media, left no manifest object in its wake save the interior impressions of the listener.

Moreover, while a number of left brain contributions can be teased out after the fact as being common to spoken languages (grammar, vocabulary etc) as a broad category, the intensive right-brain functions of speech which, among other things, coax out undertones of hidden meaning (not only from a subjective appraisal of vocabulary choice and syntax but also facial expression, vocal timbre, and body language) often hinge upon a shared context of common right-brain experiences between speaker and listener. This means that speech is generally only valuable as a communication tool between two members of an essentially homogenous cultural group, defining itself in this particular case as a shared language.

Now, when the world’s culture, as most people were prepared to comprehend it, consisted of everyone in the tribe to which they were a member and little further, speech was a vital and essential tool for communication. But as tribes became conglomerations of related tribes and then civilizations, the difficulties of intermingling these self-insulating systems of abstract sounds were many. In its dramatic account of the fall of the Tower of Babel, the book of Genesis offers this glimpse of the importance of speech in decline.

"And the whole world was of one language, and of one speech...And they said to one another, Go to, let us make a brick, and burn them thoroughly...And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth...And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of the earth: and they left off to build the city." [Genesis 11:1,3,4,6-9, KJV]

From the remarkable powers ascribed here to speech ("nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do"), it is plain that the author is full aware of how far speech had brought humanity so far, putting the powers of its collective will on par with that of the gods. But, in time, the harmonious benefits to be found from speech within a homogenous cultural unit became eclipsed by the demands of interacting with those outside of it. In order to leap this evolutionary hurdle, burgeoning civilizations turned to a variety of other means for more effective communication that had developed through the successes of speech.

THE IMAGE

Like speech, the genesis of the human practice of rendering images is shrouded in prehistory. The first flourishes of art as a distinctly human practice come to us in the form of cave paintings that served as the totems for sympathetic magic worked by early humans against their intended prey.

Critic and historian Arnold Hauser envisions it as, "the art of primitive hunters living on an unproductive, parasitic economic level, who had to capture their food rather than produce it themselves" while further noting that, "[i]n this age of purely practical life everything obviously still turned around the bare earning of a livelihood and there is nothing to justify us in assuming that art served any other purpose than a means to procuring the food [Hauser, 7]."

Due to the image having been developed before the written word and, thus, history, speculation on how exactly humans came upon the idea to reproduce images from nature or by what means it developed as an activity from accidentally coherent lines in the dirt to the centerpiece of Neolithic hunter magic is, at best, pre-historical fiction. What is certain is that, some 150,000 years ago and long before the development of any of the contemporary religions, the image’s first identifiable function was as the fetish of an act of sympathetic magic designed to better the odds against prey. The placement of these sacred paintings, deep in cave structures, often littered with the remnants of many fires lit in repetition over time, is suggestive. It describes a scenario by which the appreciation of these images was narrated by the spoken word, the content of which was maintained by the shaman of the tribe as handed down through the oral tradition.

Seen in this context, it is easy then to assign this activity primarily to the right-brain, something to be absorbed in the moment, with narrative provided by the storytelling/ritual component of the experience that utilizes both hemispheres. As an aside, what more perfect complement could have been devised to the subsequent picking up of a spear in one's right hand and calling upon its dominant hemisphere (the left) for cunning and emotional detachment in order to bring down the kill? While the use of images eventually proliferated into the realm of the mundane (decorating houseware and clothing for example), in the whole of Neolithic culture, regardless of where one finds it, images maintained a link to the divine and, in some cases, where equivocated by these people with god/desses regularly.

THE WRITTEN WORD

Whereas the origins of speech and image-making are difficult to precisely place somewhere back there on the human time line, pinning down the written word is decidedly less so for pretty much the reason one might suspect.

They wrote it down. Depending on where, how, and how many times that wrote a particular thing, there's a really good chance that at least one person alive to day on Planet Earth can still read it. Written language is so omnipresent in the modern world that it becomes difficult to imagine one without it. Thus, it would be easy to see the development of writing as an inevitable desire to more concretely deliver the power of the spoken word to future generations. Unfortunately, that hypothesis is not borne out by the historical record.

Some of the very oldest marking that can be called writing comes to us from the Sumerians circa 3500 BCE and though it would develop into a full-blown literary language in time, Old Sumerian was birthed by none other mother than Necessity. The earliest cuneiform writing are lists and records of goods and services being hoarded by the central Temple authority in order to facilitate fair redistribution to their constituents. Or, as historian Georges Roux puts it, "writing was invented purely for accounting purposes" [Roux, 75]

In every culture where writing developed and then flourished, the first step always began with a set of stylized images which stood for sounds, resulting in a monosyllabic language that was structurally not unlike modern Chinese, with each sound representing a distinct idea that could be combined with others to create an even yet-more complex idea. While this and other written proto-languages to come can be correctly identified as more left-brain intensive than the spoken words and images that preceded them, many factors still drew the right brain into the process of both reading and writing in them. To interpret a word (a left brain function), the reader must have first addressed the component image in their right brain and then passed the data along to the left. As long as the words remained buried in a code of recognizable pictures, the right brain would have remained the gateway for any incoming data gathered by reading.

But, as with every language that was born out of pictograms, the images themselves continued their stylization until the concrete fact that had once tied a picture of a fish to the sound we made when we saw, killed, or ate one became an abstract notion that this particular symbol means "fish" because we've decided that it does and if you squint your eyes just right, you might see it in there. While coherent images stimulate our right brains to internalize and interpret them, abstracted ones, especially those suggesting a coding of some sort, are passed thoughtlessly over to the left to see what can be made of it, if anything. When other left-brain friendly practices like sequentiality and grammar develop, the act of writing became an almost entirely left-brain governed ordeal and, as Shlain astutely notes, enacted on the page by predominantly right-handed males, the stylus substituted for the spear but killing with no less frenzy.

A RAGE OF ANGELS

We've taken this trip today down history lane because in order to understand how this all applies to narrative art, it is important to appreciate the nature of the relationship between these three basic ideas, narrative (or the spoken word), image-making, and the written word and how precisely they evolved one from the strengths and limitations of their predecessor in a particular order. Whatever motivations drove early humans (who communicated through a variety of right/left brain intensive means) to derive writing from images, writing and those who employed it became increasingly geared towards the values espoused by the left-brain. On the positive side, this included a heightened sense of law and justice, a flowering of mathematics and science, and a dedication to literacy as the cornerstone of their various cultures. On the negative side, the result was the rise of the kingship and militarism, the degredation of the female and the feminine in culture, and the shunning of images in the worship of divine beings.

Consider for a moment the story of Moses on Mount Sinai as he is receiving the commandments that will make up the terms of the contract bound between God and the Hebrews. It's a contract! A binding (law/left) but otherwise abstract (coding/left) document (writing/left) composed of nothing but words (vocabulary/left) that describes (facts/left)conditions that will occur in the future (time/left). And what does this God, who has no pronounceable name, only the inference of existence (I AM) derived from his cryptic anagram YHVH, demand first of his selected people? Does he ask them not to murder or to be kind to children?

"I AM the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments." [Exodus 20:1-6, KJV]

Taken in context of Moses' previous attempt to deliver God's law to his people (only to discover that they've been making sacrifices to an IDOL!), maybe we get these first because God's still really mad about it all. He wants to make a bold point early in the presentation because He's recognizing the limitations of His audience below's attention span. Whatever his motivations (unfathomable as their purported to be), it is of utmost importance that they understand that other gods are not tolerated and then, to underscore which god/dess He's talking about, he essentially forbids the practice of image-making altogether, adding only parenthetically that we shouldn't make them because we'll be then tempted to worship them; as if the very act of externalizing and then re-internalizing that image was an act of worship in and of itself. Given the source, I'm inclined to take Him at his word.

And so we see that not only are the older sister and the younger brother complementary by the very process by which she gave him birth but that he's been actively trying to kill her for it ever since. This is the paradoxical and heartbreaking conflict that lies at the very core of what of narrative art is and what it means and how it does what it does.

FOOTNOTES:

ALPHABET VS THE GODDESS, THE by Leonard Shlain, Penguin Books. 1998. ISBN 0- 14-01.9601-3 (pbk.)

ANCIENT IRAQ by Georges Roux, Penguin Books. 1992. ISBN 0-14-012523.

HOLY BIBLE (King James Edition), Reader's Digest Association, Inc. 1971.

SOCIAL HISTORY OF ART, THE Vol 1 by Arnold Hauser, Vintage Books. 1951.