I have written about Neil Gaiman's story-arc "A Game of You" twice now, in the posts "A Case Study of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman" and in "An Interpretation of Neil Gaiman's "A Game of You"". I haven't quite finished talking about it; I have a had another good look at the comic, rethought my view of it and decided there is much more to be said about it. In today's post I want to discuss it in terms of a battle between the feminine and the masculine, as a reaction against Feminism. It will help if you've read the previous post.
"A Game of You" depicts a conflict or struggle between Good and Evil. This is not unusual in any fiction and is of course the central theme of almost all Fantasy fiction. For much of the first part of "A Game of You" the Good is Feminine and and the Evil is Masculine. Barbie lives in an apartment building with two lesbians, an ancient witch called Thessaly and a trans-gender 'woman' called Wanda. These are her friends. The only man in the building, George, is sour and suspicious and disliked by the other characters – he turns out to be evil, an accomplice of the Cuckoo. The first half of the story involves a quest undertaken by Barbie and her dream-friends to defeat the Cuckoo and although the Cuckoo's gender is not specified until later it is reasonable to believe until we see the Cuckoo that the Cuckoo is probably male. It seems to begin with that "A Game of You" could be a Feminist fable, a tale of good women taking on the patriarchy. However, it goes well beyond women's empowerment. As I said in the previous post, there are elements of horror throughout, and Thessaly, although ostensibly on the side of Good, is a frightening and formidable figure who kills George and then cuts off his face and yanks out his tongue with his teeth so she can communicate with his ghost. The kind of Feminism at this moment verges on a violence towards and perhaps even hatred of men. There is a second aspect to the Feminism the story presents. The sort of Feminism at work here, at least early on, is one in which there a kind of supernatural or mystical Feminine power that women, Thessaly in particular, have access to – but which Wanda, for some reason, does not. Barbie's three female friends, having petitioned Thessaly's female gods, are able to travel via the moon's road to the Land, but Wanda cannot accompany them. After they have left Wanda says to the sleeping Barbie, "You know what's really spooky? Hazel and Foxglove. I meant they just fell into it. Like it was natural as anything. I, on the other hand squeal and toss my cookies. Maybe I'm not the woman I thought I was [...] But, Jesus, we're the good guys – you and me and Foxglove and Hazel. And Thessaly. Maybe." So even from the beginning the story presents Feminism ambivalently.
The moment that this narrative of powerful good female figures opposing a powerful male figure is totally upset and inverted is the moment when Barbie finally confronts the Cuckoo. Admittedly this upheaval in the narrative has been foreshadowed for some time. The Cuckoo it turns out is not a powerful male figure or even a powerful androgyne (a la the Goblin King in Labyrinth). It instead takes the form of a little girl. In fact, it appears to be a childhood version of Barbie. Barbie says, "You're me." The Cuckoo replies, "Not quite. I'm part of you. Sort of. You created me. Kind of. I'm the Cuckoo. [...] Like I said: I'm almost you." Barbie says, "What is this? Some kind of moment of revelation? Like in the books? Is this is where I find out I was abused as a child and I've been blocking it all the years?" Barbie's response is fascinating because it references both repressed memory syndrome and false memory syndrome. But the main point of this passage is that, for a moment, the whole reality of the Land has been called into question. For a moment all binary oppositions are up in the air.
The Cuckoo explains that Barbie wasn't abused. She just had an overactive imagination when young. She invented the Land, basing her friends on childhood toys. The Cuckoo then delivers its speech about little boys and little girls, that I have quoted in both other posts and so won't quote again. In my earlier essay I proposed that in this speech the Cuckoo is proposing an essentialist view of gender but, in fact, the speech ironically demonstrates the opposite, the idea that notions of gender in childhood are socially constructed. Barbie is left doubting her whole understanding of what constitutes her identity, saying "Is this real? Or is it just my imagination?" This marks the turning point in the narrative. The whole notion of the Masculine and Feminine has been briefly dismantled.
As I said in the previous post, the Cuckoo is a liar. It is not really Barbie's childhood self, it is not a little girl. It is a malevolent supernatural being pretending to be a little girl, pretending to be the Land's queen, an alien intruder from outside Barbie's dreams who has invaded and gestated in Barbie's fantasy kingdom. By lulling Barbie into a hypnotic trance, the cuckoo is able to compel her to do its bidding, to initiate the destruction of the Land. In this way the Cuckoo triumphs. Shortly after Barbie destroys the Porpentine, the Sandman arrives to uncreate the Land and the enchantment on Barbie (and her three female friends) is lifted. The Cuckoo is recognised as real supernatural creature, not a fiction. The Masculine and Feminine return – except now the Masculine, in the form of Morpheus, is Good and ascendent. In the first part of the story, the narrative seemed a war between good women and evil men but this second part does not involve a complete inversion, the defeat of an evil female by a good male. Rather it describes the subordination of women to men. Morpheus brings the land to its end, its inhabitants marching up the promontory to where he stands and being swallowed up in his cloak. The last to go is the Land's original princess Alianora, one of Morpheus's former flames; Morpheus greets her as "old love" before she is erased. A little later Thessaly shows the first signs of having fallen for Morpheus. It seems that when the Feminine is dominant there is no possibility of heterosexual love – we learn at the beginning of the story that Barbie has gone off men since her experience with Ken, Foxglove and Hazel are in a lesbian relationship, Thessaly is an intimidating spinster and Wanda is effectively neuter, insofar as s/he is a woman at all; only when the Masculine is dominant can real heterosexual love exist. In "A Game of You" Gaiman aligns Feminism with hatred of the opposite gender and male dominance with love for the opposite gender. And, with the appearance of Morpheus, the Masculine prevails over the Feminine. At its deepest level, "A Game on You" can be read as a reaction against elements in the Feminist movement.
On one hand, "A Game of You" concerns a conflict between females and males in which the feminine is Good at first and then the masculine is Good later. At a deeper level however it is concerned with a conflict between Fantasy and Reality. Is the Land a dream or real? Is Morpheus a dream apparition or a kind of real god? Is the Cuckoo a product of Barbie's childhood imaginings or is it a supernatural being that transcends dreams? For a moment, 'reality' takes the upper hand and the notion of gender is revealed as an ideology, the pivot that leads to the Cuckoo's triumph. We learn, however, that 'reality' is only the Cuckoo's lie; Fantasy returns. But now it is the Masculine that is dominant rather than the Feminine. The Cuckoo wants to grow up and in order to do so, to free herself of the Land, it seems she needs Barbie to grow up also. Implicitly it seems Barbie needs to recognise that it is men who have the power, and should have the power, not women. Her fantasy of male wickedness or male subordination is what must be expelled in order for her to mature. Again this suggests an attack on Feminism.
Although I am suggesting that "A Game of You" has an anti-Feminist subtext, one should remember it is a story, not a polemic. It is also a tragedy; even male readers do not glorify in Barbie's defeat, the Land's demise and Wanda's death; it has an unhappy ending. Another subtler aspect of the story is this – Gaiman is also, either deliberately or serendipitously, describing a shift within Feminism itself. Feminists once exalted and reified Femininity, associating it with Nature, with spiritual power, with the ocean and lunar gods; this kind of Feminism is represented by Thessaly. Around the same time that Gaiman wrote "A Game of You" Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble in which she argued that gender is performative; this more recent Feminist position is represented by Wanda and the Cuckoo. Perhaps Gaiman had read Butler's book. In my original essay about "A Game of You" I said that the Cuckoo and Wanda represent opposing positions; in the sequel I said that they were alike in being both transexuals. The best way to categorise the relationship between the two, I think now, is to say that both regard gender as performative. The Cuckoo is in actuality neither male nor female; it is 'naturally' a bird. Wanda too is a performer. At one point Wanda says, "I was born a guy. And now I'm a gal. Only I haven't gone all the way." (Gaiman perhaps misunderstands trans-gender people because I do not believe a real trans-gender person would say this, would more likely say, "I was born a woman in a man's body".) If there is a difference between the Cuckoo and Wanda it is that the Cuckoo's performance is a flawless exercise in persuasion and this is why it wins, whereas Wanda is too scared to go through with a sex change and so his/her performance is incomplete and defective – and so Wanda must die. Even though Gaiman I think misrepresents trans-gender people with Wanda, his categorisation of Wanda fits appropriately the underlying binary oppositions operating within the story – nature vs. performance, fantasy vs. reality, adulthood vs. childhood. It seems that dreams, fiction and even the supernatural are all on the side of the dominant ideology, on the side of 'nature'.
I should say something again about the end. After Wanda's funeral, Barbie has a dream in which she sees Wanda as a perfect woman. I still haven't completely figured out the significance of this but I would suggest tentatively the following odd reading – Wanda is not permitted to be a woman in a world where women are dominant but can only be allowed to be a woman after the masculine has won.
I have thought a lot about this story in the last couple of weeks. It seems to me that this story is pointing out something profound – that little children aren't male or female, aren't gendered, are simply children. Little boys have diddles and little girls don't, but otherwise there is almost no physical or hormonal difference between the two. Gender in children is performative; boys perform their boyness by playing with cars and girls perform their girlness by playing with dolls. For parents and other adults to worry that a boy is transexual or gay because he plays with dolls, not cars, at the age of five, is absurd; five year olds cannot be transexual or gay. It is perhaps even injurious to the child; kids pay attention and understand more than adults realise. To suppose as some neurotic conservative American parents do that Tinky-Winky is a bad influence because he carries a purse or that the makers of SpongeBob Square Pants are spreading homosexual propaganda because they show SpongeBob and Patrick holding hands is ridiculous. Children are smarter than than that. Apparent gender uncertainty in children is something they usually grow out of – unless parents make it worse.
Having said that, I have also thought a lot about my own childhood. I always knew that I was a boy. I remember before I turned six I invited my class to my birthday party and everyone wanted to come; I was dismayed because I only wanted the boys to come. At this party, a fancy dress party, I dressed up as the Incredible Hulk – imagine, if you will, a scrawny six-year old with a serious speech impediment, which I grew out of, wearing only ripped jeans and painted green. I was totally sure of my gender. After my parents divorce when I was seven, I had a strong sense that I was being punished for a crime I never committed, but I won't talk any more about that here. My understanding of gender continued to be informed by my obsessive watching of TV, by films and by the books I read; I had a reasonable understanding of sex while still in Primary School, although I was fuzzy about the details. One of my favourite series of books was The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I'll quote a couple of passage from the third novel.
"Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may have received an impression of his character and habits which, while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the truth, falls somewhat short, in its composition, of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects. And the reasons for the are obvious. Editing, selection, the need to balance that which is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance [...] But there are other omissions as well, beside the teethcleaning and trying to find fresh socks variety, and in some of these people have often seemed inordinately interested [...] 'This Arthur Dent,' comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious space probe thought to originate from a client galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, 'What is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"
I loved this chapter when I was kid. It is the only time Douglas Adams uses the word 'fuck' in any of his novels. The sex scenes in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, by the way, are romantic and very very far from being explicit. So I knew a little about heterosexual sex as a child. On the other hand, I was exposed very little to homosexuality – although I do remember seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a kid and feeling very disturbed by the scene in which Frank N. Furter sleeps with Brad. I knew then, even as a child, that two men sleeping together was 'wrong'. Yes, as a kid, I sometimes listened to the album Faith by George Michael, but there is no way for a child or even an adult to know that George Michael is gay simply from listening to this record.
The fundamental issue is this. Is future gender and sexual identity determined by what one is exposed to as a child? Or not? I don't completely know the answer but this is of course a question of fundamental importance. Certainly I don't think adults should 'diagnose' sexual or gender confusion in pre-pubescent children. To do so is both evil and stupid.
Thursday, 6 July 2017
Thursday, 29 June 2017
An Interpretation of Neil Gaiman's "A Game of You"
A couple of weeks ago I uploaded onto this blog an essay I had written about Neil Gaiman's comic The Sandman for a course I am taking. In this essay I talked a little about the story-arc "A Game of You". I wrote the essay to a deadline, and to a word-limit, so I didn't say everything I could have said about this story, but I have thought about it a lot more since and so intend to write a more detailed interpretation of this story in tonight's post. It will help if you've read Gaiman's original comic, and it will help if you've read my earlier essay, but this post should still make sense even if you haven't.
Gaiman is a darling of queer theory because he often features gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, and so what I am going to suggest may seem controversial –that I do not believe at heart Gaiman is interested in deconstructing or undermining gender difference or advocating on behalf of the queer community. Rather I believe that Gaiman is committed to confirming and strengthening the male/female binary opposition and that the exploration of gender difference is his chief interest. The queer and trans-gender characters in his fiction are usually either treated unsympathetically or are killed off. For instance, Desire, a character who is neither male nor female is almost always presented unsympathetically. (An exception occurs in an issue in the "Endless Nights" series but this was written many years after the original run.) Hal, a gay man, is presented more or less sympathetically in "A Doll's House" but, later, in "The Kindly Ones" he is shown much more negatively. And Wanda, the pre-operative transexual in "A Game of You", who is presented sympathetically, is removed from the world when a building collapses on him/her towards the end of the story. Admittedly Gaiman does treat lesbian characters more positively but even then there is still a kind of violence at work. Generally, the unquestionably masculine and feminine characters, such as the comic's main protagonists Dream and Death, are presented most favourably. The issue of gender is important to Gaiman. Not all of Gaiman's fiction is centrally concerned with gender but a lot of it is, and this is why he is fascinated with gay, lesbian and trans-gender people – because they do not sit neatly either side the gender dichotomy. They are, to use Derrida's term, 'undecidables'. Gaiman's strategy is to introduce ideological tension, conflict, by presenting these characters in his stories, before either eliminating these characters or subordinating them to the dominant gender binary. And this strategy of excluding or expelling the sexually problematic or ambiguous is very much the prevailing dynamic in "A Game of You".
The protagonist of "A Game of You" is Barbie. Barbie is introduced in the story-arc "A Doll's House" as the girlfriend of a guy called Ken. I suppose I need to point out that Barbie is thoroughly heterosexual. Barbie and Ken seem the perfect heteronormative couple on the surface, seem perfectly suited, but have very different dream lives – in Barbie's dreams she is the princess of a fantasy realm called the Land where she has talking animal friends including a big dog or bear called Martin Tenbones and a dodo called Luz. Ken's dreams by contrast revolve around money, sex and power. In "A Doll's House" a supernatural event occurs in which people's dream worlds get mixed up, and as a result the masculine violence of Ken's dreams contaminates Barbie's feminine fantasy. As a consequence of this traumatic breaching, having seen each other for who they really are, Ken and Barbie break up. Barbie furthermore is severed from the Land, stops dreaming about it. This results in a long lasting identity crisis. No longer a princess in her dreams or her waking life, Barbie loses contact with her core sense of self, and starts compensating for this lack of essential identity by performing a role, for instance by painting checkerboard patterns on her face when she goes out to cafes. This is how we find her at the beginning of "A Game of You."
The Land however has continued to exist without Barbie and the masculine contamination that had occurred because of Ken's influence has led, directly or indirectly, to its being taken over by an evil being called the Cuckoo. The Land has become a place of carnage, desolation and eternal winter. The first scene in "A Game of You" shows Barbie's dream friends concluding that they need her to return to the Land to save them. Martin Tenbones travels to the waking world to find her, to give her a magic amulet called the Porpentine and to bring her back. Tenbones does succeed in finding Barbie and giving her the Porpentine, but he is killed in the process; Barbie shortly after is conjured back to the Land. Once returned, she and her dream friends, believing this the only way to defeat the Cuckoo, embark on a quest to take the Porpentine to the Shining Sea. This in fact is what the Cuckoo wants, what it has conspired to bring about, although Barbie and the reader don't learn this until much later.
"A Game of You" can be considered a 'girl's story'. It contains strong Fantasy elements and is usefully compared to Labyrinth, another 'girl's story'. In Labyrinth, the young female protagonist Sarah embarks on a quest to save her baby brother from the Goblin King; Labyrinth can superficially be seen as a tale of female vs. male but if we look deeper we see this interpretation is too simplistic – the Goblin King is played by the androgynous David Bowie. Both "A Game of You" and Labyrinth concern childhood notions of gender. In most respects, however, "A Game of You" differs greatly from Labyrinth. It subverts traditional female Fantasy fiction and contains a great deal of horror; Barbie's dream friends are all killed one by one, her trench coated rat friend Wilkinson, for instance, having his throat slit. The story greatly disturbs. There is a question about whether this really is a 'girl's story' and it is certainly not a kids' story. Barbie's fantasy land has been fatally compromised by masculine violence. The unsettling quality in "A Game of You" is brought home by the scene in which Barbie finally confronts the Cuckoo; up until this point it is has been reasonable to suppose that the Cuckoo is a demagogic male but when it appears it is in the form of a little girl. This completely subverts traditional Fantasy fiction. At this meeting, the cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie, that I quoted in the earlier essay but is worth quoting again. "Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they're faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly The Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clarke us really Hyperman. Yes? [...] Now, little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they'll be happy for ever and ever." "A Game of You" is a Fantasy story about Fantasy stories.
The Cuckoo delivers this speech to lull Barbie into a kind of hypnotic trance so that she will do its bidding. This is a sinister magic the cuckoo has, to persuade and control others through its voice and presence, through deception. The Cuckoo is a liar, and its big lie is its pretence of being a little girl, when really it is a monster, perhaps even a male being. The Cuckoo is a kind of transexual. And it is not the only transexual in Barbie's life. In the waking world, Barbie lives in an apartment building with Thessaly, an ancient witch, two lesbians and a preoperative transexual named Wanda. The reason Wanda has not had a sex-change is because s/he is afraid of surgery, perhaps a sign that at some deep unconscious level s/he still feels a man. The three unproblematically female characters are able, using Thessaly's magic, to travel to the Land to help Barbie but Wanda, although s/he identifies as a female is viewed by Thessaly's gods as a male and is unable to accompany them. This seems cruel of Gaiman– Wanda, unlike the Cuckoo, is always presented sympathetically. But both Wanda and the Cuckoo are alike in being 'undecidables'.
After falling under the Cuckoo's spell, at the Cuckoos's command, Barbie smashes the Porpentine against the Hierogram, a monument on a promontory in the Shining Sea. This action, which the Cuckoo wanted, initiates the destruction of the Land and the death of all its inhabitants, an event which the Cuckoo desires because the land has been a kind of cage for it and this will set it free. The Cuckoo has never wanted to rule the Land, only to eradicate it. Morpheus himself appears on the scene, in a sort of deus ex machina, to facilitate the death of the Land and, later, to save Barbie and her friends. Abstractly, the last part of "A Game of You" works to resolve the tensions the story has created by removing undecidables and restoring traditional gender norms, something Gaiman achieves in a number of ways. The appearance of Morpheus puts a strong unproblematically male character for the first time in the position of supreme power; and the witch Thessaly, up until this point great and terrible, gets an inkling of a crush on Morpheus. The undecidables are eliminated. Wanda dies as the result of a hurricane caused by Thessaly's magic. And also tragically the Land itself, too contaminated by masculine violence to be saved, perishes. The Cuckoo drops its little-girl-disguise and all its lies, and takes on its real form, a bird, to fly away. Barbie asks Morpheus if he is "going to do anything about the Cuckoo" saying "she's dangerous. She's evil." Morpheus replies, "Dangerous? Perhaps. But evil? She acts according to her nature. Is that evil?" The undecidable quality in the Cuckoo has been resolved because its true nature has won through. It seems that, in the end, the 'natural' order has to prevail, and that there is no place in nature for the unnatural, for supernatural creatures who pretend to be little girls or for men who believe they're women, for undecidables.
"A Game of You" is disturbing for many reasons but chiefly because it has an unhappy ending. The Cuckoo wins and the Land is destroyed. The reader wants to ask: Could Gaiman have finished the story differently? Could Barbie have defeated the Cuckoo and saved the Land, making it again a purely female fantasy realm? Could he have resolved the issue of gender undecidability in a more positive way? When reading it however one senses that it is going to end tragically the moment we first see the Cuckoo as a little girl, when she delivers her speech about little boys and little girls and shows Barbie Barbie's childhood bedroom with its toys. The land is doomed because it is founded on a childish view of gender, rather than an adult's view of gender. Barbie has failed to grow up, to put away childish things. The Land is irrecoverable. The profound truth that Gaiman is subtly telling is that prepubescent children understand gender differently than post-pubescents and that children need to change their views of what constitutes gender difference when they grow up. Barbie needs to let the land go, to develop a different, more mature sense of what constitutes femininity; the Land itself cannot be saved. It is unnatural. Barbie's mistake is perhaps also Wanda's. Perhaps Gaiman is suggesting that Wanda's gender dysphoria may also be rooted in childhood experiences and beliefs but, if so, he is suggesting it very tactfully indeed.
The horrifying, unsettling and disturbing feel of this story stems from the fact that it is set in a world where all sexual and gender norms are in doubt. It is about the failure of childish notions of gender.
I'll finish this post by talking about the conclusion of the story. Barbie begins "A Game of You" in the grips of an identity crisis that has lasted since she was severed from the Land and the identity crisis is still present at the end of the story. She continues to perform her identity, penning a veil on her face before attending Wanda's funeral. Almost nothing has changed. The last ditch effort by her dream friends to save the Land and, by extension, Barbie, has failed, Barbie's childhood idea of what it means to be a girl is gone. But nor has Barbie been able to grow up. Still Gaiman finishes on a slightly positive note. At the very conclusion, Barbie has a dream in which she sees Wanda, with Death, as a perfect woman. "And when I say perfect, I mean perfect. Drop-dead gorgeous. There's nothing camp about her, nothing artificial. And she looks happy." In this way, too, the undecidabilty of Wanda's gender is resolved. In the universe Gaiman created, people get what they want when they die even when they can't get it in life. This scene is ambiguous, but another way to see it, the way I see it, is as Barbie's wish-fufillment fantasy. It is a dream of unqualified unproblematic femininity. Perhaps Gaiman is suggesting that she has in fact grown up.
Gaiman is a darling of queer theory because he often features gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, and so what I am going to suggest may seem controversial –that I do not believe at heart Gaiman is interested in deconstructing or undermining gender difference or advocating on behalf of the queer community. Rather I believe that Gaiman is committed to confirming and strengthening the male/female binary opposition and that the exploration of gender difference is his chief interest. The queer and trans-gender characters in his fiction are usually either treated unsympathetically or are killed off. For instance, Desire, a character who is neither male nor female is almost always presented unsympathetically. (An exception occurs in an issue in the "Endless Nights" series but this was written many years after the original run.) Hal, a gay man, is presented more or less sympathetically in "A Doll's House" but, later, in "The Kindly Ones" he is shown much more negatively. And Wanda, the pre-operative transexual in "A Game of You", who is presented sympathetically, is removed from the world when a building collapses on him/her towards the end of the story. Admittedly Gaiman does treat lesbian characters more positively but even then there is still a kind of violence at work. Generally, the unquestionably masculine and feminine characters, such as the comic's main protagonists Dream and Death, are presented most favourably. The issue of gender is important to Gaiman. Not all of Gaiman's fiction is centrally concerned with gender but a lot of it is, and this is why he is fascinated with gay, lesbian and trans-gender people – because they do not sit neatly either side the gender dichotomy. They are, to use Derrida's term, 'undecidables'. Gaiman's strategy is to introduce ideological tension, conflict, by presenting these characters in his stories, before either eliminating these characters or subordinating them to the dominant gender binary. And this strategy of excluding or expelling the sexually problematic or ambiguous is very much the prevailing dynamic in "A Game of You".
The protagonist of "A Game of You" is Barbie. Barbie is introduced in the story-arc "A Doll's House" as the girlfriend of a guy called Ken. I suppose I need to point out that Barbie is thoroughly heterosexual. Barbie and Ken seem the perfect heteronormative couple on the surface, seem perfectly suited, but have very different dream lives – in Barbie's dreams she is the princess of a fantasy realm called the Land where she has talking animal friends including a big dog or bear called Martin Tenbones and a dodo called Luz. Ken's dreams by contrast revolve around money, sex and power. In "A Doll's House" a supernatural event occurs in which people's dream worlds get mixed up, and as a result the masculine violence of Ken's dreams contaminates Barbie's feminine fantasy. As a consequence of this traumatic breaching, having seen each other for who they really are, Ken and Barbie break up. Barbie furthermore is severed from the Land, stops dreaming about it. This results in a long lasting identity crisis. No longer a princess in her dreams or her waking life, Barbie loses contact with her core sense of self, and starts compensating for this lack of essential identity by performing a role, for instance by painting checkerboard patterns on her face when she goes out to cafes. This is how we find her at the beginning of "A Game of You."
The Land however has continued to exist without Barbie and the masculine contamination that had occurred because of Ken's influence has led, directly or indirectly, to its being taken over by an evil being called the Cuckoo. The Land has become a place of carnage, desolation and eternal winter. The first scene in "A Game of You" shows Barbie's dream friends concluding that they need her to return to the Land to save them. Martin Tenbones travels to the waking world to find her, to give her a magic amulet called the Porpentine and to bring her back. Tenbones does succeed in finding Barbie and giving her the Porpentine, but he is killed in the process; Barbie shortly after is conjured back to the Land. Once returned, she and her dream friends, believing this the only way to defeat the Cuckoo, embark on a quest to take the Porpentine to the Shining Sea. This in fact is what the Cuckoo wants, what it has conspired to bring about, although Barbie and the reader don't learn this until much later.
"A Game of You" can be considered a 'girl's story'. It contains strong Fantasy elements and is usefully compared to Labyrinth, another 'girl's story'. In Labyrinth, the young female protagonist Sarah embarks on a quest to save her baby brother from the Goblin King; Labyrinth can superficially be seen as a tale of female vs. male but if we look deeper we see this interpretation is too simplistic – the Goblin King is played by the androgynous David Bowie. Both "A Game of You" and Labyrinth concern childhood notions of gender. In most respects, however, "A Game of You" differs greatly from Labyrinth. It subverts traditional female Fantasy fiction and contains a great deal of horror; Barbie's dream friends are all killed one by one, her trench coated rat friend Wilkinson, for instance, having his throat slit. The story greatly disturbs. There is a question about whether this really is a 'girl's story' and it is certainly not a kids' story. Barbie's fantasy land has been fatally compromised by masculine violence. The unsettling quality in "A Game of You" is brought home by the scene in which Barbie finally confronts the Cuckoo; up until this point it is has been reasonable to suppose that the Cuckoo is a demagogic male but when it appears it is in the form of a little girl. This completely subverts traditional Fantasy fiction. At this meeting, the cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie, that I quoted in the earlier essay but is worth quoting again. "Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they're faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly The Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clarke us really Hyperman. Yes? [...] Now, little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they'll be happy for ever and ever." "A Game of You" is a Fantasy story about Fantasy stories.
The Cuckoo delivers this speech to lull Barbie into a kind of hypnotic trance so that she will do its bidding. This is a sinister magic the cuckoo has, to persuade and control others through its voice and presence, through deception. The Cuckoo is a liar, and its big lie is its pretence of being a little girl, when really it is a monster, perhaps even a male being. The Cuckoo is a kind of transexual. And it is not the only transexual in Barbie's life. In the waking world, Barbie lives in an apartment building with Thessaly, an ancient witch, two lesbians and a preoperative transexual named Wanda. The reason Wanda has not had a sex-change is because s/he is afraid of surgery, perhaps a sign that at some deep unconscious level s/he still feels a man. The three unproblematically female characters are able, using Thessaly's magic, to travel to the Land to help Barbie but Wanda, although s/he identifies as a female is viewed by Thessaly's gods as a male and is unable to accompany them. This seems cruel of Gaiman– Wanda, unlike the Cuckoo, is always presented sympathetically. But both Wanda and the Cuckoo are alike in being 'undecidables'.
After falling under the Cuckoo's spell, at the Cuckoos's command, Barbie smashes the Porpentine against the Hierogram, a monument on a promontory in the Shining Sea. This action, which the Cuckoo wanted, initiates the destruction of the Land and the death of all its inhabitants, an event which the Cuckoo desires because the land has been a kind of cage for it and this will set it free. The Cuckoo has never wanted to rule the Land, only to eradicate it. Morpheus himself appears on the scene, in a sort of deus ex machina, to facilitate the death of the Land and, later, to save Barbie and her friends. Abstractly, the last part of "A Game of You" works to resolve the tensions the story has created by removing undecidables and restoring traditional gender norms, something Gaiman achieves in a number of ways. The appearance of Morpheus puts a strong unproblematically male character for the first time in the position of supreme power; and the witch Thessaly, up until this point great and terrible, gets an inkling of a crush on Morpheus. The undecidables are eliminated. Wanda dies as the result of a hurricane caused by Thessaly's magic. And also tragically the Land itself, too contaminated by masculine violence to be saved, perishes. The Cuckoo drops its little-girl-disguise and all its lies, and takes on its real form, a bird, to fly away. Barbie asks Morpheus if he is "going to do anything about the Cuckoo" saying "she's dangerous. She's evil." Morpheus replies, "Dangerous? Perhaps. But evil? She acts according to her nature. Is that evil?" The undecidable quality in the Cuckoo has been resolved because its true nature has won through. It seems that, in the end, the 'natural' order has to prevail, and that there is no place in nature for the unnatural, for supernatural creatures who pretend to be little girls or for men who believe they're women, for undecidables.
"A Game of You" is disturbing for many reasons but chiefly because it has an unhappy ending. The Cuckoo wins and the Land is destroyed. The reader wants to ask: Could Gaiman have finished the story differently? Could Barbie have defeated the Cuckoo and saved the Land, making it again a purely female fantasy realm? Could he have resolved the issue of gender undecidability in a more positive way? When reading it however one senses that it is going to end tragically the moment we first see the Cuckoo as a little girl, when she delivers her speech about little boys and little girls and shows Barbie Barbie's childhood bedroom with its toys. The land is doomed because it is founded on a childish view of gender, rather than an adult's view of gender. Barbie has failed to grow up, to put away childish things. The Land is irrecoverable. The profound truth that Gaiman is subtly telling is that prepubescent children understand gender differently than post-pubescents and that children need to change their views of what constitutes gender difference when they grow up. Barbie needs to let the land go, to develop a different, more mature sense of what constitutes femininity; the Land itself cannot be saved. It is unnatural. Barbie's mistake is perhaps also Wanda's. Perhaps Gaiman is suggesting that Wanda's gender dysphoria may also be rooted in childhood experiences and beliefs but, if so, he is suggesting it very tactfully indeed.
The horrifying, unsettling and disturbing feel of this story stems from the fact that it is set in a world where all sexual and gender norms are in doubt. It is about the failure of childish notions of gender.
I'll finish this post by talking about the conclusion of the story. Barbie begins "A Game of You" in the grips of an identity crisis that has lasted since she was severed from the Land and the identity crisis is still present at the end of the story. She continues to perform her identity, penning a veil on her face before attending Wanda's funeral. Almost nothing has changed. The last ditch effort by her dream friends to save the Land and, by extension, Barbie, has failed, Barbie's childhood idea of what it means to be a girl is gone. But nor has Barbie been able to grow up. Still Gaiman finishes on a slightly positive note. At the very conclusion, Barbie has a dream in which she sees Wanda, with Death, as a perfect woman. "And when I say perfect, I mean perfect. Drop-dead gorgeous. There's nothing camp about her, nothing artificial. And she looks happy." In this way, too, the undecidabilty of Wanda's gender is resolved. In the universe Gaiman created, people get what they want when they die even when they can't get it in life. This scene is ambiguous, but another way to see it, the way I see it, is as Barbie's wish-fufillment fantasy. It is a dream of unqualified unproblematic femininity. Perhaps Gaiman is suggesting that she has in fact grown up.
Sunday, 25 June 2017
Concerning Stigma, and Janet Frame
I don't know if people are still reading my blog, but I hope so. In today's post I want first to clear up some slight errors in what I have written in previous posts, before talking about the attitudes towards mental health in this country. Bear with me. The first part of the essay is clerical but I may say something quite interesting later on, especially when I talk about celebrated New Zealand novelist Janet Frame.
One of the most important posts I have written is "My First Psychotic Episode"but I may have made a couple of slight errors in this. I said that while working at bFM I reported live from an "amphetamine lab explosion" on K Road. What I should have said was that it was a "metamphetamine lab explosion" – but my readers may have guessed that I meant this. I don't know for sure if the fire resulted from a P-lab explosion but it seems probable. Also in this post I described a series of mental events that occurred in the day or two prior to my considering drowning myself. These events were, in chronological order, 1. I felt the impulse I described in that post. 2. I decided that everyone in the world, including my father, was gay except me. 3. I decided that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven to stop me from being gay, to save me. I got these mental events out of order. In fact, it went 2, then 1 and then 3. This may seem a small difference but it is significant. In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I said that the psychotic symptom I experienced started in 2013 or 2014 at the age of 33 or 34 but, although I still think it fair to say it started in 2013 or 2014, it definitely started when I was 33. I am born in August.
For around the last several decades, public attitudes towards mental illness in this country have greatly altered. One of the first people to come forward publicly as someone who had suffered depression is ex-All Black John Kirwan, a remarkable figure in that he became the 'face' of mental health. Kirwan fronted a campaign raising awareness of mental illness, advising the community that depression and anxiety are not things to be ashamed of and that it is okay to ask for help. Occasional newspaper columnist Deborah Hill-Cone suffered a severe bout of depression I think about ten years ago and reacted to this mid-life crisis by going back to university to study psychology; she writes now regularly about her life, her 'illness' and about recent psychological research. Mike King, an (ex?) comedian travels around schools speaking to students about mental health issues with the same message as John Kirwan, that depression and anxiety are not problems to be ashamed of and that it is okay to seek help. There has, in other words, been considerable work put into de-stigmatising the concept of mental illness. We don't need to look too hard to find a reason for all this government-funded publicity and all these individual initiatives. New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. I don't think anyone knows why. It seems inexplicable – why should New Zealand have a higher suicide rate than the US when America is demonstrably so much more fucked up? It could be that the suicide rate in the States only seems lower because many more suicides might go unreported there than here. Or it could be something to do with the fact that New Zealand is one of the most secular, most atheistical, countries on the planet, as a friend of mine suggested just yesterday. For whatever reason, the issues of mental illness and the high suicide rate has been deemed an issue to be discussed publicly, a problem for which solutions should be sought, rather than shameful secrets to be swept under the carpet as they once were.
This concerted effort by the government and individuals to de-stigmatise mental illness has had an odd unintended consequence, a by-product that I don't think anyone anticipated. It has brought to the public's attention the inadequacy of the Mental Health System. In the 1950s and 1960s, say, a person who suffered one psychotic or depressive episode, one bout of post-natal depression, would be thrown in an institution for the rest of his or her life. He or she would be subjected to ECT, insulin shock therapy, ice baths (in Lake Alice), even lobotomised, all barbaric and ultimately ineffective and unjustifiable, indefensible forms of 'therapy'. Psychiatrists. little more than monsters, were believed infallible gods and the mentally ill were considered and treated little better than animals. The stigma surrounding madness made patients unwilling or unable to come forward with stories of mistreatment but all this has changed. The destigmatisation of mental illness that has occurred in the last decade or two has enabled, empowered, patients to tell their stories and has shone a spotlight on the failings of the Mental Health System, a system that, in fact, has never worked. It is an escapable fact that forty per cent of all suicides in the country are mental health patients, the ones who have actually sought help. Mike King, to his great credit, has made communicating this scandalous truth a part of his mission. On 7 Sharp a month or two ago he said (and this is an exact quote) "People can say over and over again that there's nothing wrong with the Mental Health System but that doesn't make it true." More recently the current affairs show Sunday reported on a young man, misdiagnosed with Narcissistic Personality disorder, who had killed himself while an impatient in a Mental Health Ward in Christchurch; King was interviewed about this and said, "Stories like this make a mockery of everything I do." Seeking help is useless if those who seek it don't receive it.
Mental illness and the Mental Health System seem set to be key issues in this year's national elections.
So, destigmatisation seems a very good thing. The attitude towards mental illness in New Zealand is not only more sympathetic and compassionate than it once was, it is better than in other countries, particularly the US. My impression is that the stigma associated with mental illness in America is terrible. Stephen Colbert in the past would often mock Donald Trump by saying that he had forgotten to take his pills and Bill Maher still regularly calls Trump a mental health patient. To say that Trump is a mental health patient is incredibly insulting to mental health patients – this sounds like a joke but I am only half joking. My feeling is that America has a serious, serious problem with suicide and mental illness but that Americans aren't in the slightest prepared to acknowledge it. And with all America's other problems, such as racism in the police force, the repeal of Obamacare, battles over gun control and planned parenthood, the 'opioid epidemic' and so on, improving the treatment of the mentally ill probably falls quite far down the to-do list.
If New Zealand has a different attitude towards mental illness than the US, this is partly attributable to a different culture. New Zealanders value fairness and tolerance highly, whereas Americans value freedom and rights more. But if I were to try to put a name on why New Zealand has a better attitude towards mental illness than the States, I would pick one person as a reason– Janet Frame. It is Janet Frame who will be the subject of the remainder of this post; I intend to talk a little about her life. As always I should say my sources. I have read a number of her novels, admittedly over ten years ago. Just yesterday I finished the first volume in her autobiography, "To the Is-Land." The second volume, "An Angel at My Table", is on my bed-side table but I haven't cracked it open yet. My main source though is the Wikipedia entry about her. When writing about other famous people, such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and John Nash, I have relied heavily on Wikipedia but I do warn readers to be careful. The Wikipedia entry begins "Nene Janet Paterson Clutha ONZ CBE (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame" implying that 'Janet Frame' was a pen name. This is false. Janet was born 'Janet Frame' but changed her name to Nene Clutha in 1958 because of an acute shyness or fear of public recognition associated with her fame (or notoriety). Generally though I feel and hope that Wikipedia is more or less reliable.
Frame was born in 1924 and spent most of her childhood in the small Otago town of Oamaru (near the bottom of the South Island). In 1945, at the age of twenty-one, while training to become a teacher, she attempted suicide by ingesting aspirin tablets. As a result she started receiving therapy from a junior lecturer at Otago University, John Money, a psychologist who would later develop an international reputation as a sexologist interested in gender reassignment. Money is seminal, in a way: he invented the term 'gender role' and paved the way for future study of transexuality, and much feminist and queer theory, such as the work of Judith Butler, is indebted to him. Money was also a horrible quack and a pervert (see his Wikipedia page if you don't believe me). In her sessions with Money, Frame developed a strong crush on him and started telling him things he wanted to hear (this last fact is not drawn from her wikipedia page but from something I read elsewhere). Later that year Frame had another breakdown after a visit from a school inspector and was admitted to a psychiatric ward for observation. Over the next eight years, she was in and out of a variety of mental asylums. According to Wikipedia, she was usually admitted 'voluntarily' but the word 'voluntary' in this context is slippery and I know from my own experience that people can often coerced or bullied into being hospitalised or receiving treatment. During this period, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. She received ECT and Insulin Shock Therapy. In 1951, she was scheduled for a lobotomy – but the lobotomy was cancelled when a book of short stories she had written, "The Lagoon and Other Stories", unexpectedly won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. Apocryphally, that elusive creature, the Good Psychiatrist, appeared at the asylum, took an interest in her, vouched for her, said, "This woman shouldn't be here in this madhouse" and this led to her eventual release.
Frame was discharged from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum four years later and went to live in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna, on Auckland's North Shore. (Sargeson is another famous New Zealand short story writer.) There she wrote her first novel, "Owls Do Cry." Nine other novels, collections of short stories, poetry and the three volume autobiography would follow before her death in 2004. Frame is considered perhaps the greatest New Zealand novelist. When I was studying my MA in English Literature, one of my lecturers, who had been a friend of hers, told us that he had repeatedly nominated her, albeit unsuccessfully, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (For readers interested in Frame, who don't have time to read her books, Jane Campion made a film about her in 1980s called 'An Angel at my Table".)
Much has been written about Frame. The revered New Zealand historian Michael King wrote a biography on her, "Wrestling with the Angel" which is probably very good, but which I haven't read. Can anything new be said about her? In an earlier post I wrote about Virginia Woolf and perhaps the two can be compared; Woolf and Frame are alike in that both were woman novelists who sometimes wrote formidably difficult books, and both, apparently, 'struggled with mental illness'. In all other respects, however, I feel that the two are totally different. For one thing, Virginia Woof, in Mrs Dalloway for instance, wrote about what it is like to be mentally ill, to be psychotic; in the novel Faces in the Water, Frame describes a very brief psychotic episode, an episode that resembles an acid trip more than anything else, and then a lifetime trapped as a sane woman in a lunatic's asylum. In other words, from all I've read about her so far, you could be forgiven for thinking Frame was never mentally ill at all.
In this blog I have often discussed sexuality and so the reader might be curious about whether I have anything to say about Janet's sexuality. From all I've read, one would have to say that Frame was totally heterosexual all her life. In this, too, she differs from Virginia Woolf. True, Frame never had any public relationships with men – but this is understandable because she suffered acutely from social anxiety and depression, partly, surely, because of her terrible experiences of incarceration, and lived most of her life a hermit. But issues of sexuality did play a role in her life however. She fell in love with a male psychologist whose specialty was gender reassignment and remained friends with him for much of her life. She lived for a time with Frank Sargeson, a gay man. And in the 'sixties, while in the States, she formed a close friendship with painter Theophilius Brown and his long time male partner, something she later described as "the chief experience of my life". This hint in Wikipedia, together with some coy insinuations made by a friend of mind more acquainted with Frame than I am, raise an interesting possibility – that Frame might have had a brief menage a trois with two males. To put it bluntly, I believe Frame was sexually attracted to gay men. All this may seem a shocking thing to say about a New Zealand literary icon but perhaps we live in a world now in which this may seem not scandalous but an indication of a free spirit.
Leaving aside the details of her life, the fact remains that Frame was diagnosed schizophrenic, spent over ten years on and off in lunatic asylums and was almost given a lobotomy, before being released and becoming one of New Zealand's greatest novelists. I should say, because I need to, that Frame never took medication – she lived in an age before antipsychotic medication. So if she was well it was nothing to do with pills. One wonders: how many sane men and women, men and women not lucky enough to unexpectedly win New Zealand's greatest literary prize in the nick of time, were wrongly lobotomised in this era? I suspect psychiatrists in New Zealand dislike being reminded of Janet Frame. In 2008, I mentioned Frame to my asshole psychiatrist; I believed then that Frame had probably been misdiagnosed lesbian as I felt I had been misdiagnosed homosexual. He told me patronisingly that she was 'bi-polar' (rather than schizophrenic). Where did he get this diagnosis from? He pulled it out of his arse, on the spot – even then, I knew more about Frame than he did. In 2007, after Frame had died, The New Zealand Medical Journal published an article by a medical specialist who proposed that Frame may have been on the Autistic Spectrum. Was Frame autistic? Of course not. Autistics lack verbal fluency and Frame was enraptured by the magic of language. Autistics have difficulty with theory of mind and Frame was a novelist always seeking to capture others' personalities in writing. Most importantly, Frame had a sense of humour and this is something autists lack. It seems that psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit they fucked up with her, still regularly fuck up with others, and, even in death, they can't leave Janet alone.
I'll finish this post by saying something out that I have implied but not categorically said. Frame grew up in an ordinary poor family in a provincial New Zealand town, her pastimes being the reading of nineteenth century lyric verse, solving mathematical problems set by her teachers (something she enjoyed) and milking the family's cows. In 1945, she ended up the patient of a psychologist who was quite evidently homosexual and believed that gender was a social construct. This over forty years before homosexuality was decriminalised in New Zealand. Is it any wonder Frame went a little mad?
One of the most important posts I have written is "My First Psychotic Episode"but I may have made a couple of slight errors in this. I said that while working at bFM I reported live from an "amphetamine lab explosion" on K Road. What I should have said was that it was a "metamphetamine lab explosion" – but my readers may have guessed that I meant this. I don't know for sure if the fire resulted from a P-lab explosion but it seems probable. Also in this post I described a series of mental events that occurred in the day or two prior to my considering drowning myself. These events were, in chronological order, 1. I felt the impulse I described in that post. 2. I decided that everyone in the world, including my father, was gay except me. 3. I decided that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven to stop me from being gay, to save me. I got these mental events out of order. In fact, it went 2, then 1 and then 3. This may seem a small difference but it is significant. In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I said that the psychotic symptom I experienced started in 2013 or 2014 at the age of 33 or 34 but, although I still think it fair to say it started in 2013 or 2014, it definitely started when I was 33. I am born in August.
For around the last several decades, public attitudes towards mental illness in this country have greatly altered. One of the first people to come forward publicly as someone who had suffered depression is ex-All Black John Kirwan, a remarkable figure in that he became the 'face' of mental health. Kirwan fronted a campaign raising awareness of mental illness, advising the community that depression and anxiety are not things to be ashamed of and that it is okay to ask for help. Occasional newspaper columnist Deborah Hill-Cone suffered a severe bout of depression I think about ten years ago and reacted to this mid-life crisis by going back to university to study psychology; she writes now regularly about her life, her 'illness' and about recent psychological research. Mike King, an (ex?) comedian travels around schools speaking to students about mental health issues with the same message as John Kirwan, that depression and anxiety are not problems to be ashamed of and that it is okay to seek help. There has, in other words, been considerable work put into de-stigmatising the concept of mental illness. We don't need to look too hard to find a reason for all this government-funded publicity and all these individual initiatives. New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. I don't think anyone knows why. It seems inexplicable – why should New Zealand have a higher suicide rate than the US when America is demonstrably so much more fucked up? It could be that the suicide rate in the States only seems lower because many more suicides might go unreported there than here. Or it could be something to do with the fact that New Zealand is one of the most secular, most atheistical, countries on the planet, as a friend of mine suggested just yesterday. For whatever reason, the issues of mental illness and the high suicide rate has been deemed an issue to be discussed publicly, a problem for which solutions should be sought, rather than shameful secrets to be swept under the carpet as they once were.
This concerted effort by the government and individuals to de-stigmatise mental illness has had an odd unintended consequence, a by-product that I don't think anyone anticipated. It has brought to the public's attention the inadequacy of the Mental Health System. In the 1950s and 1960s, say, a person who suffered one psychotic or depressive episode, one bout of post-natal depression, would be thrown in an institution for the rest of his or her life. He or she would be subjected to ECT, insulin shock therapy, ice baths (in Lake Alice), even lobotomised, all barbaric and ultimately ineffective and unjustifiable, indefensible forms of 'therapy'. Psychiatrists. little more than monsters, were believed infallible gods and the mentally ill were considered and treated little better than animals. The stigma surrounding madness made patients unwilling or unable to come forward with stories of mistreatment but all this has changed. The destigmatisation of mental illness that has occurred in the last decade or two has enabled, empowered, patients to tell their stories and has shone a spotlight on the failings of the Mental Health System, a system that, in fact, has never worked. It is an escapable fact that forty per cent of all suicides in the country are mental health patients, the ones who have actually sought help. Mike King, to his great credit, has made communicating this scandalous truth a part of his mission. On 7 Sharp a month or two ago he said (and this is an exact quote) "People can say over and over again that there's nothing wrong with the Mental Health System but that doesn't make it true." More recently the current affairs show Sunday reported on a young man, misdiagnosed with Narcissistic Personality disorder, who had killed himself while an impatient in a Mental Health Ward in Christchurch; King was interviewed about this and said, "Stories like this make a mockery of everything I do." Seeking help is useless if those who seek it don't receive it.
Mental illness and the Mental Health System seem set to be key issues in this year's national elections.
So, destigmatisation seems a very good thing. The attitude towards mental illness in New Zealand is not only more sympathetic and compassionate than it once was, it is better than in other countries, particularly the US. My impression is that the stigma associated with mental illness in America is terrible. Stephen Colbert in the past would often mock Donald Trump by saying that he had forgotten to take his pills and Bill Maher still regularly calls Trump a mental health patient. To say that Trump is a mental health patient is incredibly insulting to mental health patients – this sounds like a joke but I am only half joking. My feeling is that America has a serious, serious problem with suicide and mental illness but that Americans aren't in the slightest prepared to acknowledge it. And with all America's other problems, such as racism in the police force, the repeal of Obamacare, battles over gun control and planned parenthood, the 'opioid epidemic' and so on, improving the treatment of the mentally ill probably falls quite far down the to-do list.
If New Zealand has a different attitude towards mental illness than the US, this is partly attributable to a different culture. New Zealanders value fairness and tolerance highly, whereas Americans value freedom and rights more. But if I were to try to put a name on why New Zealand has a better attitude towards mental illness than the States, I would pick one person as a reason– Janet Frame. It is Janet Frame who will be the subject of the remainder of this post; I intend to talk a little about her life. As always I should say my sources. I have read a number of her novels, admittedly over ten years ago. Just yesterday I finished the first volume in her autobiography, "To the Is-Land." The second volume, "An Angel at My Table", is on my bed-side table but I haven't cracked it open yet. My main source though is the Wikipedia entry about her. When writing about other famous people, such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and John Nash, I have relied heavily on Wikipedia but I do warn readers to be careful. The Wikipedia entry begins "Nene Janet Paterson Clutha ONZ CBE (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame" implying that 'Janet Frame' was a pen name. This is false. Janet was born 'Janet Frame' but changed her name to Nene Clutha in 1958 because of an acute shyness or fear of public recognition associated with her fame (or notoriety). Generally though I feel and hope that Wikipedia is more or less reliable.
Frame was born in 1924 and spent most of her childhood in the small Otago town of Oamaru (near the bottom of the South Island). In 1945, at the age of twenty-one, while training to become a teacher, she attempted suicide by ingesting aspirin tablets. As a result she started receiving therapy from a junior lecturer at Otago University, John Money, a psychologist who would later develop an international reputation as a sexologist interested in gender reassignment. Money is seminal, in a way: he invented the term 'gender role' and paved the way for future study of transexuality, and much feminist and queer theory, such as the work of Judith Butler, is indebted to him. Money was also a horrible quack and a pervert (see his Wikipedia page if you don't believe me). In her sessions with Money, Frame developed a strong crush on him and started telling him things he wanted to hear (this last fact is not drawn from her wikipedia page but from something I read elsewhere). Later that year Frame had another breakdown after a visit from a school inspector and was admitted to a psychiatric ward for observation. Over the next eight years, she was in and out of a variety of mental asylums. According to Wikipedia, she was usually admitted 'voluntarily' but the word 'voluntary' in this context is slippery and I know from my own experience that people can often coerced or bullied into being hospitalised or receiving treatment. During this period, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. She received ECT and Insulin Shock Therapy. In 1951, she was scheduled for a lobotomy – but the lobotomy was cancelled when a book of short stories she had written, "The Lagoon and Other Stories", unexpectedly won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. Apocryphally, that elusive creature, the Good Psychiatrist, appeared at the asylum, took an interest in her, vouched for her, said, "This woman shouldn't be here in this madhouse" and this led to her eventual release.
Frame was discharged from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum four years later and went to live in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna, on Auckland's North Shore. (Sargeson is another famous New Zealand short story writer.) There she wrote her first novel, "Owls Do Cry." Nine other novels, collections of short stories, poetry and the three volume autobiography would follow before her death in 2004. Frame is considered perhaps the greatest New Zealand novelist. When I was studying my MA in English Literature, one of my lecturers, who had been a friend of hers, told us that he had repeatedly nominated her, albeit unsuccessfully, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (For readers interested in Frame, who don't have time to read her books, Jane Campion made a film about her in 1980s called 'An Angel at my Table".)
Much has been written about Frame. The revered New Zealand historian Michael King wrote a biography on her, "Wrestling with the Angel" which is probably very good, but which I haven't read. Can anything new be said about her? In an earlier post I wrote about Virginia Woolf and perhaps the two can be compared; Woolf and Frame are alike in that both were woman novelists who sometimes wrote formidably difficult books, and both, apparently, 'struggled with mental illness'. In all other respects, however, I feel that the two are totally different. For one thing, Virginia Woof, in Mrs Dalloway for instance, wrote about what it is like to be mentally ill, to be psychotic; in the novel Faces in the Water, Frame describes a very brief psychotic episode, an episode that resembles an acid trip more than anything else, and then a lifetime trapped as a sane woman in a lunatic's asylum. In other words, from all I've read about her so far, you could be forgiven for thinking Frame was never mentally ill at all.
In this blog I have often discussed sexuality and so the reader might be curious about whether I have anything to say about Janet's sexuality. From all I've read, one would have to say that Frame was totally heterosexual all her life. In this, too, she differs from Virginia Woolf. True, Frame never had any public relationships with men – but this is understandable because she suffered acutely from social anxiety and depression, partly, surely, because of her terrible experiences of incarceration, and lived most of her life a hermit. But issues of sexuality did play a role in her life however. She fell in love with a male psychologist whose specialty was gender reassignment and remained friends with him for much of her life. She lived for a time with Frank Sargeson, a gay man. And in the 'sixties, while in the States, she formed a close friendship with painter Theophilius Brown and his long time male partner, something she later described as "the chief experience of my life". This hint in Wikipedia, together with some coy insinuations made by a friend of mind more acquainted with Frame than I am, raise an interesting possibility – that Frame might have had a brief menage a trois with two males. To put it bluntly, I believe Frame was sexually attracted to gay men. All this may seem a shocking thing to say about a New Zealand literary icon but perhaps we live in a world now in which this may seem not scandalous but an indication of a free spirit.
Leaving aside the details of her life, the fact remains that Frame was diagnosed schizophrenic, spent over ten years on and off in lunatic asylums and was almost given a lobotomy, before being released and becoming one of New Zealand's greatest novelists. I should say, because I need to, that Frame never took medication – she lived in an age before antipsychotic medication. So if she was well it was nothing to do with pills. One wonders: how many sane men and women, men and women not lucky enough to unexpectedly win New Zealand's greatest literary prize in the nick of time, were wrongly lobotomised in this era? I suspect psychiatrists in New Zealand dislike being reminded of Janet Frame. In 2008, I mentioned Frame to my asshole psychiatrist; I believed then that Frame had probably been misdiagnosed lesbian as I felt I had been misdiagnosed homosexual. He told me patronisingly that she was 'bi-polar' (rather than schizophrenic). Where did he get this diagnosis from? He pulled it out of his arse, on the spot – even then, I knew more about Frame than he did. In 2007, after Frame had died, The New Zealand Medical Journal published an article by a medical specialist who proposed that Frame may have been on the Autistic Spectrum. Was Frame autistic? Of course not. Autistics lack verbal fluency and Frame was enraptured by the magic of language. Autistics have difficulty with theory of mind and Frame was a novelist always seeking to capture others' personalities in writing. Most importantly, Frame had a sense of humour and this is something autists lack. It seems that psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit they fucked up with her, still regularly fuck up with others, and, even in death, they can't leave Janet alone.
I'll finish this post by saying something out that I have implied but not categorically said. Frame grew up in an ordinary poor family in a provincial New Zealand town, her pastimes being the reading of nineteenth century lyric verse, solving mathematical problems set by her teachers (something she enjoyed) and milking the family's cows. In 1945, she ended up the patient of a psychologist who was quite evidently homosexual and believed that gender was a social construct. This over forty years before homosexuality was decriminalised in New Zealand. Is it any wonder Frame went a little mad?
Saturday, 10 June 2017
A Case Study of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"
The following is another assignment I submitted recently for my degree in Communications. It was a little rushed but in the whole I hope still interesting, especially the section on gender. I hope if you read it you enjoy it.
***
Case Study of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman
Introduction
The Sandman is a comic book series, originally published monthly from January 1989 until March 1996 by DC comics, authored by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by a number of different artists. It has since been collected into ten trade paperbacks and several anthologies. It has been highly successful and has been called “the greatest epic in comic book history” (Los Angeles Times)
The main protagonist of The Sandman is Morpheus, the anthropomorphic personification of Dream, who rules over the realm of dreams known as the Dreaming. At the beginning of the series Dream is imprisoned for seventy years in a magic sigil and in 1989 escapes; towards the end of the series Dream chooses to let himself die and the series ends with his funeral and his replacement by another incarnation. The Sandman contains a mix of extended stories and one-off stories. Sometimes Morpheus is the main character but often he is a peripheral figure and occasionally doesn’t feature at all. Morpheus is part of a family known as the Endless, the others being Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium (who was once known a Delight) and these siblings often feature in the comic.
Norman Mailer described The Sandman as “a comic book for intellectuals” (Anderson, Porter (July 30, 2001). It has won more than 26 Eisner awards, the World Fantasy Award (for the issue “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and in 2005 IGN declared it the best Vertigo comic ever. The Sandman was one of the first graphic novels to be on the New York Times Best Seller list, others being Maus, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The Sandman is a significant text in Popular Culture which has influenced not only the comic book medium since but many other Pop Culture works.
Trends and Fads
The term ‘comic book’ is very broad encompassing, as it does, texts as diverse as Garfield, Maus Tintin and American Splendour. Conventions include the the use of sequence of frames or panels that represent chronologically ordered scenes and the employment of speech bubbles. The Sandman can be most closely related to, and grew out of, a sub-genre of comic books, superhero comics. In fact, Morpheus is a re-imagining of a superhero that first appeared in comics in 1939, a masked vigilante bearing a ‘gas gun’ that could impel criminals to tell the truth.
Fans of superhero comics can be considered a sub-culture. However this sub-culture has had a significant influence on mainstream popular culture, in the form of television and film, almost from its inception. The first of many Superman feature films, Superman and the Mole Men, was released in 1951 and a camp television series based around Batman was produced in the 1960s. Developments in comic books have influenced more widely popular media: for instance, beginning in the 1980s a much darker view of Batman in the comics, most closely associated with the four issue comic book series The Dark Knight Returns written by Frank Miler and published in 1986, influenced Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman. In the last several decades, the two main comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, have worked closely with film companies to produce very many films set in respectively the DC and Marvel universes. Although comic book readers constitute a sub-culture, developments in this sub-culture often impact on mainstream culture.
The Sandman, together with other seminal works of the 1980s such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen, were at the vanguard of a trend in comic books towards much greater sophistication. They were innovative – and by ‘innovative ‘ I do not mean that they improved comic books but rather that they performed something new, something novel. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, history and literature. For example, the issue "August", which concerns the Roman emperor Augustus, stays remarkably close to historical ‘facts’ about him, including rumours existing during his rule that he had been sexually abused or raped by his uncle Julius Caesar when young (see The Annotated Sandman, Klinger, 2012, p. 251). The sophistication of The Sandman and other works broadened the appeal of comic books, expanding an audience that had once comprised only pre-adolescent and adolescent boy to include women and mature readers. The success of The Sandman can principally be attributed to word-of-mouth recommendations; it was, to begin with, a true underground sensation.
The impact that The Sandman has had on mainstream popular culture is exampled by the fact that a television series Lucifer has recently been produced featuring a character invented by Gaiman. Lucifer features in the Sandman story "Season of Mists" in which he abdicates his position as ruler of Hell; likewise in the TV series Lucifer, Lucifer abdicates his throne and moves to Earth. The screenplay for Lucifer sometimes directly quotes passages from The Sandman. In 2013, reports that The Sandman itself was to be adapted into a film directed by Joseph Gordon–Levitt were floated but in 2016 Gordon-Levitt dropped out citing ‘creative differences’. It does not seem the series will be made into a film anytime soon.
The Sandman heralded a trend in comic books and graphic novels towards greater sophistication and widened the audience for comic books by appealing to girls, women and adults. This was a trend, not a fad – it is still evident today. It paved the way for other comics that tell supernatural, fantastical stories that are not simply battles between good and evil but are rather complex and nuanced graphic literature, examples including The Invisibles, Preacher and Transmetropolitan. The Sandman is not a superhero comic but it is important to remember that it evolved out of the superhero genre – characters from the DC Universe such as Batman villain Dr Destiny, and Superman and Batman themselves, occasionally appear in it. It was part of a revolution in comic books that forced cultural commentators to take comic books seriously.
Popular Icons
In popular culture studies, a distinction is drawn between icons and symbols. An icon is a visual representation of a real person or thing while a symbol is a sign that designates an abstract concept – for example, an image of the statue of liberty stands for the promise of American freedom. An icon resembles in key ways the person or thing it represents but a symbol’s relationship to what it signifies is arbitrary, and based on consensus convention. Icons are often but not always celebrities.
Neil Gaiman can himself be considered an icon, and the internet contain numerous images of him. Gaiman acquired his celebrity status not only for his authorship of The Sandman but also for other comics he has worked on and for the fantastical novels, such as American Gods and Stardust, that he has written since. It is rare for an author to acquire iconic status – although Joe Moran has discussed literary celebrity with respect to authors John Updike, Philip Roth and Kathy Acker (Turner, 2004). Iconic status requires some pubic familiarity with the icon’s appearance and authors can be shy. Another author apart from Gaiman who may, perhaps, have iconic status is Stephen King. James Joyce can also be considered an icon although, if we wish to draw a distinction between high culture and popular culture, Joyce would probably be regarded as a high culture icon rather than a popular culture icon.
However, the imagery most associated with The Sandman is not pictures of its author but rather pictures of characters from the comic. It is not uncommon for fans to put up posters of Dream, Death or Delirium on their bedroom walls. Can these characters perhaps be considered iconic? This question raises a problem, a long standing issue in analytic philosophy, the issue of whether it is possible to make true statements about fictional entities. Is the proposition “Othello is a Moor” (or the proposition “Dream kills his son Orpheus”) true or false? This problem bedevils literary criticism. One partial-solution is Meongiansm, the doctrine that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. Just because Dream does not literally exist, and has never existed, does not mean that we cannot accord him, in a way, iconic status, that he cannot be represented through imagery. Most people know Marilyn Monroe solely from representations of her and the same can be said for Morpheus. And many of The Sandman’s most passionate fans probably relate to characters like Dream and Death as though they are real people.
If we allow that the central characters in The Sandman can be in a way iconic we can discuss meanings associated with their images. There is considerable variation in the way the characters are represented depending on the artist who is depicting them – Delirium in particular varies wildly. However there is some continuity in how other major characters are presented. Mopheus is always pale and skinny, almost always wears black and has an unruly shock of black hair. He closely resembles Robert Smith from The Cure as Smith appeared in the 1980s. Death, represented as a foxy young woman, is also presented solely in black and white, is first represented (in “The Sound of her Wings”) in a black singlet and black jeans and wears an ankh around her neck. Representations of Dream and Death align them closely with the Goth subculture. The relationship between The Sandman and this subculture is not just iconographical but thematic, a shared focus on death, romance and the supernatural or mystical. The Sandman can be considered a a cultural point-of-reference for this subculture.
If we can allow not only Gaiman but the characters he invented iconic status, it is permissible to wonder if we can perhaps not also grant them celebrity status. In Understanding Celebrity (Turner, 2012), Turner proposes that although celebrity is often perceived as a natural quality certain individuals posses, a kind of charism or aura perceptible when these individuals are physically present, it is in fact manufactured by the mass media. In today’s world, in particular, people can be famous simply for being famous. Turner summarises his introductory discussion of celebrity in the following way. “Celebrity, then, is a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a social function we can better understand.” (p.9) Hollywood stars are known not only for the roles they play in films but for their privates lives, lives made public by mass media such as women’s magazines and newspapers. The discourse of celebrity is based on the assumption that there is a simple, unproblematic relationship between representations of a person and that person’s true self, between what is said about a person and who that person is; critics of celebrity, such as Turner, show that this relationship is neither simple nor unproblematic. We can apply this theoretical perspective to The Sandman. The characters Dream and Death are famous, to be sure, but they exist only in the form of representations, only as a discursive effect. There is no reality behind the images. It is perhaps to stretch the meaning of the terms ‘icon’ and ‘celebrity’ to say that these terms apply to the characters Gaiman invented, but it is surely true to say that fans of The Sandman often relate to them a little as though they were real people.
Gender
The issue of gender, along with issues of sexuality, feature strongly in The Sandman. Not only does the series often incorporate gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, many of the stories feature female protagonists. Gaiman evidently believes that there are male and female stories and tried to alternate between one and the other. In an interview, Gaiman has said, “Sandman was always designed to move from male stories to female stories.” The idea that stories themselves are gendered appears explicitly, for instance, towards the end of the series "World’s End". In this collection, a group of travellers stranded in an magical Inn tell stories to each other to pass the time. A women, Charlene Mooney, comments after hearing the others’ stories, “I’ll tell you something else I noticed. There aren’t any women in these stories. Did anyone else notice that?” Jim, a girl who has cross-dressed as a boy to work on a merchant vessel, says “But, well. What about me, missie? There’s me. There was my story. That was a woman’s story.” Charlene replies, “Oh, please. Look, girl, the whole point of your story is that there wasn’t a woman in it. Just a ship full of sailors, and a giant dick thrusting out of the ocean.”
Gender seems to be of significant interest to Gaiman and this has not gone unrecognised. In “The Sand/wo/man: The Unstable Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series” (Brisbin and Booth, 2013) the authors relate The Sandman to Judith Butler’s theory that gender is performative.
"Of particular interest in Sandman is the way that Gaiman renegotiates the traditional notions of gender in society and presents a practical representation of the same type of theoretical gender fluidity developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. Although it’s doubtful that Gaiman deliberately referenced Butlerian theory in his graphic novel, both authors do seem to have a similar agenda in terms of queer theory revisionism. Indeed, Gaiman’s work, written around the same time as Butler published her influential treatise on gender performativity, illustrates the notion that sex and gender are social constructs which inherently lead to ideological oppression. To overcome this oppression, society must examine and tear down these constructs, which have become basic to our identities and seem innate to the human condition. But, as both Gaiman and Butler argue, gender appearances are little more than artificial constructs." (p.21)
Towards the end of the essay, the authors make this bold claim. “Throughout Sandman, Gaiman offers a number of well-illustrated critiques of gender roles and sexual norms, and becomes an advocate for a queer lifestyle.” (p. 32) This conclusion is highly questionable.
It seems plausible to believe that Gaiman includes queer and transexual people not to present positive representations of the ‘queer lifestyle’ but for the same reason he presents serial killers and scenes of graphic horror and rape – because it disturbs and titillates, because it is edgy. Comic books of the superhero and post-superhero variety, even ones as sophisticated as The Sandman, trade on binary dualisms, on violence and sex, and representations of queer and transgender people constitute another kind of violence. It seems that the maintenance of gender and sexual boundaries require violence and The Sandman is often violent.
An important story-arc that involves gender, one that Brisbin and Booth discuss, is "A Game of You". In this story, Barbie is a girl who, in her dreams, was once the princess of a fantasy world known as the Land, but has been cut off from it for a long time. Since then she has suffered a crisis of identity. The Land, though, has continued to exist without her and has been taken over by an evil being known as the Cuckoo. One of her dream friends travels to the waking world to find Barbie and, shortly after, she returns to the Land and she and her dream companions journey to the “shining sea” where they confront the Cuckoo. This series is the closest The Sandman ever comes to a traditional fantasy story, involving as it does a quest, but is highly unusual, even disturbing, because all Barbie's companions are killed one by one and at the end the Cuckoo, the arch-enemy, actually wins, destroying the Land and flying away to lay eggs in other children’s minds.
In "A Game of You", it Gaiman suggests that not only are stories gendered but so are dream-worlds. Towards the end the Cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie: “Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they’re faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly the Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clark is really Hyperman. Yes? […] Now little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they’ll be happy for ever and ever. Little Cuckoos.” This passage is fascinating not only because it refers metatextually to comic book history, a history of superhero stories enjoyed solely by boys, that occurs in what is evidently a ‘girls’ story’, but also because it implies an absolute gender distinction. This is very far removed from Butler’s idea that gender is performative
Barbie has friends in the real world who live in the same apartment building as her, a lesbian couple, an immortal witch called Thessaly and pre-operative transexual who goes by the name Wanda. The three women harness the magic of the moon to travel into Barbie’s dream world to try to rescue her but Wanda, although he identities as a woman, is unable to accompany them because Thessaly’s gods do not recognise her as a female, instead seeing him as a man. Gaiman has received significant criticism in the years since for this narrative decision and replied to it in the following way:
Lots of readers assumed that that was my position too, because who
could argue with an opinion shared by an ancient witch and a
lunar god? In fact, my feeling was always that that’s an opinion
the gods can take up their sacred recta. I feel the story makes clear
that Wanda considers herself a woman; and that, at the end, Death
does too. To my mind, that’s all that matters. (Bender, 126)
Gaiman’s response requires some comment. Even while defending himself from charges of bigotry, Gaiman makes a homophobic slur, saying, in effect, that the gods can ‘take it up their arses’. Gaiman’s real position is probably more ambivalent than either his detractors or his exponents appreciate.
Those who have criticised Gaiman for this decision misunderstand what story-tellers do. In a story, a story teller presents two contradictory ideas at once and this is what Gaiman is doing. On the one hand, Gaiman is arguing for an essentialist perspective on gender; on the other he is presenting a Butlerian view that gender is performative. The first position is represented by the Cuckoo and the second is represented by Wanda. It is significant that, at the end of the story, the Cuckoo wins and Wanda dies. It is significant also that when Wanda dreams, his dreams are inspired by superhero comics not fantasy realms. Perhaps what we would like to believe about the world is not the world’s truth. However, after Barbie attends Wanda’s funeral, she crosses out the name ‘Alvin’, his/her birth name written on the tombstone and writes Wanda instead in red lipstick. Later she has a dream in which she sees Wanda, accompanied by Death, as a genuine woman. Perhaps Gaiman is saying that Wanda couldn't be a woman when alive but only when she is dead.
Brisbin and Booth discuss two of the Endless, Desire and Destruction. Desire is interesting from a gender perspective because he/she is literally androgynous, sometimes appearing as a man, sometimes as a woman. Brisbin and Booth say of Desire: “He/she is an authority, not a subordinate. When this masculine perspective is coupled with a feminine fixation on love and romance, the reader is presented not just with the physicality of an amorphous sexuality,
but also with fluid cultural characteristics of a queer gender. Desire is nothing if not a Butlerian ideal.” Brisbin and Booth imply that Desire is a kind of role model for queer or transgender people, but this misses the point entirely because, throughout the entire run of the Sandman, Desire is presented unsympathetically. S/he is not fixated on love and romance, rather s/he is spiteful, vindictive and capricious, and is continually plotting to destroy Dream. Brisbane and Booth also discuss Destruction, perhaps because he is the most masculine of the Endless, but I would like instead to focus on Death, and compare her to Desire. Death is also an authority, is older and has more power than either Dream or Desire and is even given to teasing her younger siblings, yet she is unmistakably and essentially always feminine. Death is always presented sympathetically. Through Death, Gaiman is not presenting the idea that gender is performative; rather he is broadening or redefining the term ‘female’ to make it more inclusive, to show that women can have power and remain feminine.
Then there is the Sandman himself. Morpheus takes on many guises – he can be African or even a cat– yet he is always male and always heterosexual. Early issues present him as someone quite frightening and someone absolutely committed to his responsibilities as Dream King but as the series goes on, we find he has some human qualities. Over the course of his existence, he has had a number of relationships with women. He will fall for a woman, be with her for a while, be jilted and have his heart broken and then decades or centuries later try again. In "Brief Lives", after Thessaly leaves him, Morpheus makes it rain in the dream kingdom for weeks. This quality in Dream – his need to be loved, his capacity to love and his grief when love ends – is often seen as a female quality, “a feminine fixation on love and romance” (to quote Brisbin and Boon again) but by making Dream a romantic, Gaiman is not trying to feminise Dream. Rather, just as he sought to broaden the term ‘feminine’ to show that women could be powerful, he is attempting to expand the term ‘masculine’ to show that it can encompass weakness.
The Sandman is very much concerned with gender but it does not present gender as performative, not does it subvert or deconstruct gender roles. To say that Gaiman is “an advocate for the queer lifestyle” seems patently silly. Rather Gaiman maintains and even strengthens the binary opposition while subtly redefining the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Gaiman does not espouse the idea that gender is biological or anatomical. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, magic and fantasy, and seems to present an almost Jungian conception that gender is a quality of the soul.
Conclusion
The Sandman is at once a work of high literature and an important popular culture text, leading the way in a trend in comic books towards greater sophistication. Images of Gaiman and the characters he created circulate widely and are often instantly recognisable. Thematic concerns in The Sandman have received much scholarly analysis and some of its deeper meanings are still unrecognised.. It is a truly a benchmark work.
***
Case Study of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman
Introduction
The Sandman is a comic book series, originally published monthly from January 1989 until March 1996 by DC comics, authored by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by a number of different artists. It has since been collected into ten trade paperbacks and several anthologies. It has been highly successful and has been called “the greatest epic in comic book history” (Los Angeles Times)
The main protagonist of The Sandman is Morpheus, the anthropomorphic personification of Dream, who rules over the realm of dreams known as the Dreaming. At the beginning of the series Dream is imprisoned for seventy years in a magic sigil and in 1989 escapes; towards the end of the series Dream chooses to let himself die and the series ends with his funeral and his replacement by another incarnation. The Sandman contains a mix of extended stories and one-off stories. Sometimes Morpheus is the main character but often he is a peripheral figure and occasionally doesn’t feature at all. Morpheus is part of a family known as the Endless, the others being Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium (who was once known a Delight) and these siblings often feature in the comic.
Norman Mailer described The Sandman as “a comic book for intellectuals” (Anderson, Porter (July 30, 2001). It has won more than 26 Eisner awards, the World Fantasy Award (for the issue “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and in 2005 IGN declared it the best Vertigo comic ever. The Sandman was one of the first graphic novels to be on the New York Times Best Seller list, others being Maus, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The Sandman is a significant text in Popular Culture which has influenced not only the comic book medium since but many other Pop Culture works.
Trends and Fads
The term ‘comic book’ is very broad encompassing, as it does, texts as diverse as Garfield, Maus Tintin and American Splendour. Conventions include the the use of sequence of frames or panels that represent chronologically ordered scenes and the employment of speech bubbles. The Sandman can be most closely related to, and grew out of, a sub-genre of comic books, superhero comics. In fact, Morpheus is a re-imagining of a superhero that first appeared in comics in 1939, a masked vigilante bearing a ‘gas gun’ that could impel criminals to tell the truth.
Fans of superhero comics can be considered a sub-culture. However this sub-culture has had a significant influence on mainstream popular culture, in the form of television and film, almost from its inception. The first of many Superman feature films, Superman and the Mole Men, was released in 1951 and a camp television series based around Batman was produced in the 1960s. Developments in comic books have influenced more widely popular media: for instance, beginning in the 1980s a much darker view of Batman in the comics, most closely associated with the four issue comic book series The Dark Knight Returns written by Frank Miler and published in 1986, influenced Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman. In the last several decades, the two main comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, have worked closely with film companies to produce very many films set in respectively the DC and Marvel universes. Although comic book readers constitute a sub-culture, developments in this sub-culture often impact on mainstream culture.
The Sandman, together with other seminal works of the 1980s such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen, were at the vanguard of a trend in comic books towards much greater sophistication. They were innovative – and by ‘innovative ‘ I do not mean that they improved comic books but rather that they performed something new, something novel. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, history and literature. For example, the issue "August", which concerns the Roman emperor Augustus, stays remarkably close to historical ‘facts’ about him, including rumours existing during his rule that he had been sexually abused or raped by his uncle Julius Caesar when young (see The Annotated Sandman, Klinger, 2012, p. 251). The sophistication of The Sandman and other works broadened the appeal of comic books, expanding an audience that had once comprised only pre-adolescent and adolescent boy to include women and mature readers. The success of The Sandman can principally be attributed to word-of-mouth recommendations; it was, to begin with, a true underground sensation.
The impact that The Sandman has had on mainstream popular culture is exampled by the fact that a television series Lucifer has recently been produced featuring a character invented by Gaiman. Lucifer features in the Sandman story "Season of Mists" in which he abdicates his position as ruler of Hell; likewise in the TV series Lucifer, Lucifer abdicates his throne and moves to Earth. The screenplay for Lucifer sometimes directly quotes passages from The Sandman. In 2013, reports that The Sandman itself was to be adapted into a film directed by Joseph Gordon–Levitt were floated but in 2016 Gordon-Levitt dropped out citing ‘creative differences’. It does not seem the series will be made into a film anytime soon.
The Sandman heralded a trend in comic books and graphic novels towards greater sophistication and widened the audience for comic books by appealing to girls, women and adults. This was a trend, not a fad – it is still evident today. It paved the way for other comics that tell supernatural, fantastical stories that are not simply battles between good and evil but are rather complex and nuanced graphic literature, examples including The Invisibles, Preacher and Transmetropolitan. The Sandman is not a superhero comic but it is important to remember that it evolved out of the superhero genre – characters from the DC Universe such as Batman villain Dr Destiny, and Superman and Batman themselves, occasionally appear in it. It was part of a revolution in comic books that forced cultural commentators to take comic books seriously.
Popular Icons
In popular culture studies, a distinction is drawn between icons and symbols. An icon is a visual representation of a real person or thing while a symbol is a sign that designates an abstract concept – for example, an image of the statue of liberty stands for the promise of American freedom. An icon resembles in key ways the person or thing it represents but a symbol’s relationship to what it signifies is arbitrary, and based on consensus convention. Icons are often but not always celebrities.
Neil Gaiman can himself be considered an icon, and the internet contain numerous images of him. Gaiman acquired his celebrity status not only for his authorship of The Sandman but also for other comics he has worked on and for the fantastical novels, such as American Gods and Stardust, that he has written since. It is rare for an author to acquire iconic status – although Joe Moran has discussed literary celebrity with respect to authors John Updike, Philip Roth and Kathy Acker (Turner, 2004). Iconic status requires some pubic familiarity with the icon’s appearance and authors can be shy. Another author apart from Gaiman who may, perhaps, have iconic status is Stephen King. James Joyce can also be considered an icon although, if we wish to draw a distinction between high culture and popular culture, Joyce would probably be regarded as a high culture icon rather than a popular culture icon.
However, the imagery most associated with The Sandman is not pictures of its author but rather pictures of characters from the comic. It is not uncommon for fans to put up posters of Dream, Death or Delirium on their bedroom walls. Can these characters perhaps be considered iconic? This question raises a problem, a long standing issue in analytic philosophy, the issue of whether it is possible to make true statements about fictional entities. Is the proposition “Othello is a Moor” (or the proposition “Dream kills his son Orpheus”) true or false? This problem bedevils literary criticism. One partial-solution is Meongiansm, the doctrine that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. Just because Dream does not literally exist, and has never existed, does not mean that we cannot accord him, in a way, iconic status, that he cannot be represented through imagery. Most people know Marilyn Monroe solely from representations of her and the same can be said for Morpheus. And many of The Sandman’s most passionate fans probably relate to characters like Dream and Death as though they are real people.
If we allow that the central characters in The Sandman can be in a way iconic we can discuss meanings associated with their images. There is considerable variation in the way the characters are represented depending on the artist who is depicting them – Delirium in particular varies wildly. However there is some continuity in how other major characters are presented. Mopheus is always pale and skinny, almost always wears black and has an unruly shock of black hair. He closely resembles Robert Smith from The Cure as Smith appeared in the 1980s. Death, represented as a foxy young woman, is also presented solely in black and white, is first represented (in “The Sound of her Wings”) in a black singlet and black jeans and wears an ankh around her neck. Representations of Dream and Death align them closely with the Goth subculture. The relationship between The Sandman and this subculture is not just iconographical but thematic, a shared focus on death, romance and the supernatural or mystical. The Sandman can be considered a a cultural point-of-reference for this subculture.
If we can allow not only Gaiman but the characters he invented iconic status, it is permissible to wonder if we can perhaps not also grant them celebrity status. In Understanding Celebrity (Turner, 2012), Turner proposes that although celebrity is often perceived as a natural quality certain individuals posses, a kind of charism or aura perceptible when these individuals are physically present, it is in fact manufactured by the mass media. In today’s world, in particular, people can be famous simply for being famous. Turner summarises his introductory discussion of celebrity in the following way. “Celebrity, then, is a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a social function we can better understand.” (p.9) Hollywood stars are known not only for the roles they play in films but for their privates lives, lives made public by mass media such as women’s magazines and newspapers. The discourse of celebrity is based on the assumption that there is a simple, unproblematic relationship between representations of a person and that person’s true self, between what is said about a person and who that person is; critics of celebrity, such as Turner, show that this relationship is neither simple nor unproblematic. We can apply this theoretical perspective to The Sandman. The characters Dream and Death are famous, to be sure, but they exist only in the form of representations, only as a discursive effect. There is no reality behind the images. It is perhaps to stretch the meaning of the terms ‘icon’ and ‘celebrity’ to say that these terms apply to the characters Gaiman invented, but it is surely true to say that fans of The Sandman often relate to them a little as though they were real people.
Gender
The issue of gender, along with issues of sexuality, feature strongly in The Sandman. Not only does the series often incorporate gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, many of the stories feature female protagonists. Gaiman evidently believes that there are male and female stories and tried to alternate between one and the other. In an interview, Gaiman has said, “Sandman was always designed to move from male stories to female stories.” The idea that stories themselves are gendered appears explicitly, for instance, towards the end of the series "World’s End". In this collection, a group of travellers stranded in an magical Inn tell stories to each other to pass the time. A women, Charlene Mooney, comments after hearing the others’ stories, “I’ll tell you something else I noticed. There aren’t any women in these stories. Did anyone else notice that?” Jim, a girl who has cross-dressed as a boy to work on a merchant vessel, says “But, well. What about me, missie? There’s me. There was my story. That was a woman’s story.” Charlene replies, “Oh, please. Look, girl, the whole point of your story is that there wasn’t a woman in it. Just a ship full of sailors, and a giant dick thrusting out of the ocean.”
Gender seems to be of significant interest to Gaiman and this has not gone unrecognised. In “The Sand/wo/man: The Unstable Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series” (Brisbin and Booth, 2013) the authors relate The Sandman to Judith Butler’s theory that gender is performative.
"Of particular interest in Sandman is the way that Gaiman renegotiates the traditional notions of gender in society and presents a practical representation of the same type of theoretical gender fluidity developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. Although it’s doubtful that Gaiman deliberately referenced Butlerian theory in his graphic novel, both authors do seem to have a similar agenda in terms of queer theory revisionism. Indeed, Gaiman’s work, written around the same time as Butler published her influential treatise on gender performativity, illustrates the notion that sex and gender are social constructs which inherently lead to ideological oppression. To overcome this oppression, society must examine and tear down these constructs, which have become basic to our identities and seem innate to the human condition. But, as both Gaiman and Butler argue, gender appearances are little more than artificial constructs." (p.21)
Towards the end of the essay, the authors make this bold claim. “Throughout Sandman, Gaiman offers a number of well-illustrated critiques of gender roles and sexual norms, and becomes an advocate for a queer lifestyle.” (p. 32) This conclusion is highly questionable.
It seems plausible to believe that Gaiman includes queer and transexual people not to present positive representations of the ‘queer lifestyle’ but for the same reason he presents serial killers and scenes of graphic horror and rape – because it disturbs and titillates, because it is edgy. Comic books of the superhero and post-superhero variety, even ones as sophisticated as The Sandman, trade on binary dualisms, on violence and sex, and representations of queer and transgender people constitute another kind of violence. It seems that the maintenance of gender and sexual boundaries require violence and The Sandman is often violent.
An important story-arc that involves gender, one that Brisbin and Booth discuss, is "A Game of You". In this story, Barbie is a girl who, in her dreams, was once the princess of a fantasy world known as the Land, but has been cut off from it for a long time. Since then she has suffered a crisis of identity. The Land, though, has continued to exist without her and has been taken over by an evil being known as the Cuckoo. One of her dream friends travels to the waking world to find Barbie and, shortly after, she returns to the Land and she and her dream companions journey to the “shining sea” where they confront the Cuckoo. This series is the closest The Sandman ever comes to a traditional fantasy story, involving as it does a quest, but is highly unusual, even disturbing, because all Barbie's companions are killed one by one and at the end the Cuckoo, the arch-enemy, actually wins, destroying the Land and flying away to lay eggs in other children’s minds.
In "A Game of You", it Gaiman suggests that not only are stories gendered but so are dream-worlds. Towards the end the Cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie: “Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they’re faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly the Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clark is really Hyperman. Yes? […] Now little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they’ll be happy for ever and ever. Little Cuckoos.” This passage is fascinating not only because it refers metatextually to comic book history, a history of superhero stories enjoyed solely by boys, that occurs in what is evidently a ‘girls’ story’, but also because it implies an absolute gender distinction. This is very far removed from Butler’s idea that gender is performative
Barbie has friends in the real world who live in the same apartment building as her, a lesbian couple, an immortal witch called Thessaly and pre-operative transexual who goes by the name Wanda. The three women harness the magic of the moon to travel into Barbie’s dream world to try to rescue her but Wanda, although he identities as a woman, is unable to accompany them because Thessaly’s gods do not recognise her as a female, instead seeing him as a man. Gaiman has received significant criticism in the years since for this narrative decision and replied to it in the following way:
Lots of readers assumed that that was my position too, because who
could argue with an opinion shared by an ancient witch and a
lunar god? In fact, my feeling was always that that’s an opinion
the gods can take up their sacred recta. I feel the story makes clear
that Wanda considers herself a woman; and that, at the end, Death
does too. To my mind, that’s all that matters. (Bender, 126)
Gaiman’s response requires some comment. Even while defending himself from charges of bigotry, Gaiman makes a homophobic slur, saying, in effect, that the gods can ‘take it up their arses’. Gaiman’s real position is probably more ambivalent than either his detractors or his exponents appreciate.
Those who have criticised Gaiman for this decision misunderstand what story-tellers do. In a story, a story teller presents two contradictory ideas at once and this is what Gaiman is doing. On the one hand, Gaiman is arguing for an essentialist perspective on gender; on the other he is presenting a Butlerian view that gender is performative. The first position is represented by the Cuckoo and the second is represented by Wanda. It is significant that, at the end of the story, the Cuckoo wins and Wanda dies. It is significant also that when Wanda dreams, his dreams are inspired by superhero comics not fantasy realms. Perhaps what we would like to believe about the world is not the world’s truth. However, after Barbie attends Wanda’s funeral, she crosses out the name ‘Alvin’, his/her birth name written on the tombstone and writes Wanda instead in red lipstick. Later she has a dream in which she sees Wanda, accompanied by Death, as a genuine woman. Perhaps Gaiman is saying that Wanda couldn't be a woman when alive but only when she is dead.
Brisbin and Booth discuss two of the Endless, Desire and Destruction. Desire is interesting from a gender perspective because he/she is literally androgynous, sometimes appearing as a man, sometimes as a woman. Brisbin and Booth say of Desire: “He/she is an authority, not a subordinate. When this masculine perspective is coupled with a feminine fixation on love and romance, the reader is presented not just with the physicality of an amorphous sexuality,
but also with fluid cultural characteristics of a queer gender. Desire is nothing if not a Butlerian ideal.” Brisbin and Booth imply that Desire is a kind of role model for queer or transgender people, but this misses the point entirely because, throughout the entire run of the Sandman, Desire is presented unsympathetically. S/he is not fixated on love and romance, rather s/he is spiteful, vindictive and capricious, and is continually plotting to destroy Dream. Brisbane and Booth also discuss Destruction, perhaps because he is the most masculine of the Endless, but I would like instead to focus on Death, and compare her to Desire. Death is also an authority, is older and has more power than either Dream or Desire and is even given to teasing her younger siblings, yet she is unmistakably and essentially always feminine. Death is always presented sympathetically. Through Death, Gaiman is not presenting the idea that gender is performative; rather he is broadening or redefining the term ‘female’ to make it more inclusive, to show that women can have power and remain feminine.
Then there is the Sandman himself. Morpheus takes on many guises – he can be African or even a cat– yet he is always male and always heterosexual. Early issues present him as someone quite frightening and someone absolutely committed to his responsibilities as Dream King but as the series goes on, we find he has some human qualities. Over the course of his existence, he has had a number of relationships with women. He will fall for a woman, be with her for a while, be jilted and have his heart broken and then decades or centuries later try again. In "Brief Lives", after Thessaly leaves him, Morpheus makes it rain in the dream kingdom for weeks. This quality in Dream – his need to be loved, his capacity to love and his grief when love ends – is often seen as a female quality, “a feminine fixation on love and romance” (to quote Brisbin and Boon again) but by making Dream a romantic, Gaiman is not trying to feminise Dream. Rather, just as he sought to broaden the term ‘feminine’ to show that women could be powerful, he is attempting to expand the term ‘masculine’ to show that it can encompass weakness.
The Sandman is very much concerned with gender but it does not present gender as performative, not does it subvert or deconstruct gender roles. To say that Gaiman is “an advocate for the queer lifestyle” seems patently silly. Rather Gaiman maintains and even strengthens the binary opposition while subtly redefining the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Gaiman does not espouse the idea that gender is biological or anatomical. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, magic and fantasy, and seems to present an almost Jungian conception that gender is a quality of the soul.
Conclusion
The Sandman is at once a work of high literature and an important popular culture text, leading the way in a trend in comic books towards greater sophistication. Images of Gaiman and the characters he created circulate widely and are often instantly recognisable. Thematic concerns in The Sandman have received much scholarly analysis and some of its deeper meanings are still unrecognised.. It is a truly a benchmark work.
Wednesday, 17 May 2017
Definitions of Sexuality Part 3
Before I leap into the body of this post or essay, I'd like to talk briefly about David Foster Wallace.
Wallace has been for a long time my favourite author; I have discussed him a little already in this blog in the early post "An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace". This was the first post in which I first mentioned my own 'mentally illness' and the first to bring up the taboo subject of sexuality. Since his suicide scholarship about Wallace has burgeoned dramatically but this does not mean everyone knows everything about him now. There is n aspect of the man which I suspect is probably often overlooked. Wallace believed that most everything everyone else believed was bullshit.
I don't have a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on hand but I can remember much of it more or less. The last story in the collection describes the attempted rape of a hippie chick by a violent nutter. The narrator of this story says something like, "Psychotics, as everyone knows, having issues with their mothers." The narrator of the story seems to believe this but did Wallace himself give any credence to this snippet of pop psychology? I don't think so – but he knew that very many people do. Wallace specialised in writing from the perspective of someone who knows a little of what passes for psychology today but is not quite smart or critical enough to know that most of it is bogus. As I discussed in my other post about Wallace, the narrator of "Good Ol' Neon" diagnoses his psychologist as a repressed homosexual. On what grounds does the narrator of this story make his 'diagnosis'? He decides that the psychologist is insecure about the size of his dick, is anxious that he doesn't "measure up". A kind of pop psychology idea circulates almost subliminally through the heterosexual community that homosexuals of both the latent and overt sort worry about their 'manhood' and the narrator of "Good Ol' Neon" obviously believes this. But did Wallace as well? I don't think so.
I suspect that Wallace knew that if he wrote about the world as it really is, people wouldn't believe him. Wallace really, really wanted people to like him. And if he told the truth as he saw it, people would dislike him and perhaps even think he was crazy. So Wallace opted for writing literature rather than philosophy, a choice that enabled him to talk through others, to express and conceal himself at the same time, to have it both ways.
I can identify with Wallace's predicament. I have opined in this blog that the massive increase and decrease in crime during the twentieth century was causally related to lead poisoning, an idea John Oliver has also expressed on his show – but few people seem to want to even countenance this possibility. Should I renounce this position and say, as everyone else on the Left seems to say, that the cause of crime is simply poverty? Unfortunately I can't bring myself to do this. Yes, poverty plays a role in pushing people towards crime but, by itself, it is not an adequate explanation for the crime waves of the late 'eighties and early 'nineties.
In this blog I have tried to define sexuality in different ways. I have talked about it in terms of experiences and in terms of love. I have claimed that Kurt Cobain defined it in terms of sexual arousal. It may seem that I have been skirting the issue however, because I have never addressed the psychiatric definition of homosexuality. In early 2014, in the short period between being bullied into going into respite and being put under the Mental Health Act, I saw a psychiatrist once, one that I had briefly seen when I first entered the service and had never seen again and would never see again. She took a risk no other psychiatrist had by stating the psychiatric definition. She defined homosexuality as a sexual attraction toward members of the same sex. When she told me this, I literally felt like something evil had looked at me out of her eyes. Partly this is because she was telling me something that I already knew, as if I was stupid. And partly because I think this definition is evil.
Consider, first, what is meant by the term 'sexual attraction'? The expression is slippery. Is it simply the ability to recognise that another person is good-looking? If a man is aware that another man is attractive does that automatically make him homosexual? Leading Hollywood actors, like Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell and Ryan Gosling appeal to men as well as women and this is partly because these actors are handsome. In Austin Powers Mrs Kensington says of Austin, 'Women want him, and men want to be him', variants of this phrase having been around since at least the 'fifties and which were often associated with James Bond. We have to draw a distinction between identification and attraction. Nevertheless the concept of 'sexual attraction' is hard to define and so almost useless.
In 2011, the real Jess told me a story about a patient she had known who, for a period when he was unwell, thought he might be gay. When his episode passed, this feeling that he might be gay went away. This suggests that what we think of as homosexuality can be transient. The question is: why did this young man feel he might be gay? Did he hear voices telling him he was gay? Did he form the paranoid conviction that others around him thought he was gay? Or did he go through a phase during which he worried that he was sexually attracted to men? Unfortunately I don't know what it was like for him. Men who temporarily worry about their sexuality seldom explain what the feeling was like.
Around 2013 or 2014, I started to worry that I might start being sexually attracted to men. My first hint of this psychotic symptom occurred in 2013: I was at WINZ and when talking to the youngish man behind the desk heard a voice in my head that said, "Nice eyes". In 2013 or 2014 I had become terribly afraid that I might turn gay and this fear subsequently affected my interactions with all men.
I need to make some important remarks about this 'attraction'. First, it didn't start until 2013 or 2014, when I was thirty-three or thirty-four, six years after I had first become a patient of the Mental Health System. Second, I found it incredibly unpleasant. Third, because I had been ill in 2007 and 2009 and been well for two years, during which time I'd reflected upon my illness and done some study into schizophrenia, I knew that this 'attraction' was a psychotic symptom that would pass given enough time or if I did or said the right thing. I knew furthermore that it came from the outside; this 'symptom' never affected my core sense of who I was And it has passed, now, finally, although it took three years for it to vanish completely.
I ought also say that I have always been strongly attracted to women and, during this period, continued to be attracted them.
The horrible thing is that, during this long period when I experienced this distressing psychotic symptom, it was impossible to talk about. For obvious reasons. For one thing it would have been misinterpreted as a trait I'd always had, which would have been false. Towards the end of my 'treatment' with the psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 he asked me something like, "Aren't you attracted to men?" I can't remember his exact words but it was a leading question, a question to be answered only with a 'yes' or 'no'. It was another double bind. I gave no answer at all. What could I have said? Either way I was screwed. But I wasn't going to give the Mental Health Service the satisfaction of confirming their diagnosis when they themselves were the cause of my illness.
As readers of my blog will know (and I hope not all of my posts have been atrociously written) I hated Judkins. In this blog I have suggested that the event during childhood that made me vulnerable to psychosis was my parents' divorce when I was seven; I spelled this out in a fucking essay I had given my psychiatrist in 2014 shortly after I was put under the Act. Did Judkins even bring up the issue of my parents' divorce? Not once. Perhaps he got his psychology degree from the bottom of a box of breakfast cereal. I half suspect, although I have no evidence, that the only reason he got a job at the Taylor Centre was that Tony Fernando had a hand hiring him.
In the previous post I discussed sociopaths a little. Don't mistake me, there are very many good people who work in the Mental Health Service but there are also many arseholes who get into psychiatry and psychology because they want to know how others tick and enjoy having power over damaged people, victims of circumstance. Sociopaths are very different from schizophrenics: a sociopath has no soul, a schizophrenic has too much. Deep down a sociopath has no core self. He doesn't know if he's gay or straight, doesn't even deep down know if he's a man or a woman. The term for this is 'sociopathic inadequacy'. I have been treated by two sociopaths, a psychiatrist and a psychologist and both made me worse rather than better. I might make another remark which may be relevant. I read many years ago that sometimes sociopaths will say, in effect falsely, that they're gay, if they think it can win them sympathy and help them manipulate others better. Despite what many on the Left think, not all openly gay people are good.
I'll finish this post by saying one last thing. In the previous post I described the double-bind the Mental Health Service put me in. In the end, it was not just a choice between Bruce Springsteen and Faith No More, it was also a choice between Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, between "Born This Way" and "I Kissed A Girl". Back in 2007 and 2009, when I was most ill both options were bad, both represented positions I couldn't espouse. But in the end I had to pick one anyway. And so I opted for Katy Perry.
Wallace has been for a long time my favourite author; I have discussed him a little already in this blog in the early post "An Appreciation of David Foster Wallace". This was the first post in which I first mentioned my own 'mentally illness' and the first to bring up the taboo subject of sexuality. Since his suicide scholarship about Wallace has burgeoned dramatically but this does not mean everyone knows everything about him now. There is n aspect of the man which I suspect is probably often overlooked. Wallace believed that most everything everyone else believed was bullshit.
I don't have a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on hand but I can remember much of it more or less. The last story in the collection describes the attempted rape of a hippie chick by a violent nutter. The narrator of this story says something like, "Psychotics, as everyone knows, having issues with their mothers." The narrator of the story seems to believe this but did Wallace himself give any credence to this snippet of pop psychology? I don't think so – but he knew that very many people do. Wallace specialised in writing from the perspective of someone who knows a little of what passes for psychology today but is not quite smart or critical enough to know that most of it is bogus. As I discussed in my other post about Wallace, the narrator of "Good Ol' Neon" diagnoses his psychologist as a repressed homosexual. On what grounds does the narrator of this story make his 'diagnosis'? He decides that the psychologist is insecure about the size of his dick, is anxious that he doesn't "measure up". A kind of pop psychology idea circulates almost subliminally through the heterosexual community that homosexuals of both the latent and overt sort worry about their 'manhood' and the narrator of "Good Ol' Neon" obviously believes this. But did Wallace as well? I don't think so.
I suspect that Wallace knew that if he wrote about the world as it really is, people wouldn't believe him. Wallace really, really wanted people to like him. And if he told the truth as he saw it, people would dislike him and perhaps even think he was crazy. So Wallace opted for writing literature rather than philosophy, a choice that enabled him to talk through others, to express and conceal himself at the same time, to have it both ways.
I can identify with Wallace's predicament. I have opined in this blog that the massive increase and decrease in crime during the twentieth century was causally related to lead poisoning, an idea John Oliver has also expressed on his show – but few people seem to want to even countenance this possibility. Should I renounce this position and say, as everyone else on the Left seems to say, that the cause of crime is simply poverty? Unfortunately I can't bring myself to do this. Yes, poverty plays a role in pushing people towards crime but, by itself, it is not an adequate explanation for the crime waves of the late 'eighties and early 'nineties.
In this blog I have tried to define sexuality in different ways. I have talked about it in terms of experiences and in terms of love. I have claimed that Kurt Cobain defined it in terms of sexual arousal. It may seem that I have been skirting the issue however, because I have never addressed the psychiatric definition of homosexuality. In early 2014, in the short period between being bullied into going into respite and being put under the Mental Health Act, I saw a psychiatrist once, one that I had briefly seen when I first entered the service and had never seen again and would never see again. She took a risk no other psychiatrist had by stating the psychiatric definition. She defined homosexuality as a sexual attraction toward members of the same sex. When she told me this, I literally felt like something evil had looked at me out of her eyes. Partly this is because she was telling me something that I already knew, as if I was stupid. And partly because I think this definition is evil.
Consider, first, what is meant by the term 'sexual attraction'? The expression is slippery. Is it simply the ability to recognise that another person is good-looking? If a man is aware that another man is attractive does that automatically make him homosexual? Leading Hollywood actors, like Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell and Ryan Gosling appeal to men as well as women and this is partly because these actors are handsome. In Austin Powers Mrs Kensington says of Austin, 'Women want him, and men want to be him', variants of this phrase having been around since at least the 'fifties and which were often associated with James Bond. We have to draw a distinction between identification and attraction. Nevertheless the concept of 'sexual attraction' is hard to define and so almost useless.
In 2011, the real Jess told me a story about a patient she had known who, for a period when he was unwell, thought he might be gay. When his episode passed, this feeling that he might be gay went away. This suggests that what we think of as homosexuality can be transient. The question is: why did this young man feel he might be gay? Did he hear voices telling him he was gay? Did he form the paranoid conviction that others around him thought he was gay? Or did he go through a phase during which he worried that he was sexually attracted to men? Unfortunately I don't know what it was like for him. Men who temporarily worry about their sexuality seldom explain what the feeling was like.
Around 2013 or 2014, I started to worry that I might start being sexually attracted to men. My first hint of this psychotic symptom occurred in 2013: I was at WINZ and when talking to the youngish man behind the desk heard a voice in my head that said, "Nice eyes". In 2013 or 2014 I had become terribly afraid that I might turn gay and this fear subsequently affected my interactions with all men.
I need to make some important remarks about this 'attraction'. First, it didn't start until 2013 or 2014, when I was thirty-three or thirty-four, six years after I had first become a patient of the Mental Health System. Second, I found it incredibly unpleasant. Third, because I had been ill in 2007 and 2009 and been well for two years, during which time I'd reflected upon my illness and done some study into schizophrenia, I knew that this 'attraction' was a psychotic symptom that would pass given enough time or if I did or said the right thing. I knew furthermore that it came from the outside; this 'symptom' never affected my core sense of who I was And it has passed, now, finally, although it took three years for it to vanish completely.
I ought also say that I have always been strongly attracted to women and, during this period, continued to be attracted them.
The horrible thing is that, during this long period when I experienced this distressing psychotic symptom, it was impossible to talk about. For obvious reasons. For one thing it would have been misinterpreted as a trait I'd always had, which would have been false. Towards the end of my 'treatment' with the psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 he asked me something like, "Aren't you attracted to men?" I can't remember his exact words but it was a leading question, a question to be answered only with a 'yes' or 'no'. It was another double bind. I gave no answer at all. What could I have said? Either way I was screwed. But I wasn't going to give the Mental Health Service the satisfaction of confirming their diagnosis when they themselves were the cause of my illness.
As readers of my blog will know (and I hope not all of my posts have been atrociously written) I hated Judkins. In this blog I have suggested that the event during childhood that made me vulnerable to psychosis was my parents' divorce when I was seven; I spelled this out in a fucking essay I had given my psychiatrist in 2014 shortly after I was put under the Act. Did Judkins even bring up the issue of my parents' divorce? Not once. Perhaps he got his psychology degree from the bottom of a box of breakfast cereal. I half suspect, although I have no evidence, that the only reason he got a job at the Taylor Centre was that Tony Fernando had a hand hiring him.
In the previous post I discussed sociopaths a little. Don't mistake me, there are very many good people who work in the Mental Health Service but there are also many arseholes who get into psychiatry and psychology because they want to know how others tick and enjoy having power over damaged people, victims of circumstance. Sociopaths are very different from schizophrenics: a sociopath has no soul, a schizophrenic has too much. Deep down a sociopath has no core self. He doesn't know if he's gay or straight, doesn't even deep down know if he's a man or a woman. The term for this is 'sociopathic inadequacy'. I have been treated by two sociopaths, a psychiatrist and a psychologist and both made me worse rather than better. I might make another remark which may be relevant. I read many years ago that sometimes sociopaths will say, in effect falsely, that they're gay, if they think it can win them sympathy and help them manipulate others better. Despite what many on the Left think, not all openly gay people are good.
I'll finish this post by saying one last thing. In the previous post I described the double-bind the Mental Health Service put me in. In the end, it was not just a choice between Bruce Springsteen and Faith No More, it was also a choice between Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, between "Born This Way" and "I Kissed A Girl". Back in 2007 and 2009, when I was most ill both options were bad, both represented positions I couldn't espouse. But in the end I had to pick one anyway. And so I opted for Katy Perry.
Tuesday, 9 May 2017
Schizophrenia and the Theory of the Double-Bind
There is a great deal of misunderstanding around schizophrenia. The word itself literally means "split-mind" and people have historically confused schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder. Readers can look up definitions of schizophrenia on the Internet but, bear in mind, most are bullshit. For instance, schizophrenics are supposed not to be able to think clearly, to lack verbal fluency and to have difficulties with abstract thinking, but I certainly hope readers of my blog feel that this view doesn't hold true of me. In today's post I am going to try to give some idea of what schizophrenia is, what its cause is or at least what I think it is, at least as it applies to me.
In a way, the term split-mind is not inappropriate. I sincerely believe that every person has two selves – the self as the person sees himself and the self that others see. Neither self is unitary. I change day to day and the self another sees varies depending on who that other is. Schizophrenia often (I shouldn't say always because I'm sure there are exceptions) involves a mismatch between others' perceptions of the subject and the subject's perception of himself. The schizophrenic totalises the Other, says to himself "They are all out to get me." This is of course the definition of paranoia. I think of the moment in Watchmen when Night Owl asks Rorschach, "Don't you think you're being a little paranoid?" and Rorschach replies, "Paranoid? Is that what They're saying about me now?" The disjunction between the self as it knows itself and the self as it is known by others can take a drastic form, can lead to a complete split. In an earlier post I mentioned Yves, a man somewhat older than me who was treated by the same psychiatrist as me, Tony Fernando, and finally escaped of the system by, in his own words, "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". Yves is still schizophrenic, still very unwell. Last year I talked to him and he said to me "Have you considered cultivating a persona?" – something he obviously felt he had done himself. Yves is an extreme case but this mismatch between self and 'persona' is not uncommon. When I first became unwell, at the Big House, I believed briefly that I had multiple personality disorder. It was the only way I could make sense of the mismatch between my knowledge of myself and my sense of others' perceptions of me.
A person's sense of who he or she is is influenced by what other's think of him or her. Michel Foucault, someone who knew something about madness, argued that discourses create the objects they talk about. It is through discourse that the subject as it known to others becomes manifest. We might go a bit further and say "Bullshit discourses fuck people up". A couple of decades ago, the dominant theory of schizophrenia was that it was caused by a 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a mother who doesn't love her child. I think this theory is wrong or often wrong. I have only met one schizophrenic who expressed ambivalence about her mother and that was Jess, and I now think her ambivalence was simply the ambivalence all young women feel towards the mothers. But imagine a situation in which this theory holds sway among Mental Health professionals as it once did. Over time, the patient comes to blame his mother for his condition and his mother, feeling unfairly blamed by him and by others and feeling consequently angry or ashamed, will take it out on her child. In other words, the theory of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' may well have ruined the most important relationship in the lives of many young men and women, may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. In early 2014 I was in a respite facility and I met an older schizophrenic, a man in his fifties or sixties who had probably been institutionalised when he was younger and had probably been treated during the heyday of this theory; over dinner one night he bluntly said that during a psychotic episode once he'd considered chopping up his mother with an axe. It scared the shit out of me and the next night I ran away from the respite facility back to my mother's house and didn't go back. I had only been at that respite facility two or three days. I'm sure that this man had been messed up by the discourse around schizophrenia current when he was younger.
This is not to say that all theories of schizophrenia are bullshit. One that may apply to me is the theory of the double-bind; I don't know that this is the root cause of my illness but it strongly featured in it. The double-bind theory of schizophrenia posits that schizophrenics are put in a situation where they must choose between two alternatives, both of which are bad. Naturally the schizophrenic is trapped, unable to make up his mind, driven mad by equally bad alternatives. I have hinted that this was the situation I was in in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". I felt that the Mental Health Service had put me in a situation where I was being forced to choose between being a closet homosexual or coming out as gay. Both options were bad. I hated closet homosexuals – but I couldn't come out as gay because I'm not. This double bind didn't predate my illness. I'd been put in it by the Mental Health System because, for some reason, the people who were treating me refused to simply accept that I was straight.
The double-bind I was in follows naturally from attitudes prevalent among people generally nowadays and the Left in particular. It may also follow from whatever voguish theory of schizophrenia is fashionable among psychiatrists at the moment.. As readers will know, I am quite liberal but on one issue I now believe the Left is wrong. The Left believes that closet homosexuals are all bad, reprehensible, that openly gay men and women are good, honest, and that all gay people should come out. This is what I believed when I first became sick. It is a political position founded on an essentialist notion of sexuality. For instance, at the very end of 2014 I read an article in the Sunday Star Times, I think, in which a famous sportsman came out as gay; the article hailed him as "a hero" who would be a role model "for other young men struggling with the sexuality." This is typical of contemporary discourse about sexuality. As readers of my blog know, I do not regard sexuality as fixed any more. I think now that straight men can turn gay. It is a terrible thing to say I know but I believe it to be true.
For years, from the beginning of 2010 until the beginning of 2013, I dealt with the double-bind I was in by steering a course between the horns of the dilemma, by pushing it away rather than facing it. I was well then. I never kept a secret from anyone that I was straight but I didn't force the issue and pretty much allowed people around me to believe whatever they wanted. The film I wrote in 2012, "The Hounds of Heaven", was my way of publicly coming out as straight – because it was written about a woman I loved. It may not have gone down well. In early 2013 I became sick again, I think perhaps, and I speculate here, possibly because of public reaction my film. It became impossible then to avoid the double-bind any longer and I have suffered from severe anguish ever since. I had to make a choice. And the only choice I could make was to side with the closet homosexuals. This blog has been an inventory of people thought to be gay who have never come out – John Nash, John Ashbery, Lou Reed, Mike Patton, Virginia Woolf, Morrissey, Tom Cruise... And of course Kurt Cobain. There are others I could mention like Cliff Richard and David Bowie. The point, of course, is that just because a perception gets into circulation that someone is gay doesn't make it true.
It might seem as though I am dismantling the whole notion of 'closet homosexual' but I'm not. The question becomes, "How does one define the term 'closet homosexual'"? One way would be to say that a closet homosexual is a man who deliberately trawls for homosexual encounters by clandestinely visiting public bathrooms and disreputable parks to pick up men. This is the way people thought of homosexuality for much of the twentieth century– before it was legalised. I honestly don't believe this type of demi-monde exists anymore, that the world has changed. Furthermore I don't think this perception applies to the people I have listed above. But psychiatrists haven't realised that the world has changed. A couple of weeks ago I heard Jess in my head. She said, "Is it illegal for two consenting adults to have sex?" Of course the answer is 'no'. But psychiatrists still seem to think it is and often assume that patients have secrets to hide.
I have had two homosexual experiences in my life. Once, when I was twenty-two, a man got in my face. And once, when I was thirty, I had a delusion or hallucination about someone, an experience I have been unable to describe fully in this blog and that I repressed for four years. When I did remember it, in early 2014, it caused me profound distress for a long time after. I didn't want either experience. The perverse irony, though, is that these experiences, and the fact that I have talked about them, prove that I'm straight. If I'd never had a homosexual experience and told the psychiatrists this, they would have continued not to believe me, continued to think I was lying. When trying to prove one's heterosexuality, the other side of the coin is heterosexual experiences – but why should I have to talk about those? I believe sex is sacred; sex and love go together. To say that I had had two long term relationships with girls, one lasting four years and the other lasting around five should have been enough.
I would never have been trapped in this double bind if it wasn't for the Mental Health System. It was the Mental Health System that put me in it. I remember my first or second appointment with my first psychiatrist Tony Fernando. He leaned towards me and with an insincere shit-eating smile told me that he had a sister who was schizophrenic. I wish to make two points about this. First, it is grossly unethical to effectively diagnose a patient schizophrenic on the first or second appointment as he had implicitly done. Second, is it not reasonable to wonder that the reason his sister was schizophrenic was because of him? Perhaps he had driven her mad when she was young. Perhaps the reason he got into psychiatry was because he got a thrill from sadistically messing with people's minds as he had conceivably done with his sister. My New Zealand readers may doubt the allegation that Fernando might be a sociopath; he had a high public profile. I remember he would sometimes feature in the newspaper, often talking about "teaching doctors compassion". But, lest we forget, Rolf Harris fronted a campaign raising awareness of childhood sexual abuse even as he was serially molesting young women. It is what sociopaths do. For them life is a game. How much can I get away with without being caught?
I might finish by talking about the difference between sociopaths and schizophrenics, psychiatrists and patients. I like schizophrenics but I detest psychiatrists. The schizophrenic wants to bring the two sides of identity together, his public and private self; the sociopath wants to keep his public and private life separate. The schizophrenic, for all his delusions, is concerned with the truth, with integrity; the sociopath doesn't give a shit about the truth and basically lacks a moral core. This is perhaps the fundamental problem with the Mental Health Service. It is a war to the death between sufferers and sadists.
In a way, the term split-mind is not inappropriate. I sincerely believe that every person has two selves – the self as the person sees himself and the self that others see. Neither self is unitary. I change day to day and the self another sees varies depending on who that other is. Schizophrenia often (I shouldn't say always because I'm sure there are exceptions) involves a mismatch between others' perceptions of the subject and the subject's perception of himself. The schizophrenic totalises the Other, says to himself "They are all out to get me." This is of course the definition of paranoia. I think of the moment in Watchmen when Night Owl asks Rorschach, "Don't you think you're being a little paranoid?" and Rorschach replies, "Paranoid? Is that what They're saying about me now?" The disjunction between the self as it knows itself and the self as it is known by others can take a drastic form, can lead to a complete split. In an earlier post I mentioned Yves, a man somewhat older than me who was treated by the same psychiatrist as me, Tony Fernando, and finally escaped of the system by, in his own words, "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". Yves is still schizophrenic, still very unwell. Last year I talked to him and he said to me "Have you considered cultivating a persona?" – something he obviously felt he had done himself. Yves is an extreme case but this mismatch between self and 'persona' is not uncommon. When I first became unwell, at the Big House, I believed briefly that I had multiple personality disorder. It was the only way I could make sense of the mismatch between my knowledge of myself and my sense of others' perceptions of me.
A person's sense of who he or she is is influenced by what other's think of him or her. Michel Foucault, someone who knew something about madness, argued that discourses create the objects they talk about. It is through discourse that the subject as it known to others becomes manifest. We might go a bit further and say "Bullshit discourses fuck people up". A couple of decades ago, the dominant theory of schizophrenia was that it was caused by a 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a mother who doesn't love her child. I think this theory is wrong or often wrong. I have only met one schizophrenic who expressed ambivalence about her mother and that was Jess, and I now think her ambivalence was simply the ambivalence all young women feel towards the mothers. But imagine a situation in which this theory holds sway among Mental Health professionals as it once did. Over time, the patient comes to blame his mother for his condition and his mother, feeling unfairly blamed by him and by others and feeling consequently angry or ashamed, will take it out on her child. In other words, the theory of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' may well have ruined the most important relationship in the lives of many young men and women, may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. In early 2014 I was in a respite facility and I met an older schizophrenic, a man in his fifties or sixties who had probably been institutionalised when he was younger and had probably been treated during the heyday of this theory; over dinner one night he bluntly said that during a psychotic episode once he'd considered chopping up his mother with an axe. It scared the shit out of me and the next night I ran away from the respite facility back to my mother's house and didn't go back. I had only been at that respite facility two or three days. I'm sure that this man had been messed up by the discourse around schizophrenia current when he was younger.
This is not to say that all theories of schizophrenia are bullshit. One that may apply to me is the theory of the double-bind; I don't know that this is the root cause of my illness but it strongly featured in it. The double-bind theory of schizophrenia posits that schizophrenics are put in a situation where they must choose between two alternatives, both of which are bad. Naturally the schizophrenic is trapped, unable to make up his mind, driven mad by equally bad alternatives. I have hinted that this was the situation I was in in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". I felt that the Mental Health Service had put me in a situation where I was being forced to choose between being a closet homosexual or coming out as gay. Both options were bad. I hated closet homosexuals – but I couldn't come out as gay because I'm not. This double bind didn't predate my illness. I'd been put in it by the Mental Health System because, for some reason, the people who were treating me refused to simply accept that I was straight.
The double-bind I was in follows naturally from attitudes prevalent among people generally nowadays and the Left in particular. It may also follow from whatever voguish theory of schizophrenia is fashionable among psychiatrists at the moment.. As readers will know, I am quite liberal but on one issue I now believe the Left is wrong. The Left believes that closet homosexuals are all bad, reprehensible, that openly gay men and women are good, honest, and that all gay people should come out. This is what I believed when I first became sick. It is a political position founded on an essentialist notion of sexuality. For instance, at the very end of 2014 I read an article in the Sunday Star Times, I think, in which a famous sportsman came out as gay; the article hailed him as "a hero" who would be a role model "for other young men struggling with the sexuality." This is typical of contemporary discourse about sexuality. As readers of my blog know, I do not regard sexuality as fixed any more. I think now that straight men can turn gay. It is a terrible thing to say I know but I believe it to be true.
For years, from the beginning of 2010 until the beginning of 2013, I dealt with the double-bind I was in by steering a course between the horns of the dilemma, by pushing it away rather than facing it. I was well then. I never kept a secret from anyone that I was straight but I didn't force the issue and pretty much allowed people around me to believe whatever they wanted. The film I wrote in 2012, "The Hounds of Heaven", was my way of publicly coming out as straight – because it was written about a woman I loved. It may not have gone down well. In early 2013 I became sick again, I think perhaps, and I speculate here, possibly because of public reaction my film. It became impossible then to avoid the double-bind any longer and I have suffered from severe anguish ever since. I had to make a choice. And the only choice I could make was to side with the closet homosexuals. This blog has been an inventory of people thought to be gay who have never come out – John Nash, John Ashbery, Lou Reed, Mike Patton, Virginia Woolf, Morrissey, Tom Cruise... And of course Kurt Cobain. There are others I could mention like Cliff Richard and David Bowie. The point, of course, is that just because a perception gets into circulation that someone is gay doesn't make it true.
It might seem as though I am dismantling the whole notion of 'closet homosexual' but I'm not. The question becomes, "How does one define the term 'closet homosexual'"? One way would be to say that a closet homosexual is a man who deliberately trawls for homosexual encounters by clandestinely visiting public bathrooms and disreputable parks to pick up men. This is the way people thought of homosexuality for much of the twentieth century– before it was legalised. I honestly don't believe this type of demi-monde exists anymore, that the world has changed. Furthermore I don't think this perception applies to the people I have listed above. But psychiatrists haven't realised that the world has changed. A couple of weeks ago I heard Jess in my head. She said, "Is it illegal for two consenting adults to have sex?" Of course the answer is 'no'. But psychiatrists still seem to think it is and often assume that patients have secrets to hide.
I have had two homosexual experiences in my life. Once, when I was twenty-two, a man got in my face. And once, when I was thirty, I had a delusion or hallucination about someone, an experience I have been unable to describe fully in this blog and that I repressed for four years. When I did remember it, in early 2014, it caused me profound distress for a long time after. I didn't want either experience. The perverse irony, though, is that these experiences, and the fact that I have talked about them, prove that I'm straight. If I'd never had a homosexual experience and told the psychiatrists this, they would have continued not to believe me, continued to think I was lying. When trying to prove one's heterosexuality, the other side of the coin is heterosexual experiences – but why should I have to talk about those? I believe sex is sacred; sex and love go together. To say that I had had two long term relationships with girls, one lasting four years and the other lasting around five should have been enough.
I would never have been trapped in this double bind if it wasn't for the Mental Health System. It was the Mental Health System that put me in it. I remember my first or second appointment with my first psychiatrist Tony Fernando. He leaned towards me and with an insincere shit-eating smile told me that he had a sister who was schizophrenic. I wish to make two points about this. First, it is grossly unethical to effectively diagnose a patient schizophrenic on the first or second appointment as he had implicitly done. Second, is it not reasonable to wonder that the reason his sister was schizophrenic was because of him? Perhaps he had driven her mad when she was young. Perhaps the reason he got into psychiatry was because he got a thrill from sadistically messing with people's minds as he had conceivably done with his sister. My New Zealand readers may doubt the allegation that Fernando might be a sociopath; he had a high public profile. I remember he would sometimes feature in the newspaper, often talking about "teaching doctors compassion". But, lest we forget, Rolf Harris fronted a campaign raising awareness of childhood sexual abuse even as he was serially molesting young women. It is what sociopaths do. For them life is a game. How much can I get away with without being caught?
I might finish by talking about the difference between sociopaths and schizophrenics, psychiatrists and patients. I like schizophrenics but I detest psychiatrists. The schizophrenic wants to bring the two sides of identity together, his public and private self; the sociopath wants to keep his public and private life separate. The schizophrenic, for all his delusions, is concerned with the truth, with integrity; the sociopath doesn't give a shit about the truth and basically lacks a moral core. This is perhaps the fundamental problem with the Mental Health Service. It is a war to the death between sufferers and sadists.
Thursday, 4 May 2017
Journalism and PR
I thought I would include another essay I wrote for the degree I am studying. The subject is the relationship between journalism and PR.
***
Journalism and Public Relations have a highly contentious relationship. Each profession views the other negatively: journalists denigrate ‘spin doctors’ and ‘flacks’ while PR practitioners similarly disparage journalists as ‘hacks’ engaged in ‘churnalism’. Mutual distrust and avowed antagonism diverts attention from just how close the relationship between ‘the press’ (by which I include also television, radio and internet news) and communication strategists is today and has been for some time. Journalists tend to deny the extent that PR informs the articles and items they write. Journalists see their role as a noble calling, view themselves as comprising a ‘fourth estate’, championing truth, speaking truth to power and servicing democracy by informing citizenry of truths they need to know; PR by contrast is viewed as mendacious, manipulative, frequently unethical, in the service of special interests and as verging on governmental and corporate propaganda. Consequently, journalists seek to rationalise their reliance on PR in various ways, as shall be shown in this essay. The distinction between PR and journalism has eroded further with advent of the digital age. Perhaps what is needed, as shall also be argued, is greater transparency in the media and an empowerment of marginal and disenfranchised groups by providing such groups access to PR services.
PR and journalism are in some ways alike. Both PR and journalism operate within what Habermas calls the “public sphere” (Habermas, 1989). The public sphere can be likened to a coffee house in which members of the public gather to discuss issues of common concern. Both PR practitioners and journalists engage in communication, conversation, with the public, or with publics, although with different motives. Journalists tend to engage in what Habermas calls communicative action. Communicative action is “designed to achieve understanding in a group and to promote consensus and cooperation” (Macnamara, 2014, p.140). Journalists often characterise their role within society from a High Modernist perspective, as crusaders fighting corruption and falsehood in the name of indignant objectivity. As Lord Northcliffe said, “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising”; journalists see their role as inherently adversarial. This Messianic self-image however is compromised in two ways. First, journalists have a duty not only to the truth but to the profitability of the media organisations for which they work. They need to sell newspapers and magazines, maximise and maintain ratings and attract advertisers by finding and composing stories very rapidly. Second, there is inevitably a subjective dimension to news production because journalists must not only report facts accurately but select which stories to cover and which facts to report; they must decide what should be important to their readers. The choice of which issues to cover is known as agenda setting, the choice of which aspects of an issue to highlight is known as framing and the implying of broader context is known as priming. Decisions with respect to agenda setting, framing and priming are made by journalists and editorial staff but are influenced by publics, governmental and corporate bodies – and of course PR. For example, recent articles in the New Zealand Herald concern water purity in rivers, which the newspaper has deemed a salient political issue. This shows the news media attempting to fulfil its civic responsibility. More recently, a number of articles have reported the fact that Bill English puts canned spaghetti on his home-cooked pizzas, an issue that blew up overseas before becoming newsworthy here. This coverage has all the hallmarks of a National Party PR campaign.
If journalism is communicative action, PR is what Habermas calls strategic action. Strategic action is “designed solely or primarily to achieve one’s own goals and focusses primarily on persuasion” (Macnamara, p. 140). PR practitioners seek to present the organisations they work for in the best possible light, and generate publicity that complements advertising activities. Although it is common to think of PR only in terms of its relationship to media, PR encompasses many other activities, including intra-organisation functions. PR practitioners have a foot in both camps – they not only represent their organisations to publics, they also represent publics to their organisations, and PR specialists can and often do recommend organisational changes. According to Grunig and Hunt, four different models of PR can be distinguished: first press agentry/publicity typified by exaggeration, stunts and hyperbole (the type of PR that gives all PR a bad name), secondly public information in which the practitioner disseminates truthful facts and can be considered a type of in-house journalist, thirdly two-way asymmetrical PR and fourthly two-way symmetrical PR. The third model is the most common today and involves PR practitioners gathering data on the public to facilitate “scientific persuasion” (Macnamara, p. 65). The last model involves a balanced co-involvement of public and organisation: it is considered normative, ideal, and is exemplified very rarely in the real world.
PR practitioners reach out to journalists to help publicise their organisations, and make themselves available to journalists when issues relevant to their organisations draw media attention. Nevertheless journalists view PR practitioners very derogatorily. Terms used by journalists for PR and PR practitioners include “spin”, “fabricators”, “flacks”, “fakers and phonies”, “hype” and “liars”. The negative perception among journalists (and the broader population) of PR is founded partly on true stories of manipulation, stonewalling, obfuscation and outright deception that circulate privately and publicly. It also arises from the journalistic self-image as a righteous crusader for truth which contrasts with the image of the PR practitioner as someone whose job entails concealing or distorting the truth. For their part, PR agents retaliate by describing journalists as “hacks” engaged in “churnalism”. It is worth noting however, as Macnamara points out, that many real world PR practitioners regard a free and fair objective news media as a social good, necessary to democracy, and so the perception of all PR workers as duplicitous con-artists is far from universally true.
Considering the negative stereotype of PR among journalists, the extent to which journalists make use of PR materials and sources must be seen as problematic. This contradiction between avowed practice and actual practice verges on hypocrisy; it has been called the “dirty secret of journalism”. Macnamara cites multiple studies which show just how much journalists rely on promotional information, summarising these findings in the following way. “Extensive data from quantitative studies conducted over the past 100 years show that somewhere between 30 and 80 per cent of media content is sourced from or significantly influenced by PR, with estimates of 50-80 per cent common.” (p. 127) How has this situation arisen? Journalists face tight deadlines: they must find, research and write stories in short time periods. It is easiest often to grab a press release from one’s inbox, either simply rewrite it lightly or seek out a single opposing view in the belief this will provide ‘balance’. It has arisen as a result of a combination of time constraints and laziness. Journalists often blame their reliance on PR material today on the crisis in journalism, the decline in mainstream media news with its concomitant loss of jobs and increased pressure on remaining staff, but as Macnamara argues persuasively the influence of PR in journalism is no recent phenomenon but has been a feature of journalism for more than a century.
The disjunction between journalistic attitudes to PR and their actual use of PR must create cognitive dissonance. How do journalists rationalise their dependence on PR? Macnamara cites a number of strategies which journalists employ to publicly distance themselves from PR, in this way bolstering the myths of journalist as heroic warrior for the truth and PR practitioner as dissembling devil. The first is denialism, journalists simply repudiating any relationship with PR. The second is the discourse of ‘spin’. By applying a pejorative label that “masks diversity, ambiguity, and even contradiction and presents a falsely coherent unified view of PR” (Macnamara, p. 13), a journalist can reject, eject, exclude PR from his or her sense of self and role. The third is the discourse of victimhood: the journalist is someone helplessly overwhelmed by a flood of PR generated misinformation. This strategy downplays journalistic agency and trivialises journalistic complicity in propagating PR. The final strategy is the doctrine of selective depravity. Macnamara presents this doctrine in the context of PR practitioners (“Some PR people are dishonest but most are not”) but it can equally apply to journalists: a journalist can say, “Some hacks make use of PR but I don’t.”
In day to day practice, journalists find other ways to rationalise the pervasive influence PR has on the profession. Despite the public narrative of Good vs. Evil, Truth vs. Lies, ‘hacks’ vs ‘flacks’, many real journalists conceptualise the relationship in a more practical way. “Most journalists and PR practitioners agreed that each has a job to do and that, even though their roles interrelate, the jobs are different.” (Macnamara, p. 172) Journalists and PR people can even often be friends. A strategy journalists adopt to mitigate cognitive dissonance in real world practice is to mentally reclassify the PR practitioners with whom they have professional relationships as ‘experts’. ‘good contacts’ or ‘trusted sources’. Information that from one perspective would be viewed as Public Relations can be reimagined as objective testimony. The term ‘spin’ can be reserved for PR that is false, overblown or obfuscatory; the rest is not spin at all.
In the digital age, PR has an even greater influence on journalism. In Dirty Politics (Hager, 2014), investigative reporter Nicky Hager claims that right-wing blogger Cameron Slater was being paid by the National Party to attack National Party opponents. If this is true, Slater can be considered an unofficial PR practitioner, but one who was keeping his paid political allegiance secret and presenting his opinions as a kind of citizen journalism. Slater’s posts were often picked up by the mainstream media, an example being when Bevan Chang revealed in Whaleoil an affair with then Auckland mayor Len Brown. A second example that shows the blurring of the line between PR and journalism in the digital age is Donald Trump’s tweets. For example, Trump tweeted on 4th March this year that he had just found out that outgoing President Barack Obama had wire-tapped Trump Tower. This was widely regarded as a false allegation but was still widely reported by media. Some journalists have proposed that Trump was seeking to divert attention away from allegations that his newly appointed attorney-general Jeff Sessions had contact with Russian officials. Unscrupulous governments may also take advantage of social media to spread false information. For example recently reports spread that the sarin gas attack in Syria had been carried out not by the Assad regime (as the Pentagon and all reputable news networks had reported) but by ISIL. This story originated with the Kremlin-run news network RT. Many observers have argued that the US Presidential elections were swayed in Trump’s favour through the dissemination of fake news, authored by Russian sources, through Facebook.
The issue of journalistic hypocrisy with respect to the use of PR is troubling. Denial is not the solution. Even as journalism is declining, the number of PR practitioners is increasing massively. One partial solution is for journalists to take a lesson from academia (and Wikipedia) and cite their sources, an approach that would afford much greater transparency. The myth of total journalistic independence is false and ultimately deleterious and would be better abandoned.
Another partial solution is to embrace PR, to make it even more available. Yes, PR definitely has a dark side. Setting aside the issue of deliberate misinformation, obfuscation and distraction, there is the issue of systemic bias – PR overwhelmingly serves the interests of governments and monied elites. An obvious example is the pharmaceutical industry. As John Oliver has pointed out (see Last Week Tonight: Opioids, 2016), the opioid epidemic ravaging the United States can be partly attributed to Big Pharma having marketed morphine-derived painkillers to the public (and to doctors) as non-addictive. Democracy would be better served if PR agencies also represented underdogs, such as the victims of Big Pharma – if representation were made available to opioid addicts, former addicts and responsible clinicians as well as pharmaceutical companies, this issue might receive fairer media attention. Civil debate requires diverse publics to coalesce, mobilise and seek articulate voices. Not only would making PR more available to subaltern groups serve democracy by improving the quality of debate about issues, it would help journalists by providing them with a greater range of sources. The only way we can imagine this world arising however is through charities or governmental subsidies.
PR is here to stay. We live in an ever changing world, with journalism currently declining, PR expanding and new media continually appearing and reforming our conceptual landscape. It seems the wrong approach to pretend PR does not exist or that journalists don’t use it. Journalists are avowedly committed to the truth and they should face up to the truth of their own use of PR.
References
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere (T. Burger, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Polity
Hagar, N. (2014). Dirty Politics. New Zealand: Craig Potton Publishing
Macnamara, J. (2014). Journalism & PR. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
Oliver, J. (Oct 23. 2016). Last Week Tonight: Opiods. [Television Program]. US: HBO.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)