Messing with Metanarratives

Part 1: It's All About the Stories

By Suzette Chan
March 1, 2007

Welcome to the first of a series of articles on how metanarratives are being questioned, broken down, used and recontextualized in movies, books and especially comics.

Last fall, so many highly touted books, movies and comics of the season shared some related themes:

The young girl in the post-civil war Spain of the movie Pan's Labyrinth and a young boy in the novel The Book of Lost Things escape troubled lives by interacting with faerie lands.

A graduate student in England and a group of postmodern hippies in America encounter the linguistic underpinnings of reality in, respectively, the novel The End of Mr. Y and the comic Testament.

Hindu gods become superheroes in the Virgin Comics South Asia-inspired titles, a superhero is reacquainted with his Norse mythological roots in Thunderbolt Jaxon, while gods are absent altogether from The Bronze Age.

So what the heck kind of trend is this? These stories deal with different subject matter, and are set in different times and places, some on different planes of reality. What they have in common are authors and directors willing to play with metanarratives.

Humans are natural born storytellers. We can't help it. We use stories to teach ourselves, to remember things, to amuse ourselves, to explain hows and whys, to visualize and to relate to the world around us — in other words, we use stories to create our realities. The biggest stories are metanarratives which are meant to be universal explanations of everything.

Some of the most powerful metanarratives in the Western tradition include:

Judeo-Christian Religion: The idea that the world was created by a single, willful entity (Yahweh, God) whose truth is written in book form (the Torah, the Bible).

Progress: The idea that history has a directional trajectory, for example: the social Darwinist view that societies continually evolve into improved states; the Marxist view that there is a template through which we are working to achieve Utopia; and the view of technological futurists who believe technology will answer humanity's greatest challenges.

Freudianism: The idea that the balance between, and proper expression of, the three levels of a person's "consciousness" determines his or her psychological fitness.

Postmodern theorists have challenged these and other metanarratives, on the grounds that their proponents falsely claim them to be universal truths. Rather, they should be seen as the products of beliefs and conventions of particular times and places. Many of these challenges have come in the form of deconstructive analysis, which looks not only at the principle texts of these ideas, but also at their sources and underlying influences and assumptions. When all these elements are understood, the metanarratives can be re-evaluated in a new context.

Postmodern theorists relate the act of constructing narratives to writing; in this view, the world-creation process we use every day to interact with our reality is the same process writers employs when they set out to write fictional work.

Writing reality is a major theme of the films and books which caught my eye last season. These stories play with the constant permeability between writing and being written, author and subject, fiction and reality, the process of telling and the told story. The authors write stories based on metanarrative tropes which they know will be familiar to their readers. They work on the assumption that readers know that these stories are influenced by many other stories, some in different genres, and all filtered through the imagination of an individual: the author, whose experiences and thoughts as a whole are unique, but parts of which are shared by others.

Comics in particular do an excellent job of recontextualizing metanarratives. Partly, this is because publishers of ongoing mainstream comics must ensure their products are at peak marketability at all times. Continuities are disrupted for a variety of reasons: to get more readers, to attract new generations of readers, to entice readers to buy more and different titles; and also to address changes in editorial personnel, the political climate, legal issues, etc.

Whatever the particulars, the marketplace reality means that comics must refresh on a regular basis, maintaining decades-old characters who must always appeal to new readers. The long-time reader becomes accustomed to a cycle of repeating and forgetting. In discussing the problem of how to keep non-aging characters relevant, Umberto Eco writes:

"The stories develop in a kind of oneiric climate — of which the reader is not aware at all — where what has happened before and what has happened after appear extremely hazy. The narrator picks up the strand of the event again and again, as if he had forgotten to say something and wanted to add details to what had already been said." (From The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979; First Midland Book Edition,1984), p. 114.)

Comics are also outside the canon of culturally "accepted" narrative forms (books, film, journalism, theatre, opera), so they can pick and choose from these conventions to tell stories that are intertextual (meaning arising from references to other texts) and intended for an audience that is receptive to the blurring of narrative borders. For instance, Wonder Woman comics began as a pastiche of Greek and Roman myths, adventure stories and psychological theories of sexuality.

A famous non-comic example of intertextuality is the classic episode of The Simpsons, "Cape Feare." Sideshow Bob escapes jail to get his revenge on Bart in an episode that borrows the plot structure (and songs!) of the late film noir and subsequent remake versions of Cape Fear and the songs of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance. Film and stage, low culture and high culture, drama and musical comedy were married to create a freakishly entertaining monster.

Over the next few months, I'll be looking at current comics and other pop culture endeavours which exemplify the trend to mess with metanarratives.

I'll begin next month, with a look at some interesting current explorations of the land of faerie.