“It Never Happened Anymore”: Amnesia and Hyperconsciousness

Morrison’s mission is to bestow “hyperconsciousness” on Batman. As Jim Collins explains, hyperconsciousness “depends upon a simple realisation on the part of both the producer and the audience: popular culture has a history; earlier texts do not simply disappear or become kitsch, but persist in their original forms as well as diverse reactivations” (159). This is spelled out in Morrison’s incarnation of the Joker, which holds all versions of the character as having occurred, and the Joker as simply developing new personalities every few years. He becomes “a self-conscious performance artist who contains all his prior representations” (Singer, Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics 274), from his ridiculous prankster of the 1960s to his sadistic killer of the 2000s. Since its beginnings, comic book history has been riddled with amnesia. There was no guarantee of being able to collect every issue in sequential order, and done-in-one stories with no sense of ongoing continuity were the norm, until Marvel’s new continuity of the 1960s (Friedenthal 16). Superman didn’t remember events from years before “for the simple reason that his readers could not recall events of which they were ignorant” (Smith 55). This is the state that Umberto Eco discusses in his essay “The Myth of Superman”: one in which events occur, but do not accrue. Superman is “[a]esthetically and commercially deprived of the possibility of narrative development”, says Eco (“The Myth of Superman” 149). He suggests that Superman’s ongoing adventures “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 Myth of Superman” 153). This gives Superman his “mythic” status, existing outside of narrative time; his audience must therefore enter this “uncontrollable flux” of temporality (“The Myth of Superman” 156). Eco gives the marriage of Clark Kent and Lois Lane as an example of something that would not be allowed to happen, as it would imply a “before” and an “after”, forcing Superman to take “another step towards his death” (“The Myth of Superman” 154).

As serialised stories took over (and Lois and Clark were, indeed, finally married) comic books had to remember more and more of what had come before. When this became too much, universe-spanning reboots like 1987’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (Marv Wolfman & George Perez) wiped clean DC Comics continuity, giving its superheroes fresh beginnings. This retconning is one way superhero comics fight Eco’s “oneiric problems”, as it “allows creators to rewrite the past of characters so that they pull back from an inevitable death”, writes academic Andrew J. Friedenthal (18). In his dissertation, he describes two kinds of memory: cultural memory and continuity. Cultural memory belongs to audiences and fans, out in the present of the real world; continuity exists as events that take place within comic books themselves. Continuity “is cultural memory for superhero universes”, he states (15). Crisis therefore can wipe memory from continuity, but cultural memory is not so easily manipulated. If you held on to these old stories, keeping them fresh in your memory, you found yourself suffering from – as Will Brooker puts it – “false memory syndrome”. Brooker writes: “It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t an imaginary story. It never happened anymore” (115).

The role of these memories remains hazy, however. Audiences may remember stories that never happened, but those memories are not useless. Luca Somigli states: “The development of the narrative over time in subsequent retellings and rearticulations does not entail a suspension of memory, a sort of continuous oblivion, as Eco seems to imply, but works more effectively the more the audience is aware of the previous articulation of the narrative that each retelling extends and remakes” (288). Even if you are reading the new “first time” a hero and villain meet, the story plays upon your knowledge of their previous meetings – knowledge that continuity may have declared to be nothing more than a false memory. The audience’s cultural memory therefore retains its value, even after a line-wide continuity reboot. Friedenthal quotes Crisis writer Marv Wolfman: “The heroes don’t buy our comics. It doesn’t matter if they remember the stories. The readers do and they’ll remember them” (262).

Of course, whether or not the heroes remember the stories does matter; it matters to the heroes themselves. Batman’s opening narration in Batman: Death and the Maidens #1 highlights this concern. Over nightmarish images of his parents’ murder, he thinks: “I can’t remember my mother.” Despite living in their home, he worries that “… it is only intellect keeping them alive, now. I can’t remember them anymore […] And I am afraid … I don’t feel it anymore …” He knows that without these memories, without his origin-pain, he can no longer be Batman. Perhaps this is why it’s important for Batman to be shown as a collector: the Batcave is filled with mementos of past adventures – a giant penny, a robot T-Rex – as well as of past traumas, like the costumes of once-dead sidekicks. The grandfather clock that gives access to the Batcave must be set to the moment of his parent’s deaths to open; and in Batman: Gothic (Grant Morrison & Klaus Janson 1990), Bruce Wayne sits in an entire room of clocks, all stopped at that exact same time. Batman’s obsession with branding is well documented. “Everything Batman makes carries his brand,” says Brooker, “from the biggest tank in his garage to the smallest of the bespoke shuriken he carries on his belt”. This logo helps to fix “character, genre, location and props” throughout the ever-shifting multiverse of Batman adventures (79–80). But there’s another interpretation, too: perhaps Batman surrounds himself with these images as he’s afraid of forgetting. Every Bat-symbol reminds himself of his own identity. When he regularly announces “I’m Batman” to a villain, he might also be telling himself, over and over again.

“The Black Casebook”: Narrative Games and Temporal Paradoxes

So what happens when Batman does, in fact, remember everything? Morrison’s goal of bestowing hyperconsciousness onto Batman rescues old stories from oblivion and drags them back into present continuity. The “Black Casebook” is full of stories that were once ignored and are now used by Morrison to generate new adventures: the League of Batmen from around the globe; the science experiments of “Robin Dies at Dawn!”; and most famously, the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh – an alien Batman dressed in a garish purple uniform. Writing about TV’s teen Superman show Smallville (Gough & Millar 2001-2011), media scholar Angela Ndalianis discusses how it “relies on the nostalgic desire of fans who have decades of memories of Superman stories to draw upon” (273). Ndalianis draws attention to Eco’s “temporal paradox”: a paradox resulting from mythic characters whose adventures have already occurred but who also require ongoing new stories. Eco suggests this “should not be obvious to the reader”; however, in Smallville and other hyperconscious stories, the temporal paradox is an “integral part of the narrative game” for the audience (272).

Morrison and his artists play the same game. Equipped with all their memories of stories once declared “false”, the audience can enjoy this hyperconsciousness and aspects of stories from all of Batman’s cultural history, remixed back into present continuity. Collins suggests that telling the story of Batman is impossible “without reconfiguring the encrustations that have become as inseparable from the ‘text’ as any generic convention or plot function” (155). If this is a game, however, it is one the authors of the comic will always “win”. Drawing on the work of historian Hayden White, Friedenthal makes a distinction between the “chronicle” – every single undifferentiated event that occurred – and the “narrative”, shaped in the subjective telling of these events (258). Morrison’s take on Batman’s career may be that “everything happened”, but this chronicle is only what has potentially happened. It is still up to the author to reactivate certain stories from the past and place them in present continuity. Hyperconsciousness may blur the line between producer and consumer, one day creating “Viewer-Reader-Gamer-Listener-Users” who “play the game called Batman” through new navigational and curatorial opportunities (Collins 169); for now, though, the producers remain the ones setting the rules of continuity.

Even the strictest canon of comic book continuity possesses “elastic” boundaries, says Brooker: “[S]napping back tightly into place, but able to stretch – rather than brittle” (157). The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, for example, doesn’t return to the page as the original story’s smiling space-cop, but rather as his costume is recreated in colourful rags by a disturbed Bruce Wayne. “Zur-En-Arrh” becomes a hypnotic trigger word. Did the original adventure “really happen” or was it just a bad dream? It’s not as simple as plucking moments from the chronicle of Batman’s expansive timeline and placing them in current continuity – Morrison transforms these moments into something new. The audience may remember the original story, but to Bruce Wayne it’s just a fleeting nightmare. So if Eco’s oneiric climate has been replaced by hyperconsciousness, why do the adventures of Morrison’s Batman still feel so dreamlike? It is not just the nightmare that is traumatic, after all; it is also the trauma of awaking from the nightmare. Waking up means you have survived your traumatic experience (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History 64). For Batman, this would mean confronting the cold fact that he lived while his parents died, and therefore a “living nightmare” might be preferable.

Marc Singer refutes Ndalianis’ assertions that a text like Smallville breaks down the oneiric climate of Eco’s descriptions, contending that shifting the categories of “before” and “after” does not affect his dreamlike space: “Eco’s oneiric climate already problematizes and manages this [temporal] distinction through an interplay of stasis and progress, adding new elements to the myth while restarting the story anew with each new installment” (“The Myth of Eco” 362). Even the done-in-one stories Eco references therefore balance amnesia and remembering – and hyperconsciousness doesn’t dispel Eco’s dreams; it just makes them even more complicated. Morrison’s Batman plays out in the realm of half-remembered images and narratives from the past. This is why the main villain of Morrison’s run on the title, Doctor Hurt, strikes fear into Batman: he claims to b Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father, still alive. Appearing as Thomas Wayne puts a stake through the origin-engine that drives Batman. Hurt says he is “the hole in things” and “the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning”, sitting outside of the easy answers of continuity. As the Joker tells Batman in Batman #680 (Morrison & Daniel 2008): “You think it all breaks down into symbolism and structure … No, Batman, that’s just Wikipedia.” Hurt is a villain who exists outside of this strict “wikipedia” and the solid ground of its canon.