Dick Grayson and the Literary Tradition of the Carnival
The Dan Watters run recently got me thinking a lot about literature and comics
Introduction: Robin and the Carnival
The theory of the Carnival emerges in Mikhail Bakhtin’s "Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics", a key work in literary theory that is in conversation with said Russian author. Bathkin introduces Carnivalisation as a translation of the "folk carnival" into literary tradition. The idea here is to take folk rituals -- the circus, the carnival, the feast, the celebration -- and see how those ideas continue into literature in a cultural sense. The key ideas are:
Reversals; de-hierarchization: everyone is an equal in the carnival. There are no boundaries between spectators and the performers, no hierarchies, no rank.
The World turned Upside Down: Kings become paupers, fools being wise men, anyone can be king. What was once up is now down.
Liminality: Temporary condition of chaos and freedom. Nothing is immortal, everything changes. Complete chaos and complete freedom. Being external to society. The rules no longer apply.
Profane: the metamorphosis is unfinished, it is ugly, it is vulgar, it is profane, shocking outside of society.
and finally, and probably most important --> The culture of laughter: You are able to turn all of these ideas upside down, to be anti establishment and powerless because of laughter. Laughing at power is an ability to take the power back. The joy and laughter of the carnival is the KEY to carnival
So starting here, we can understand Dick Grayson, and even more specifically the creation of Robin as something belonging to the literary tradition of carnival.
Robin brings laughter and light - the colors of the suit, the attitude, the jokes; these all brings the carnival. And, just like the carnival, he uses the laughter to mock and win against stronger opponents.
Other than laughter, Robin also represents the reversal/de-hierarchization piece of the carnival innately. He creates child heroes and in doing so inverses power hierarchies. The powerless become the powerful. The victims become the heroes. The children triumph over the villains. But he is also a reversal to Batman himself, in his bright circus colors.
More than being the carnival, Robin brings the carnival to Gotham. He is the light to the world’s darkness.
And finally its focus on the circus. Bahkin takes great care to reference that even though Carnival has died and evolved since its origins in Western medieval celebrations, its legacy still lives on in the modern day within literature, performance, and especially the circus.
Robin is from the circus, the successor of carnival, and as such he takes a lot of carnival with him.
Watter’s Nightwing and the Carnival
So as we can see, Dick Grayson as a character is intrinsically linked to the literary traditions of carnival. Furthermore, in the recent Watter’s run of Nightwing, a lot of the ideas of the carnival are cited and explored in relation to Dick Grayson as Nightwing, with Zanni, the main villain of the arc, being the physical representation of the carnival.
The focus of the world of the Zanni is a new relationship with reality (breaking it), with no “point” in the way that anyone outside of the circus would understand -- internally motivated.
Its use of circus/carnivalistic language:
Its focus on Dick being from the circus, living as a member of the carnival
Its depiction of Zanni’s world as being one of dreams and visions.
Even with the way Dick is able to engage in these collective hallucinations as a member of the carnival, while others cannot
Zanni basically explicitly says it. As Dick created the mantle of Robin, as he performed and cackled on the streets of Gotham, he became a part of the circus. He was theirs.
So using this connection to the literary tradition of comics, the circus and the carnival, Watters is playing with the COMICS themselves as a genre. Because while the Carnival fits well with the Robin mythos, there are points in the literary theory that don't quite fit. The main one is the profane. The idea of the profane and grotesque is central to the carnival. and its like ugliness, shock value, orifices copulating, eating, defecating -- not particularly heroic traits.
One of the ideas behind the profane is things that do not belong in polite society -- the carnival is subversive, it provokes emotions like disgust to out of social boundaries and break down hierarchies.
Watters, through Zanni, then redefines the profane for the cultural context comics exist in. He redefines the profane instead of being about these bodily functions; it's about violence. It's about the ugliness of blood and being tied up. It's all these things that were so grotesque they made comics be banned.
Heroes are bound in a "deviant" fashion. It's the language of death traps. Comics are degenerate. They are violent. They are profane. They are the carnival!
Just like the grotesque and profane makes the carnival external to society and uses discomfort to flip authority, this new definition of profanity does this for comics. The push back against these happening in comics was because of the same kind of discomfort that makes people uncomfortable with the carnival!
He's using the moral panic and the comic code of the 1950s here as a vessel for the theme. He is using a real world events to plug this gap in literary tradition!! To close the loop and make the literary theory work!
So as Watters is connecting the theory of the carnival to Nightwing, DC comics as a whole, and Dick Grayson's literary history, he's simultaneously able to put it in the context of our society and how it was evolved and influenced from this literary tradition.
Comics reflect our society through their evolution and provide a way to contextualize and understand the carnival in the modern world. And of course this anchors comics as being carnivalesque and being a literary successor to the carnival.
The Death of the Carnival
Or at least they used to be! They no longer are. You know who else lost the carnival? Dick Grayson.
He left Robin. He stopped laughing. He became a leader, an older brother, and left the carnival behind.
But Zanni says this as well, explicitly calling out the profane as no longer shocking meaning it can no longer preform this role for the carnival, as it has been made "mundane through repetition"
But what does the death of the carnival mean? Remember when I introduced the carnival -- power of the powerless, flipping hierarchies, being anti-establishment. In the carnival, everyone is equal, there is no hierarchy.
The key to Olivia's fathers argument is literally this -- comics serve the same function as the carnival -- to undermine authority, to flip things on their head. And that is unacceptable.
As I’m sure many of you know, this reference to the “Children of Wertham” and this court case references the moral panic over comics in our world in the 50s and the rise of the comic code authority. When psychiatrist Fredric Wertham wrote his book “The Seduction of the Innocent”, blaming comics for degeneracy in society, parents were so appalled that the Comics Code Authority was created. The CCA censored violence, horror, and gore, and even comics that dealt with racial and religious prejudice. This is widely considered the end of the golden age of comics – and arguably the end of carnival in comics as well.
Just as Olivia’s father yells about respecting authority in Nightwing, in our world, the comics code also focused on ensuring the establishment would be respected: "(3) Policemen, judges, Government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority." (The Comics Code of 1954, 1954)
While the villains in this arc are the carnival in some senses, in another big sense the villain is the system. There is an entire issue examining a police officer who killed a child. He is a “good cop” defined as doing things “by the book” - following authority and the rules. Dick’s sister as mayor authorizes military technology on the streets of Bludhaven to win an election. These characters are all the antithesis of what carnival is meant to be.
And then Zanni and Olivia say the carnival is dying. It has died in Dick Grayson.
It has died in comics. What used to be anti-change and carnivalesque is now used to enforce the status quo.
Comics used to be about fantastical subverting authority, giving power to the powerless. Now heroes are affirming the establishment. Comics enforce the status quo.
In our world, Carnival died once. It survived through jokes and performances, the circus. Eventually it found a home in comics. But then it died there too, and became used to enforce the status quo. From the comics code onwards, comics shifting to prioritizing the affirmation of authority instead of flipping hierarchies, with the Tom Kings and Tom Taylors (in the literal last arc!) making the heroes work for the establishment.
Through our world, in their world, carnival is dying. It has been dying in Dick Grayson. He became serious, a part of the system, he lost his colors, his laughter. When you're a billionaire and the president likes you and you have control over the institutions are you really from the carnival? Zanni doesn’t think so. And he will do whatever he can to return Dick Grayson to the carnival from which he emerged.
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