One must imagine Sisyphus happy, as we've probably heard before.
I'd like to argue that one must imagine Atlas cares for us all.
Atlas, the Titan who was punished for defiance of the Gods, was forced to take on four of his usurped brother's duties by holding the sky above the ground.
The sky crushes him every day, never giving him a break, never letting him rest. He's in pain every waking moment of his life, and he's unable to sleep.
Atlas has met very few humans. His one attempt at escape was foiled by his empathy for trying to trick Heracles into taking his place. Had he not given Heracles 5 minutes to "adjust his position," Atlas would have been free. Despite this, he holds the sky.
Atlas could certainly let the sky fall. The world would be darkened, life would get squashed, an extinction would begin, and he would be first. What issue does he have with this? His life is pain, his future worse than his present, his days monotonous with suffering.
He has no real reason to keep his position, for he has no reason to love nor live life. If it isn't his life he loves, it must be another. All the living things under his protection must matter to him. All of us must be considered more valuable to him than his pleasure of release.
Therefore, Atlas loves us all. He loves us more than he loves himself. He lives not for his sake, but for ours.
Oh hi! I didn't see you there, because I'm a blog post. I'm going to be trying something different this time around. At the end of my last post about Supergirl, I said "The protagonist is supposed to be the character who makes things happen, not just the character things happen to." To which @heretolurkbutalasitstaken replied:
This got me thinking about how a lot of my interpretations of the material are based on the assumptions of straightforward superhero storytelling. I was worried that I was being somewhat reductive in my analysis. I want to try to find a more unconventional approach to these old comics. So, we're looking at a story from Superman's Alleged Girl Friend, Lois Lane #23. Welcome to the Gutters!
Absurdism is a literary genre that deals with the struggle for meaning in a universe where none seems to exist. Works such as these will often be about more esoteric struggles than those of the events, which can range from world-shattering to surprisingly mundane, if not completely inconsequential. If you're of a literary bent, I'd recommend Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, or Kurt Vonnegut as great absurdists. If movies or television are more your style, I'd recommend shows like Seinfeld, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or Twin Peaks, and movies like The Big Lebowski, Dr. Strangelove, or Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Personally, one of my favorite absurdist works is the first five seasons of Red vs. Blue, dubbed "The Blood Gulch Chronicles." It's a youtube series about two groups of soldiers trapped in a pointless forever war over a meaningless bit of territory with no idea of why they're fighting or how they got there. Every supposed revelation just brings them farther away from actually learning anything, or at least it does until the later seasons when they make the foolish decision to try and explain things. Fair warning, a LOT of the language used in this show has not aged well, 2003 was a LONG time ago.
A gruff sergeant. An unlucky ghost. A psychotic mercenary. A sarcastic slacker. An unrepentant kiss-up. Two morons. A tank with impeccable m
Since this is Tumblr, I trust all of you are familiar with Sysiphus. In 1942, Albert Camus wrote the essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" which compared his perpetually rolling the boulder up the hill to mankind's search for meaning. He puts forward that in acknowledging that the struggle in pursuit of meaning is futile allows one to create one's own meaning in the void left by the universe. From there we get the essay's final lines: "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
There, that's a thing you know now!
Anyway, I bring this up because I began to wonder if the whole interconnected universe of Silver Age Superman comics worked when viewed as absurdist fiction instead of straightforward superhero adventures. The story begins when Perry White, apropos of nothing, sends Lois Lane out to write an article on the witch trials of the 17th century. Lois has no idea what she's going to do, but she goes there anyway, and learns about a woman named Louella Thompson, who was burned at the stake for witchcraft.
Louella Thompson happens to look just like the town librarian, a beautiful young woman named Lena Thorul, a name which looks like Louella Thompson if you stare at it while drunk. Lena happens to live in the same boardinghouse where Louella once lived, and all her family suffered violent deaths. Lois begins to wonder if Lena isn't secretly the witch reborn in a new body.
As Lois prepares to write up her story, she's stymied by seemingly magical events that only serve to confirm her suspicions. When Lois tries to take Lena's photo, her camera disappears. She nearly gets into a car crash on the drive home. Later, her typewriter vanishes, as does a book on witchcraft. When Lois tries to travel back to New England with Clark Kent in tow, he gets distracted by a news broadcast that Lex Luthor had escaped from jail, and runs away like the coward he is.
Fortunately, Superman just happened to be flying by, and picks up Lois Lane. This flying man from outer space doesn't believe in magic, and suspects that Luthor is really behind everything that's happening, because it's always him. He's actually been out of prison for a whole week, but they only discovered it now.
Superman immediately discovers Luthor's secret hideout, wrecks all his science guns, and figures out his whole plan in less than a minute, because he is god's most precious princess and Luthor is a bald man in his 50s. Lex Luthor built this whole secret compound with magic surveilance cameras and "super-science rays" because Lena Thorul is actually his sister, Lena Luthor! Lex was doing this whole Scooby-Doo plot to keep Lois from writing a story about her, because he doesn't want her name to be associated with a criminal like him.
Lot of fascinating developments in the psychology of Lex Luthor this year. Earlier we've seen inside his fortress of balditude and seen the depths of his obsession with beating Superman, but now we see that there are depths that even he won't sink to. He knows he's the villain of the story, but he doesn't want his kid sister to pay for his crimes.
I think there's at least some value in looking at these stories as absurdist fiction. Normally superhero comics tell absurdist stories by having the protagonist be so overpowered that they completely break the narrative (One Punch Man) or by delving into the unrestrained nonsense of the setting (Doom Patrol) but the Silver Age Superman comics bring it back down to a more relatable level. Everything is obfuscation upon obfuscation, from the covers which blatantly lie to audience, to the characters having multiple identities that are patently transparent yet seemingly opaque, to the plots that rely on misunderstandings, deception, and random chance to make it impossible to tell what's actually going on. The point at the end when everything is revealed is the boulder rolling back down the hill, the rug pulled out from under the audience as we realize that everything we just went through was a practical joke on us.
Is it well-done? Usually not. Was it intended by the creators? We have no real way of knowing. Am I stretching to try and get any kind of point out of this, despite the fact that we're talking about absurdism which suggests that trying to find a deeper point is meaningless and I should just enjoy the ride? Banana. Until next time.
