Written by Floyd Kermode
I mentioned Ludwig Wittgenstein in my last column on this subject. Wittgenstein was a famously obscure philosopher, which is why there is a huge industry devoted to interpreting him. Although his original writing is pretty difficult, his Big Ideas are fairly simple and useful, which is one reason he’s so popular these days (the other reasons are that he gets points for being homosexual and that other philosophers like the idea of someone who was eccentric, asocial and brilliant. Since many of them fit the first two adjectives, Ludwig gives them hope that they might fit the third).
I came across this idea again in a guide for would-be comics writers printed in one of 2000 AD’s excellent annual editions. These fat progs, usually named after the year to come, always have something extra for the fans and Prog 2003 had a detailed guide for would be writers and another one for artists. In the writers section, the alien editor had this advice ‘turn exposition into ammunition’. In other words, don’t do like Gary Trudeau does in Doonesbury and just draw four panels of the same picture with long chatty talk bubbles coming out of it. Make something happen to show what the characters are talking about.
After Wittgenstein finished his first book, he declared that he had solved all the problems of Western Philosophy and went off to Norway to have a holiday with one of his boyfriends (I should say ‘young male friend’ since Ludwig didn’t have it together enough to have boyfriends really). While he was away, a movement of people who thought he has solved all the worthwhile problems sprang up. They called themselves Logical Positivists, which is not as snappy as ‘Fantastic Four’, but sounds brainier. One thing that particularly inspired them was that Wittgenstein had written “wherof we cannot speak with certainty, we must remain silent”. In other words, philosophers should give up worrying about things they couldn’t hope to work out – just quit wondering if God was there and what he was like, how to prove that some things are morally wrong and knock it off with attempts to show objectively that Mozart’s work is really better than “itsy bitsy, teeny weeny, yellow polka-dot bikini”. If you can’t say anything about it, just knock it off.
To the uninitiated, this might look like the philosophers putting themselves out of a job. It wasn’t. The Logical Positivists saw themselves as being in the business of rubbishing all that waffly stuff about Morals, God, Art and so on and leading the way into a future of mathematics and analysis of language. Wittgenstein, when he got back in touch with these guys, was horrified. They’d got it all wrong he said (somewhat unfairly, since he’d made it very difficult to get right, but he was like that). What he had meant, was that we couldn’t TALK about morality, aesthetics and religion, not that these things weren’t important. There are some things that can be shown but not said, he said. With morality, it was silly to try to explain right and wrong in the way you might explain biology or box-girder bridges. However, you could indicate what was right and wrong by telling stories and parables about it.
The classic example of showing-not-saying is games. Any attempt to make a definition of games fails because there is always a game that falls outside the definition. Not all games have rules, not all games have winners and losers, not all games are fun and so on. However, if you say to someone ‘monopoly, chess, hide-and-seek, Australian politics’ and so on, they’ll get the idea. You have explained something by showing, rather than by saying.
Once Ludwig explained this, the flakier side of the philosophical community (ie most of it) heaved a sigh of relief and his fame and relevance was assured. Today, Ludwig is one of the few philosophers popular with both the hard-edged types who understand mathematics and speak in formulae and the softer types who just want to tell eveyrone to be nice. What on earth does this have to do with comics?
Well, comics are very suited to showing rather than just saying, you would think. They have pictures we can look at. We can see things happen. Doonesbury aside, there isn’t very much space to say anything in comics anyway, so it’s easier to show things with the right kind of facial expression, a distant explosion, a puff of smoke from the barrel of a gun.
Where the saying/showing distinction comes to mind for me, is in cases where people successfully show something rather than saying it. One example concerns sexuality and comics.
Now, I’m a fairly typical comics-reader. I don’t read comics to have my views of politics and society formed, I read them for entertainment. However, comics, like sci-fi, is a genre which constantly strains for meaning. Lately I’ve been remembering the Hernandez brothers ‘Love and Rockets’. I used to love it in the eighties. It’s come back to mind because people were talking about it on the 2000ad message board and because I’m back in Melbourne and feeling very nostalgic.
In Love and Rockets, there are two female characters who sleep together. One of them is gay, the other one just sleeps with her friend while she’s between boyfriends. This just happens, in between important bits of the plot; people getting rocket repairing jobs and trying to get a rock group started, that kind of thing. It was a revelation to me because it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to be very ostentatiously said, rather than shown. You know; “next week in LnR, a SHOCKING, GAY KISS” kind of thing, like they do with tv shows.
On the other hand; the characters in Alan Moore’s ‘Promethea’, never shut up about the topics Moore wants to get across. This is not to say that everything can be shown rather than said, but normally Moore is good at using plot and visuals to say things. In Promethea, I feel that he has so much he wants to say about magic, myth and the rest, that he’s just blurted it out. In an old-fashioned thrill like the Phantom, everything is said; not only does the Phantom have muscles, but every time he clobbers someone, a panel informs us that “the Phantom’s fist is like flying steel” or some such ‘old jungle saying’.
There is a lot of this kind of thing in Judge Dredd, especially in the older stories. As the writers got more confident however, there have been a lot more effective pauses and non-verbal panels showing us things about Dredd and his world. Like the Westerns that they take so much from, the Dredd stories can say a lot without saying anything.
