For a long time I struggled with how to start this paper. There is so much I want to cover in only eight pages, and writing in a way which is un-academic terrifies me. But honestly, what scares me the most about what I am going to attempt to do is this: I want to talk about me. In this class, we have focused on individual readers and why certain types of fiction and story appeals to a certain subset of people. Stanley Fish, in Interpreting the Variorum, believes there are interpretive communities which we are all part of (unaware or no) which dictate how we read a text, claiming that “strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around” (Theory and Criticism 2087). I think there is a great deal of credence in this theory. We all begin to associate with a group of people and see through their collective lenses. It stretches back to man’s cro-magnon days where it was important to have a cohesive community; and society does seem to have a way of getting rid of undesirables (ala Stephen King’s Carrie). It has an invisible iron which flattens out the wrinkles. Everyone struggles with being accepted by others—we all put on these "masks" so we can acclimate. In this paper, I would like to focus on both sides of this binary—culture and the individual. As far as reading goes (as well as society, in general), I support giving the power back to the unit. Unit is a very utilitarian world, but it perhaps it is necessary to think of society in that way. It is a collection of units, of cells, making up the whole. A utilitarian, socialist, communist structure would seem to be an ant-hill mentality, worker drones constructing a bigger framework. But we are not ants, our sole need being pleasure, and our one aversion, pain. Humans are selfish, needy, despicable, but also gloriously intelligent, generous, and kind. This struggle between the dominant culture and the individual is an important part of what makes stories and pulp fiction so important. It gives a person a way out of the society of boundaries and social anxiety, a peak into the multi-armed god, Shiva—a grand master of creation, like Shakespeare's Prospero.
Tomas Makris says, in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious, that there are two kinds of people, “Those who manufactured and maintained tedious, expensive shells, and those who did not. Those who did, lived in constant terror lest the shells of their own making crack open to display the weakness underneath, and those who did not were either crushed or toughened” (177). Literature is a transport away from this singular existence of our personalities—our rigid, separated egos which demarcate us from everything. It allows us to become anything or anyone: a pirate, a detective, a cowboy, a space alien, a 30 year-old woman desperate for a man, a governor of Venice, and a wolf in the Alaskan snow. In a novel or short story, we are everyone, every single character, every tree or stone. We are the master stage director, ordering people around and setting locales and environments in the stage of our mind, yet we are not present. We become everyone and no one—an outsider observing the show, but also the dreamer and creator of it all. What is the relationship between the inner theater (Morpheus’ realm of archetypes, motifs, ogres, faeries, dwarves, and Jedi) and the outer one, our mundane constructed personalities? Why does everyone find it so easy to see through another, no matter how different they are from us (a pig in Charlotte’s Web, and even a rock in short story I wrote a few years ago)?
I would also like to delve deeper into another idea which for me has been bubbling under the surface this entire semester. Something we have never explored in class is the role writing has in our lives. We have looked at pulp fiction and why that sort of literature appeals to such a wide audience, but I think I had a slightly different experience. Ever since I was a small child, I would always spend a great deal of my time constructing stories of my own. There was the massive epics depicting Jedi and Sith waging war on each other, the Pokémon, Final Fantasy, and Harry Potter fan fiction which I kept in my head, but sometimes submitted online, and the sequels to movies I loved: a group of people get stranded on Isla Nubar and are attacked by Velociraptors and T-Rex, climaxing with the survivors on a raft being chased by dino-sharks; an epic where the hero and his man-tiger friend have to escape a fantasy apocalypse; and my imagined seventh Harry Potter book where Ron Weasley sacrifices his life for Harry, and Dumbledore returns like a phoenix to save the day. There was the reconstructed story about a hero having to go through an encounter with the Minotaur, a Dinosaur, Joe Dante's Gremlins, and mummies. I would race around my living room, bouncing off furniture and banisters, making explosive noises. I lived in my imagination where there were no fetters. There could be dragons, ewoks, magic, light sabers, gods, monsters, and heroes all inhabiting the same universe, declaring war on each other, making alliances, and dying tragically. This was the realm I created. This was the kingdom I craved—a land free of inhibition, only drama and comedy, explosions and dinosaurs, and action and intrigue.
Reading did not play as large of a role in my life as did others in this class. Instead, I created my own worlds. I was, of course, influenced by different movies I watched or books I read, but on the whole, I loved being somewhere I made. The rules were my own, because I completely took the author out of the equation. There were no copyright laws in my skull--Gandalf, Dumbledore, and Yoda could dine at the same table, Batman and Wolverine could play ping-pong, and Goku could crash into Mordor and kick Sauron’s eye in with a Kame-hame blast. I think there is something deeply powerful at work here, one that always seems to be bouncing up and down in my head, but I can never quite place it in the words I want to. Nothing is ever quite elegant enough. The closer I examine myself, pick myself a part for my own interest and hopefully, the interest of others I keep on discovering more layers to dig up. In class, out on the mall, in high school with the jocks, emo kids, preppies, band geeks, goths, and math nerds, I felt (I feel) isolated. I have to construct a super-composed aloof kid because I do not know how to interact. I feel the acting around me, the need for attention, and it makes me feel, well, off. I am not criticizing people's personalities; I feel a certain unwillingness to play along with it all--that, and I am scared. People scare me. They are unpredictable. What I am trying to get at is this: the bigger wall I put up towards other people, the greater the desire is to sink into my own worlds. High School was not a good time for me, the only way I really lived was through story. The universes I created grew bigger and darker. My characters became more angst-y, doubtful, and frankly demented and evil. I drew comic books. Yes, even now I am embarrassed to admit it. They were populated by the eponymous Piggy, the reluctant hero who fate would never give a break, Rooster, his arch nemesis, a chain-smoking, yes, rooster, Master Teddy, the paragon of reluctant evil who came from a parallel universe (he was a teddy bear), Heroic Man, a mixture between Superman and Coriolanus but more demented, Preston, the good nerd who wanted to conquer the world, and assorted other friends and enemies of Piggy. They emerged from the ethers, beings of my subconscious wanting to break forth and have stories written about them. I want to focus my attention on these characters, why they came from me at a specific time and place. For awhile in my life, they meant so much to me. I was lost and needed friends to guide me--they were there, my own creations. Some might call them imaginary friends, but isn't that all authors do, create non-existent people to satisfy their needs? I also want to experiment with something else. I have come to a time in my life where things are again drastically changing. Will I need Piggy and friends again? Will they return to me, or have they found someone else to live through? Can I draw a Piggy comic again?
First, I would like to give you a brief overview of the conception of Piggy, and why he started to become such a huge part of my life. Growing up, there slowly started to emerge two main threads to my imagined epics—one consisted of a four book long sequel to Star Wars, which was eventually transformed into a universe of its own, and Piggy the Super Heroe. Piggy was a joke. He was a comic book super hero I created in seventh grade in math class. A friend and I both drew a single “issue” and compared them. We would laugh at what each other had done and point out flaws in drawing and story construction. It started out sort of us as competition. He was the acknowledged better drawer, and finally, I was labeled the better story teller, the funnier one. My Piggy was short, tenacious, with a huge self-esteem problem. This portrayal of Piggy was entirely different than the one my friend had drawn. His was a muscular pig the size of a man. He had fewer one-liners and moments of complete devastation and destruction, and in my opinion, less heart. His Piggy’s enemies were muscle men who were overcome with strength; while my Piggy won by not giving up, though he was not particularly smart or strong. After eighth grade I lost contact with my old pal. I am not sure where my friend is these days but wonder if he still remembers Piggy. Piggy the Super Heroe (unintentionally misspelled at first, but later accepted as a sort of joke) became all consuming for me at different points of my high school career. I would trace his image over all my notes. I portrayed him as myself in a family portrait I did for a French class. I hid a picture of him in the wall of my bed room. Something about this little hero I created spoke to me. He, like me, was unconfident, lost, yet never gave up. No, Piggy spoke through me. He wanted to be released through my teenage self. He was like a Xenomorph trying to burst forth through my chest. Piggy helped me more than I can say. In many ways, I took solace in my own creations and not those of others. I was influenced by graphic novels obviously (Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez and The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, being the two which stand out the most), books (The Stand by Stephen King), music, television, and movies (oddly, looking at them now, the movie I see the most in the series was “Heavy Metal”, the 1980's hard rock cartoon movie). I took it all in, and I loved every one of them.
I have always been a very visual person. Most of my ideas start out as movies which transformed into books. The Comic Book section in The American Popular Lit Handbook says comic books are “one of the most popular and widely read of the mass literary media in this century by both children and adults, with as many as 200 million copies a year published in the United States alone” (75). Comic book characters are as important today as they have ever been. It seems that every year brings two or three more blockbuster movies on comic heroes. Their personalities range across a wide range of good traits—the reluctant good, the neutral good, and the chaotic good. I think this is why they are so appealing, because they can represent the drive to make right, at that is a powerful motif. I, however, have always been drawn to the darkness which comics could so readily portray. I always liked the Joker more than Batman, the Decepticons more than the Autobots, and Vegeta more than Goku. I am attracted to the bad boys of entertainment. They represent perfect images of what we want to be, and comics (“modern mythology” as some call it these days) offer no better agar to grow it in. Radway would say they free us and offer us something which our mundane lives do not. I do not necessarily think we read stories to get things we desire, but we look to them to give narrative to our own lives. Characters in stories are archetypes (essentially everyone is except the people who know you the best) that give us a way of looking at our own lives. That is why when Superman, an image of perfect good, can take down an image of perfect greed, Lex Luthor, we feel something. Do we not all like to think of ourselves as Superman when our friend steals from someone and we confront them, or when we grab a child before he walks into the street and gets hit by a car? They give us vision, and the more archetypal they get, the clearer the vision. They show not only text but a mirror image of ourselves, if McCloud is to be believed in his essay. The more basic the drawing, the closer we can identify with it. I think it was easy to see myself in these stories I drew. It did things for me that writing simply could not.
As I continued into high school, the “Piggy” stories got continually darker. I introduced new characters: the insane Master Teddy, the pompous, crazed Heroic Man, the Rooster Gang, and the dark force which seemed to bringing it all to some tragic conclusion. I think they were manifestations of my id. They were how I saw the world pushed to exaggeration. The main arch near the end was gearing towards an Apocalypse. Slowly, Piggy’s enemies were being drawn together by evil force similar to Randall Flagg in The Stand. Piggy was being driven another direction, going through existential crisis after existential. He eventually died but was revived in hell, only to come back and discover the world was a desert. I do not know where it went after that, but I know that is what it was building toward. To write this terrible stuff, I would put on a song, be it depressing, energetic, or happy, and draw. I would really let the music pulse through me; afterwards, it was like I had been through a catharsis. The words were down on the notebook paper—I could go back to normal, knowing my thoughts were forever contained. The next day, I would show it to my chosen few friends I deemed worthy of being able to comprehend what I had done. I was often very proud just to have finished one (near the end, I think I produced over 20 of the things). Starting on a new “issue” scares me. I cannot remember how I did this. Did I plan out the story before I began? Did I just start writing and let the characters speak for themselves? Was it Salieri’s perfectly constructed anthem, or a sublime requiem by Mozart? What were the themes and can I recreate them? As I begin writing, I stare down at the blank page. Will Piggy return to me?
The first few pages were always the hardest, I remember. It is getting the flow of the story down which matters. I still draw the characters the same. The further I go on, the harder it is conjure their personalities and remember what it was like speaking through them. Have they drifted away from me, then, to some far away kingdom I no longer have access to? As I make my way further into the script, a story begins to finally develop. Piggy is looking back at the time he fought Master Teddy for the final time. He tries to fire a gun, to kill the stalwart teddy bear, but the bullet stops midair. MT is being protected by something and explains that the evil energy let him be the true monster that was inside of himself, he just had to accept it, to become what he was always destined to be: a cruel, heartless villain. Where before he was reluctantly doing his master’s bidding, now he does it with full relish. If Master Teddy is going to be a bastard, he might as well be the best bastard there ever was.
Literature, entertainment, in the end it reminds us of the illusion of ourselves. As I draw (which is the hardest thing, surprisingly, to come back to), I realize that all these characters we play exist through me. I am them. By presenting them to my friends in comic book form, I am just showing them another layer of myself. I feel the people who know of my creations know me better than any other. They accept me for who I am, and all which I can do. Stanley Fish might say this is another act of inclusion by society—that these stories bring us together and make us into a single organism by accepting them as our own. There is something deeply gratifying about being connected to a group of people which all know you and allow you to be yourself. Myth makes a community; it ties us together into a narrative. These stories gave me that power to create my own narrative, and that’s what makes them special.
This project has been draining. I do not remember it being this hard. Part of the problem is, I think, is that I wrote in moments of passion, when my raging hormones were in full force. Every word bit me, struck me down, and made me feel bruised yet alive. Now I feel different, like it does not matter as much. Being a five-year senior with 4-year senior friends who are all graduating, with a girlfriend who is living in California during the summer on an internship, with my mom moving on with her life and dating, with my other friends from Billings no longer as essential as they once were, and with being confused on what I am doing this summer, I had a inkling that maybe I would need my characters again. Maybe they will have changed as much as I have. Maybe they have moved on with their lives. Maybe they are happy—somehow I doubt that. The beauty of Piggy was my limited capabilities in drawing. I could never make it as grandiose as I wanted because of my own limitations. It was like a limited-budget movie and was better because of it. But perhaps I have changed so much that comics are no longer my strong suit, maybe I should switch to writing completely. I have changed too much. Now I know my limitations.
I will not stop writing Piggy. I want to keep on going over the next few weeks and see where it takes me. Piggy may end up in a dark place or on a cruise ship drinking a martini. At this point, I cannot tell. But isn’t that the beauty of our lives? We do not know where we will be in the future, what group we will associate with, or who we will be ten years from now. We are constantly changing, and the literary characters we choose to escape reflect our morphing person. Piggy will always be with me, whether I am one-hundred years old in a wheel chair, wind sailing off the coast of Baja Mexico, or selling someone insurance they do not need. I am legion, and Jesus, do not save me.
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