Participants
Fearful Visibility:
Symmetry, Prophecy and Citation in Blake's "The Tyger" and Moore's Watchmen
Roger Whitson
University of Florida
rwhitson@english.ufl.edu
Taking Alan Moore's obvious citation of William Blake as a starting point, I want to explore the relationship between prophetic discourse, symmetry and visuality. The citation, I argue, is a fundamental characteristic of visibility--there is no visibility without citation. Citation, furthermore, is produced within a precarious relationship with symmetry. As Blake's poem "The Tyger" makes explicit, citation seeks a kind of symmetry with an assumed original. Blake's citation of the tiger as one of the two images to allegorize Christ in the Bible serves to both mark its relationship to that problematic original text and to distance itself from it. Symmetry has, furthermore, an interesting relationship to prophecy. One could argue that, temporally speaking, prophecy disrupts temporality to produce a symmetric relationship to an impossible prophetic tradition. Prophetic rhetoric frequently disrupts history in order to enter into it. This has strange resonances in Moore's text, as one can only read the symmetrical layout of the "Fearful Symmetry" issue by removing onesself from the narrative flow of the comic story and looking only at backgrounds and panel layout.
The visible, as both Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida argues, can only exist with a certain blindness. Symmetry can, furthermore, only exist with a certain blinding. In a very real sense, the visible is prophetic; it is involved in a simultaneous suspension and reinstitution of time. "Fearful Symmetry" is just this violent disruption and reconstitution of time by a prophecy that underlies all visuality. I want to use this understanding of a visualized prophetics to discuss the "use" of Blake by Moore in Watchmen. What type of visibility does the sitation of Blake, the place of Blake as well as the image of Blake with one of his more well-known poems, do to the tradition that Moore tries to invoke in this comic? It is my contention that the citation of Blake acts as a perverse holy spirit--that the repetition of Blake always produces derelict results. Even with a figure who seeks a subversive and revolutionary image, Blake's citation violently infects any narrative with deadly terrors that mock any mimetic symmetry.
