Peter Parker and the Monologic Imagination
Nearly all the personas Stan Lee co-created were hyperverbal. Even the Incredible Hulk, who mysteriously lost his mastery of personal pronouns within a few years of his first appearance, never stops talking. They do not all put their prolixity to the same use, however. The aforementioned Hulk, while repeatedly lamenting that the “puny humans” won’t leave him alone, does not engage in a great deal of soul-searching. Susan Storm Richards, the Fantastic Four's Invisible Girl, labors under the narrative burden shouldered by so many female characters in mid-century pop adventure dramas: like the female companions in Doctor Who, she asks questions so that a male genius (Reed Richards, aka Mister Fantastic) can answer them. She is also a past master at simpering exclamations, her go-to phrase being, “Oh, Reed!” They also serve who only stand and emote.
While all the members of the Fantastic Four engage in both internal and external monologues at various points in their Lee-helmed careers, one of the advantages of a team book is the greater opportunity for dialogue. The more a character is isolated or alienated, the more central the role of the monologue. And of all the Lee/Kirby/Ditko heroes of the Marvel Age, who is more isolated or alienated than Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man?
Yet Peter Parker’s tendency to narrate his own inner conflicts is not just a function of his role as a solo hero, or even of Spider-Man’s perpetual unpopularity with the people he serves and protects. Rather, it has to do with the way in which he exemplifies Lee’s ethos of “real heroes with real problems.” Guilt-ridden after the death of his Uncle Ben, anxious about providing for his frail Aunt May (who seems to have one foot permanently planted at death’s door for over a decade), and torn by the incompatible duties of his dual identity, Spider-Man is profoundly neurotic. Small wonder that he is so proficient at the monologue; agonizing over virtually every choice he faces, Peter Parker would be the perfect Hamlet if one could only imagine a radioactive spider biting a Danish prince.
At times, Peter’s propensity for monologue is transparently functional, such as when he spends three panels describing the improvements on his web-shooters before going into battle with the Vulture (Amazing Spider-Man 7 (1963)). And, of course, his entire public persona is built on Spider-Man’s capacity for endless jokes at his enemies’ expense. In fact, Spider-Man’s facility at trash-talking points the way towards understanding his use of language. Differentiating between speaking styles was never one of Lee’s hallmarks as a scriptwriter; his characters fell into particular verbal types: gruff men from the “street” (Ben Grimm); noble, god-like beings (the Silver Surfer); hipsters (Mary Jane Watson’s cringeworthy early dialogue); scientific explainers (Reed Richards); linguistically neutral heroes (Captain America, Hank Pym); and generic women (Susan Storm Richards, Alicia Masters, Jane Foster). But Spider-Man does not talk exactly like Peter Parker; there is a continuity of concerns, certainly, but Peter Parker rarely displays Spider-Man’s cutting wit. When he becomes Spider-Man, Peter adopts a verbal mask to go with his spandex disguise.
This distinction between hero and civilian makes sense in the Marvel comic that does the most to explore the tensions surrounding the secret identity. One of the recurring themes in Spider-Man’s monologues is the burden of his double life, a burden made irreconcilable by Spider-Man’s original sin. In his origin story, Peter puts on the Spider-Man costume in an attempt to make money, and is so preoccupied that he can’t be bothered to stop a burglar running right past him. That burglar, of course, is the man who kills Ben Parker. From this point on, Peter will be wracked with guilt, but not just for his inadvertent role in his uncle’s death; the very act of taking on the identity of Spider-Man was tainted by selfishness. So now he must move in the opposite direction, performing heroics as Spider-Man to the detriment of his life as Peter Parker. [1]
As a result, his monologues are unusually meta, since their subject is his dual identity. Before Spider-Man, DC comics exploited some of the potential of its main characters’ double lives, but rarely for emotional reasons; instead, the secret became a useful cog in the mechanics of plot, with both villains and vixens trying to uncover the heroes’ civilian identity. The shenanigans that punctuated the Superman stories of the 1950s function according to a psychology that could only charitably be called childlike: Lois Lane would try to prove Clark Kent was Superman, Clark would trick her, and the story would end with Superman’s smug satisfaction at pulling one over on her yet again. [2]
Satisfaction is rarely part of Peter Parker’s emotional repertoire. His monologues are about suffering, guilt, and a pervasive sense of inadequacy. The paradigmatic storyline comes in issue 50, when Peter comes back to his apartment after yet another successful fight with the bad guys confronts him with his ungrateful public (“No matter what I do, half the population is scared stiff of me! —And the other half probably things I’m some kinda full-time nut!”). His roommate tells him that his Aunt May is ill. Peter then engages in the version of multi-tasking at which he excels: moving forward in space (on his motorcycle) while ruminating over his own guilty: “I just pray I’m not…too late! / Aunt May must have had another attack! / And I was too busy playing super-hero to be there when I should have!”) It turns out that May had been calling for him, but no one could find him (“If I’d been at home—like any other normal guy—they could have reached me fast! / But no—I was out…flexing my muscles…trying to help the very people who fear me!”)
WATCH OUT, PETER! IF YOU DISAPPOINT PROFESSOR WARREN, HE’LL CLONE YOU AND YOUR DEAD GIRLFRIEND.
The rest of the day is a disaster for him. He barely passes an exam (in “science”), and his teacher reminds him that his grades are slipping. Gwen invites him to a party, but he has to beg off. At home, he turns on the television to see Jonah Jameson offering a one-thousand-dollar award for Spider-Man’s arrest and conviction. He clutches his head, with sweat pouring down his brow (this during a time when superheroes were rarely shown to sweat), as he appears to be assaulted by Jamesons’s accusations: the words ”Menace!” “Egomaniac!” “Public Enemy!” “Fraud!” and “Mentally Disturbed!” surround his head, most of them coming from Jameson’s tirade, though one (“Fraud”) was never specifically uttered by the editor. Showing Peter succumbing to internalized negative thoughts, the panel could be an illustration for a cognitive behavioral therapy textbook.
Peter’s monologue continues in response:
“But…what if he’s right? How … can I have been so blind…never to have realized..???
“Perhaps…only a madman would do what I do…taking the risks…accepting the dangers…and…for what?!
“After all these years…it’s suddenly clear…I must be a glory-hungry fool…or worse!”
Now the scene shifts. Peter leaves his apartment, and finally stops speaking aloud. The monologue continues in thought balloons:
“Being Spider-Man has brought me nothing…but unhappiness!
“In order to satisfy my craving for excitement…I’ve jeopardized everything that really matters…
“Aunt May…my friends…the girls in my life…
“And… for what??
“Can I be sure my only motive was the conquest of crime?
“Or was it the heady thrill of battle…the precious taste of triumph…the paranoiac thirst for power which can never be quenched??
“May heaven forgive me…the more I think of it..the more I feel that Jameson was right?
“In which case…for the sake of my own sanity…
“There’s only one thing left to do…”
The next page is a full-page spread, a device usually reserved for important action scenes. But here it simply shows Peter with his back turned, walking away from a trash can in which he has dumped his costume:
“I was just a young, unthinking teenager… when I first became…Spider-Man…
“But the years have a way of slipping by…of changing the world about us…
“And ever boy…sooner or later…must put easy his toys…and become…a man!"
Naturally, his resolve doesn’t even last the entire issue. He remembers his failure to save Uncle Ben, and vows to continue his heroic career, “no matter how great my personal sacrifice."
Decades later, it might be hard to see the value in a story that has now played itself out so many times as to become a cliche, and Lee’s melodramatic language doesn’t help. [3]. But this story, told in an anniversary issue (comics whose numbers end in 50 or 100 are usually treated as special events), privileges inner turmoil over external conflict. In doing so, however, it is merely highlighting the convergence of inner and outer drama that is the hallmark of 1960s Marvel.
When Peter goes outside during his crisis of conscience in issue 50, he caption reads: “Like a man in a trance, the heartsick youth leaves his apartment, trudging listlessly through the night…his thoughts as dark and stormy as the skies above him…”
It’s a cheap simile, as well as a predictable indulgence in the pathetic fallacy, but it also points to the main artistic device that allows Lee and his collaborators to convey interiority: using the external world and external action as a metaphor for the character’s inner state. In one of the most famous scenes in all of Marvel Comics, Lee and Ditko showcase the perfect physical metaphor for the burdens under which Peter Parker constantly labors. Aunt May is in the hospital, and it’s all Peter’s fault: “In some mysterious way,“ the doctor tells him, “Mrs. Parker absolved a radioactive particle into her blood! And we’re unable to get it out!” (Amazing Spider-Man 32) After one of Aunt May’s previous brushes with death (near death experiences being something of a full-time occupation for her), Peter saved her with a transfusion from his (spider-irradiated) blood. It’s a classic example of the “Parker luck”: Peter did the right thing, saved the day, and yet he’s still on the hook for making things worse.
Thanks to the magic of mad science, Spider-Man and part-time villainous Lizard Curt Connors have developed a serum to save her, but it’s been stolen. A fight with Doctor Octopus leaves Spider-Man trapped under tons of heavy debris from metal machinery, with the serum just out of reach. Not only that: the room is flooding, and if Spider-Man doesn’t free himself, he’ll drown. The issue ends on this cliffhanger, with nearly half of the following issue (33) devoted to Spider-Man’s efforts to escape. Over the course of five pages, Spider-Man strains under the weight, narrating his dilemma all along:
“If she—doesn’t make it— it’ll be my fault! Just teh way I’ll always blame myself for what happened to Uncle Ben…”
“The Two people in all the world who’ve been kinder to me! I can’t fail again! It can’t happen a second time! I won’t let it—I won’t!
“No matter what the odds—no matter what the cost—I’ll get that serum to Aunt May! And maybe then I’ll no longer be haunted by the memory—of Uncle Ben!”
As he says all this, he is framed by yellow-tinted faces of May, unconscious in her bed, and Ben, looking down on him beatifically. Obviously, they are not really there; Ditko is doing visually what Lee is accomplishing verbally: getting us into Spider-Man’s head. The action of the next three pages is nothing but Spider-Man trying to stand up and lift the weight (“I must prove equal to the task—I must be worthy of that strength—/“—or else, I don’t deserve it!”). Again, the words are clumsy, but they make Ditko’s visual metaphor perfectly clear: Spider-Man is defined both by the heavy weight on his shoulders (figuratively, in the case of Aunt May, literally, in the case of the machinery), as well as by his determination to bear the burden and keep fighting. This is where my earlier, facetious comparison to Hamlet instructively breaks down: Peter may constantly bemoan his fate, but he is ultimately a man of action. A Marvel superhero can be troubled and neurotic, but he cannot be consistently tragic.
After all, Peter Parker is Spider-Man, not Underground Man. The nameless protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) is, like both Hamlet and the average Marvel Superhero, intensely hyperverbal, accustomed to speaking at great length to no one in particular. While putting Spider-Man and his ilk on the same spectrum as some of the most ingeniously imagined heroes of world literature might seem like overreaching of exactly the sort that Stan Lee himself was famous for, I would like to stay with it for a moment. Not in order to make claims about quality or greatness, but to demonstrate two important characteristics of the Marvel hero.
First is the question of self-narration and audience. The underground man, Hamlet, and Spider-Man can serve as examples of the challenge of portraying individual subjectivity and the endless ratiocination of the conscious self across three different media: prose fiction, theater, and comics. In each, there is an element of artifice that must be overcome. Here Dostoevsky has it easiest, since we can imagine someone simply sitting in a dank cellar writing endless notes for no one to see. But the underground man is still obliged to dream up imaginary interlocutors, responding to the non-existent reactions of his non-existent readers or conversation partners. Hamlet has the opposite problem; as a character in the theater, he truly does have an audience who has actually paid money to hear him. But dramatic convention has it that he is speaking aloud so we can here him while at the same time unaware that we are present; in his own world, that of the stage, no one else can hear what he is saying, since his speech is only uttered for those who live off-stage. Spider-Man, as a comic book character, speaks aloud like Hamlet, except that we don’t actually “hear” him—we read him, as if we were the imagined readers who argue with the underground man.
The audience question is thoroughly embedded in the medium, in this case, the medium of comics. But the second issue is rooted in genre: superheroes are supposed to take action. Hamlet spends most of the play dithering, until Act V, which functions as an efficient narrative machine for the production of corpses. The underground man turns inaction into both an art form and a moral imperative. He is so preoccupied with his own consciousness that he finds any action next to impossible. He thinks so hard about deliberately bumping into a man he hates on the street that he finds himself swerving at the last possible moment. The underground man considers consciousness to be a disease, a term which makes sense in that he sees the problem as communicable. But when considered in isolation (and the underground man is definitely in isolation), it looks more like a disability. According to the underground man, the man of action charges forth without thinking, able to accomplish both great and terrible things because he is unburdened by consciousness. The conscious man is so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he can barely move.
Such paralysis is unthinkable for Spider-Man, at least for more than a page or two (Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, however, will be another matter entirely.). The Sixties Marvel hero is meant to balance external action and an inner turmoil, and therefore becomes what neither Hamlet nor the underground man can ever be: a multitasker. Lee’s characters compulsively narrate everything: their thoughts, their fears, the actions they are currently performing, and the events taking place around them. Here genre and medium converge. The superhero drama’s action requirements, when combined with Lee’s focus on his characters’ inner lives, necessitate a strange kind of narrative economy, where fighting and fretting must share the same panel. Yet the ability to combine the two is made possible by the peculiarities of the comics medium. The reader controls the rate of movement across the page, allocating as much time as necessary to take in both the feelings and the fights. This is the same feature of comics that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons would exploit so effectively in Watchmen (1986), where multiple “voice-over” narrators develop plot lines parallel to the events in the panels. The device is roughly the same; the difference lies in the sophistication brought to bear.
The resemblance between the Marvel hero’s narrative monologue and the Shakespearean soliloquy thus involves not just artistry and audience, but a particular understanding of time. In their study of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Caryl Emerson and Robert Williams Oldani differentiate between two different times in the operatic libretto: aria and recitative:
Recitative is the dynamic, social and dialogic component; it knows real duration and expects a response “within the story” from those who hear it, or are implicated in it, on stage. Aria, on the other hand, stops or marks time: it is often a meditation sung to oneself, or to the audience, outside the public bounds of the story. Its relative autonomy is marked by decontextualization, melodiousness and rounded musical form. When “heard” at all by other onstage characters, aria is heard “as a song.” (Emerson & Oldani, Modest Musorgsky & Boris Godunov 193)
Lee’s monologuing heroes fall into neither category: time does not always stop for them as they are narrating aloud. Nor do they fit Thierry Groensteen’s category of the “reciter,” whose voice is usually heard in narrative captions (Comics and Narration, Chapter 5). They are obliged to function in two worlds at once, as part of the action in the “real time” of the comics narrative, and as the subjective narrator of events and emotion. Where prose can move seamlessly from one mode to the other, essentially pressing “pause” on the action while we hear the narrator’s thoughts, the visual component of comics makes such a pause difficult. As a result, Marvel Comics readers internalize a set of conventions that allow them to follow both action and monologue without constantly being reminded that the hero’s thought process represented during a fist-fight is not “realistic” (the same way people spontaneously breaking into song in a musical also defies “realism”).
Notes
[1] The exception here would be the money he makes photographing Spider-Man for The Daily Bugle, but this never brings him prosperity, and serves as a vehicle for his ongoing suffering at the hands of tyrannical editor J. Jonah Jameson.
[2] There’s a reason that there’s an entire website on this and related topics called “Superdickery” (www.superdickery.com).
[3] Nor does his vocabulary. In what way is a “thirst for power” “paranoiac”?