Alan Moore's Watchmen is full of chaos and confusion. There are so many storylines, so many different things happening at once, that still tie in with the central plot of the book. In chapters 3, 5, 8, 10 and 11, an African-American boy is seen sitting on a street corner next to a newsstand, reading Tales of the Black Freighter, a comic book within the comic book. How the story in Freighter is told oftentimes matches with the storyline of the main novel.
Moore could've made this boy any of the different races, yet he is seen with black skin and talks with the same dialect. Such quirks as "Suit y'self, jive ass", "Hey man, I'm reading!" and "Shee-it!" are the only types of comments that come out of this boy's mouth. The author makes the point that even though he is an adolescent that reads comic books, he's still "fluent" in this type of "language". Dialogue of this nature is common in novels by white authors. Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, "...the dialogue of black characters is construed as an alien, estranging dialect made deliberately unintelligible by spellings contrived to disfamiliarize it;..". Just take a look at the way Moore spells "yourself" when the black boy is speaking. "Y'self" is not in the English dictionary. It is however, in the racist dictionary.
Despite his obviously racist accent, the comic he reads, Tales of the Black Freighter, is a strong compliment to the emotions the characters are feeling at a certain time. During talks of war with the Soviet Union, one man says, "This war's lookin' serious. Makes a guy start figuring escape routes, y'know?" The boy then reads in Black Freighter, "It was then I conceived of building a raft...". These similarities in storylines are important to the understanding of the story. Without the presence of the African-American boy, the story would not fit together as well. "...the Africanist presence informs in compelling and inescapable ways the texture of American literature," Morrison writes. This statement assesses the importance of the black character in American novels. This principle can be applied here; the African-American (whose name is unknown throughout the book), despite being a minor character, really adds to the "texture" of the chaotic, sometimes confusing, all-white novel that is Alan Moore's Watchmen.
Interesting discussion of the ways in which race plays out in Moore's The Watchmen. It strikes me that this a rich book for testing out Morrison's theories: she discusses the concept of "impenetrable whiteness" and, as you mention, the metaphoric uses of blackness. Both are on display in Moore's novel, from the vast whiteness of Ozymandias's arctic hideout to the fact that the freighter is black.
ReplyDeleteNice work, Mason!