How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language . . . . Create the opposite dream: know how to create a becoming-minor.

Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 27.

One afternoon in ’90, some criminally bright young thing, he leans across the coffee house table and he says to me, "the difference between your segment of Gen X (1) and mine–let’s call them Attari and Nintendo–is that you expected the country to explode, atomically, while we expect it to implode from internal tensions."

Fast forward a couple of years. Durham Dems have gathered at a reggae club downtown to watch Clinton trounce George the Elder. I walk over to the bar and order not one, but two kamikazes. The bartender glances at the televised election results, and then at my white skin. "You sure you’re in the right bar?" he asks. "You’ve got to understand," I say, "I’ve been old enough to vote for 12 years, and until tonight, not a single candidate, not a single issue, not a single anything I’ve ever voted for has actually won. I don't believe it's real."

FF >> to ’01. After a few years of using other graphic novels, I teach Alan Moore’s Watchmen again. Always a hit–prospect of nuclear war, crazed fascists in charge, people caught in situations they realize sucks but feel powerless to change–what more could I ask for? A lot, I find. For the first time ever, "Watchmen" belly-flops with my 18-20 year-olds. "Too grim," they tell me. "We’ve never worried about nuclear war," they say. "There’s something unhealthy about Moore’s attitude."

My younger students, who are mostly white, have grown up in the world of Watchmen character Adrian Veidt, the "retired" superhero and multinational magnate who plays god by attempting to avert nuclear war through an elaborate hoax. It works in the short run, and creates my younger students’ world. A world of multinationals, pervasive commodification and remanufactured nostalgias.2 A world where thermonuclear anihilation feels like a remote threat, and GenX sobriety, its Gothic air of mourning possibilities lost, is just another fashion statement, a commodity/lifestyle choice with its own distinctive sort of nostalgia.3

In short, my students’ failure to instinctively identify with "Watchmen",4 confronts me with the fact that it is not a major literature, automatically accessible to a broad range of readers and viewers in a variety of contexts. But perhaps this is precisely its strength.

Warren Hedges, SOU, 8/30/01

FF >> September 20, 2001.

Given that "Watchmen" contains both an armed confrontation in Afghanistan and a deliberately provoked disaster in New York City that kills three million people, I wasn't sure whether to continue with this web project. But it also seems to me that one of the issues at stake is the freedom to think critically. Because Watchmen explores issues young people will be facing in a world that is perhaps irrevocably altered for them, it seems all the more important to reflect on the novel and its themes.

onward to the thesis

Notes

1> Many qualifications for this label in the GenX thread but if I were you, I'd save it for later and go back to the main body of this text.

The generational part of my argument focuses more on text’s enthused reception and appropriation by Gen X male WhAnglos (white Anglos) in the US than its conditions of production in Britian.

(Nonetheless, I do wonder about parallels with the condition of younger white, working class UK men after the 60s, at least as they are described in various Birmingham school cultural studies speculations, with pride of place going to Dick Hebdige’s book Subculture: The Meaning Of Style. But I don’t know the British context well enough to speculate about overlaps.)

Finally, none of this site based on what Alan Moore consciously had in mind when he wrote this (aka the intentional fallacy), though you can't help but speculate (evidence for what Stanley Fish calls "the intentional fallacy fallacy"). Back.

2> s-frag. Go back.
3> ibid. Expect many of these in this project. Also, I'm a bad speller. Please let me know if you find any spelling errors. Go back.
4> Except for a few neo-Goths, bless their dark souls. Go back.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Dana Polan, Trans. Theory & History of Literature 30. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. 1979. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Moore, Alan. Watchmen. Dave Gibbons, Illustrator. John Higgins, Colorist. New York: Warner, 1987.