Because no one can save me from myself.
Posted here, top-of-head thoughts in response to a couple of thoughts shared by others over on Newsarama's blog. Of course as soon as I hit "say it" two more things popped into my head, but that's how it rolls. There's a reason I rarely post on boards & blogs. Oh well! I'll let it fly for now.
Replicating that post under the cut, but I suggest that if you're interested keep an eye out on that thread. If anything else pops up there that I feel needs to be responded to, I shall do so there. I will not do so here. (However, I will continue responding to your emails as time and temperament allows.)
Crooked, I am happy to explain to you why the use of the Golliwoogg’s sex bits is not at all consistent with Moore’s use of sexuality so far in the League, and why his failure to set the stage previously by dodging the root of this character, along with his stated agenda, lead up to a spectacular failure with this particular character.
I don’t want to hijack someone else’s site, so I will keep this as brief as possible. There are a couple of minor spoilers, too.
Depending on how closely you’ve been paying attention to the League so far, you have noticed that it is extremely hetero, biased in favor of the female characters. He has chosen to tackle head-on Victorian attitudes toward gender and sexuality, and depending on your affinity for the series, he’s either done pretty amazing, insightful and entertaining things with this exploration, or he became tedious about the whole thing about halfway through vol. 2. What one may think about his success in upending Victorian attitudes toward gender and sexuality is a ‘your mileage may vary’ thing. That he’s made a significant attempt to speak on these topics in the League is undeniable.
However, that respect (lack of a better term) for the humanizing freedom he’s telegraphed as being intrinsically tied to sexuality has not at all been extended to other characters in the League.
Wells' (2010 update: it was late when I typed this) Verne's Nemo had a family whom he loved that was killed by the British during one or another of their imperialist operations. That murder is presented by Wells Verne as one of the prime motivators for all of Nemo’s actions and hatred of the British. Moore has restored Nemo’s family, but he has broken it. He has estranged Nemo and his wife, going so far as to exile the wife and children to compound outside of Lincoln island. He has made it very clear that the wife is rebuffed for failing to produce a male child. He has intimated through the story that Nemo has pursued no other sexual outlet in all this time. So while just about all of the other major and secondary characters in the LoEG are “having relations” (I don’t want to cuss on somebody else’s site) with humans and other creatures, and are exploring emotional relationships mono and poly, the main brown person in the League - nay, the *only* brown person in the League - is denied a range of sexual expression by Moore. He denies him companionship. He denies him love. He denies him a necessary element of humanity (as defined by Moore). But he keeps the hate.
There’s Quartermain, also. I thought I could summarize this, but this is the best I can do. Let’s just say that early on Quartermain was the biggest sign that something was wrong on the racial front in the League. You have to be familiar with Haggard’s work to understand why. The sensitive new age wuss that has been Quartermain throughout the LoEG is absolutely not Haggard’s take, even making allowances for aging. A new approach is fine because Moore is doing that with a lot of the characters, but when Quartermain is stripped of his essence, what you get is a blob of jelly. What’s wild is that Haggard’s Quartermain walked the line between xenophobic colonial imperialist of the Great White God In Africa variety and almost-progressive-for-its-time racial awareness/critique. While Haggard/Quartermain is not quite an example of what scholars call dual masking, a literary approach of white authors often seen in Faulkner, Adams and the like, he comes close. Moore could have, though Quartermain, busted out on poking at the Victorian attitudes toward race as he has done so abundantly with sex and gender. Instead, he avoided the entire topic by emasculating Quartermain and retreating from his source. (Which is why every time Ayesha is mentioned in the League it pisses me off.) In Moi opinion, Quartermain is the *only* character through which Moore could have easily done this. Once I finished the Dossier, I wondered if that could have also dovetailed into race/sex and set up whatever he has in mind for the Golli down the road.
Hyde. Okay I realize Hyde is not a brown person. But I’m bringing him up because it ties into the disingenuous messaging that’s been in this series all along. For all of the ! ooo look at the wild, transgressive, totally free and liberating ! sex in the League, it’s not, really. How often are Orlando’s gay male relationships/encounters explored as compared to her lesbian encounters? Do you remember the references to Quartermain not so much being into the gay thing with Orlando, even after all these years? Fanny and Mina have lots of flirty, sex-positive, even joyous lesbian encounters. But when gay male sexuality is presented center stage, it’s through Hyde, and it is violent, mean-spirited, and not at all fun. It is, in fact, Victorian. (On the other hand, at least Hyde didn’t go out like a punk.)
Why is that? Is he playing to the audience, you know, the legions of comic book boys who find lesbian stuff titillating? (For those who haven’t read the series, the lesbian stuff in the LoEG series is overwhelming in comparison to the gay male stuff.) What would Oscar think of that, I wonder? Crooked, since you think it’s important to use the success of work-X when discussing the failures of work-Y, perhaps you have a hypothesis explaining how the man who put his own money behind AARGH to fight government-sactioned gay bias so badly messed up with the gay messaging in the League? How could the man who created Dhalua and Telsa have blundered so with the glaring racial omissions in the League?
Perhaps what he pulled off well elsewhere has little to do with how he didn’t do so well this time out.
I focused only on the Golli because that’s my thing. But for all that’s nifty about the League, the other big missteps outside of racial issues has been the void around homosexuality and class issues. Arguably, the class issue should be a hefty presence considering the works and creators being used as springboard.
Back to the race stuff, the source materials and creators that Moore has heavily relied upon to pull off the League - to the point where this series *would not be possible* without the benefit of public domain - bleed with racist, xenophobic common-for-those-times attitudes. Attitudes as common as the gender and sex stuff he has chosen to engage, and without subtlety I might add. Moore has not been satirizing racial attitudes in the LEoG. He’s been playing them for straight or for the most part ignoring them. He has been doing this since the series started, and all of the benefit of the doubt/wait and see how it plays out/surely he will get to it won’t he that has been part of my experience reading this series from Day One collapsed when the Golli showed up late in the game and out of context. If he has been *trying* to satirize racial attitudes in the series, he has failed. Monumentally.
When combined with his agenda to “rescue” a racist construct that endures to this day, a construct loaded with cultural baggage Moore has chosen to avoid, adding the sex part is not going to work because it wasn’t set up. The sexual threat posed by black men (or the sexual ease of black women) is a foundation element of blackface and minstrelsy, of which the Golliwogg has been an enduring manifestation. Moore’s decision to ignore the coals while playing with the resulting fire is not something I need to witness. Just the bit he’s already done with the Golli’s intro is enough to alert me that no good will come of this.
Since we (okay *I*) have been told that one of the things he and O’Neill want to do with this character is to “save” and rehabilitate it, that speaks to a disappointing and rather shocking agenda when you look at the big picture landscape of Moore’s work on other issues in the series so far.
Thematically in the League so far, all indications are Moore cares and has thought a lot about sex and gender. His *approach* to the story so far lends evidence to an argument that he cares and has thought a lot about the sexual liberation of heterosexual white people, particularly white women of a certain level of economic comfort.
Nick, Moore has been toying with attitudes of gender and sexuality, from a 21st century perspective, throughout the entire series. His informed-by-modern-attitudes approach toward the 19th-century characters of Mina, Orlando, Fanny, Quartermain, everybody he’s decided to attach to Bond and the overall political critiques (particularly in the Dossier) makes that crystal clear. One must choose to be willfully blind to this truth in order to not see it. On the other hand, with this series one can be so caught up in trying to spot the references to other pop culture works that it’s easy to let the rest of it go right past you.
The blackface stereotype affects us across the diaspora, with no regard for country, or, as evidence shows, time. If you are unaware that Robertson didn’t officially stop using the Golli as its logo until 2001, or that “Black Pete” celebrations are rife throughout Europe in this modern era, or that minstrel- and blackface-inspired attacks are unleashed against prominent black American persons in the current time, or that the BBC didn’t end the Black & White Minstrel Show until the late 1970s, or that the very popular Papa Lazarou still shows up on the BBC to this day, you should probably work to educate yourself.
I still have no idea what’s up with the James Bond obsession, save an inkling that maybe it ties into the gender thing. I’ve only read a few of the Fleming novels, but the Bond of the books is not so nice toward women. The movie Bond is nicer in comparison. I admit to being curious if the Bond stuff will play out more in the future editions, if only because the punch line presented in the Dossier was not worth the two volumes building up to it.
For the record, just because I’m tired of answering this question… Deciding to walk away from the League does not mean banning all future Moore work from my reading list. I’m kicking just this one to the curb. If he comes up with something else down the road that sounds interesting, I’ll check it out. In general I like his work a lot. Just so happens that I don’t have a high tolerance level for obscenity, which is what Moore & O’Neill’s intent with the Golli is to me.
