Spatial Inversions

Just a quick post to open up another topic of discussion: How does Moore use notions of space to achieve targeted effects in his texts? Here I am not thinking of the spaces between panels - unique to the comic book medium - that Scott McCloud describes as "gutters", where "in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and tranforms them into a single idea" (66 Understanding Comics). Although this is an integral part of Moore's work (e.g. Dr. Manhattan existing in a space/time continuum), I am thinking in particular of the way Moore inverts foreign physical presences in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in order to unsettle commonplace imaginative conceptions of 19th C. London.

Perhaps the most powerful character that Moore mobilizes in this respect is the enigmatic Captain Nemo, taken from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Nemo's name itself reveals his chief attribute: rootlessness. Translated into Latin, Nemo is "no man", or "no-body". An individual with elusive motivations, aside from an interest in generating scientific knowlegdge and the nebulous desire to deliver some form of comeuppance to civilized society, Nemo's primary defining trait is his freedom from governmental control. Thus, Moore's decision to include him as one of his titular League members is quite telling. By working under the auspices of the British secret service, Moore's Nemo is a frank inversion of the character that Verne gave the world. Rather than exisiting in the interstitial space of the ocean, Nemo - the nomadic, autonomous rogue of empire - becomes a force for the maintainance of British authority and power. It is for this reason that I think the Nemo of League strikes such a self-loathing posture. He practically seethes at having to pretend to be a coolie during one scene in Vol. I. I read Moore's Nemo as a representation of the coercionary force of the law. Eventually even the "no man" can be brought to heel and subordinated to the law. By bringing the "other" into the realm of the British secret service, clear and precise notions of 'Britishness' itself are problematized. It calls to mind the famous FDR quote about the leader of Nicaragua: "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch". Such naked real politik would certainly interest an author like Moore who would see in the figure of Nemo a brilliant opening to recode him as a potent "node of intelligibility" for his readership.

In contradistinction to Nemo, I take the character of Allan Quartermain as another of Moore's spatial inversions. The hero of imperial Britain is initially found in a foreign opium den, a mere vestige of the literary figure's former glory. This, it seems to me, is another potent example of the manner in which Moore destabilizes notions of imperial space: if Nemo has been brought into the fold, Quartermain has to rehabilitated and re-inserted into the quasi-legal frame of the League. Rather than Quartermain operating as a cautionary tale, I see his presence in the series as a comment on the fulfillment of imperial desire. His is the figure of the glutton, the imperial hero who has satiated himself on the spoils of ill-gotten wealth to the point of human wreckage. Quartermain's vice - opium - has a redolent and almost overburdened associative connection to Britain's part in the opium trade of the 19th C. One can almost sense the way in which a contemporary crooked DEA figure lurks beneath his Victorian patina. With Quartermain the self has become the other. Not only does he occupy a physical space far beyond the bounds of Britain, but his drug-addled desires are those that were thought properly to exist beyond Britain's shores, the exclusive purview of the hedonistic East. It is, instead, the figure of Nemo who exercises restraint and to whom we look for strength of character.

What are some of the other ways that Moore uses space in his texts? How do notions of spatiality allow him to achieve a critical stance on the subject of the law? Are there any other examples you can think of where he effects a self/other inversion along the contours that I have described above? I will elaborate on these themes in later posts, as I am also interested in the Limehouse section of Vol.I, where the Chinese threat is found to be lurking in a subterranean (subconscious?) section of London.