SOURCE: Rollin, Lucy. “Guilt and the Unconscious in Arkham Asylum.” Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies 1, no. 1 (February 1994): 2-13.

[In the following essay, Rollin argues that Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum is a powerful work that has both puzzled and fascinated readers due to its intense, surrealistic exploration of the subconscious.]

One does not need to be an avid reader and collector of comic books to be aware of the remarkable transformations comic art has undergone in recent years. Once aimed at children and young adults, comic books were chiefly action tales told in serial pictures, printed on pulp paper and full of advertisements. Now, the comic market includes longer and more complex tales aimed at an adult readership. Printed on high-quality paper and free of advertisements, these books have been designated “graphic novels” to distinguish them from more traditional comic books, and their contents are certainly worthy of the term comic art. Their authors use narrative techniques more akin to Robert Coover (out of James Joyce) than to Louis L'Amour, and stunningly versatile artwork which borrows equally from the traditions of Breughel, Turner, and Steve Ditko.

As M. Thomas Inge has pointed out. such transformations parallel those in social consciousness over the last fifty years, as Americans have moved from what seemed a relatively simple society to one marked by pluralism and confusion in almost every area.¹ The fragmented narratives of recent graphic novels such as Watchmen attest to, and seem to replicate, the fragmentation of our culture.

Inge notes that the creators of such comics are “free as never before to address some of the philosophical, social, and political issues that are at the heart of all great literature.”² He also says that one graphic novel has remained puzzling to its readers: Morrison and McKean's 1989 Batman tale Arkham Asylum.³ This essay proposes that the power of Arkham Asylum lies not in philosophical, social, or political speculations, as have its predecessors in the genre, but in an intense exploration of the unconscious. This interpretation may partially explain the puzzlement and controversy which have accompanied it, since it bypasses the externals and goes directly to the human psyche—never a comfortable place to be. As earlier graphic novels face and replicate the fragmentation of our culture, Arkham Asylum faces and replicates the ambivalent human mind and heart, precariously balanced between sanity and madness.

Dave McKean's artwork for Arkham Asylum evokes the unconscious more fully than could any novel of words alone, not only underscoring and interpreting this tale of guilt and madness but expanding it symbolically until it becomes an experience of the unconscious instead of a depiction of it. For example, the color used throughout the book is extraordinarily intense. Black and white pictures occur at moments with exterior focus—moments of evident sanity and truth, such as Batman's conversation with the Commissioner near the beginning of the book. But the chief colors throughout, announced by the endpapers as they draw us in, are black and red, colors appropriate to this tale of interiors, darkness, bats, and blood. Other colors are used for their shock effect, such as the Joker's intensely green hair and nails and the vivid blue of the electrified darkness at the heart of the asylum. A rich brown marks the title and concluding pages, as if to anchor the tale, as its subtitle says, “in a serious house on serious earth.”

Julia Kristeva has suggested that color in visual art is the element that speaks most directly to the unconscious, to that which we cannot name in language: “color … escapes censorship; and the unconscious irrupts into a culturally coded pictorial distribution.”⁴ Though the usual comic art codes are clearly operating here, the overall use of color certainly suggests such an “irruption.” Moreover, some psychologists have determined that it is not hue or shade which most communicates emotions, but saturation—the relative intensity of color which “manifests itself most powerfully in the analysis of the relations between connotations and perceptions.”⁵ One has only to page through Arkham Asylum to experience the remarkable saturation of color throughout the book. Even the quality of the paper allows for an intensity of color more associated with gift books or “coffee-table books” than with comic art, and since the white space in this book is limited to occasional thin white lines between pictures, the overall effect is emotionally unrelenting.

McKean's use of collage further replicates the unconscious. Alternating with such drawing as we might expect in comic art are moments of photographic realism, close-ups of fabrics and objects, writing, vague suggestions of shadowy figures, and even “quotations” from other artists such as Turner. Such fragmentation visually reproduces the jumble of memory, sensory experience, language, image, and fantasy that characterizes our dreams, allowing a glimpse into the unconscious. There is also often a figure-ground arrangement: the pictures which move the narrative forward are imposed on backgrounds which appear to be fabrics, torn paper, diagrams, clocks, blood, and the shadow of Batman himself. The entire book gives the impression of dense layers of meaning, symbol on symbol, most of which we can never consciously explain but which nevertheless communicate and disturb—as do our dreams.

The order and shape of the pictures also contribute to the phantasmagorical quality of the book and create an image of the unconscious, as the narrative focuses alternately on Batman and on the founder of the asylum, Amadeus Arkham. The pictures in the Batman sections of the narrative tend overall to observe the standard comic book format: rectangles clearly delineated from each other, six or eight to a page, to be read from left to right, line by line of pictures. Alternating with these moments, in which we can be fairly certain the narrative is proceeding ahead in the present time, are the Arkham segments, taken from Arkham's journals from 1920 and 1921. These pictures tend to be narrow vertical rectangles separated from each other on varying backgrounds, sometimes moving unevenly across the page, making the reader feel uncertain about the order of the narrative at times. As the tale describes Arkham's mushroom-induced vision and as Batman moves into the heart of the asylum, the pictures become more randomly placed, the lines separating them crooked, incomplete, overlapping, the pictures themselves showing many shadowy shapes punctuated occasionally by startling, detailed images. At the moment when Arkham and Batman simultaneously kill the “dragon,” the pictures stretch completely across the page horizontally, creating a sense of fluidity that occurs nowhere else in the book and which blends the figures of Arkham and Batman for the reader visually as words alone could not.

In addition to this visual evocation of the unconscious, the plot of Arkham Asylum invites a more specific psychoanalytic interpretation, partly, of course, because it is set in a mental hospital and makes frequent references to psychotherapy. Arkham was a psychiatrist, and says that he met Jung in Switzerland in 1920. When Batman comments that psychiatry has destroyed an inmate's personality, Dr. Ruth Adams, a therapist in the asylum, says that psychiatry must “pull down in order to rebuild … psychiatry's like that.”

More importantly, the character of the Joker assumes an especially psychoanalytic function. On April Fools' Day, he telephones the Commissioner and insists that Batman come to the asylum; the inmates have taken over and want Batman as their hostage. When Batman arrives, he finds the Joker in charge as his usual abrasive and wise-cracking self, his clown-white face often thrust toward Batman or the reader in deliberate attempts to shock. Further, McKean uses the usual speech balloons for most of the characters in this novel, but the Joker's dialogue appears only in red scrawls, uncontained, uneven, its appearance suggesting what we might expect of the Joker: aggression, freedom from the usual restraints of ego and superego, extreme abrasiveness—in Freudian terms, the id. However, as the narrative proceeds, the Joker's function becomes more complex. By urging Batman into the dark places of the building and thus into the dark places of his mind, he becomes his psychiatrist, at one point even giving him a Rorschach test. Moreover, from his first appearance he takes on a feminine role, greeting Batman with “Aren't I just good enough to eat?,” calling him “honey pie,” and goosing him. His red mouth and long nails also suggest the feminine, and in one of the final pictures of him, he is wearing high heels. This particular brand of clowning is not especially new for the Joker, but its significance is intensified in the psychiatric setting of this book. In psychoanalytic terms, the Joker is encouraging the transference that must take place for a successful psychoanalysis: he assumes the role of a woman to help Batman reenact his feelings toward his mother and her death. Batman's journey into his unconscious is facilitated by the Joker, making him a kind of perverse healer, a Dantean guide into the underworld of the asylum and of Batman's mind.

What emerges on this interior journey is Batman's guilt over his mother's death. Of course, this guilt is not a new theme in Batman tales. Batman's painful memory of the violent death of his parents helps establish his humanity—the quality that makes him unique among comic book superheroes—and appears frequently though not centrally in other Batman stories. But set in an asylum peopled with the criminally insane, where guilt is problematic at best, and set against Arkham's confused memories of his own mother and her death (we learn eventually that Arkham murdered his mother). Batman's recurring guilty feelings become the nucleus of this tale.

The visual and verbal complexity of this book makes any single interpretation, psychoanalytic or otherwise, difficult. Other psychoanalytic interpretations might draw on Jung's archetypes, Lacan's mirrors, Winnicott's holding, or Kohut's notions of the self, all of which would illuminate the book in particular ways. But the centrality of guilt and its association with the mother in Arkham Asylum invites a psychoanalytic approach that focuses on these elements, and one particular analytic theorist provides that approach. While Freud acknowledged guilt as the source of neurosis, analyst Melanie Klein, in her work in England between 1920 and 1955, placed guilt at the very center of the human psyche, making it the fulcrum which determined sanity and psychosis. An interpretation based on Kleinian theory has, therefore, special significance here.

Two basic elements of Kleinian thought are particularly germane to this novel. First is the importance of the mother. Unlike Freud, who emphasized the father as the formative figure in a child's life, Klein believed that the central relationship in human life was that between mother and child. The mother, or mother-figure, is the object of all the infant's love and aggression—conflicting feelings that are present from the first, according to Klein, and against which the infant learns to defend itself. Second is her notion of how the infant copes with its conflicting feelings. The frustrations of early infancy cause the infant, in self-protection, to split off the bad from the good, in both itself and the mother-figure, and to project all its aggression outward onto what it has fantasied as the bad mother. Klein called this the paranoid-schizoid position. As the infant's ego develops, however, it begins to perceive a whole mother, not a split-off part, and feels guilt for its aggression, trying then to repair its fantasied destruction of the bad mother. Klein called this the depressive position, believing it a major achievement in human development, for it allows us to learn to love and trust.

Some people, for whatever reasons, cannot achieve a genuine sense of guilt and never work through the depressive position. Their egos, Klein said, regress to the paranoid-schizoid position, the guilty feelings become aggressive and destructive, and they are likely to become psychotic. In Klein's view, though, most of us oscillate between these two positions, to some degree, throughout our psychic lives, returning again and again to the depressive position to make reparation for our fantasied early aggressions.

In Arkham Asylum, the Joker's evident amorality and complete freedom from guilt contrast with the deep guilt of Batman and of his alter ego here, Amadeus Arkham, founder of the asylum. The narrative alternates Batman's visit to the asylum, happening in the present, with excerpts from Arkham's journal of 1920 and 1921, shifting back and forth between the two narratives until they momentarily merge at the climax of the tale. What unites the two men is their guilt about their mothers' deaths. Arkham's widowed mother is established as clearly insane in the opening pages of the novel; after her apparent suicide and after Arkham has become a psychiatrist working with the criminally insane, he returns to the house in 1920 and opens it as a hospital for such people. Soon thereafter, his wife and daughter are horribly murdered by a patient he has treated. He controls his rage for a time, and continues to treat this man, but one day, murders him on the electroshock couch. “I feel nothing,” he says. Eventually, after becoming more isolated in the house, he ingests the amanita mushroom and experiences a vision: he faces and kills his “dragon,” crying out “Mother!” and realizing in that moment that it was he who murdered his mother, when she begged him to protect her from her terrible fears of a huge bat. Kleinian theory would suggest that—perhaps because his mother's insanity prevented a normal relationship with her, perhaps because of genetic disposition—he could not work through his depressive position. Instead of making reparation, he took revenge, his unresolved guilt eventually resulting in complete psychosis; he hears voices, sees visions, and retreats into an obsessive-compulsive state in which ritual and symbol are his only protection from the evil he sees around him, but which is really inside him. He spends his last days scratching a binding spell on the floor of his prison cell.

Alternating with this narrative, we see Batman reacting to Arkham's tale and using it to confront his own guilt. At the Joker's urging, Dr. Ruth Adams begins the process with a word-association test, the opening word of which is “mother,” thus encouraging Batman to recall the circumstances of his mother's death. The next portion of the novel—the journey into the depths of the asylum and into Batman's unconscious—is partly organized around just such word associations, as the Joker's words and those of other inhabitants of the asylum trigger Batman's memories and guilt. As the Joker orders him to “Run!” into the bowels of the asylum, he remembers running terrified from the movie Bambi, a film famous for its depiction of a murdered mother (though a subsequent picture indicates that the movie was Zorro—suggesting that like Arkham's, Batman's memory is factually confused but psychologically accurate). His parents followed, angry, his mother telling him she would leave him “right here” unless he behaved. At this moment, his parents were senselessly murdered on the street, leaving the boy orphaned. The pain of this memory causes Batman to stab himself in the hand, saying “Mommy?” He runs further into the asylum, encountering inmates who become projections of his own psyche, especially of his isolation and his obsession with power. One of these characters comments, “Arkham is a looking glass, and we are you.” Arkham's journal entries then become a kind of voice-over, as in a secret room deep in the asylum Batman encounters his own “dragon” and slays it, joining in Arkham's cry of “Mother!” At this moment, Batman and Arkham are one.

But unlike Arkham, Batman apparently does not become psychotic. Instead, he acknowledges his guilt simply, and takes on the duties of reparation. In answer to the mad Doctor Cavendish's accusation that he is the terrible bat-spirit that haunts the asylum, responsible for the deaths of Arkham and Arkham's mother, Batman says hesitantly, “I'm just a man.” Though his guilt is enormous, the sense that he was responsible for his mother's death a painful and omnipresent burden, Batman has moved outside himself to make reparation, using his guilt to help others overcome evil. In this novel he makes specific reparation, after this dramatic encounter with his guilt, by destroying the secret room and freeing the inmates. He also offers to stay with them, if he loses the toss of a coin. But he wins the toss and goes free, still carrying his burden. We have the sense that Batman will have to return again and again to his depressive position, symbolized here by the asylum, to make reparation again and again, not only by conquering a continuing series of comic book villains, but by facing his own rage and aggression. For unlike Arkham, Batman seems to realize the blurred line between reparation and revenge, wondering which he is engaged in at times, always aware that his actions might be the signs of madness—a theme developed early on in Batman comics and explored more fully in the 1986 graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and in the subsequent Tim Burton films. Batman shares this uncertainty with Superman and the Green Lantern, and with other superheroes who have acknowledged their weaknesses and wondered about their reliance on disguise and violence to achieve their ends.

But in the character of Batman, a superhero without superpowers, this awareness is especially poignant and Christlike, a similarity Morrison and McKean underscore. The religious aspects of guilt are acknowledged directly and symbolically in Arkham Asylum. One of the opening pages calls the tale “the passion play, as it is played today,” and at the moment when Batman says, “I'm just a man,” an image of Christ appears beside him. Images of the floor plan of a cathedral appear often, and at the moment of the dragon-slaying, Arkham—and Batman—compare themselves to Parsifal and to “Christ on the cedar.” Even the blood-sodden wedding dress of Arkham's mother, which he in his madness wears and which later the insane Dr. Cavendish seems to be wearing in his imagined role of purifier, looks more like a bishop's robe than a bridal gown. All of this suggests the themes of guilt and atonement which permeate Christian thought just as they do this novel. But Christian guilt was atoned for on the cross, and believers can be washed clean forever. Arkham Asylum is the passion play “as it is played today,” when the cause of guilt takes other forms: Freudian id, Jungian shadow, Kleinian aggression. Since, psychoanalytically speaking, these are perpetually present, they require repeated atonement, just as Batman must continue his vigilance and his struggle with himself. The Joker's closing words, as Batman leaves the asylum, evoke the original, religious meaning of asylum, a place of refuge: “Just don't forget,” he says, “if it ever gets too tough, there's always a place for you here.”

One of the most useful elements in Klein's work is her assumption that psychological time is not linear. Where Freud examined the present moment of neurosis and reconstructed the past from it, Klein believed that infantile notions of time govern the unconscious and make the past a “perpetual present.” Such infantile time “would seem to be nearer to spatial relationships: here, there; come, gone; horizontal, punctuated duration rather than an historical, vertical temporal perspective.”⁶ The entire arrangement of Arkham Asylum, both its plot and illustrations, offer the reader this sense of spatial time; Batman's experience of his mother's death is perpetually present in his unconscious, just as Arkham's was. Batman experiences Arkham's past as he reads it just as he experiences his own. He slays his dragon at the same moment—in psychological time—that Arkham slays his. The intensity and ambiguity of this moment are represented by the ambiguity of the fluid horizontal pictures, showing partial moments of Batman slaying a huge reptile but himself being stabbed through the body at the same time. Moreover, it is only in the next moments, evidently, that Batman first sees Arkham's journal, though it has been visually present to the reader from the opening pages of the novel. Thus the narrative takes on a circular quality, suggesting that Batman will relive Arkham's tale, again and again, as he projects his own rage and guilt on to the figure of Arkham. Though Arkham is physically dead, he has become perpetually present for Batman.

One of the problems with Klein's theory is its constant use of duality, a way of thinking that has come under critical scrutiny as oversimplified. Klein posits two basic “positions” in our psychological lives, which continue to dominate our relationships with others; Kleinian analysts speak constantly of “splitting.” And Klein focused, not on the Oedipal triangle, but the mother-child dyad. Yet what Kleinian theory seems to lose in intellectual complexity through this emphasis on the dual, it gains in emotional intensity. Certainly the mother-child relationship dominates most people's early lives, and using it to drive a narrative is an almost infallible way to involve the reader, both consciously and unconsciously. Morrison and McKean underscore the importance of the mother to this tale with their epilogue, a quotation from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: “Is it not a Mother's gentle hand that withdraws your curtains, and a Mother's sweet voice that summons you to rise? To rise and forget, in the bright sunlight, the ugly dreams that frightened you so when all was dark.” In the light of all that has preceded, this is extremely ironic: it is the mother who has caused the ugly dreams, not released Arkham or Batman from them. Arkham is dead, but the dreams have not ended for Batman. The novel plays with duality in other ways as well: in the alternating narratives, in the Batman-Joker confrontation and in the Batman-Arkham identity, both encounters with Jungian shadows, and especially in the presence of the inmate criminal “Two-Face,” who was Harvey Dent. One side of his face having become horribly disfigured, Dent had become obsessed with duality and flipped a silver dollar to make all his decisions. Dr. Adams, the psychotherapist, has weaned him to a pack of tarot cards, so that he now has more choices. Yet at the end of the tale, the choice comes down to two: Batman stays or goes, and it is Two-Face's coin that makes the decision. Here too, complexity collapses like Dent's tarot deck in the face of the emotional simplicity and intensity of the dual.

The duality that characterizes Kleinian theory seems especially appropriate for interpreting almost any graphic novel or comic book, because these literary forms communicate simultaneously in words and pictures. Just as the unconscious mixes words and images in remarkably complex ways to pursue its concerns, the layering of words and images in comic art suggests that words alone cannot hold all meaning. But in Arkham Asylum especially, the pictures do not only add information; they are information, equal to the words. They do not only clarify; they deliberately multiply possible meanings, suggesting hidden significances, other paths to take, a truth always just out of reach. And our eyes must work through both media, balancing, sorting, accepting. Such reading may involve more layers of the conscious and unconscious than can words alone.

Freud's breakthrough was the recognition that the neurotic was an extension of the normal. Jung believed we must acknowledge our evil “shadow selves” before we can be whole. Klein's contribution, working as she did on the borderline between the physical and the psychological, was the recognition of the psychotic in the infantile, and hence in all our dreams, our fantasies, and our hidden obsessions. McKean and Morrison's Arkham Asylum explores the many forms this presence might take. Amadeus Arkham was insane. The Joker may be insane, though Dr. Adams says that he may represent some kind of “super-sanity … more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century.” What about Batman? The closing pages of the novel, a kind of “cast of characters” summary, place him, obsessed with criminals and disguise, among the inmates of the asylum: primus inter pares. With wry humor, McKean and Morrison place themselves there as well; their pictures and bios follow this list of the criminal inmates, inviting the reader to wonder if we do not all belong there, for we all dream, we all fantasize, we all obsess to some degree. As the character in the asylum tells Batman, Morrison and McKean seem to say to the reader: “Arkham is a looking glass, and we are you.”

It may be coincidental that Melanie Klein's work is best known in England and that Morrison and McKean both live in the United Kingdom. But all three have much to offer to readers on this side of the Atlantic as well. Just as Klein's work raises disturbing questions about mothers and about the associations among sanity, guilt, and madness, Arkham Asylum opens a window onto the unsettling world of the unconscious, raising those same questions, and not simplifying the answers. Since the days of EC Comics, comic books have always offered their readers a glimpse of their darker fantasies, but this novel depicts the guilt occasioned by our most elemental fantasies, as its strange, painterly beauty draws us into the dark world we share with all who feel guilty. It is a remarkable achievement.

Notes

1. M. Thomas Inge, “American Comic Books: A Brief History and State of the Art,” The World and I (July 1992): 560-577.

2. Inge, “American Comic Books,” 577.

3. Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, Arkham Asylum (New York: DC Comics, 1989).

4. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 220.

5. Benjamin Wright and Lee Rainwater, “The Meaning of Color,” Journal of General Psychology 67 (1962) as quoted in Perry Nodelman, Words about Pictures (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 66.

6. Juliet Mitchell, Introduction to The Selected Melanie Klein (London: Penguin, 1986), 26.