To call into question readers’ perception of reality through representa-tions, Watchmen uses a postmodern aesthetic style called pastiche, a style that pastes various facets together “without the satirical impulse” ( Jameson, “Post-modernism” 114). According to Fredric Jameson, pastiche is not a style to create meaning but to frustrate it (“Postmodernism” 114). Watchmen faith-fully applies the distinctive nature of pastiche to its verbal and visual narra-tive. The novel uses pastiche not only for the characters within the story of the text, but also for readers outside the text: the characters’ reality is con-structed by the combination of the facts that actually happen in the story and the fiction that a character, Ozymandias, plots; the novel also uses (fre-quently distorted) historical events and figures, targeting readers. Pastiche is used to make readers question the credibility of their interpretation of real-ity as well as of the text by blurring their distinction between the real and the fictional.
In Watchmen, historical people appear with references to real events, such as Nixon, Kennedy, Ford, the Vietnam war, and the cold war. How-ever, their historical conditions are partly distorted. The distorted events or historical fictions are set by fictional superhero characters: in Watchmen’s world, the United States won the Vietnam war thanks to Dr. Manhattan’s intervention, and thanks to that victory, President Nixon has been reap-pointed for five consecutive terms. Thanks to Comedian’s involvement, the
Watergate scandal was never publicized. However, although Watchmen sets a fictional historical background, the reality that the text depicts does not seem quite different from readers’ own: in reality, readers in the 1980s, when the text was published, were still under the threat of nuclear war in the cold war, just as in the text, despite different historical processes. It could thus be said that readers live in the same historical moment as the characters do.
However, such a similarity between the text and readers’ reality is not intended to comment on contemporary politics, but rather to show that real-ity is “the play of random stylistic allusion” ( Jameson, Postmodernism 18).
Appendixes attached in the end of each chapter except chapter 12 reconfirm that claim.
The appendixes consist of various types of documents that help read-ers undread-erstand the events and charactread-ers within the text.6As “an open invi-tation to readers to provide their own context for the story,” the appendixes are a means for the text to engage in dialogue with readers (Reynolds 109).
However, here, the dialogue is designed to obstruct readers’ reading and interpretation. The four or five colorless pages of appendixes, following twenty-eight colorful pages of the main plot, interrupt readers’ stable read-ing not only by causread-ing visual and narrative discontinuity but by disputread-ing readers’ perception of reality. In fact, for the appendixes dealing with the superhero characters, although they are equipped with clipboards and hand-written comments informing the sources of documents that pretend to be real, readers may not doubt its fictionality. However, a few appendixes that insidiously mix fact and fiction, with textual reality laid against the readers’
own, suggest the possibility that the reality that readers recognize as absolute is also constructed by the same sort of pastiche of fact and fiction.
The appendix to chapter 5, which contains information about the comic book, Tales of the Black Freighter, that appears in the text, shows how a real-ity can be created by the stylistic combination of fact and fiction. The appen-dix addresses Joe Orlando and Max Shea as the artist and the writer of the comic book. Joe Orlando is a famous artist in the real comics industry, and readers may have noticed that his name was listed in the acknowledgments section of the novel. To make readers believe in the existence of Tales of the Black Freighter, the appendix provides Orlando’s real picture and this infor-mation about its copyright: “the following is reprinted from chapter five of the Treasure Island Treasury of Comics (Flint Edition, New York, 1984) with permission of the author and publisher.” The document even presents the corporate logos of DC Comics and E. C. Comics, and mentions the
long-term competition of the two companies — again, a well-known fact in the real history of comic books. Nevertheless, Tales of the Black Freighter, which the appendix claims that DC Comics published, and Max Shea, mentioned as its writer, do not really exist. But it is not easy for readers to discern such fictional elements. Watchmen further confuses readers’ distinction between fact and fiction, their real world and the textual world.7
The appendix also says that in the 1950s, “E.C.’s line of Pirate titles”
dominated the marketplace, but that period, in reality, was the heyday of superhero comics (Sabin 44). The document ignores the history of super-hero comics and instead fabricates a strange and new history of comics: pirate stories. This fabricated history of comics is intentional, considering Rorschach’s comment: “Y’know superheroes are finished these days. It’s all pirates” (3:25). The age of superheroes has gone, but only its style, invok-ing nostalgia, remains. Watchmen, which mocks the style of superhero comic books, is a remnant of that history. The superheroes of Watchmen in the emp-tied style float in the “pastiched depthlessness” of the empemp-tied style like the marooned pirate of Tales of the Black Freighter (Hutcheon 17). Such an inse-cure condition for the superheroes reflects Watchmen’s postmodern under-standing of reality.
Ozymandias is aware of how reality is constructed, and he thus attempts to make one in which (super)heroes could return their glorious past. Ozy-mandias employs scientists to manufacture atomic bombs and hires science fiction writers to create the scenario that can make his bombing the alien attack. As soon as his nuclear attacks occur, the media quickly make the alien invasion a fact, and the world ostensibly cooperates against the fictional aliens: Ozymandias hopes that the attack destroys the existing order of the cold war world, thus giving rise to a new order. However, his attempt sim-ply changes the object of the fear from the enemy countries to the aliens;
the world is still controlled by the threat of destruction. After the bombing, when Ozymandias asks Dr. Manhattan if he “did the right thing ... in the end,” Dr. Manhattan retorts, “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends”
(12:27). Dr. Manhattan means that the order that Ozymandias wishes can-not be realized. For Ozymandias, who admires past heroes, such as Alexan-der the Great and Ramses II, the orAlexan-der that he wishes to achieve would revive the heroic age when (super)heroes could protect certain values and mean-ing. But as Dr. Manhattan points out, “nothing ever ends,” and thus no value, no meaning, is fixed and universal. (Super)heroes lose what they should protect, and their raison d’etre is forfeited.
Superheroes of comic books can be considered a zeitgeist in that they represent the imaginary and stereotypical ideal in a certain historical period.
They serve for the good and punish the evil, reflecting the ethical and polit-ical values of an age. However, the superheroes of Watchmen are not sure what is good and what value they should protect. Instead, the novel reasserts through the superheroes’ confusion that values are not fixed but contingent, not universal but ideological. Therefore, the superheroes’ nostalgia for the past, or for the fixed and universal values, is an ideological fantasy. The per-fume Nostalgia, which Ozymandias sells, embodies people’s nostalgia for an age where universal values and absolute meaning were possible. The per-fume frequently appears throughout the text not only to reinforce super-heroes’ nostalgia, but also to touch off readers’ nostalgia. The consumers of the perfume cooperate in Ozymandias’s project to revive the glorious past by helping him financially and emotionally, and readers also share the talgia by consuming the novel in which superheroes try to re-present the nos-talgia. Watchmen, however, shows readers that nostalgia does not result in the return of the past, and thus their efforts to find value and meaning from their reading might be meaningless. The text makes readers see their reality through the world of Watchmen. But that does not mean that they can inter-pret the reality through the text; rather, they come to know that “the ‘true’
world is merely added by a lie,” as Ozymandias shows (Taylor 29–30). As long as reality is a pastiche of fact and fiction and thus is without a distinc-tion between true and false, no interpretadistinc-tion can be meaningful. The read-ers’ desire to interpret the text and reality is a kind of nostalgia, which is a fantasy. Watchmen invalidates nostalgia itself by destroying the linear con-cept of time.