‘An altered view regarding the relationship between dreams and reality’: Magic, politics and the comics medium in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrow’s Providence

Alan Moore reports that through researching Providence he ‘became more fully acquainted with academic literary criticism’ and the extensive evidence of research throughout the series supports this claim. In this article, I argue that Providence uses the comics form to assert the value of humanities research, and of the arts more broadly, and to educate its audience in reading and research practices (some of which are more providential than others). My focus is on the relationships between imagination and the historical realities of readers; while the latter are not detailed at length, the discussion does map onto the real world of Brexit, the aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential election and austerity politics because Moore’s underlying premise is that it is possible to trace the origins of our contemporary moment through the societal anxieties encoded in Lovecraft’s fiction. The analysis combines key concepts from adaptation studies with the theoretical model of the comics system proposed by Thierry Groensteen; moreover, it both draws upon and extends Brian McHale’s work on metafiction to suggest ways of extending Groensteen’s model in order to better understand the way in which Providence uses the comics medium to put into practice his hopes concerning the world-altering potential of art and scholarship.

the magician his or her original shamanic powers and social import' (2010)is relatively well known, but Providence takes this a step further extending the overlapping fields of the artistic and the magical to include works of interpretation and research that are depicted as fundamental to the transmission of a cultural inheritance capable of bringing about change on a global scale. The research and reflections included in Black's commonplace book and the tentative forays into literary criticism revealed in his conversations with Lovecraft (whom he meets in Issue 8) are represented as indispensable for the development of the Lovecraftean mythos that will bring on the apocalypse. Underscoring the relevance of literary scholarship not just to the series but also to the potency accorded to fiction and art more generally, the renowned Lovecraft scholar, S. T. Joshi, is afforded a place as a witness to the apocalypse. Moore may be taking his cue from Lovecraft himself hereafter all, several tales include university professors as key actorsbut there is a richness to Joshi's narrative and meta-narrative functions here that is absent from Lovecraft's characterizations of Miskatonic staff. In the face of trans-dimensional beings, alien technologies and ontological uncertainties (Moore and Burrows 2017: 19-20, 29-31), Joshi's literary knowledge is accorded an explanatory force that leads Agent Brears to describe him as the 'last remaining scientist' (Moore and Burrows 2017: 31).
Joshi's very appearance in the story exemplifies the possibility of a self-reflexive criticism that fully immerses itself into its subject, whilst also reaching beyond the text to a wider reality. He becomes an actor in the narrative, but he also exercises a meta-narrative function bridging the gap between the diegesis and our world. Within the storyworld, Joshi demonstrates an embrace of the dialogic and an openness to alterity that allows him to develop with his circumstances -'I-I'm starting to assimilate this. New York already seems like an impossible Dunsany Fantasy' (Moore and Burrows 2017: 27, original emphasis). Yet, he also retains a higher-level awareness, able to perceive and question his position within a larger narrative: 'What place does this world have for FBI agents or literary scholars?' (Moore and Burrows 2017: 29, original emphasis While this line has added resonance in view of Donald Trump's decision to remove James Comey as Director of the FBI, Providence ultimately suggests that such agencies are poorly equipped to deal with the cultural forces responsible for the disfiguration of the political landscape.
Perlman takes a forensic interest in scholarly work, but as an agent of federal law enforcement/surveillance his role is to maintain the status quo and he ultimately shows little respect for material texts. The final four-panel page of the series mirrors the first page of Issue 1, but instead of the letter to Jonathan the manuscript consists of the pages from Black's commonplace book, and it is Perlman who tears them asunder, revealing the alien landscape of post-apocalyptic America. On one level, this is an act of censorship -Perlman destroys the journal on the grounds that it inspired Lovecraft's talesbut as a repetition of the opening scene it is also revealed as an act of despair.

Metacomics and adaptation
When contrasted with Promethea (Moore and Williams 2004), Moore's other sustained meditation (in comics form) on the relationship between writing and apocalypse, Providence and its precursors ('The Courtyard' and Neonomicon) appear very pessimistic. Promethea concentrates on an internal apocalypse that positively alters the self's comportment with the world, a change that is offered to all, but not imposed: It's not even like there aren't still wars and murders and rapes.
Everybody had the revelation, but not everybody understood it, or took any notice of it.
Though maybe enough people did. Things are changing. (Moore and Williams 2004: 17, original emphasis) Whereas the physical landscape in Promethea remains largely unaltered, the characters in Providence find the world that they inhabit transformed into something inimical and dreadful, an Subsequently, Brears suggests that perhaps the world has 'always been Yuggoth', the alien planet Lovecraft introduces in 'Whisperer in the Darkness' (Moore and Burrows 2017: 28, original emphasis), with Joshi developing this proposition further: 'And human reality has only ever been a fragile construct that we briefly imposed upon the fundamental chaos of existence' (Moore and Burrows 2017: 29, original emphasis). Taken together, these comments suggest not that the world depicted across Lovecraft's mythos is truer but that it is stronger, a view that likely reflects a sober appraisal of the resurgence in the present of xenophobic discourses descended from those encoded in Lovecraft's tales. But if the apocalypse in Providence feels like it has been imposed from without, the series also provides some of the intellectual resources required to resist such imposition. Through the use of metatextuality and adaptation, Providence structurally embodies the very intercourse between the fictional and the real that the narrative describes; moreover, the identification of approaches to texts that lack the potency required to counteract such oppressive impositions combined with Moore's broader views on the relationship between magic and politics can be used to outline more concrete modes of resistance than those suggested in Promethea.
As a number of scholars have noted, the comics medium encourages a metafictional response in readers and creators, thanks to elements such as its multimodality, linear and non-linear modes of relation, and the hand-drawn feel of images and/or letters (Atkinson 2010;Cook 2012Cook , 2017Joseph 2012). Moreover, Moore's prevalent use of self-referentiality has been noted by scholars (Di Liddo 2009; Kidder 2010) and its specific links to his views on magic and apocalypse are well established (Green 2011(Green , 2012(Green , 2013. In Providence, Moore and Burrows' use the comics medium to open a number of metatextual fissures throughout the presentation of the narrative. The most fundamental structural element that achieves this effect is the use of panelling to affect the comic's rhythm. As Groensteen (2013: 138) notes 'beat […] is closely dependent on […] the arrangement of panel frames' and 'when the layout is regular, so is the beat'. Moore's use of the four-panel horizontal grid thus establishes a simple rhythm that is regularlybut in most instances minimallyinterrupted by panels that are differently sized or that are orientated vertically rather than horizontally. Given that a regular layout 'possesses the ultimate virtue of handling the possibility of sudden and spectacular ruptures from the initially given norm' (Groensteen 2007: 97), it makes sense that panel variation in Providence often serves to cue metatextual effects. Thus, for example, the second page of each issue consists of a full-page panel, which encourages the readers to pause in their pursuit of the narrative and to contemplate the scene in which the action unfolds, an effect that both distances us from the story whilst drawing us into the storyworld itself, paradoxically interrupting the narrative flow by more fully immersing us in Burrows' visual representation of the scene. Elsewhere, variations in panelling are used to highlight transitions from one mode of reality to another. Thus, the first shift from horizontal to vertical panels corresponds with the point in the plot when Black first finds himself in the subterranean dreamworld (Moore and Burrows 2015b: 16-23). Unsurprisingly, when the series reaches its apocalyptic climax in Issue 12, during which the real world becomes thoroughly transfigured in accordance with Lovecraft's mythos, we find the regular structure interrupted on more occasions than in any other issue. 2 An increased number of larger panels (ranging from half-to full-page panels) interrupts the reading flow and draws attention to the apocalyptic events, including the appearance of the monstrous Azathoth and Shub-Niggurath (Moore and Burrows 2017: 18, 30). Similarly, the compressed grid on page 24, composed of eight rather than four panels, juxtapose close-ups of Brears giving birth to Cthulhu with the facial responses of those who are present for this event. Finally the use of vertical panels on pages 6 and 7 emphasizes the environmental transformation of the landscape. There are three equally sized panels spread across each page and, taken together, they suggest a single cityscape in which the panel borders maintain a regular beat that aligns with the moment-to-moment transitions between panels; however, in the movement across the page divide (i.e. in the gutter We may guess that in dreams, life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence in the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. While the apocalypse is described in terms of a shift from one ontological pole to another -'dreams and our world are two extremes of a bi-polar reality, that can flip from one state to the other' (Moore and Burrows 2017: 5) -images and plot elements from 'Beyond the Wall of Sleep' also feature in Issue 8, which expends considerable time charting Black's foray into the dreamlands, led by Randall Carver, an analogue for Lovecraft's Randolph Carter. Here, the flipping between these two poles is embedded within the page layout itself. Thus, the regular four-panel grid that runs across pages 4-7 juxtaposes two different worlds as the panels alternate between depicting Black and Carver having tea in Carver's house and showing them in diverse historical and fictional settings. In addition to juxtaposing different places, Moore also sets up three different rhythms in these pages, achieving the same effects as Groensteen (2013: 154) has identified in certain 'remarkable' pages from Watchmen (Moore and Gibbons 1986-87): the ternary rhythm of the strip, the binary rhythm of the A-B alternation, and the rhythm of the text, at once regular in that it sits atop two series of images with no interruptionand irregular, in view of the varying length of the lines of dialogue.
In fact, Providence takes this effect further than Watchmen, for while it is possible to describe this alternation in binary terms -A-B-A-B -where A is the 'real' world internal to the diegesis and B is the dreamworld, the internal inconsistencies of the dreamworld as depicted across these four pages yield the more complex pattern of A-B1-A-B2 (page 4), B3-A-B3-A (page 5), B4-A-B5-A (page 6) and B6-A-B7-A (page 8). This pattern continues across pages 8 and 9 (although here with a move to a layout of three vertical panels per page) and is only broken on page 10 when the return of the  (1987: 56) writes, 'to picture literature as a field or, better, a network whose nodes are the actual texts of literature'; Issue 12, however, alerts us to the presence of the imaginary at the heart of the 'actual'. Whereas, for example, Burrows' drawings of H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Burleson 1983) and Lovecraft at Last (Lovecraft and Conover 1975) are signifiers referring to physical objects that exist on the same material plane as the book in which these pictures are contained, the drawing of the commonplace book, depicted on Perlman's lap, only exists within the fictional world.
Within the covers of an individual comic book, album or issue, the associative logic of braiding supplements the 'syntagmatic logic of the sequence' such that 'through the bias of a telearthrology, images that the breakdown holds at a distance […] are suddenly revealed as communicating closely, in debt to one another' (Groensteen 2007: 158). What the above analysis suggests is that this tele-arthrology remains operative beyond the borders of the book, 3 closing the gap not only between literary texts but across the entire domain of culture, asserting the place of fiction as part of the frame through which we organize and interpret the multitude of lived experience. Providence is not unique in this respect, but in its plot and throughout its structure, the series draws serious attention to the interpenetration of the fictional and the non-fictional across the intertextual network. Moreover, by highlighting the way in which the imaginary and the real interact across this network, Providence reveals that intertextual space is not simply one means of generating a heterotopic effect, but rather that 'heterotopia' names the very condition, or precondition, of intertextuality itself.

From spectral reading to Peasants with Pens
As he heads towards the climax of Providence's apocalypse, Perlman reflects on the relationship between the dramatic transformation of the external landscape and the psychological changes that he perceives in himself: This feels more dreamlike all the time. There's that acceptance, like everything that's happening is somehow normal. recognize the extent to which the archival material that he consults relates to an ongoing revolutionary programme and erroneously views himself as beyond the socio-textual networks that he is researching. This leads to a trenchant use of dramatic irony in Issue 6 (Moore and Burrows 2015f: 1)here Black finally obtains access to Hali's Booke of the Wisdom of The Stars and fails to recognize himself in the proclamation that 'black is the messenger, and black is his path'.
Providence reasserts the cultural power embedded in fictional worlds and academic texts, extending Moore's views on the magic of writing into the field of scholarly practice at a time when the value of the arts and humanities is increasingly under attack (Preston 2015; Roussi 2017).
Further it asserts the cultural importance of the archive, at a time when libraries are under serious threat from austerity programmes that Moore continues to vocally oppose (Redigolo 2017). The narrative itself offers few suggestions for how to counteract the 'Innsmouth Tide' (Moore and Burrows 2017: 31, original emphasis); however, Moore gives us enough pointers to make the connections that allow us to read Providence both as a meditation on the relationship between text and context, and also as a critical commentary exposing the cultural undercurrents responsible for the current transformation of the geopolitical landscape. A product of extensive research, critical reading and self-reflexive artistic practice, Providence demands an active mode of spectral reading capable of meeting the demands of heterotopic space, an interpretative endeavour that not only traces but acts upon the nodes connecting the fictional and the real. In short, it encourages us to become better readers, better teachers and better makers.
Terry Eagleton has defined the task of the critic as 'to participate in… the cultural emancipation of the masses', although he notes that this 'describes the task [] in far more politically hopeful times than we're living through at present' (Eagleton and Beaumont 2009: 312).
Beyond interventions as a public intellectual, Eagleton lists activities such as 'the organization of writers' workshops and popular theatre, the business of public design and architecture and so on' as good critical practices. All of this sounds surprisingly like the work undertaken by the UK Arts Labs in the 1970s and perhaps it is no surprise that Moore has recently become involved in