Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Light of Thy Countenance by Alan Moore


What exactly is literature? I define it to be any work that elicits thought or emotion from the reader. Take Alan Moore’s Light of Thy Countenance for example. To some it may read as an overcomplicated comic with more illustrations than words. Moore wrote the story to make a point: that television has gone so far as to control the daily lives of people, regulating what they say and how they interact with others. The illustrations only help to emphasize that point. When I read the comic, I felt slightly troubled by how much technology has started to control my life and how it plays a part in defining who I am. That’s probably what Moore was going for: getting a response to his writing. It is true that the comic is not presented in the normal way of back-to-back pages of continuous words segregated by chapters. Still, it tells a story of sorts, of the history of television and its growing control of the minds and attentions of people. It has characters; Maureen Cooper, Carol Lively, and Television who serves as narrator. Most importantly, it makes us think. Why do authors even write novels in the first place? Leaving the money explanation aside, it is because they use their literary works to help put out their opinions on certain topics so that people can be exposed to them. Ray Bradbury most likely did not write Fahrenheit 451 so that parents could read it to their kids as bedtime stories; he wrote it in order to express his views on censorship, something he was against. The only real differences between Fahrenheit 451 and Light of Thy Countenance are that the comic is shorter and has more pictures, and these differences are not valid enough to separate Moore’s work from being in the distinguished category of “literature.”