On Becoming a Superhero
- By Ilan Stavans
How did I become a superhero?
As a child in Mexico City, I devoured comic strips of all types. At first they were American imports like Batman, Spiderman, and The Avengers. What I most liked about them was the dual identity, say between Clark Kent and his alter ego. Then I found the native counterparts, such as Kalimán, superheroes autochthonous to Latin American. It was then, I realized, that I’d found my passion. What I liked about these was their dedication to put order in a world like mine, which seemed defined by chaos.
From comic strips I graduated to detective novels. I loved the armchair type: educated, unapologetically snobbish. Again, I looked for aboriginal examples. I found them in Borges, and in his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares’ private eye H. Bustos Domecq, and in the novel Ensayo de un crimen by Rodolfo Usigli, which I discovered through a movie adaptation by Luis Buñuel.
These rendezvous, I know, weren’t atypical. Yet it was my chance encounter, decades later, with graphic novelist Steve Sheinkin, creator of the Rabbi Harvey series, which actually turned me into a superhero, or at least into a cartoon. Deciding to try our hand in a graphic novel, Sheinkin suggested I—that is, Professor Ilan Stavans—become the novel’s detective, hot on the trail of a precious manuscript dating back to the sixteenth century.
The collaboration became El Iluminado (Basic, 2012). Set in part in present-day Santa Fe, New Mexico, it delves into a topic that fascinates me: the secret life of crypto-Jews, who, in order to escape the mighty fist of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, pretended to others to be Christians. Specifically, the novel harks back into the past, rotating around the historical character of Luis de Carvajal the Younger, who was burnt at the stake in an auto-da-fé that took place in Mexico City in 1596.
Professor Ilan Stavans, with the help of a female acquaintance called Irina, explores the mystery of Carvajal’s legacy and the founding of Santa Fe by crypto-Jews persecuted by the Christian establishment.
Since the release of El Iluminado, readers have sent me hundreds of emails applauding Professor Stavans’ adventures and asking me about my relationship to—or possible identification with—the persona of the protagonist. They are also curious about the transformation that I went through to turn myself into a comic-strip superhero, and about the fight the hero engages in against his nemesis, Professor Contreras. Plus they are eager to find out if Professor Stavans will be solving another case soon.
My answer comes with a smile. I’m not sure a scholar-turned-sleuth is a full-fledged superhero. But I take the compliment: at work in El Iluminado is the use of the human intellect as a tool to solve problems. If that’s a superhuman quality these days, I’ll take it. Perhaps more curious are the projections readers make of the cartoon of me as an extension of myself. Yet what else is social interaction if not a game of misinterpretation?
As I look back at the creative process, I’m struck by a synergy with Sheinkin. In routine conversations, it became imperative to distinguish between the protagonist and me as co-author. Sheinkin devised a strategy whereby “You” was me and “Ilan” was the character. I didn't think much about the duality until recently, when, during an event on El Iluminado, a member of the audience asked me if it was challenging to think of myself in the third person.
In my response, I said that shortly before his death, Luis de Carvajal the Younger wrote an autobiographical essay in which he detailed his odyssey from secrecy to confession, and did it by creating a new persona, that of Joseph Lumbroso, and by referring to it in the third person. Inadvertently, Sheinkin had invited me to do exactly the same. The effect was a “Borges and I” paradigm. It enabled me to meditate on the gap that separates the private and public selves that define me, and to acknowledge that the relationship between these two is at times tyrannical.
Is that what Clark Kent and Superman experience? And Kalimán? The comic strips I read when I was young never explored the tension between the two selves; in truth, I don't explore it in El Iluminado either. Maybe it’s because that’s too much for a superhero to tackle: the whirlwind confusion of identity. If they don’t, i.e., if they keep their identities secret, they—and I (a.k.a. Ilan)—can solve a case or two.
By the way, Sheinkin and I are at work in the next installment in the series, in which Professor Stavans enters into debate with “Shakespeare deniers” while looking into allegations that the Bard plagiarized Cervantes. Along the way, Ilan is also accused of academic theft…
