THE READING RHEUM: THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1902)

I've probably read Doyle's HOUND two or three times just for pleasure, but not since starting this blog in 2007. I recall occasionally ascribing high mythicity to the novel in this or that essay, but I never analyzed the book, even though the story is one of the best-known in literature, making it something of a "popular myth." That, however, doesn't count in terms of my charting a narrative's epistemological patterns. I have reviewed at least four cinematic adaptations of HOUND on the movie-blog, and I've never discerned high mythicity even in the two best and most famous films, the 1939 Fox film and the 1959 Hammer outing. 

Having reread the book now with my myth-stalker's hat on, I find that Doyle was in no way subtle about his primary myth-theme. The author hints at that theme in the first chapter, when Holmes and Watson discuss the pedigree of their client Dr. Mortimer by consulting a medical directory (the Victorian version of the Internet). They find that the doctor has authored articles with titles like "Is Disease a Reversion?" and "Some Freaks of Atavism." This concern with the distant past plays into the case Mortimer had brought to Holmes. The doctor tells Holmes and Watson that he half-believes in the Baskerville curse, that may have killed the former baronet Charles and may yet take the life of the sole heir. Sir Henry.

I've mentioned in one film-review that there's never a possibility, in Holmes' modern London, that there exists a demon-hound that slew the Baskervilles' degenerate ancestor in the 17th century, or one that might take the life of Sir Henry. Holmes duly mocks the very idea, despite taking the case. In the end the existence of a demon-hound matters less than the fact that the world that bred such superstitions still endures. Thus the still-savage land of Dartmoor can cast a spell upon some Victorian men, as attested by Watson when, as Holmes' agent, he first views the wild moorland around Baskerville Hall:

MY DEAR HOLMES: My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.

The curse of the Baskervilles might not extend back to the days of prehistoric menhirs, but the event that brought about the supposed curse, in which a hot-blooded lord dedicated his soul to Satan for the sexual possession of an innocent maiden, remains no less remote from the experience of Victorian Londoners. 

And yet, England has its share of non-superstitious degeneracy. Selden, the murderer who haunts the moors, is directly compared to a caveman when Watson first sees him. Master plotter Stapleton, the one who arranged his uncle's death and tries to do the same with his cousin Henry, is called a "throwback" when Holmes descries how much a portrait of a 17th-century Baskerville resembles Stapleton. Stapleton's real name is the same as that of his father Rodger Baskerville, and no one knew of Stapleton's existence because he was born abroad, when his father left England under some cloud. In fact, a fair number of modern Britons have similar clouds. Stapleton and his wife Beryl get involved in some vague corruption long before the hound plot, and Laura Lyons, one of Stapleton's pawns, suffers from having made a bad marriage, though Doyle imputes all the wrongdoing to a no-good husband. If, as Mortimer believes, all disease really is a "reversion" to some less exalted state, that would include the disease of crime, which can be cured only by the relentless logic of a master detective.

While the cinema has its own ways of conveying mythicity, so far even the most faithful adaptations of HOUND known to me haven't been able to tune into Doyle's myth-theme. After finishing the novel, I re-watched the 1939 version again. Sure enough, the script only uses the prehistoric settings briefly and doesn't even show the villain meeting the harsh justice of a death in the Grimpen Mire. It's not impossible, though, that there's some HOUND-film I've not seen that taps into the deeper theme, and I look forward to finding it. 

ADDENDUM: I didn't originally apply the "clansgression" label to the 1902 novel, because Doyle downplays the fact that Stapleton is Sir Henry's cousin. And the author certainly does not pass comment on the fact that when Stapleton seeks to pimp out his wife by causing Sir Henry to fall for the glamorous Beryl, he's "sharing" her with a first cousin, even though (1) no sexual congress takes place, (2) Beryl does not become emotionally entwined with Henry as he does with her, and (3) Stapleton/Baskerville becomes jealous of the tete-a-tete even though no transgression has occurred. The novel ends with Stapleton's death and the assertion that Beryl knew nothing of the murder plot, implying that she'll be exonerated of complicity-- though Doyle also devotes little space to the cooling of Henry's passion for his cousin's wife.  

        

THE READING RHEUM: AYESHA, THE RETURN OF SHE (1904-05)

 

Roughly the same amount of time passed between this review and my 2008 review of Rider Haggard's masterpiece SHE (beginning here) as between the 1885 serialization of that novel and that of its sequel in 1904. I wll not, however, be devoting three separate posts to AYESHA as I did with SHE. While AYESHA also qualifies as a high-mythicity novel, the later book doesn't even come close to touching the hem of SHE's robe.

Eighteen years also passes between the climax of SHE-- wherein POV characters Horace Holly and his adoptive son Leo Vincey witness the immortal queen Ayesha when she re-immerses herself in the Flame of Life-- and the beginning of AYESHA. Haggard didn't have to wait that amount of time to write his story, but perhaps he felt he had to experience what his characters experienced: the sense of "time's winged chariot hurrying near." Still, it creates a mild continuity problem-- one that Haggard seems aware of-- in that once Ayesha is reincarnated in a new, living body, there's no strong reason she must wait a full eighteen years to summon her reincarnated lover Leo and his adoptive father. Haggard chalks the delay to vague metaphysical factors and moves on.   

In any case, Holly and Leo are summoned from England to Tibet, the new exotic locale where Ayesha hangs her veil. Almost certainly Haggard chose Tibet because of that culture's associations with reincarnation, a major theme of the first book. And Haggard did admirable homework in researching the physical perils the two Englishmen would face. as well as the often-dizzying complexities of Tibetan Buddhism. That said, what distinguished Haggard's African novels was his personal experience with African lands and tribes, and thus AYESHA lacks those touches of verisimilitude.

Ayesha's original body was destroyed at the end of SHE, but her magically endowed spirit has usurped the dying body of a Tibetan holy woman, and with that form she has become the queen of a new race of people, and she's once more seeking union with Leo. However, since the novel needs conflict, Ayesha's power is challenged by another female who also falls in love with Leo before he reaches Ayesha. This cosmic chick-fight was fresh when Haggard did it in SHE, and it worked because Leo fell in love with the tribal girl Ustane before he met Ayesha or knew of his archaic association with the immortal queen. Here, Leo is pursued by Atene, whose name alone indicates her non-Tibetan, "lost race" heritage-- but he's never interested in Atene. Thus Haggard chose to copy from himself and did so badly.

The strongest aspect of AYESHA is that Leo doesn't quite know how to take his beloved being in a new, older body, rather than in the dazzling female form he knew. He's still in love with her mind, so to speak, but he also desires her beauty. To compensate, Ayesha calls upon supernatural powers and essentially remolds herself into the image Leo loved. But at novel's end the transformation levies a price, not unlike the one paid by the mortal Semele when she demanded that Zeus reveal to her his ineffable glory. In addition, though Ayesha spouts a lot of Buddhist teachings and the unity of religions, her character remains the same as it was in the first novel: once she's united with her eternal love, she plans to use her great knowledge to conquer the world.  

There are a lot of good scenes in AYESHA, but they just don't add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, as was the case with SHE. The other two SHE novels are prequels, so SHE and AYESHA together constitute the entirety of the story of the Ayesha-Leo romance. And though Haggard would never put things this way, I can't help thinking that what the author committed to literature was the longest case of "male and female blue balls" in narrative history.         

THE READING RHEUM: THE SLEEPING SORCERESS (1972)

 

SLEEPING SORCERESS was the second of the Lancer paperbacks to spotlight novel-length adventures of Elric. It's not nearly as well-composed as the first novel and is more transparently a fix-up of separate stories. All the stories here are, like the tale "The Singing Citadel" in the collection of the same name, are prequels to 1962's "The Stealer of Souls," in that they all concern Elric's conflicts with his first major enemy, the sorcerer Theleb K'aarna. The stories written from the 1960s and 1970s set the foundation of Moorcock's multiverse, but as he himself has commented, he was often making up things as he went along.   

Book One of SORCERESS, entitled "The Torment of the Last Lord," is the source of the image of a sleeping enchantress whom, one presumes, the hero will rescue-- though in the whole of the book, this is only true up to a point. Elric and his sidekick Moonglum have just left behind Queen Yishana in "Citadel" in order to pursue Ka'arna, and they encounter a castle inhabited only by the sleeping body of Empress Myshella, an ally of the Powers of Law, just as Elric is aligned to the powers of Chaos. Myshella instantly reminds Elric of his lost love Cymoril, whom he tried to rescue but slew instead, but despite those bad memories, he finds a magical means to revive her. Myshella wakes up just as Theleb K'aarna, allied to an army of Mongol-like warriors, marches on the castle to eliminate its potential threat to Chaos. Myshella summons forces that destroy the horde but K'aarna escapes. Not surprisingly, Myshella is instantly drawn to the brooding albino, and she soon becomes the newest in Elric's "Bond Girl" collection.

Book Two, "To Snare the Pale Prince," is a needlessly confusing sequel to the story "To Rescue Tanelorn" from CITADEL.  "Tanelorn" seems to take place after Elric meets Rackhir the Red Archer in the 1972 ELRIC novel before the latter has visited the mystical city of Tanelorn, while in the short story Rackhir resides in the city and protects it from a Chaos-inspired invasion by an army of beggars from the corrupt realm Nadsokor. Elric is referenced in "Tanelorn" but he does not appear-- and yet, "Prince" tells readers that Elric has visited Tanelorn at some previous time, and thus the albino and his buddy become allies with Rackhir's forces as they defend themselves from a new invasion. This time K'aarna allies himself with Urish, King of Nadsokor, who also has a previous grudge against Elric. The two villains conspire to steal a magic ring from Elric, knowing that he and Moonglum will come to Nadsokor to retrieve it. The evildoers also unleash a new invading force upon Tanelorn, a gaggle of demons who look like women and who therefore prove difficult for Tanelorn's defenders to strike down. Elric summons a troop of male demons, described as "ape-like," who destroy the female creatures and then die as well. ("Beauty and the Beast," anyone?) Elric recovers his ring and there's a rather pointless exchange with the hero's demon patron Arioch. K'aarna gets away again but kills Myshella in the process. His next foray against Tanelorn transpires not much longer afterward.

Book Three, "Three Heroes with a Single Aim," takes place during a period when Rackhir has invited Elric and Moonglum to abide in Tanelorn. The peace of the eternal city does nothing to dispel Elric's anomie, so he rides out into the wilderness, possibly hoping to die. Instead, he stumbles across K'aarna utilizing a mystic device to transport alien reptiles from another cosmos in order to attack Tanelorn. When Elric seeks to destroy the device, it hurls him into another dimension, which is the hero's first real encounter with the Moorcockian multiverse. He meets both Prince Corum of the "Swords trilogy," conceived around the same time, and Erekose, a character whom Moorcock loosely formulated in 1957 and then updated for a stand-alone novel in 1962, and they all realize, in some vague metaphysical manner, that they're all aspects of the same "eternal champion." I wrote up my impressions of "Heroes" in a previous post and my re-reading now does not alter my verdict:

Trouble is, while such heroes are interesting individually, they're not quite as interesting when they meet each other.  In the 1972 "novel" THE SLEEPING SORCERESS-- actually a collection of three separate novellas featuring Moorcock's most popular character, Elric of Melnibone-- the albino-skinned protagonist encounters two other heroes. Both are, like Elric, aspects of the "Eternal Champion," a sort of archetype that remains constant in many multiversal domains.  One is "Prince Corum," who had his own series of adventures around the same time as Elric. The other calls himself "Erekose," though he's not entirely identical with the character from the one-shot 1970 novel THE ETERNAL CHAMPION. For one thing, the Erekose-warrior in this story is explicitly black-skinned. I have not recently reread ETERNAL CHAMPION, but as I recall no reference is made to the race of the original Erekose. I assume Moorcock was having a bit of fun playing around with the racial identities of his heroes in different incarnations.

The crossover-novel brings the three heroes together in the equally eternal city Tanelorn, where they battle the magic of an evil sorcerer. It's a decent enough story but loses some punch given that all three heroes sound and act pretty much the same. Further, this sequence of SLEEPING SORCERESS was originally derived from a similar section in the 1971 Corum novel THE KING OF THE SWORDS. Since they're pretty much the same story, I decided to count the Elric version as "best crossover," simply because it stands upon its own better as a crossover-tale.  Further, it's a good basic representation of Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" concept, though perhaps not its most complex manifestation.

After Elric helps the other two heroes overcome an adversary in the other dimension-- a singularly underwhelming threat-- Elric returns to his own world and uses magic derived from the other dimension to thwart K'aarna's plot. Again, K'aarna gets away, as he must to satisfy the continuity. But the threat of Myshella is arguably greater. She has to perish because, if she's allowed to survive, she might tempt the hero away from his dolorous quest to slay lots of sorcerers and monsters before he dies. In the final analysis, there is enough symbolic discourse in all three chapters to justify my saying that its mythicity is high. But SORCERESS is not even close to being as aesthetically pleasing as ELRIC OF MELNIBONE.    

          

THE READING RHEUM: THE SINGING CITADEL (1970)

 

I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Michael Moorcock's Elric saga, since I often find the results uneven. I may just finish up with SLEEPING SORCERESS and then conclude with STORMBRINGER, the collection of stories in which Moorcock killed off his hero-- thus engendering dozens of prequels and interstitial tales. After that, maybe I'll explore his other two serials of the 1960-70s, Corum and Dorian Hawkmoon.

SINGING CITADEL was a Berkely paperback edition of four stories Moorcock had previously published in British magazines, only one of which is an Elric story, while two others were brought into the "Elric universe." Instead of reviewing them in order of collection, I'll go with the order of publication.

TO RESCUE TANELORN (G)-- This story, published in 1962 (the year after Elric's debut), is tangentially connected with the albino hero, thanks to a brief mention of Elric's rumored adventures. I don't know if Moorcock contemplated bringing this story's hero, Rackhir the Red Archer, into the Elric-verse that early, since the two character would not meet until 1972's ELRIC OF MELNIBONE. In any case, "Tanelorn" is easily the best story in the collection. Rackhir is a "warrior-priest" who served the same Lords of Chaos seen in the Elric tales. However, he and many similar warriors became weary of fighting their Lords' pointless battles, and so retired to a vaguely mystical city, Tanelorn. A Chaos Lord takes offense at these defections and summons an army of mindless beggars to destroy the city. Rackhir consults an aged magician to learn to reach a group of entities, the Grey Lords, for help, and the two of them venture into several alternate dimensions in search of Tanelorn's salvation. The conclusion seems rushed, but "Tanelorn" serves to put forth one of the author's best sketches of his nihilistic universe.

THE GREATER CONQUEROR (F)-- Published in 1963, "Conqueror" takes place in the historical domain of Alexander the Great, shortly after he made his foray into India. However, in Moorcock's version, Alexander's reign is the center of a struggle between the opposed powers of Good and Evil, represented respectively by the Persian deities Ormuzd and Ahriman (who may be a big influence on the athor's conceptions of Law and Chaos), Alexander's mother Olympias, a worshipper of Ahriman, consecrated her son's body and soul to Evil, and in some vague way Alexander's path of conquest is supposed to aid Ahriman's mastery of the world. The possessed Alexander is not the story's eminent hero: rather, a skeptical mercenary, Simon of Byzantium, is drafted by the powers of Good to take out the Macedonian monarch. Simon is quickly converted to the reality of the Good-Evil struggle by his encounter with real demons, and yet the conflict proves underwhelming, even up to a final sword duel between the hero and the possessed ruler. The characters are all flatly conceived and "Conqueror" feels like a concept that might've been interesting in a full novel, something along the lines of the Haggard-Lang fantasy THE WORLD'S DESIRE.

MASTER OF CHAOS (P)-- According to this vital Moorcock site, this story was composed in 1964, shortly after Moorcock published the 1963-64 Elric tales that became the fix-up novel STORMBRINGER, the one in which Elric dies. The hero is a valiant knight, Earl Aubec, who seeks to extend the dominion of his queen/lover, only to find that he's encroached upon the terrain of Chaos, and he never returns. The aforementioned site includes the information that Moorcock considered doing a series of stories with Aubec, but when the proposed series didn't pan out, Moorcock may have channeled some of these ideas into another character. Aubec is name-checked in ELRIC OF MELNIBONE in that the hero acquires the knight's fabled sword. Most if not all Moorcock contains strong elements of irony, but "Chaos" comes closest to being purely ironic in tone.

THE SINGING CITADEL (F)-- This short tale appears to be the first of the "prequel stories," as well as being written to clarify events in "The Stealer of Souls," (reviewed here) an Elric tale published in 1962. In "Citadel," Queen Yishana hires Elric and his Melnibonean magic-mastery to investigate a mysterious citadel into which Yishana's knights have disappeared. However, Yishana sweetens the pot by sleeping with the hero, and this pisses off her former lover, the court wizard Theleb Ka'arna. Thus Elric has to deal with sorcerous assaults from both the wizard and the master of the citadel, a minor Chaos-Lord named Balo. The tale is just okay, with the best part coming at the end. Yishana tells Elric not to bother seeking vengeance on Ka'arna, that he should just remain in her domain as her consort. But Elric is hot to pursue the wizard, and it's evident that the hero's accumulated guilt and regrets make it impossible for him to "settle down," arguably contributing to his doom.

In my crossover-system, "Tanelorn" is a null-crossover for having name-checked Elric.                    

THE READING RHEUM: ELRIC OF MELNIBONE (1972)

 

Apparently Michael Moorcock so liked the title for his first Elric tale, one of novelette length, that he re-used it for the first full Elric novel, the first one written for the paperback market rather than for magazines. Later printings were re-dubbed ELRIC OF MELNIBONE to minimize confusion between the novel and the novelette. I'm reprinting the original Lancer paperback cover, partly because Charles Moll's illustration is the best of the pack, to say nothing of how Moll captures the surrealistic spirit of the 1970s.

My other reason for at least for referencing the original title here is that, though I will henceforth call the novel MELNIBONE for short, "Dreaming City" is much more appropriate for this prequel work than it was for the introductory novelette. From the first story, one barely gets a sense of what the city Melnibone is like, and how it influenced the formation of the doleful champion Elric. MELNIBONE was entirely devoted to providing a substantial background for Moorcock's increasingly popular hero.

As I mentioned in my review of Moorcock' s STEALER OF SOULS collection, the denizens of the decadent city Melnibone are humanoids, but despite having the same constitutions as humans, they're somehow distinct in terms of their origins. In the distant past, Melniboneans ruled a vast empire, and human beings were a young race kept under their dominion. But for whatever reasons, the empire has now contracted to one well-defended metropolis, Imryyr the Dreaming City. Moorcock never provides an explicit reason for the empire's decline, but he implies that the Melniboneans became preoccupied with abstruse aesthetic pursuits-- including the art of torture-- and so they lost their drive to conquest, much like decadent Rome.

As the novel opens, Elric is the hereditary emperor of his people, though he's set apart from them in having been born an albino. This means that in order to bolster his strength to normal levels he must take special drugs even to lift his sword. But with the drugs he's a good fighter, and it's not the color of his skin but the content of Elric's character that makes his people despise him. In short, Elric possesses a conscience, something most Melniboneans lack. He's capable of taking expedient actions, to be sure. When the city is threatened by spies from human armies planning an attack, the albino ruler does not have a problem allowing a court torturer to wring information from the captured agents.

However, Elric won't eliminate potential enemies gratuitously, and tolerates the disrespect of his cousin Yyrkoon, who clearly covets Elric's throne. Yyrkoon's sister Cymoril, the lover of Elric, advises him to do away with her brother, but noble Elric forfends. Possibly, because he was born so physically different from his people, Elric became alienated from their ways, though Moorcock doesn't say so. In any case, Yyrkoon rewards his cousin's generosity by trying to drown him at sea. For good measure, Yyrkoon mocks his sister's anger by telling her that once he sits the throne, he plans to revive the old custom of consanguineous marriages-- though there's no indication that Yyrkoon would do so out of real desire for anything but to further torment his sister.  

Only a beneficent sea-god allows the albino to return to Imryrr, where Elric condemns Yyrkoon to death. However, the villain escapes, taking his sister prisoner and using sorcery to conceal his whereabouts. Elric makes a devil's bargain with Arioch, Lord of Chaos, and thereby learns Yyrkoon's whereabouts. In the company of a faithful retainer, Elric journeys to the evildoer's sanctum, and finds that Yyrkoon has an almost impenetrable defensive weapon. Elric finally manages to liberate Cymoril-- though she's been drugged into a coma. 

Yyrkoon flees to another dimension, and once more Elric might put himself in debt to Arioch to follow his enemy. In the otherworld, Elric meets an exiled human warrior, Rackhir the Archer, and the two men team up. In a sacred cavern Elric catches up with his cousin, and they both behold two magical swords. The enemies each take one of the blades-- Elric taking one called Stormbringer, Yyrkoon possessing Mournblade-- and they fight. Elric wins, and Yyrkoon loses his sword, while Elric calls again upon his chaotic patron to get back to Imryrr, along with his new ally and his prisoner. However, instead of sentencing his captive to death, Elric seems to think that he's cowed Yyrkoon into submission, and he decides to depart Imryrr to explore the younger domains of the humans. Elric also decides to allow Yyrkoon to be his regent, which only makes sense in terms of solving a narrative problem for Moorcock, because he has to find some way of putting Yyrkoon into power again as he is in "The Dreaming City."

This dodgy conclusion, though, is MELNIBONE's only major flaw. Moorcock is not usually what I'd call a "poetic" writer. However, in his soaring descriptions of Imryrr and the doomed love of Elric and Cymoril, the author taps into a lyrical power I've rarely seen elsewhere in his other works, one that compares with the best "poetic prose" of Tanith Lee and Clark Ashton Smith. The next and last of Moorcock's works for Lancer, THE SLEEPING SORCERESS, is according to one online source less of a unified novel and more an assemblage of three separate novelettes.       

ADDENDUM: Until I read the SINGING CITADEL collection, I didn't realize that this novel is both a crossover, in that Elric meets Rackhir, hero of the short story "To Rescue Tanelorn" (which takes place after ELRIC), and a null-crossover in that the albino acquires the sword of Earl Aubec, the hero of "Master of Chaos."  

    

       

THE READING RHEUM: HELL'S SALES MANAGER (1940)

 

I could never attempt a "1001 myths" project with prose pulp magazines and their kindred, even though in many ways those periodicals primed the pump for superhero comics. In the time it takes me to read one book-length pulp novel, I can read (say) ten horror stories in search of the mythopoeic. In prose pulps, I can find particular authors who were great at bringing the touch of the mythic to their stories, such as Rohmer, Burroughs and Howard. But it takes too damn long to search for myths in the hero pulps. Still, I did locate one by sheer chance-- even though both its title and its cover illustration have nothing to do with the story inside. 

Norvell Page wrote the vast majority of SPIDER adventures credited to house-name "Grant Stockbridge," and ever since I first encountered pulp heroes in comics and paperback reprints, I've always favored Page's frenetic SPIDER over the faux-cerebral SHADOW. The SPIDER stories are justly mocked for being wildly over the top in terms of all the chaos and destruction the villains would unleash upon New York City, and all the violence the city's arachnid defender would commit to bring down said villains. But MANAGER shows Norvell Page being a bit more-- dare I say it-- "cerebral" in terms of bringing his myth-materials into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

This time the Spider's other self, heroic Richard Wentworth (as well as his aides, principally his valiant girlfriend Nita Van Sloan) encounter menaces on two fronts. On the mundane front, Wentworth's police commissioner buddy Kirkpatrick has been assigned to help a deputy from the French Surete, Raoul Chartres, who's been instructed to bring down The Spider. Of course, this late in the game-- MANAGER was the seventy-seventh novel in the series-- Kirkpatrick had frequently suspected Wentworth's double identity but has arguably let his long friendship with Wentworth cloud his judgment, even though he firmly believes that the Spider should be jailed for his reckless vigilantism. Page may have brought Chartres in to freshen up the old formula with a new face. In addition, though the United States would not enter World War II for two more years, the spread of fascism on the European continent would have a French copper like Chartres sympathetic by reason of his allegiance to his embattled country-- even though the events of the war are only briefly touched upon in MANAGER.

In any case, Chartres is given a feisty, demanding character, and he has no doubt from his studies of the case that Wentworth is the Spider. There are a lot of good tense scenes between Chartres and Wentworth, and even between supposed allies Chartres and Kirkpatrick. But the primary menace is yet another dire super-villain determined to wreak chaos on New York for the sake of profit. I'm not entirely sure why Page named this fiend "The Brand." At first I thought it was because the red-clad evildoer initially bites the Spider's style by leaving sigils of his deeds on the bodies of his victims, the same way the Spider does to conquered criminals. But this brand-motif is quickly dropped. Once or twice the Spider thinks of his foe as a "firebrand" he means to extinguish, and I guess that's the most likely association, since the Brand's distinguishing gimmick is a special weapon, "the Bolt," that can spew forth lightning-like effects. But this power doesn't operate like conventional lightning, but has more the effect of a super-hurricane, inducing "implosions" that can devastate physical objects and kill people by exploding their heads. The descriptions of the weapon's devastation are much better than Page's logic as to how the Brand got hold of such a device. As pulp-scholar Will Murray has warned, no one should expect an ingenious surprise at the revelation of any SPIDER master villain's true ID. 

The super-science of the Bolt doesn't resemble anything in real science, but Page's imaginative extrapolation of the way implosions work in his world endow MANAGER with its most potent mythicity. It's also of interest that the Spider also tries to bite the Brand's style by joining his gang under his underworld alias of "Blinky McQuade, safecracker." This leads to a scene in which "McQuade," along with several thugs, must don imitation Brand robes to join his gang, and this leads to a tense scene when the Brand detects the Spider among his auditioning minions. Eventually, the Brand imprisons Wentworth and sends out thugs dressed as the Spider, so that the hero will die with the reputation of being a cop-killing crook like those on whom the hero preyed. So I assign some mythicity to the trope of hero and villain assuming one another's guises for this or that advantage.

Girlfriend Nita acquits herself well here, dressing up as the Spider when he's caught, and shooting it out with the phony Spiders, even though Page is careful to note that this level of violence does not come naturally to the heroine. I also give Page props for some very cinematic writing that goes a little beyond simple purple prose. Here's a scene told from Nita's POV, one that explains much of the perennial appeal of the superhero:

"Wentworth looked so small against the bulk of the building-- small, yet the dance of his shadow stretched out hugely across the barren field. It was enormous, dominant, a black silhouette of unconquerable power-- the will of The Spider!"

                    

THE READING RHEUM: VATHEK (1786)

 

Following the first European translation of a version of The Arabian Nights in the early 1700s, various European authors attempted to emulate the freewheeling charms of the famous Oriental story-collection. The English lord William Beckford produced one of the most enduring such works of the period. Apparently he fell in love with the Nights in his early twenties and wrote VATHEK in a white-hot expression of literary ardor. Then Beckford never wrote fiction again, according to Lin Carter, who edited the Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback of this unique effort, a favorite for such authors as HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

I say "unique effort" advisedly, because I don't consider VATHEK great literature, even of the sort produced by Lovecraft and Smith. The book feels a bit like Marlow's Faust festooned with Oriental tropes and suffused with Beckford's perception of the casual cruelty in the original stories. Beckford also copies the paper-thin characterizations and wandering narratives of the Nights, and though neither of these is necessarily a bad thing, one does have to be prepared for this style of writing. VATHEK doesn't capture the wilder fantasies of the Arabian Nights, though, because the main narrative-- as well as three side-stories-- all share the theme of the Satanic overreacher. 

The Caliph Vathek, ruling in the city of Samarah in the Abbasid period, only appears to be the defender of the Muslim faith. In truth he's a thoroughgoing hedonist who thirst after forbidden knowledge, much like his mother Carathis, a sorceress who follows the fire-worship attributed to the Zoroastrians (frequent villains in the Nights). One day Vathek is visited by a Giaour ("non-Muslim foreigner") who slowly draws the caliph into renouncing Allah to gain knowledge. That the Giaour is clearly not a human being is shown by an amusing scene in which he somehow morphs into a ball and lures Vathek and the rest of his subjects into becoming a huge soccer-team, kicking the animated ball all the way out of Samarah and up to the edge of a cliff. Beneath the level of the cliff is a literal doorway to the Islamic Hell, where rules the Islamic Satan "Eblis." At the cliff's edge Vathek receives a private message from Eblis' servant The Giaour: Vathek can gain supreme knowledge if he will sacrifice fifty Muslim children to Hell.

That Vathek does not succeed in delivering this sacrifice is not for lack of trying. But in Vathek's single-minded, impious quest, a lot of innocents do perish-- including fifty Samarah citizens who attempt to save Carathis from what they think is a raging fire, and who all end up getting killed by the witch's servants. Vathek and his mother make excellent, utterly conscience-less villains.

Unfortunately, in the second half Beckford's narrative vacillates. He has Vathek and a great entourage leave Samarah to visit an Emir, whose daughter Vathek eventually weds. This romantic subplot drags the narrative pace downward, partly because Beckford initially suggests that the Emir's daughter Nouronihar will resist Vathek because she's in love with her nancy-boy cousin Gulchenrouz. Then for no clear reason Beckford changes Nouronihar's character, so that she joins Vathek because of greed. Carathis, hearing about the effeminate Gulchenrouz, thirsts to sacrifice the youth. However, a beneficent genie rescues the cousin and takes him into a bower of immortal existence, along with the fifty children Vathek tried to sacrifice to Eblis. (Beckford does not explain why the genie didn't return the children to their parents in Samarah.)  Then eventually Vathek and Nouronihar make their way to the Islamic Hell, thinking they're going to enjoy the fruits of paradise, only to become, like all other damned souls, bereft of joy and hope.

Before coming to this dolorous conclusion, Vathek listens to the testimonies of three other damned souls about what deeds brought them to Hell. I lost interest in the first, "Prince Alasi," which just seemed like a reprise of Vathek's own career, and so have little to say about it. The third story, "Princess Zulkais," is a little better. It starts out with another tyrant who goes to extremes to push his only son into becoming a great ruler. The trouble is that son Kalilah really has a passion to stay in the company of his twin sister Zulkais. Beckford never shows any incestuous act, but Zulkais also goes to extremes to stay within the orbit of her brother, makes a deal with the devil, and so they both end up hopeless in Hell.

The middle story is meatier if still uneven. The eponymous narrator of "Prince Barkiarokh" is like Vathek an overreacher who hungers for anything he cannot have. By dumb luck a female peri, Homaiouna, falls in love with Barkiarokh at first sight, and maneuvers things so that he marries her and she sets up him up to ascend to the throne of Berdouka. However, Prince B. doesn't want to live the virtuous life Homaiouna expects him to observe. He betrays her with a mortal woman, hires thugs to knife his peri-wife over and over just to make her go away (he's aware it won't kill her), and finally falls in lust with his grown daughter by his mortal wife. Again, the main attraction of this story is much the same as the main one: to see just how ruthless a villain Barkiarokh can be, just as the main story focuses on the iniquities of Vathek and Carathis.

Scholars of the period have seen Vathek as a precursor of the obsessed Byronic hero (not least because Byron admired the book and wrote a narrative poem called "The Giaour") and of the Gothic villains who arose mostly in the 1790s (in belated reaction to Walpole's OTRANTO in 1764). But I find Beckford's concentration on over-the-top intense sadistic scenarios to have more in common with the works of the Marquise de Sade. Beckford began VATHEK four years before it was published, and the year after VATHEK was published in 1786, Sade wrote the work that made him famous, JUSTINE, which when published four years later would comprise an introduction to his doctrine of libertinage and Sadean excess. I'm not arguing direct influence. But it seems as if something was in the wind around that time, even though Beckford and Sade were in most other respects utterly unalike.      

             

THE READING RHEUM: THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL (1805)

 I recently commented to a poster on CHFB that if any author deserved to have the honor of reigniting "the superhero idiom" since its suspension at the end of the 16th century, it would be Sir Walter Scott, who as far as I can tell also reignited the combative mode in canonical literature. I made this comment, however, having only read two Scott novels-- IVANHOE and THE TALISMAN-- though I'd also seen various film adaptations of Scott novels. Up to this point, I would have said that 1812's IVANHOE was Scott's most significant work, as it brought back the "chivalric romance" that had been destroyed by the early 1600s release of DON QUIXOTE's two sections. Yet I was intrigued to read on Wikipedia that after Scott gained a measure of fame translating old Scottish ballads, often about border wars between feuding clans, his first attempt at an original ballad was an immediate success with 1805 audiences.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), in medieval romance form, grew out of Scott's plan to include a long original poem of his own in the second edition of the Minstrelsy: it was to be "a sort of Romance of Border Chivalry & inchantment".^[28] He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited by John Stoddart. (It was not to be published until 1816.)^[29] Scott was able to draw on his unrivalled familiarity with Border history and legend acquired from oral and written sources beginning in his childhood to present an energetic and highly coloured picture of 16th-century Scotland, which both captivated the general public and with its voluminous notes also addressed itself to the antiquarian student. The poem has a strong moral theme, as human pride is placed in the context of the last judgment with the introduction of a version of the "Dies irae" at the end. The work was an immediate success with almost all the reviewers and with readers in general, going through five editions in one year.^[16] The most celebrated lines are the ones that open the final stanza:

 The Wiki article also described enough of the plot for me to surmise that MINSTREL might be in the combative mode, which could potentially make it relevant to the superhero idiom, if not necessarily "superhero-adjacent." That, however, will be a separate argument for another post, and from here on it, I'll simply set down my impressions of Scott's first big hit.  

The word "lay" in the title connotes a narrative poem, traditionally sung by a minstrel in various European cultures, and the titular lay here is a framing-device for the main story, as it is related to a court full of listeners by a minstrel. I have no idea why Scott dubbed the unnamed singer "the last minstrel," unless he simply wanted to suggest the idea of a time that was passing in the shadow of the Industrial Age. Following the introduction of the framing-device, the minstrel only pops in at the end of each of the ballad's six cantos, as he takes a rest from his narrative.

The main story is set in historical Scotland, apparently of the 16th or 17th century. I'm sure that MINSTREL contains dozens of references to real Scottish and/or English history that simply went right past me, though I don't think Scott kept complete fidelity to historical sources. For one thing, a major part of the story involves a famous Scottish scholar, one Michael Scott, who though deceased is treated as if he had been a contemporary of the other characters in the narrative. In real history, Michael Scott lived in the 13th century, and though various legends made him a wizard there's no indication of occult knowledge in the real scholar's history. Still, English readers of the period would have recognized dozens of Renaissance-era historical figures worked into the story, even though I assume some though not all of the principal characters were fictional.

As the story opens, the Clan Scott has just suffered a grievous loss thanks to their enemies Clan Kerr, as Lord Scott has been killed in combat. The widow Lady Scott is not a happy camper.

Vengeance, deep-brooding o'er the slain

Had lock'd the source of softer woe;

And burning pride, and high disdain,

Forbade the rising tear to flow

Lady Scott, who is said to possess magical talents (she's seen listening to voices of local spirits), orders a trooper, William of Deloraine, to undertake a macabre mission. Deloraine must ride to the crypt where the wizard Michael Scott (no relation to the Scott Clan so far as I could tell) lies buried. Deloraine must descend into the crypt and remove a Book of Magic from the corpse of the wizard and bring it back to Lady Scott. The author never puts into words what Lady Scott plans to do with the book. though "vengeance for the slain" seems a not unreasonable conclusion. 

Deloraine journeys to the site of the crypt, and with the help of a monk (who claims to have known Michael Scott in life) the young man successfully liberates the magic book. Though the author puts in a lot of eerie descriptions, nothing specific happens during the crypt-raid, though the monk passes away a day or so later-- again, not from definite sorcerous causes.

Deloraine only gets into trouble in Canto 3, when he gets closer to his home base. Prior to the slaying of Lord Scott, his grown daughter Margaret fell in love with Cranston, the heir apparent of Clan Kerr. Naturally, Lady Scott is not much inclined to entertain a clan-uniting marriage after her husband's death. Cranston has however managed to contrive a secret if brief meeting with Margaret, and as he leaves the castle of Clan Scott he runs into Deloraine. The two fight, and Cranston wounds Deloraine. Cranston calls upon his page Gilpin to transport wounded Deloraine into the castle without detection, which is something Gilpin can do, because Gilpin is a goblin.

The author provided a loose history as to how the head of Clan Kerr came to be served by a goblin of magical talents: apparently Gilpin just appeared to the Kerr lord one day and insisted on becoming the lord's servant. Toward the poem's close, we finally learn, more or less, that Gilpin was originally in the service of Michael Scott, and that after the wizard perished, Gilpin apparently had to offer his services to some mortal. Or maybe Gilpin does so just to have opportunities for mischief, for while transporting Deloraine back to the castle, Gilpin also steals the magic book. He never does anything with the book, because it's bound with iron clasps he can't open, but he keeps it for the rest of the story. I'm not sure the author didn't forget about it, since Lady Scott, tending Deloraine's wounds, never asks any questions like "what happened to the book" or "how'd you get in the castle without anyone seeing you?"

Moreover, once Gilpin is on "enemy territory" as it were, he feels free to make more mischief. He lures the unnamed small son of Lady Scott into the forest, and though Gilpin would like to kill the kid, the goblin fears some retaliation from the boy's mother. So while the kid wanders in the forest, Gilpin assumes his appearance, returns to the castle and begins committing acts of childish destruction.

But although Cranston returned to his own lands without incident, his kindred have decided to march on Castle Scott for past grievances. Some outriders find Lady Scott's wandering son and take him hostage, since the boy is good enough to inform them of his lineage. Clan Kerr's forces and their English allies clash a few times with Clan Scott's soldiers. Then during a parley Clan Kerr reveals its hostage and proposes one of two outcomes. They'd like to try Deloraine for past acts of malice against their clan. However, since one of those acts included slaying the brother of a lord named Musgrave, Clan Kerr is amenable to letting Musgrave and Deloraine settle their quarrel in one-on-one combat. However, Deloraine still suffers from wounds that might make it tough for an equal battle. (The author uses this trope again in IVANHOE.)

Miraculously, wounded Deloraine appears to fight and slay Musgrave. But big reveal time: the man beneath the helmet is Cranston, who wanted to spare the life of the man he wounded. Cranston somehow came across Gilpin and compelled the goblin to use his powers of illusion to make Cranston appear to be the other knight. In fact, Deloraine makes a belated appearance after Cranston kills Musgrave, with the Scott clansman rather offended that someone else swiped his identity.

The final canto starts off with familiar lines that almost no one can ever quote the origins of--

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

--and the sentiments seem appropriate here, because the main action of the poem has been to provide a happy ending to a story of warring families. Cranston and Margaret, the discount versions of Romeo and Juliet, receive permission to marry from the mollified Lady Scott, and apparently everyone in Clan Kerr is fine with it too, now that someone has died as a sort of scapegoat-that-solves-the-problem. The unnamed son of Lady Scott is of course returned, leaving just one difficulty, that of Gilpin-- which is solved when his master apparently leaves his unquiet grave to claim the goblin (and maybe the book too, for all I can tell). While the lords and ladies are feasting in a grear hall, Gilpin is seeking to make mischief again, when there's a flash of lightning and the goblin disappears, as well as a supernatural intrusion that out-otrantos OTRANTO.

Some heard a voice in Branksome Hall,

Some saw a sight, not seen by all

That dreadful voice was heard by some,

Cry, with loud summons, "Gylbin, come!"

And on the spot where burst the brand

        Just where the page had flung him down,

Some saw an arm, and some a hand,

        And some the waving of a gown.

The guests in silence pray'd and shook,

And terror dimm'd each lofty look.

But none of all the astonish'd train

Was so dismay'd as Deloraine

His blood did freeze, his brain did burn,

'Twas fear'd his mind would ne'er return;

For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,

Like him of whom the story ran

Who spoke the spectre-hound in Man.

At length, by fits, he darkly told.

With broken hint, and shuddering cold,

That he had seen, right certainly.

A shape with amice wrapp'd around,

With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,

Like pilgrim from beyond the sea;

And knew--but how it matter'd not--

It was the wizard, Michael Scott.

But once the dread apparition has passed, everything returns to normal, the happy couple is wed, and the frame-story of the minstrel's lay comes to an end. And I will deal with the ramifications of this story for the superhero idiom in a separate post.  

     

                  

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 5

 

As I wend my way toward the final chapters of METROPOLIS, it seems like Von Harbou may be losing control of some aspects of her dramaturgy.  

Chapter 10 is long and talky, as the ailing Freder is visited by his servant Josaphat (who has a separate minor plotline of no great importance). This gives the author a chance to recapitulate many things the reader already knows, with the protagonist conflating the imagery of the Seven Deadly Sins (from the cathedral) and the Whore of Babylon (from his own reading, apparently). He doesn't seem overly convinced that he merely hallucinated seeing his fathe and Maria together, but he talks about it in highly religious terms: "I saw Maria's brow, that white temple of goodness and virginity, besmirched with the name of the great harlot of Babylon." He also compares her to various archaic goddesses, two ancient cities (Gomorrha and Babylon) before labeling her "Metropolis," which brings one back to the origins of the name, "mother-city." This continues into Chapter 11, and Josaphat, not to be outdone, goes into huge detail about a seductive dancer who's performing at Yoshiwara, and who has sowed enmity between families and young males. This is presumably Fake Maria, but Von Harbou apparently forgot her timeline, for Josaphat imagines that this seductress was dancing in Yoshiwara during the same time that Freder saw Maria at Rotwang's house. Perhaps the 1925 proofreaders were as bored with this section as I was, that they didn't catch the error. The reference to Futura dancing for wealthy patrons has no plot-purpose but to set up, both in book and film, a later sequence where Futura seeks out Yoshiwara to make merry while the city falls apart.      

Von Harbou follows this up with an unusual tangent for Joh Fredersen. Though no version of the movie alludes to any Fredersen relatives except his son, Chapter 12 has the Master of Metropolis leave his domain and go to some nearby rustic locale, to visit the house of his unnamed mother. Described as "paralyzed," she appears to live alone in a farmhouse, supported by Fredersen's money though the two of them maintain a hostility between them due to the son's "sin" in seducing Hel away from Rotwang. Apparently, though Fredersen has always seemed stiff and unbending in his every encounter with his son, he's now disturbed at how easily virtuous Maria won him away from his father, and he's come to ask his mother's advice. (As I predicted, no one ever brings up Fredersen's reverse-Oedipal flirtation with a robot made in the image of his son's lover.) The mother doesn't give her son much advice beyond the platitude of "you reap what you sow." It's not clear how if at all this visit causes the Brain of Metropolis to alter his later course.      

The film has a scene in which Rotwang is seen talking for a bit to his prisoner Maria, but in the novel he Freder goes on and on with ornate phraes just like those of Freder: "Women know nothing of love either. What does light know of light?" He wants some sort of forgiveness from Maria, even though he boasts about having stolen her "soul" and given it to her impostor, who will soon bestir the workers into rebellion. The chapter suddenly ends with Fredersen showing up and strangling Rotwang unconscious.   

Meanwhile, we're finally getting close to the big finish. Freder still doesn't know that there are two Marias, but he's heard that the Real One is going to speak to the rebels that evening. Futura addresses the crowd, encouraging them to riot and destroy the machines that make life in the city possible. To his credit Freder finally realizes that this is an impostor. He tries to denounce her, but he's recognized as the offspring of Fredersen and he's forced to flee. 

Slightly later Maria finds herself alone in the room with the unconscious body of Rotwang. The cut 1927 film doesn't even include the scene of Rotwang's strangulation, but in the book, it seems that Fredersen, despite being in the same room with the captive, doesn't interact with Maria in any way. Did Von Harbou want readers to believe she was just sitting in shadows (the room isn't well lit) and so Fredersen just didn't see her, and that she didn't call attention to herself? In any case, after Fredersen leaves, Maria escapes as well. She immediately heads to the city of the workers, evidently arriving some time after Freder runs away. She doesn't see him but she sees Fake Maria leading the rebels in an assault on the city's maintenance machines. I realize that this is supposed to be the book's great cataclysmic climax, but despite all Von Harbou's fervid descriptions I found it rather boiler-plate. Maria eventually finds a bunch of kids to whom she gives succor, which is clearly meant to bookend her Christ-like association with kids in her first appearance. The film improves on this by having her try to correct the malfunctioning machines.    

Freder seeks out and finds his father at the New Tower of Babel, but nothing much comes of it. Fredersen, who originally seemed obsessed with crushing the rebellious workers to protect the status quo, has suddenly "got religion" of a sort, telling Freder hat he unleashed the violence "for your sake, Freder; so that you could redeem them." In one of Von Harbou's best images, Fredersen happens to be standing on a platform supporting a power-tower, whose struts remind Freder of "the crosses of Golgotha," emitting "long, white crackling springs of sparks." Freder eventually concludes that his father won't help stop the cataclysm, so he returns to the underground, where he helps Maria save the imperiled children.

Elsewhere the revolting workers become incensed at Fake Maria for unleashing the chaos that endangered so many of them, so they go looking for her in Yoshiwara, where Futura is captivating the rich boys. Instead of the two groups fighting, the leader of the cathedral-monks also shows up, condemns Futura as a witch, and persuades both groups to burn her at a stake. Freder, having somehow become separated from Maria, happens across the scene and initially thinks Real Maria has been immolated. For some reason Von Harbou doesn't produce anything like the memorable reveal of the film, where Futura's robotic nature is revealed.

Almost lastly, Maria runs around looking for Freder, and Rotwang attacks her, suddenly imagining that she's Hel reborn. There's no precedence for this in the novel, though one line in the film has the inventor fantasizing about bringing back Hel in the form of a robot. So it seems as if the two father-figures in the story both conceive an unnatural passion for the young heroine, even though one knows that he's messing around with a fake woman. Freder catches sight of Maria being menaced again and overtakes Rotwang, eventually tossing him off a roof. This is the last of the big spectacle-moments, as Fredersen the Father turns over the administration of Metropolis to Freder the Son and his bride, who is also-- sort of a "holy mother?"

I'm glad I reread METROPOLIS, for all of its uneveness and its purple prose. I'm not sure how deeply invested Von Harbou was in her vision of a perfect, sexless madonna-woman as the counter to the Whore of Babylon, but the sheer excess of all of her fulminations about sin and virtue is entertaining in a way that, say, John Bunyan could not be. I've said almost nothing about the author's Big Moral that appears throughout the book and movie, because like most platitudes it doesn't really amount to much. METROPOLIS the novel is much more interesting when judged as a form of "religious fiction," rather than as "science fiction," even allowing for the story's indubitable impact upon the SF genre.      

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 4

 The scene in which Freder thinks that Maria has given herself to Fredersen is in my mind the almost definitive proof that Von Harbou was aware of some basic aspects of Sigmund Freud's Oedipal theory. Here's an apposite example of that theory from a 1910 essay:

When after this he can no longer maintain the doubt which makes his parents an exception to the universal and odious norms of sexual activity, he tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing. The enlightening information he has received has in fact awakened the memory-traces of the impressions and wishes of his early infancy, and these have led to a reactivation in him of certain mental impulses. He begins to desire his mother herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted, and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in the way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex. He does not forgive his mother for having granted the favour of sexual intercourse not to himself but to his father, and he regards it as an act of unfaithfulness.

^[Of course, Von Harbou would have been filtering any Oedipal concepts through her novel's heavy Judeo-Christian religious structure. But as mentioned in the last post, Freder does not get directed by Rotwang to seek out his father, and there's no evidence that Freder even knows that the mystery-house belongs to Rotwang. He does know of Rotwang's affiliation with Fredersen, though because Freder tells a confidante that he wonders if Rotwang and his father have a hand in Maria's disappearance. With that theory in mind he seeks out his father's "New Tower of Babel."

 The film is actually a little more explicit this time about clarifying Maria's primary purpose for seeking out Fredersen. A brief scene shows Fredersen giving Maria her assignment, to go among the underground workers, preaching violence so that they will revolt and so Fredersen can crush them--and then Freder barges in, seeing his father with the Fake Maria. The book is more ambiguous. We don't see Fredersen talking to Futura; Freder simply intrudes on the two of them, with his father embracing Futura. In fact, he seems to be in full seduction mode: "She [Futura] was not struggling. Leaning far back in the man's arms, she was offering her mouth, her alluring mouth..." Up to this point Fredersen has seemed utterly asexual, obsessed only with power, and he certainly showed no interest in Maria when he spied upon Freder and her in the underground city. Futura, as far as the reader knows, has never been anywhere or done anything, but somehow Rotwang has imbued her with a mature, knowing sexuality. Fredersen knows that Futura is just a robot, not his son's true love, but though I'm still working my way through the novel, I suspect Von Harbou will not make further comment on this curious book-scene.

Still, whatever Von Harbou had in mind, symbolically Fredersen is messing with the image of his son's beloved. Thus she has him reversing the usual course of the Oedipal configuration, where the son becomes possessive of the mother and envies the fact that she gave her "whorish" attentions to the father rather than the son. 

In both book and film, Freder goes berserk and attacks his father, who simply fends him off. Maria watches the father-son conflict a bit and then leaves the room, after which Fredersen convinces his son that he hallucinated the whole incident. Freder falls ill and is confined to bed. Later he has a long conversation with a confidante, during which he recapitulates some of the imagery of the Seven Sins imagery he saw at the cathedral, and brings into it the Scarlet Woman imagery, which apparently he acquired from his own religious education, whatever that was. Freder's ramblings about the Scarlet Woman go on for two chapters before they terminate with the confidante telling Freder that he's seen Fake Maria dancing at some men's club. Lang cuts most of Freder's speech or substitutes hallucinatory imagery, and then moves on to the subject of Fake Maria bringing all the boys to the yard.     

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 3

 During Frederen's visit to the laboratory of Rotwang (whose name in German means "red cheeks"), the reader learns (pretty much as in the film) that the two middle-aged men once contended over a woman named Hel. It's broadly implied that she first belonged to Rotwang, only to be lured away by Joh Fredersen. Hel bore Fredersen's child and apparently died in childbirth, intimating that Freder was raised without a mother-- which might explain why he has such an ardent fixation on a Madonna-like image of a "virgin-mother," to use his own term. This also suggests that Maria, who is said to possess "Madonna-eyes," is also a mother-substitute.

Though Fredersen and Rotwang share an old enmity, they continue to collaborate, Rotwang perhaps serving as a court sorcerer to the tyrannical Metropolis Master. Fredersen has learned that the rebellious workers show allegiance to the strange woman named Maria, and he wants to quash her influence. Rotwang just happens to have devised a prototypical female android, sometimes called "Futura," and he plans to make it look and act like a parody of Maria.

Freder, finishing the shift he took over from Georgi, is informed that the workers plan to assemble to listen to Maria, so of course he attends. Maria is, as it happens, counseling the workers to pursue the path of peace and not revolt. (Both Fredersen and Rotwang also attend this meeting in secret, but Fredersen evidently does not think of using Maria to tamp down the rebel movement, but instead commands Rotwang to continue with the plan with Futura.) Freder pledges love to Maria, and as one might expect it's a very sanitized romantic moment, though Freder does indulge in a bit of stormy sentimentality. They part, planning to meet again at the cathedral, and Rotwang kidnaps Maria.

Freder shows up at the cathedral-- where he somehow knows that Hel, the mother he never met, uses to attend--but Maria isn't there. Freder sees statues representing the Seven Deadly Sins (also in the film), and a priest who hates his father asks him to leave. He wanders the city and just happens across the old house where Rotwang maintains his library. He hears Maria calling to him, albeit with ambiguous phrases, so he breaks in . Rotwang merely moves Maria to one of the house's many rooms and lets Freder exhaust himself running around the house, whereon Freder collapses. The only major difference between book and film is that in the film, Freder hears a priest at the cathedral lecturing about the "Scarlet Woman" from Revelations. This was Lang re-purposing some lines of internal dialogue in Freder's head later, where Freder thinks about the so-called "whore of Babylon" when he thinks he's been betrayed.

In the book Rotwang, who didn't know Freder was coming, claims that he wants to emotionally torment Maria so that he can make Futura's head more closely resemble that of the original. (That, and Rotwang also just wants to torment the son of his unfaithful lover Hel as a way of getting back at Fredersen.) Rotwang taunts Maria, claiming that she's naive to assume that Freder has not had other women before her (though the book affirms that he has not), but Maria does not respond. That scene ends with the statement that Rotwang has not yet finished the head of the false Maria. Later, Freder awakens and happens to see Fake Maria leaving, but though he follows her, he's not able to catch up with her. The book does not include any extended scene in which the mad scientist uses advanced technology to morph Future's countenance into that of Maria. In all likelihood, Von Harbou only intended to suggest that Rotwang worked on the robot's head just like a puppet-maker would. Lang, in setting up the film's action with Von Harbou, was probably the one who knew best what visual effects he could use to make Futura's transformation more startling, and so he was dominantly responsible for that content in the 1927 movie.

Also in the film, Lang does not have Freder spy the departing Futura and try to follow her. Rather, Rotwang appears before Freder and tells him that Maria "is with your father," knowing that the young man will come to the wrong conclusion.     .  

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 2

 In the 1927 film, Freder tries to follow Maria, but loses her and finds himself in the City of Workers, where he seems utterly shocked to see the dehumanized condition of the workers. In the novel, though, Freder does not follow Maria because he knows he's being watched by the agents of his father. He is also fully aware of the workers' situation, for he knows that his father Joh Fredersen has forged Metropolis in this image. Von Harbou draws many comparisons to pagan imagery here, particularly that of Moloch, devouring the workers as the idol Moloch received the sacrifices of children (though of course the workers do not actually perish, they merely live lives of quiet dehumanization).

  Also in the film, Freder seeks out his father and engages him in a fruitless conversation, in which Freder tries to understand why so much suffering is necessary. Von Harbou's novel is much more specific than the screenplay in laying out Fredersen's merciless philosophy, stating that, "That men are used up so rapidly at the machines, Freder, is no proof of the greed of the machines, but of the defiency of the human material." The two of them talk at cross-purposes, and Freder leaves, though Fredersen orders one of his flunkies to keep tabs on the youth. During this colloquy, Fredersen is also advised that there may be insurrection brewing in the underground City of Workers.

More or less the same is that the frustrated Freder eventually extends the hand of brotherly love to an afflicted worker named Georgi, taking his place at his machine and letting Georgi leave the hellish underground. Lang's film birthed the unforgettable image of Freder in his work-clothes contending with the hands of a giant clock, while the novel gives us a less compelling image of Freder manipulating some sort of hoses. These Von Harbou compares to the image of the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha. Von Harbou does not make clear what new dispensation Freder is following, though it's implicit that he wishes to feel closer to Maria by following her brotherhood precepts.

At various parts of the early chapters, Von Harbou makes reference to "Yoshiwara," a gambling-den, presumably open only to those with money. In the novel, when Georgi leaves the underground in a cab, he witnesses some of the denizens of Yoshiwara-- presumably Japanese, though Von Harbou does not use the name at this point, calling the denizens only "yellow-skinned fellows" who leap about shoving advertising hand-bills into the hands of passersby. Georgi, who's been given some money by the man who took his place, uses that money to gamble at Yoshiwara for about a chapter. The Fredersen agent assigned to follow Freder ferrets out Georgi and seeks information on the son of the Metropolis Master. The film just shows the agents accosting Georgi after his illicit visit. This is just as well, for if Von Harbou meant to depict Yoshiwara as a den of iniquity, possibly a brothel as well as a gambling-house, she failed, as the chapter on Yoshiwara is thoroughly dull. There are a couple of references to persons with Japanese names or heritage, though there's no clue as to what Japan signified to the author herein. 

Another odd detail in the novel is that Von Harbou devotes a lot of space to a Christian church whose archaic look contrasts with the ultra-modernity of Metropolis. Fredersen left the church in place because its denizens were fanatics and he didn't want to create martyrs by kicking them out. This holy building is contrasted to the laboratory of Rotwang, a small house decked out with cabalistic symbols. It's to this location that Fredersen appears to charge mad scientist Rotwang with a mission: to undermine the brewing insurrection, led by the saintly Maria, by making a not-so-saintly duplicate of Maria and making her look bad.     

More to come...

     

     

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 1

 I've just started re-reading Thea Von Harbou's METROPOLIS for the first time in perhaps forty years, as it occurred to me that it might prove interesting to compare the book with the screenplay for the 1927 movie in its extant versions. But because this entails a lot of detailed analysis I'm posting my reactions as I go along, which I haven't done with a prose novel review since I did Rider Haggard's SHE on this blog. My understanding is that Von Harbou began the novel with the expectation that her then-husband Fritz Lang intended to adapt it for the UFA studio, and that she completed the novel before she wrote the screenplay. It's possible Lang had some input into the novel but I have no evidence of this. 

The first thing I'll point out is that the city of Metropolis, which means roughly "mother-city," is the true star of the story, easily eclipsing any of its human characters. That said, the viewpoint character Freder is almost as important in the novel, if not so much the truncated original release. The name "Freder" is generally translated as "son of Frederick," which itself means "peaceful ruler." Von Harbou only calls Freder by his first name, but his father, Joh (short for Johann) Frederson is called by his full name. One online source says that both "Freder" and "Fredersen" can be patronymics," but I don't know if Von Harbou intended this to carry any special symbolism. I think, for reasons I'll show later, that Von Harbou might have chosen the name "Freder" because it sounds like the Latin word "frater," meaning "brother." 

The 1927 release opens with a quick montage of scenes in Metropolis, with the memorable image of dozens of identically clad workers trudging down into "the City of Workers." After that, the film shifts to "the Club of the Sons," a paradisical pleasure-dome for the male children of the city's movers and shakers. Freder is first seen cheering on other young men engaged in sports, and playing tag with a cute young serving-girl-- all of which is meant to suggest that he's unaware of the suffering of the lower classes.

The novel, however, starts with what seems much like a "sturm-and-drang" moment from a 19th-century German novel. Freder is still at the Club when first viewed, but he's in a room with star-designs on the ceiling, playing an organ and apparently working himself into a froth about some tormenting matter. By the second page it's disclosed that he has some obsession with an idealized image of femininity, which in early chapters Von Harbou calls, at least three times, "the austere countenance of the virgin, the sweet countenance of the mother-- the agony and the desire with which he called and called for the one single vision for which his racked heart had not even a name..."

 Now, why is Freder so "racked" by thinking about what sound like rather pacific images of femininity, both of which have strong associations with Christian imagery? I find it interesting that both "virgin" and "mother" become blended in the icon of Mary Mother of Jesus, but I don't think Freder is so wrought up by any sort of religious vision. What I think Von Harbou is editing out is the other half of what Sigmund Freud, in 1905, called "the Madonna-Whore Complex." In this formulation, Freud observed that young men felt ambivalence toward females their own age, for though the men had been raised from childhood by non-sexual mothers, or "madonnas," what young men in their maturation wanted from females was their sexual availability. I think it's likely Von Harbou was aware of Freud's theory, but that she elided the scandalous part of it to make her protagonist seem more noble and selfless-- though even in 1925, I feel sure that most readers would have made the same correlation I've made, that Freder is tormented by his natural biological concupiscence. A later scene with Freder in the Club with other young men does NOT show him canoodling with barmaids, and in conversation with his father in the novel, he as good as admits to being a virgin. 

Back to the novel: Freder dolefully leaves the organ-room and mixes with other young men in the stadium of the Club, where he is served a drink by a sexy young woman-- the book's first image of a provocative female-- but Freder certainly does not pursue this girl.

Then book and film enter a parallel course, for into the Club comes a pretty young woman-- later given the name "Maria"-- who is surrounded by an entourage of children. In both works Maria's only purpose seems to be to show the children the pleasures of the city's idle rich, though she does so without condemnation. Speaking of the wealthy swains, she tells the children, "Look, these are your brothers." She does not seem to see Freder, but he immediately recognizes her visage to be that of the "virgin mother" with which he's obsessed. Maria and the children then leave the Club-- which leads to another divergence I'll address in Part 2.