SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 3

 Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.

In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. But I missed an important insight, and it's a strange oversight on my part, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic." In the overlooked insight, Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.

...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.

Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, as Fiedler says of the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.          

What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from the era of the Crusades. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and after he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.

During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There existed a few broad fantasies like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.         

WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even when the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.                  

NEAR MYTHS: THE ARAK SAGA (1981-85)

There''s the germ of a really good sword-and-sorcery concept in the eighties DC series ARAK OF SON OF THUNDER, created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Ernie (RICHIE RICH) Colon. In the eighth century CE, a Native American man is shipwrecked off the coast of Norway and found by Vikings. The Scandinavians dub the strange red man "Eric," though he pronounces this new name "Arak." His memories of his past life are hazy so as to not get in the way of the first step in his heroic destiny, which begins with his seeking vengeance on an evil sorceress who kills his Viking friends. This mission, and many like it, propel Arak throughout many of the historical hotspots of 8th-century Europe and even parts of Asia. 

Given the peripatetic nature of the feature, there can't be any serious doubt that Roy Thomas sought to duplicate in ARAK his success with the Marvel feature CONAN. Thomas had not only encouraged the company to purchase adaptation rights to the Robert E. Howard barbarian, he wrote the rough-hewn hero's adventures for the better part of the seventies prior to leaving Marvel and accepting employment with DC. Like Conan, Arak is a barbaric fish out of water as he passes through domains of relatively greater sophistication. Like Conan, Arak never spends much time in any locale, always finding some reason to move on and sample the challenges of other lands, usually represented by more wizards, beasts, and demons.

In my view the "germ" of greater potential suggested by ARAK would be the fun of cultural contrasts, of having a barbaric hero, with all of his own cultural preferences, bouncing off the priorities of French knights-in-armor, Muslim traders, and the like. But Thomas does not do this. Despite the fact that his scripts (whether on his own or with collaborators) are among the wordiest he ever produced, there's never room for interesting meditations on deeper subjects. To some extent this was the way Thomas wrote his last five years of CONAN, so maybe he figured lightning would strike twice if he followed the same course. However, CONAN had two things ARAK never had. First, skilled workhouse John Buscema provided the visual look of the main title, and to some extent followed a visual template for other artists to follow-- whereas Arak was cursed with the less "cinematic" art-styles of Colon, Tony deZuniga and others. Second, whereas Conan was a rough fellow who was often unpredictable, Arak was a very dull upright heroic type. This resulted in most of the stories ranging from poor to merely average in their appeal. There's one good myth-sequence I'll analyze separately, but otherwise, in this essay I'll just touch on points of interest.

"The Devil Takes a Bride," #2-- Arak gets mixed up with a maiden named Corrina, who's confined to a castle because her mother had congress with a demon. Or--maybe she's her own mother--? The hero picks up the first of his long-running support-cast, the aged good magician Malagigi, who serves the court of Charlemagne.

"Sword of the Iron Maiden," #3-- Arak gets his second support-character, the female knight Valda, given the rather fey cognomen "the Iron Maiden," and who is the daughter of the legendary lady knight Bradamante. Valda becomes Arak's first romantic interest in the series. Issue #7 contains an amusing reversal of a similar scene in the first encounter of Conan and Red Sonja. In the earlier story, Red Sonja prompts Conan to go skinny-dipping with her in order to make him dumb with lust for her. Valda joins Arak in a mutual bath, but her purpose is clearly to get him to show interest in her so that she can shut him down, proving to herself that he wants her and to Arak that she ain't no easy lay.

"The Last Centaur," #10-12-- Arak ends up in Greece, where all the gods have apparently died, though this leads the warrior to a revelation about his own possibly divine paternity. He meets the last centaur, who dies, and the last satyr, one Satyricus, who pledges to go along with Arak on his various quests and provide comedy relief. In #12 Valda gets the first of a handful of backup strips about her early days.

"The Slayer from the Wine-Dark Sea," #15-- Despite the title's Homeric reference the main focus is medieval Byzantium, where the majority of the series' stories transpire. As seen on the cover, Arak gets a Mohawk for a while in response to having found he's half thunder-god, but the hairstyle won't last long. 

"At Last, Albracca," #21-- There wasn't been a lot of "sense of wonder" in the ARAK title up to this point, or much past it, precisely because Thomas kept his scripting at a very pedestrian level. But, after not having read this story in some thirty years, I was struck by one wonder: that of Arak and his allies traveling over a "sea of moving stones." At the end of this arc Valda and Malagigi decide they must return to France, while Arak and Satyricus undertake a new quest: that of finding a way to locate Arak's lost people in the Americas. But before Valda leaves, she and Arak finally do the deed.

"To Your Sky Born Father Go," #33-- After the end of a rambling arc involving the Golden Bough and Arak growing his hair out again, Arak "dies," ascends to commune with his thunder-god father, and then returns to life. It's at this point that Thomas belatedly decides to give Arak an overarching adversary, a "serpent-god" who's also the enemy of Arak's dad and all life on Earth. Arak and Satyricus pick up two new cast-members, a pair of Syrian cousins named Alsind and Sharizad, who will later be revealed to be cognates of the famed characters Sinbad and Scheherezade. This arc is followed by Arak's first meaningful battle against the serpent god, which as I said I'll consider separately.

"Once Upon a Unicorn," #37-- This stand-alone, Valda-centric story may not be mythic but it is, unlike all the other stories, fun. The issue features the only Colon art job that isn't trying to be John Buscema, and his fine, slightly cartoony linework is well suited to the story's humorous tone. When Valda returns to the court of Charlemagne, she finds that her king wants her to perform an unusual duty. She's expected to tame a unicorn with her virgin nature-- which she ain't got no more.

"Dragon Slayers for Hire," #48-- Though Arak has a few more encounters with serpent-creatures, Thomas does not really bring the snake-god back as such. The writer does bring Valda and Malagigi back to accompany Arak, Satyricus, and Alsind for the remainder of the issues from #38 on, though "Scheherezade" gets married off in an earlier issue. "Slayers" is a pretty lame story, though it sports the curious art-team of DeZuniga and Carmine Infantino, and it gets rid of the tiresome Alsind by pairing him up with a jeune fille. There's also some curiosity-value in that Thomas takes the trouble of taking his heroes all the way to China and introducing them to his version of Mulan, about thirteen years before the Disney movie made the legendary Chinese heroine famous the world over. And after all that, Mulan barely does anything! Still, she is given a certain amount of heroic charisma, which is more than I can say for "Sinbad," so in my book this is the only real "charisma-crossover" in the series.

"The Road to the Rising Sun," #50-- Arak and company end up in Japan, and after a battle with a nasty oni, Arak sets sail with Satyricus in search of the Americas, while Valda and Malagigi determine to hike back to France again. I suppose the "hero sailing into the sunset" is as good a way as any to conclude things, since the feature never found a strong voice anyway. In the letter columns Thomas talked about a VALDA mini-series that was to be drawn by Todd MacFarlane, which patently never came to pass. Thomas also mentioned the possibility doing another ARAK adventure as a book, which I suspect would not have found much demand even if DC had permitted it. To date there have been a couple of "in name only" iterations of the Arak character, but no actual continuations of the Arak Saga.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE SHADOW OF THE VULTURE" (1934)

After re-viewing the 1985 RED SONJA film, I became more curious about the possible evolution of the Marvel Comics character from Howard's one-shot character "Red Sonya of Rogatino." She, along with her male compatriot Gottfried Von Kalmbach, appeared only in the above-titled short story in the pulp magazine MAGIC CARPET, which was published by Popular Fiction Publishers. The same publisher brought out WEIRD TALES, the magazine that published the majority of Howard's Conan stories.

Here's my initial writeup from FEMMES FORMIDABLES regarding the story's significance in terms of Red Sonja's evolution:

I mentioned in my first 1934 post that Robert E. Howard had authored at least three significant femmes formidables in the same year, but one of them, "Red Sonya of Rogatino," gained more fame in a derived form, that of Marvel Comics' "Red Sonja."  Since Red Sonja only borrowed a few motifs from Howard's character, as well as appearing in a thoroughly different milieu, it seems sensible to give the earlier Sonya separate consideration.  The French reprint book above, which retitles the Howard story "Shadow of the Vulture" into "Sonya la Rouge," looks as if it's illustrating the Marvel version more than Howard's.

One surprising facet of "Shadow" is that Red Sonya is at best a secondary element of the tale.  The bulk of the story is Howard's rewriting of the history of the 1529 Siege of Vienna, the last attempt made by the Ottoman Empire-- then under the command of Suleiman the Magnificent-- to extend its power into Europe.  Robert E. Howard, being an ardent Celticist, had his own fictional version of "how the Irish saved Europe," often sending Celtic, English, or roughly related racial types into the mysterious East.  This time Howard sends a German hero, Gottfried von Kalmbach, to personally twist the tail of the ruler Suleiman.  Suleiman responds by sending a hitman, the "Vulture" of the title, to bring him Gottfried's head.

Sonya becomes embroiled in this conflict only because she comes to have some regard for Gottfried as a fellow warrior, and possibly (though it is not stressed) as a man.  Sonya saves Gottfried twice from his enemies, and displays fearless prowess on the battlefield, but her own character-arc is dubious.  She claims to be the sister of Roxelana, a historical Polish woman who became the real Suleiman's primary wife.  Howard devotes nearly no space to describing how this state of affairs came to be, though there's a mention that Roxelana was abducted in a Muslim slave-raid. To modern ears, this sounds pretty exculpatory for most sins that Roxelana would have committed in order to survive.  Yet Sonya refers to her sister as a "slut," apparently for not having chosen death over bedding a Muslim potentate.  It's possible Howard had some notion of pursuing this plot-thread in a separate story, but "Shadow of the Vulture" remains the only story about the woman from Rogatino.

Naturally, given Howard's great talent, there are other mythic aspects of "Vulture" aside from its introduction of the Polish femme formidable. MAGIC CARPET was probably interested in the story only because it offered readers some violent, exotic adventure, but as I noted above, Howard was a history-buff who believed in what a later author called "the clash of civilizations." He quite clearly took pleasure in the failure of the Ottoman Empire to secure a foothold in 1529 Austria, which would have put Islamic rule within the perceived boundaries of Europe proper, and Howard explicitly took it as the good favor of fate that the Muslims had been thwarted by "the yellow haired Aryan barbarian." (I'm not sure what Howard made of Islam's domination of the Iberian Peninsula for several centuries.) I should not need to point out that Howard 's mention of "Aryan" is not covalent with formal Nazism. Within the context of the story, which is not a racist story as such, the term only means that the author advocated the fading of the East's power as the West came to prominence.

The Ottoman failure to take Austria loosely parallels the failure of Suleiman I to take the head of German mercenary Von Kalmbach, even though Suleiman sends one of his foremost warriors, Mikhal "The Vulture" Oglu, to accomplish the deed. In a broad sense, Suleiman does Von Kalmbach a favor by persecuting him, for the German, though prodigious in battle, is something of a rebel without a cause, sneering at both the Ottomans and his own "Frankish" allies. Von Kalmbach seems content to spend his whole life fighting and then drinking like a sot.

While fleeing from Oglu's forces, Von Kalmbach takes refuge in an Austrian siege-city. One of the city's foremost defenders is Red Sonya, and though the German is fascinated with the red-haired fury, she seems initially scornful towards him. However, it eventually comes out that she does hold high regard for Von Kalmbach's battle prowess, and she ends up saving the mercenary's hide twice. Howard shows no literal romance between the two of them, but it's likely he meant to suggest that they were both alpha-types who sublimated their sexual feelings through constant quarreling. That said, the story ends without depicting even a symbolic union, such as a partnership, between the mercenary and the Polish warrior-woman.

In the first CONAN story that births Red Sonja, the heroine voiced her determination never to yield her favors to anyone save "him who has defeated me on the field of battle." There's nothing remotely like this declaration in "Vulture." The only remotely similar statement comes from a bit-player who tells Von Kalmbach that Sonya "marches and fights like a man," but is "no man's light o'love." Howard probably only included this observation to make sure readers understood that Sonya was not a camp-follower. If anything, Sonya is an antitype to her sister Roxalana, who, though never "on stage," allowed Suleiman I to take her maidenhead. (Possible pun-alert here: the Ottoman ruler can take a woman's "head," but not the head of a superior warrior.) I won't say categorically that Howard never wrote any character who might have challenged one or more males after the fashion of Marvel's Sonja. But Red Sonya of Rogatino is wholly defined by her mission to take the role of a male warrior in order to defy the Turkish ruler who despoiled her sister, so there's a loose opposition between the worlds of war and of sexual conquest. In later years Red Sonja would sometimes become a symbol of feminist liberation, yet the lady from Rogatino says nothing against the dominion of the male of the species. For such protests, one would have to seek out a character Howard created around the same time, Dark Agnes de Chastillon, whose first of two adventures deals with her escaping an arranged marriage and imprisonment in a brothel. 

Next up: Red Sonja Risin'.