AMAZON ATROPHY

 Yesterday I decided to do a deep dive into a section of the shallow pool known as "Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN." I didn't want to try reading everything that he might have written since he (almost exclusively) took over writing the DC feature following the passing of William Marston in 1947. But since I think Kanigher was a guy who had real talent, I wanted to get as much info as possible about why he didn't seem to show any of that creative ability during the decade of the sixties. He was doing some good scripts in that decade for BATMAN, METAL MEN, and the war books, but as far as WONDER WOMAN was concerned, a Kanigher script from the 1960s reads just like anything he did in the 1950s. I don't fault him so much for being dull in the 1950s, because the majority of the stories from DC Comics were dull then, as the company sought to keep its squeaky-clean image amid industry controversies. But why couldn't he seem to craft a decent story for the Amazing Amazon?

In this essay I suggested one reason:  

"[Kanigher's] use of myth-ideas was both derivative and desultory, giving one the impression that he could barely summon any enthusiasm for the series, even when dealing with characters he himself created, or at least substantially re-worked, like the idea of “Wonder Woman as a girl.” Another reason may have related to his insider knowledge that DC wanted to keep control of the franchise in those days, before the company bought the character from the Marston estate outright. His knowing that the company wanted to keep their hold on the character, and that they didn't seem to have any concept of what to do with the Amazon except to emulate Marston (but without as much bondage), probably contributed to Kanigher's sense that he could do anything he wanted, as long as he kept turning in scripts on time.   

I started collecting superhero comics after the debut of the Batman teleseries, so Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN was my first experience with the heroine. I remember thinking at some point that I didn't initially like the Andru-Esposito art or the romantic aspect of the Amazon's ongoing romance with Steve Trevor. Was any of that just the usual antipathy of a pre-teen toward matters of sex? Possibly, but if so, the phase didn't last, as I welcomed the change to "Mod Wonder Woman" with the new editorship of Mike Sekowsky, and even bought those issues off the stands new-- and there was a fair amount of romance appeared in those stories.

I didn't confine my study only to issues in the 1960s but rather extended it from issue 105 (April 1959) through issue #176 (May-June 1968). I did so because #105 introduced the aforementioned "Wonder Woman as a girl." Since these stories usually took place before the juvenile Wonder Woman became a superhero, a lot of them took place in the fantasy-domain of Paradise Island and various vague fantasy-domains. But here, as described, Kanigher just tossed out his concepts willy-nilly, with no attempt to ground them in any knowledge-system, as one could find in titles of the time like FLASH and SUPERMAN. Thus even though Wonder Girl might have been introduced to give the title "teen appeal," both her character and her adventures were superficial. As time went on, Kanigher devised ways for all three members of the Wonder Family -- Wonder Girl, her adult self, and Wonder Tot, a baby-wonder-- to appear in the same adventures. But this merely made Kanigher's attempt to imitate the "Superman Family" of the more popular SUPERMAN titles more forced and therefore pathetic. In both sets of stories, the authors were attempting to get readers invested in the recursive nature of the SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN worlds; worlds in which repetition of motifs was intended to be reassuring. But though there were a lot of dull 1950s SUPERMAN stories too, there were also tales that sustained a sense of juvenile charm, particularly in the late 1950s, when editor Mort Weisinger became somewhat more venturesome in his choice of story-subjects.    

The Marston feminist message was given no more than lip service during the sixties decade, even in the brief period when Kanigher and his artists emulated the general look of Golden Age WONDER WOMAN. However, there was an aspect of the Superman books that both Marston and Kanigher imitated: the hero's use of incredible powers to perform unique feats. Kanigher's concoctions of bizarre tasks were no better or worse than those of Marston, but generally speaking Marston usually provided some rationale for the menaces WW faced. In the above excerpt from WW #154, Kanigher wastes no energy figuring out why a giant flaming humanoid happens to be dwelling right under Paradise Island. Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians? It's astounding that Kanigher worked in comic books for so long but had so little insight into what his audience wanted. Yes, the flashy super-feats might be the primary concern of kid-audiences. But Marston sold well in part because he challenged his audience, while Kanigher seemed to have had a low opinion of kids' capacities.

Yet there was one type of super-feat Kanigher avoided in the six years of my survey: the hand-to-hand fight-scene. Marston's Amazon was a jock; she liked not only entering athletic contests but challenging opponents, particularly conceited males, to fights. Kanigher didn't show any reluctance to show his Golden Age creation Black Canary duking it out with male crooks, so he wasn't personally repelled by "tough females." Even his female robot Tina of the contemporaneous METAL MEN was a spitfire. So it's possible that the low incidence of fight-scenes in the five-plus years from #105 to #155 (July 1965) was a dictate from DC editorial not to make the heroine seem too masculine, since that had been a major complaint about the character from the fanatic Frederic Wertham, the man whose fulminations made the 1955 Comics Code necessary for the comics-industry. However, evidently by 1965 sales on WW had declined enough for Kanigher to attempt impressing readers with his Marston-imitation, beginning in issue #156. Sales probably did not appreciably improve, but this new direction resulted in much more physical violence between the Amazon and her opponents for the remaining three-or-so years of Kanigher's tenure. Here are a few examples from that period:

    

This development certainly allowed artists Andru and Esposito to make the art more dynamic. Another possible factor is that even though the Marston-emulation took place before the debut of BATMAN in January 1966, by 1965 many DC superheroes began getting more "punchy," possibly in recognition that Marvel Comics was cutting into DC's action with the hyperkinetic fight-scenes of Kirby, Ditko and others. But apparently, even once the Marston-schtick ran its course in about eight issues, Wonder Woman's sales did not improve despite more fight-scenes either. This resulted in the aforementioned phase of "Mod Wonder Woman," which seemed to do a little better for the first year before its sales also declined.

Of all the stories I studied, only one merited the designation of a myth-comic, and I'll devote a separate essay to Kanigher's only exceptional WW story of the 1960s.   

UNCANNY AND MARVELOUS UNDER OTHER NAMES

 Some years back I wrote out some chapters of a hypothetical book outlining aspects of the combative mode and the Num Formula in much simpler, less prolix terms that what I employ here. Then I back-burnered the project. Recently I revisited certain sections, and I found that this one, in which I tried to show how "the uncanny"-- here called "The Lesser Metamundane"-- manifested even in narratives devoted to such famous Greek heroes as Heracles and Theseus, known largely for their adventures in the realm of the marvelous, i.e. "The Greater Metamundane." But I decided that most general readers would not be interested in the varied careers of these archaic Greek legends. So I cut Heracles and Theseus and reworked other aspects of the argument. By the way, what I call the metamundane is the same as what I call "metaphenomenal" on this blog, but with two less syllables and maybe less chance of chasing off receptive readers. But I decided to preserve this excerpt here in case it proves useful down the road.              

In the first section of this chapter, I was careful to cite examples of the metamundane that ranged from phenomena that were just barely beyond the mundane, as with my implied mention of The Lone Ranger, to phenomena that took over the entire narrative. From now on I will distinguish between the two extremes as “The Lesser Metamundane” and “The Greater Metamundane.” 

The cultures of the ancient world—Egypt, Sumeria, and Classical Greece—are replete with many stories of gods transforming mortals into plants and animals, or of monster-killing heroes gifted with super-strength or invulnerability. To pursue a parallel with modern comic-book heroes, such extravagant stories might be called the “Superman type” of narrative. However, in the extant culture of the Greeks we also see the rise of a “Batman type” of narrative. In such stories, the audience is still dealing with metamundane subject matter, but with less recourse to monsters or magical powers.

Heracles, for instance, is regarded as the Greek hero par excellence. He possesses unbelievable strength and lives in a world of out-and-out marvels. During his famed Twelve Labors he defeats the invulnerable Nemean lion and the immortal Hydra; he journeys to the edge of the world to gather the Apples of the Hesperides and descends to Death’s realm to capture the Hound of Hades. All of these adventures contain elements that contravene everyday reality so strongly that they belong to a category I’ll call the “Greater Metamundane.”  However, one tale, that of the Ninth Labor, is not quite so extravagant.

In the Ninth Labor, Heracles is charged with the task of acquiring the Girdle of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. He journeys to the Amazons’ domain, and tries to negotiate with the queen. The peaceful negotiations are interrupted by troublemaking Hera, who spreads the rumor among the other Amazons that the Greek hero intends to kidnap the queen. The Amazons attack Heracles, and he kills several of the warrior-women before retreating with a valuable capture, the queen’s daughter. Later Heracles ransoms the princess for the girdle, and so accomplishes his mission.

In my view the Amazons belong to the domain of the metamundane subject matter just as much as Cerberus and the Hydra. Yet it’s obvious that these mortal warrior-women aren’t nearly as overtly fantastic as Heracles’ usual opponents. The hero doesn’t perform any super-feats to defeat them, and any competent Greek warrior could have simply taken a hostage to gain an advantage. There is no archaeological evidence that the Amazons ever existed. Yet the idea of a matriarchal cult of warrior-women, while far from the continuum of everyday experience, resonates as “something that might happen” under the right circumstances. The Amazons choose to diverge from the norms of Greek society—meaning patriarchal rule—and so they became, for the Greeks, “monsters” in a purely figurative manner. This figurative, less extravagant manifestation of the metamundane I term “the Lesser Metamundane.”

Theseus is generally deemed Athens’ belated attempt to design a Heracles of their own. Modern readers usually know the Athenian hero for his one monster-killing feat, slaying the Minotaur of Crete. Prior to the Cretan adventure, though, Theseus has some episodic adventures that are closer in spirit to the Lesser Metamundane.

The hero is raised in the Greek city of Troezen, his mother’s city. Upon reaching manhood he travels overland to meet with his father, the ruler of Athens. On the way the hero—who, despite being the son of the sea-god Poseidon, has no special powers—encounters a bunch of mortal brigands, most of whom seem like the archaic ancestors of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter. The bandit Cerycon has a thing for waylaying travelers, challenging them to wrestle, and then killing them. Theseus accepts the bandit’s  challenge and breaks Cerycon’s neck. Then Theseus meets Sciron, who has the habit of kicking travelers off a neighboring cliff. Appropriately, the hero introduces this brigand to the wrong end of the same cliff. Finally, the hero encounters an innkeeper worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. When Procrustes allows guests to sleep in one of the beds at his inn, he insists on making the guest fit the bed, either trying to lengthen the guest’s limbs on a rack-like device, or cutting off body parts that are just too darn long. Theseus forces the innkeeper to sample his own hospitality, putting him to bed and chopping off the evildoer’s head with Procrustes’ own axe.

These tales have a simpler ring to them than many Heracles stories, following the folkloric pattern of “the biter bit.” One can find this simple pattern in stories like the Aesop’s Fable “The Cock, the Fox, and the Dog,” which depicts how a predatory fox, seeking to prey upon a rooster, gets lured into the jaws of the rooster’s buddy, a fox-killing hound. Like the Amazons, and like Theseus himself, the three brigands have no special powers. What makes them metamundane is that they diverge from the practical ways of real robbers. Each criminal has an almost fetish-like preoccupation with executing victims in some particular way. Given their impractical preoccupations, the brigands of Theseus loosely anticipate Batman’s fetish-oriented fiends, who pattern their crimes after birds (The Penguin) or cats (The Catwoman) in a perverse assertion of their quirky identities.

Roughly contemporaneous with the culture of Classical Greece is that of ancient Israel. The stories of the Hebrew Bible are generally regarded as belonging to religious mythology, and so there are many narratives of God and his angels. Yet the Lesser Metamundane also appears here, as seen in the narrative of David and Goliath. Goliath is called a “giant,” but standing a mere nine feet by current reckoning, he’s a long way from the behemoths that stormed Mount Olympus. As with the story of Heracles and the Amazons, if one disregards the deities hanging on the periphery of each story, the physical contest is very close to a mundane battle. Yet Goliath, like the Amazons, belongs to the Lesser Metamundane in being a lesser transgression of the expectations of everyday experience.

During the Christian eras that followed, non-Christian mythological tales became verboten, though some of the material of mythology was recorded in the form of stories of olden days. Some storytellers, like the composer of Beowulf, attempted to fuse the charms of a Celtic warrior-ethos with the moral meaning of Christianity (Grendel is called “the son of Cain.”) Other writers, usually monkish scholars, recorded the myths of their ancestors with some degree of fidelity, as seen in such compilations as the Elder Edda and the Book of Kells. However, only in the 13^th century did Christian Europe develop a purely literary mythology: that of the courtly epic. The original Arthur appeared in a chronicle from the sixth century, where he was simply a skilled warrior. Yet over the centuries he became not only a king but also a lodestone drawing other heroes into his field of influence, so that in time names like Lancelot, Gawain and Tristan began to sustain their own legends. Aside from Arthur, who wielded a magical sword, most of the knights were ordinary skilled men wielding ordinary weapons. Yet the element of knights’ armor was sometimes used for a metamundane effect of the Lesser kind. When Malory gives readers a Black Knight, or Spenser uses a Red Knight, both authors are emphasizing the metamundane aspects of the knights’ appearance, in a way that would eventually be mirrored in the costumes of 20^th-century superheroes.

THE DAWN OF THE MAGICAL ERA

 To be more specific, it's the dawn of my term "magical-era stories," which takes the place of the former term "magical fantasy stories." I introduced that term in the essay-series MIND OUT OF TIME, which wrapped up here. In that essay I provided this rationale for reworking the term "fantasy" so that its dominant exemplars, like CONAN and LORD OF THE RINGS, fall into a more specific category of fantasies that take place in an era that validates magic over science:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

  The more I thought about in the ensuing months, calling something a "magical fantasy" didn't speak specifically to my formulation: that certain fantasies are categorically different than others in that the former evoke an archaic era in which magic supervenes science. Thus, "magical-era stories" at least specifically references my main concept.  

The two types described above also broadly describe the way magical-era fantasies were structured. The narratives we commonly call "myths" tend to emphasize large-scale events, some of which take place largely in the worlds of the gods, of the heights of Olympus or the depths of Hades. In contrast, many folktales tend to be more limited in scope and deal with ordinary humans encountering supernatural presences. However, in keeping with today's review of Jack Vance's DYING EARTH, I should mention one other form of archaic fantasy that indirectly influenced many pop-cultural descendants: the apocalyptic fantasy that describes the final fate of the profane world, seen in both the Norse Ragnarok and the Christian Book of Revelations. To the best of my knowledge there were no archaic apocalypses that involved the concepts of science, because such concepts had yet to become systematized. Modern "futuristic" magical-era stories can't avoid being influenced by science-fiction tropes, which is the case with both DYING EARTH and its literary ancestor, Clark Ashton Smith's ZOTHIQUE. More on these matters later, perhaps.

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 As a quick coda to CROSSING GODS PT. 3, it occurs to me that. although I may find uses for the terms I introduced there, there's a simpler line I might draw in the sands of shifting alignment, at least with respect to modern usages of all types of traditional narratives, be they myths, folktales, or legends. 

If a given modern narrative attempts to substantially represent a traditional story's plot action-- that is, making some attempt to be "canonical"-- but alters the scenario by bringing in extraneous elements, or rearranging elements within the actual canon, then that is a crossover. Thus, of the earlier examples cited, the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA would be a "re-arrangement" type, in which the (probably political) marital alliance of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is reworked so that Sheba never marries Solomon but rather hooks up with the king's son Rehoboam, who's in the Solomon narrative but not with that role. The examples with extraneous elements would include the movie NOAH, which imports Tubal Cain from a different Biblical story to serve as the story's villain, and the 1980s CLASH OF THE TITANS, which the story of Perseus is merged with elements from the narratives of Achilles and Bellerophon.

However, if there is no substantial attempt to be canonical, then what one has is an "open canon" created of whatever elements appear in an aligned set of traditional stories. Thus Marvel-Thor can meet any character from Norse mythology or folktales, and there is no crossover-tension. Even though the Thor of Myth may never have encountered the Surtur of Myth (so far as we know from surviving texts), Marvel-Thor can meet any Nordic traditional figure, from any time period, and it won't be a crossover. However, when he meets Hercules or Shiva, traditional figures from other myth-cosmoses, that's a crossover.

The "open canon" principle would also hold for my example of THE IRON DRUID CHRONICLES from the first CROSSING GODS. The entirely fictional hero of this series, Atticus, is a master of Celtic magic, so any purely Celtic myth-figure he encounters is a null-crossover. But when he meets the pale horseman of Christian Revelation, that's a crossover of the innominate kind. Ditto Marvel's Daimon Hellstrom meeting any entity purely native to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Null-crossovers would include Satan and all traditional figures from that cosmos, probably including even icons from other pantheons who were demonized by early Jews and Christians (Baal, Astarte), but would NOT include icons from completely different traditions, such as the Egyptian Anubis and the Celtic Morgaine LeFay.         

         

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.2

In this 2022 post, I briefly described a few ways in which I differed from the statements Susanne Langer made in the section I quoted here. To sum up my main line of critique, I stated that I felt that the "unknown creators" of both archaic religious myths and folktales possessed the ability to allow "their imaginations to roam freely," but that both forms of narrative also channeled epistemological patterns, though myths tended to develop those patterns more "thoroughly." So I disagreed with Langer's essential claim: that tales were focused wholly upon "wish fulfillment" while myths encompassed "a world picture, an insight into life generally, not a personal imaginary biography." What I liked about her formulation is that she distinguished between the tales' supposed reliance upon "subjective symbols" and the myths' predilection for "observed folkways and nature-ways." Though I did not say so in the 2022 post, the subjectivity that Langer attributes to tales may be loosely comparable to my concept of a narrative's "lateral meaning," while her focus upon "folkways and nature-ways" parallels my criteria for "virtual meaning." That demonstration of an intersubjective pattern of thought between myself and a deceased scholar I never knew prompts me to indulge in this "compare-and-contrast" game.                                                                                          

But none of the above relates to the topic of emulation, which I've raised in my title. As it happens, 2022 was also the year I began writing a lot more about crossover, agency, and interordination, as in this August post. In that post, I used two iterations of Steve Ditko's originary character The Question to formulate the concepts of "trope emulation" and "icon emulation." To shorten the argument a bit, I said that when Alan Moore conceived Rorschach, his variation on The Question, he was in no way asserting any identity between his character and Ditko's character. Rather, what Moore did was to borrow tropes from Ditko's character and from other sources in order to create an independent icon. This, I asserted, was trope emulation. But when Denny O'Neil created his variation on the Ditko crusader, he attempted to assert an identity between his creation and that of Ditko, if only for the sake of impressing fans of the older creation. This, I asserted, was icon emulation.                                 

Since Langer was in no way attempting to form a general theory of literary narrative, naturally she started from a different place than I did. But I find it interesting that. rightly or wrongly, she characterizes all the figures of folktales as entities completely independent of one another, claiming that they are little more than the functions of various wish-fulfillment scenarios. This I regard as "trope emulation," though with the caveat that in my system characters like Cinderella are not just functions, but icons in their own right, no matter how much they fluctuate from one iteration to another. In the case of myth-figures, Langer regards that they are capable of merging with one another because "myth tends to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin enter into definite relations with one another." This I regard as "icon emulation," and there's even a loose parallel of purpose. Just as O'Neil promulgates his version of "a Question" but some but not all of the poetic tropes of the Ditko character, Irish Christians promoted a saint called Brigid in order to appeal to a laity familiar with a pagan goddess of the same name. There will probably be a few other points of comparison, because whatever my disagreements with Langer, I find her fertility of mind on matters mythopoeic to be equal to that of Jung and Campbell.

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.1

 I thought that I had gone into some detail regarding Susanne Langer's views of the distinctions between "myths" and "tales," but my previous posts on Langer don't seem to cover those distinctions in depth. In any case most of those earlier posts predate my formulation of the concept of "emulation," so that's as good a reason as any to start from scratch. Since the passage I'm reprinting from her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY is so long, I'll confine this post to preserving the passage as a resource from which I'll draw for Part 2.                                                                                                                          Here we have a literary product belonging to the civilized 

races of Europe just as much as to the savage cultures of darker 
continents. Aristocratic beings, chiefs or princes, now play the 
leading role; dragons and ogres and wicked kings, or beautiful 
witches of great power, replace the monkeys, crocodiles, angry 
dead men, or local cannibals of the older tradition. The wish- 
ful imagination of man has been disciplined, by public expo- 
sure and realistic reflection, into a genuine art-form, as far re- 
moved from personal dreaming as the ritual dance from self- 
expressive bouncing and shouting. 

Yet this high development of fantasy has brought us no- 
where in the direction of mythology. For although fairy-story 
is probably an older form than myth, the latter is not simply 
a higher development of the former. It, too, goes back to prim- 
itive fantasy, but the point of its origin from that source Ues 
far back in cultural history, long before the evolution of our 
modern fairytale — of Kunstmarchen, as the Germans say, or 
even Volksmarchen. It required not a higher stage of story- 
telling, but a thematic shift, to initiate what Miss Harrison  

called "the myth-making instinct."                                                              For the fairytale is irresponsible; it is franlily imaginary, and 

its purpose is to gratify wishes, "as a dream doth flatter." Its 
heroes and heroines, though of delightfully high station, 
wealth, beauty, etc., are simply individuals; "a certain prince," 
"a lovely princess." The end of the story is always satisfying, 
though by no means always moral ; the hero's heroism may be 
slyness or luck quite*as readily as integrity or valor. The theme 
is generally the triumph of an unfortunate one — an enchanted 
maiden, a youngest son, a poor Cinderella, an alleged fool — 
over his or her superiors, whether these be kings, bad fairies, 
strong animals (e.g. Red Riding Hood's wolf), stepmothers, 
or elder brothers. In short, the fairytale is a form of "wishful 
thinking," and the Freudian analysis of it fully explains why 
it is perennially attractive, yet never believed by adults even 
in the telling. 

Myth, on the other hand, whether literally received or not, 
is taken with religious seriousness, either as historic fact or as 
a "mystic" truth. Its typical theme is tragic, not Utopian; and 
its personages tend to fuse into stable personalities of super- 
natural character. Two divinities of somewhat similar type — 
perhaps miraculously born, prodif'ious in strength, heroically 
defeated and slain — become identified ; they are one god under 
two names. Even those names may become mere epithets link- 
ing the god to different cults.  

This sets the hero of myth strikingly apart from the fairy- 
tale hero. No matter how closely the Prince Charming of 
Snow White's story resembles the gentleman who wakens 
Sleeping Beauty, the two characters do not become identified. 
No one thinks that the trickster "Little Glaus" is the little 
tailor who slew "seven at a stroke," or that the giant whom 
Jack killed was in any way related to the ofjre defeated by 
Puss in Boots, or that he figured elsewhere as Bluebeard. Fairy 
stories bear no relation to each other. Myths, on the other 
hand, become more and more closely woven into one fabric, 
they form cycles, their dramatis personae tend to be intimately 
connected if not identified. Their stage is the actual world — 
the Vale of Tempe, Mount Olympus, the sea, or the sky — and  

not some ungeographical fairyland...And myth has, indeed, a more difficult and more 

serious purpose than fairytale. The elements of both are much 
alike, but they are put to quite different uses. Fairytale is a 
personal gratification, the expression of desires and of their 
imaginary fulfilment, a compensation for the shortcomings of 
real life, an escape from actual frustration and conflict. Be- 
cause its function is subjective, the hero is strictly individual 
and human; for, although he may have magic powers, he is 
never regarded as divine; though he may be an oddity like 
Tom Thumb, he is not considered supernatural. For the same 
reason — namely that his mission is merely to represent the 
"self in a day-dream — he is not a savior or helper of man- 
kind. If he is good, his goodness is a personal asset, for which 
he is richly rewarded. But his humanitarian role is not the 
point of the story; it is at best the setting for his complete so- 
cial triumph. The beneficiary of his clever acts, his prowess, or 
his virtue is he himself, not mankind forever after. And be- 
cause an individual history is what the fairytale fancies, its 
interest is exhausted with the "happy ending" of each finished 
story. There is no more mutual reference between the adven- 
tures of Cinderella and those of Rapunzel than between two  

separate dreams. Myth, on the other hand, at least at its best, is a recognition 

of natural conflicts, of human desire frustrated by non-human 
powers, hostile oppression, or contrary desires; it is a story 
of the birth, passion, and defeat by death which is man's com- 
mon fate. Its ultimate end is not wishful distortion of the 
world, but serious envisagement of its fundamental truths; 
moral orientation, not escape. That is why it does not exhaust 
its whole function in the telling, and why separate myths 
cannot be left entirely unrelated to any others. Because it pre- 
sents, however metaphorically, a world-picture, an insight into 
life generally, not a personal imaginary biography, myth tends 
to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning 
are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin 
enter into definite relations with each other. Moreover, because 
the mythical hero is not the subject of an egocentric day-dream, 
but a subject greater than any individual, he is always felt to 
be superhuman, even if not quite divine. He is at least a de- 
scendant of the gods, something more than a man. His sphere 
of activity is the real world, because what he symbolizes belongs 
to the real world, no matter how fantastic its expression may 
be (this is exactly contrary to the fairytale technique, which  

transports a natural individual to a fairyland outside reality) .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Hmm, guess that will teach me the formatting perils of copying from a PDF. More shortly.

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 I devoted one essay in this series to "external alignment," defined thusly: 'This form of crossover I will term an "external alignment" crossover, in that one icon with archaic myth-associations appears in a cosmos with which that icon is not aligned.' I then followed it up with another essay, which defined "internal alignment" as "substantive alterations of icon-arrangements in a single cosmos." However, in re-reading my other essays on the topic of "alignment," I see that the essay I wrote just before these two, COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 5, also dealt with two forms of alignment, both of which might subsume the external and internal formulations.                                       

  One example I gave of internal alignment was that of the 2014 film NOAH. I remarked that this film took place in the "Noah cosmos," but that it reached into some loosely allied Biblical narratives to flesh out the cinematic storyline: narratives such as the story of Tubal-Cain, which is not directly involved in the tale of Noah. I did not mention that the film also played off of alternate Noah-stories like the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which is probably the movie's source of its "rock-giants." These two borrowings bring me to explore my description of "static alignment" in Part Five of COSMIC ALIGNMENT. In that essay, I used the Joker as an element of the "Batman cosmos" that is always aligned with Batman, no matter how many other "other-universe" characters the Joker may encounter.                                                                                           

Now, there are various narratives, whether stand-alone or serial in nature, that relate fictional stories of archaic myth-characters meeting, even though they never met in archaic stories. The archaic Hercules never met a lot of the Greek figures encountered by, say, the televised Hercules of the LEGENDARY JOURNEYS teleseries, such as the above-seen monster Echidna. But in my view, even the modern-day version of Hercules remains in a static alignment with nearly all Greek mythology, just as the modern-day Noah is in a static alignment with all Biblical mythology. The only way in which the alignment is bent, though not broken, is when an element strongly aligned with another icon-cosmos is imported into a given narrative. The rock-giants of NOAH aren't in the Old Testament text, but they are in the Book of Enoch, so the two iterations of the Deluge Story can blend with no crossover-vibe. But Tubal-Cain, though he's a distant Hebrew ancestor like Noah, properly belongs to the narrative of Cain, and so a static type of crossover ensues.                                       

                           

              

                                       

     The opposite of the "static alignment" was the "dynamic alignment." My main aim in forming this concept was to describe cases in which a particular "Sub" was not firmly bonded to the cosmos in which it first appeared, so that it could successfully migrate into other cosmoses. My examples there were super-villains like Thanos and the Cobra-Hyde team, which did not remain firmly associated with the hero-cosmos in which each originally appeared, to wit, Iron Man for Thanos, Thor for Cobra-Hyde. This also applies to the examples given in the "external alignment" argument: certain elements in a given culture's stories can be seen as dynamic in that they can and do move from one sub-cosmos to another. For example, one may posit that the Greek monsters called "Cyclopes" start out as smith-servants to Zeus, King of the Gods, crafting the heaven-lord's fatal thunderbolts. Arguably later, the poet Homer reworks these traditional figures into a race of cannibalistic giants who live apart from humankind and become menaces within the cosmos of the hero Odysseus.                                                                                                                         

                                                                             This transitive property of certain myth-figures transfers to their entirely fictional (and thus nominative) iterations. Thus Marvel Comics' Thor can meet pretty much any figure within Norse mythology-- say, the fire-god Surtur-- and it doesn't matter that Archaic Thor never crossed paths with Archaic Surtur.  This is the same intertextuality that keeps the NOAH movie's intermingling of elements from both Old Testament and apocryphal sources from meriting the crossover-vibe. The "static crossover" might still be possible if Marvel-Thor is constellated with another major figure of Nordic myth, like Roy Thomas' attempt to meld the legend of Marvel-Thor with that of Seigfried. But there's no intertextuality between Norse myth and Hindu myth, as per my example of Marvel-Thor meeting Marvel-Shiva. Thus, an encounter between any version of Thor and any version of Shiva is a dynamic one and parallels the sort of dynamic crossover one finds whenever a villan with a static default to a particular cosmos interacts with some other cosmos (The Joker hassles Superman, for example).                                                                                   

                                                                                      I felt I should be more specific on this subject also with reference to purely nominative fictional characters who are aligned with archaic mythologies, such as Wonder Woman. If Wonder Woman simply encounters a beast from Greek mythology without its "own story," such as the Chimera or the Hydra, then that's not a crossover. But if she meets a character from Greek myth that has been the "star" of his own narrative, such as Heracles, then that's a static crossover-- while if she meets myths or legends from outside the sphere of Greek myth, then that's a dynamic crossover.

NEAR MYTHS: "THIS MORTAL COIL" (ALPHA FLIGHT #50, 1987)

Bill Mantlo's tenure on the original ALPHA FLIGHT series wasn't much more distinguished than that of the feature's creator John Byrne. Yet curiously, one of the few times Mantlo delves into the world of epistemological myth was a story in which he was clearly attempting to jettison a couple of characters he didn't like writing-- that is, Northstar and Aurora, whose history I briefly examined in TWINSANITY.

To the extent "Mortal Coil" is remembered at all, it's as the issue in which writer Mantlo made the big reveal that ambiguously gay superhero Northstar was actually a "fairy"-- but in the literal sense (though this didn't keep some commenters from assuming that this revised origin was meant as gay-bashing). Such invidious remarks didn't take into account (1) that Mantlo was also stating that Aurora, who was not gay/lesbian, shared the same human/fairy heritage, and (2) that Mantlo was a fairly conspicuous Liberal, who was unlikely to have been bashing even an implicit gay character.

Bill Mantlo took over writing the regular ALPHA FLIGHT title after John Byrne departed with issue #28, and he continued on the feature until issue #66. I would judge Byrne's stories to be no more than standard Marvel soap-operatics, in which a team of disparate individuals bounce off one another with lots of emoting and hand-wringing in place of substantial characterization. Mantlo's run was largely more of the same, and it can be argued that he made an honest attempt to follow through on most of the character-arcs Byrne had established. The two authors had roughly opposite strengths and weaknesses. Byrne could not plot an arc to save his life, but he was able to give his characters distinct voices. Mantlo was a better plotter, but all of his characters talk like they just graduated Exposition 101.

I glanced over the Mantlo issues prior to "Coil," and for the most part he keeps the Byrne status quo with respect to the mutant twins. Northstar is jealous of Aurora's dalliance with men in a way that would seem incestuous were he not supposed to be implicitly homosexual. As it is, Brother Northstar just comes off as judgmental for no particular reason. After the death of Aurora's former lover Sasquatch, she begins a love-affair with technician Roger Bochs, a legless paraplegic. Throughout these issues, Aurora's split personality remains unaltered, and her superhero persona is that of a flirt who has only light, insubstantial loves. Mantlo clearly had no interest in improving the fractious characters, and "Coil" is a story in which he sought to get rid of the twins-- and, for that matter, another Byrne original, the dwarf-hero Puck.

Since issue #44, Mantlo introduced the notion that Northstar had a "pre-existing disease" that made him cough in every succeeding issue. Unconfirmed rumors of the period asserted that Mantlo meant to imply that Northstar had contracted AIDS and to have the mutant hero perish of that disease. Allegedly, Marvel Editorial refused to let him make even indirect allusions to homosexuality, so Mantlo revised whatever plans he had to rid himself of the mutant siblings. Thus, Northstar's illness, as well as Aurora's mental instability, become serious enough that the team takes both of them to a potential place of healing, a mystical conduit that links to many of the Marvel magic-worlds.

Despite some nice art by June Brigman, most of the perils the Alphans face are standard and uninvolving. Thus there's some irony to my assertion Mantlo saved his creative energies to craft a new origin for the characters, just so that he could be rid of them. This new origin claims that the twins' mortal father, who died before either sibling could have met him, found his way into the Faerie World, and caught a female elf, Danae, who wanted to be caught by him. However, after the two were married and Danae conceived the twins, an Elf Purity Squad tracked the wayward fairy down. The twins' father expires in an accident and Danae, despite being immortal, perishes for some reason Mantlo does not bother to discuss.

This revelation by Loki, Norse God of Mischief, is taken at face value by both twins as they seek to survive in the darkness of the conduit. This situation engenders the closest thing the two characters have to a "mythic moment." John Byrne, during some of his last issues, had Aurora declare her independence from her snobby brother by altering her genetic makeup so that the two of them lost their powers when they made physical contact. Faced with the prospect of death in an otherworld, Aurora makes a sacrifice, radiating her store of light-energy-- which I guess is now mystical in nature-- into her brother's body. This depletes her so that Aurora is captured by some of the conduit's demonic denizens. 

Northstar locates the rest of Alpha Flight, but because their leader Vindicator is suddenly antsy about letting the demons out of the gate the heroes opened, she then seals it, with both Aurora and Puck inside. With two of the three characters Mantlo didn't want to write out of the way, he then came up with a way to usher Northstar into the Faerie-World of his mother's race-- though it's not clear why the elves suddenly welcomed a half-elf, half-human when twenty-something years ago they wanted to keep their bloodlines pure. 

The book's heroes have to slink away with their tails between their legs, but Mantlo makes certain that the readers don't condemn him for consigning two regular characters to horrible fates. I won't get into Puck's disposition, except to say that he's relieved of an ongoing curse. Loki then tells some irate deities that Aurora, by hurling all of her light-force into her brother, not only cured him but purged her own elf-nature as well. Loki claims he delivered her to some unspecified mortal custodians and that he supposedly cured her of her split personality.

I don't pretend that "Coil" is a good story, and as soon as Mantlo left the feature, the subsequent writer reversed the "half-elf" solution and both Northstar and Aurora came back, though I haven't re-visited at those stories for years. But I will give Mantlo some credit for coming up with a climax for the Northstar-Aurora sibling relationship, in marked contrast to the characters' creators John Byrne, who was content to have them simply snipe at one another endlessly. The idea of Aurora surrendering her essence to cure her ailing brother could even carry a loose clansgressive motif, which plugs in to Northstar's jealousy of his sister's sexual relationships-- though I won't claim that this was intentional on Mantlo's part. The name he gives to the twins' elfin mother also has an inverted connection to the use of "light" to signify "intercourse." In Greek mythology, the mortal maiden Danae begets Perseus after the hero's godly father Zeus appears to Danae as a "golden shower," usually translated as rain, though the shower's color has stronger associations with sunlight. And though I don't have reason to think Mantlo a "mythophile," it's interesting that the name Danae resembles a Celtic name for the faerie-folk: the "Tuatha de Danaan."

CROSSING GODS PT. 2

 Like the earlier CROSSING GODS, this essay will focus mostly upon how different forms of literary works, whether nominative or innominate (as explained here), utilize deific icons.

As noted in the cited essay, innominate texts are those whose "history is hard to determine." So even the earliest texts available to us testifying as to the history of Zeus or Enki or Thor are not necessarily the first appearances of those deities, in the way that we can be totally certain that the first appearance of Marvel Comics' Thor was JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #83. So the Thor of the Prose Edda is an innominate figure, even if the author tries to claim that he was just a human being descended from Priam of Troy, while Marvel's Thor is nominative, "able to accurately named."

Now, a nominative icon may emulate many of the tropes associated with an innominate original. In archaic texts, Thor isn't always the star of every story in which he appears, but he is for all of the Thor stories appearing in the MIGHTY THOR feature. And just as Thor is a nominative character based upon an innominate one, the same holds true for all the support-cast icons who derive from archaic stories. Further, these Subs are aligned with Prime icon Thor as much as his rogues' gallery of villains.

However, icons who do not derive from the Norse mythos of the archaic Thor cannot be fully subsumed by his cosmos. I've already referenced some of the differing ways the character of Hercules was brought into the Marvel Universe-- first as a one-off character in an AVENGERS issue, and then as a more long-lived iteration that was probably planned to be launched as a Prime at some future time. 

But Thor crossing over with another deific "cosmos" stands as a crossover even if the new icon never appears again. For instance, in THOR #301 Marvel premiered its version of the Hindu god Shiva, who naturally was given some reason to go toe-to-toe with the Thunder God. I think it's safe to speculate that none of the people associated with that story planned to use Shiva again. Had there been any such intention, that plan would have been squelched by reader-protests to the effect that it was inappropriate to feature a fictional version of a still-worshipped deity alongside a fictionalized Norse god. FWIW, Marvel editors did a retcon claiming that the entity who had fought Thor in that issue was actually "Indra," a Vedic divinity whose worship seems well and truly dead.

I touched on this type of crossover at the end of CROSSING GODS PART 1, discussing a paperback fantasy-series, "The Iron Druid Chronicles." The Prime icon of this series was a modern-day druid who was still in contact with all the ancient religious entities of Celtic myth and legend, and so I judged that all of those Celtic entities were Subs to that hero's Prime, just as Odin and Heimdall and Loki are all Subs to Thor. But just as Shiva was a "crossover god" the first time he appeared in Thor, because of his innominate history, the same would be the case for every time the druid-guy encountered a myth-figure from outside the Celtic cosmos.

This form of crossover I will term an "external alignment" crossover, in that one icon with archaic myth-associations appears in a cosmos with which that icon is not aligned.

And where there's an "external alignment," can there fail to be an "internal" one? Stay tuned.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SHIP OF ISHTAR (1924), PT. 2

In my review of A. Merritt's THE MOON POOL, I observed the following of his highly lapidary prose style:

Author Merritt takes great pleasure in describing the interfusion of loveliness and wickedness, of heaven and hell, and in future novels he develops this trope to greater effect. 

SHIP OF ISHTAR is in my mind one of those more accomplished later novels, though the titular ship itself might seem to reject any such fusions, given that the ship is divided into a white-colored half devoted to Ishtar, Goddess of Love, and a black-hued half devoted to Nergal, God of Death. Furthermore, early in the novel the human representative of Ishtar on said ship, the priestess Sharane, explicitly lays down a rather Manichean separation between Love and Death that sounds more Christian than Babylonian to my ears.

"Between Ishtar and Nergal is and ever must be unending hatred and strife. For Ishtar is the Bestower of Life and Nergal is Taker of Life; she is the Lover of Good and he is the Lover of Evil. And how shall ever Heaven and Hell be linked; or life and death, or good and evil?"

That said, Sharane, relating to protagonist John Kenton the story of the Ship's creation, doesn't necessarily speak for her creator. It's true that unending strife rules the Ship, with Sharane and her fellow priestesses constantly warding off the mystical attacks of Klaneth and his priests of Nergal. And despite the opposition of male and female forces, Klaneth has no designs on Sharane. Most villains from similar adventure-romances were always the hero's competition for the girl, but Klaneth just wants Sharane dead. The two of them seem to validate the opposition of the gods they represent, deities who can enter the bodies of their servants at will, like the orisha-spirits of voodoo.

However, the Ship comes about because of a love that transgresses the normal boundaries between religious spheres. In ancient Babylon the Ishtar-priestess Zarpanit falls in love with the Nergal-priest Alasu, and the two begin meeting clandestinely. The mortals are about to consummate their love when, quixotically enough, both of their deities choose to possess their votaries at the same moment. Merritt is decorous in having Sharane claim that the two mortals did not quite "meet," which would have had the effect of bringing about a cosmic sex-act between two opposed forces. (It would have also been a traducement of Babylonian marital law, because in Merritt's world Ishtar is the wife of the war-god Bel.) 

The Ship is created as a punishment for the rebellious votaries, in that Zarpanit and her retinue-- including Sharane-- must occupy one half of the ship while Alasu and his retinue-- including Klaneth-- must remain on the other side. However, Zarpanit and Alasu cross the forbidden barrier and die together. Thus Sharane and Klaneth inherit the punishment of the two dead lovers, though this ends up giving them an otherworldly immortality, as they and all in their contact remain preserved while the Babylon of history perishes.

Into this domain of sexual brinkmanship, modern-day Kenton enters. Yet he doesn't precisely get the same friendly welcome from the leading lady as Burroughs' heroes usually receive. Having heard her story, Kenton tells Sharane that Babylon is long gone. Sharane, who has already experienced an instant attraction for the American, becomes angry at his claim that she's a spectre who's outlived her culture. She has her warrior-maidens overwhelm Kenton and thrust him over the Nergal-side of the ship. Klaneth consigns Kenton to the oar-locks, ensuring that Klaneth will rue the day he did so. However, Kenton is more than a little wroth with Sharane as well, particularly when she and one of her maidens venture close enough to taunt the imprisoned oarsman.

"Satalu," [Sharane] murmured, "would you not think the sight of me would awaken even a slave? That any slave, so he were young and strong, would break his chains-- for me?"

I doubt any Burroughs heroines ever talked this way. Sharane is mocking Kenton for his enslavement, but at the same time she's daring him to use his masculine might to break free, claiming that even "any slave" would willingly break his bonds if tempted by her feminine charms. On some level she wants him to break free and ravish her, because ravishment is the proof of vital male energy. She pretends to be offended when Kenton responds that when he takes over the ship, he's also going to take her. But all these sallies are rough love-talk, not any sort of literal promise of rapine.

Kenton takes over the Ship of Ishtar and rids it of all other males except those in his retinue. However, the death-god Nergal hurls his own rejoinder, manifesting warriors to attack Kenton's forces (all before he takes Sharane, though he does catch her unaware in her cabin and bind her). But Ishtar sends her own female emissaries, not to fight the Nergal-men, but to overwhelm them with love. Both groups of magical minions dissolve in an act of cosmic sex, and immediately after, Sharane is suddenly converted to instant love of Kenton's masterful ways. The two retire to a cabin-- not without some more rough talk from Kenton-- and Merritt tells us that the goddess sends down her sacred doves to consecrate this "wedding" of Babylonian priestess and American archaeologist.

The latter part of the book throws another image of sexual duplication into the mix. Sharane, captured by Klaneth's forces, is taken to Emaktila, another still-living part of Old Babylon. Almost all of the action on this island takes place in the Temple of Seven Zones, which like the Ship is a shrine dedicated to more than one god-- in fact, to all seven of Babylon's planetary deities. 

Now at the Temple Merritt plays up a detail about Sharane: that she's actually a priestess of Bel, not of his wife Ishtar, and this opens her to a new kind of peril. Even though Sharane has obviously had sex with Kenton, she stands in danger of having sex with another man-- because Shalamu, the priest of Bel, is a twin for Kenton. Shalamu takes over the role scorned by Klaneth: that of the rotter who's willing to rape a woman for sheer lust. Kenton invades the temple to save Sharane, and the two men fight. Ironically, Shalamu is doomed not by Kenton but by a female dancer, Narada, who loves the Bel-priest and stabs him by mistake. Sharane then kills Narada, so that the "good couple" wins out over "the bad couple."

Nergal and Ishtar have a mystical conflict toward the novel's end, but for the most part their opposition becomes less important for most of the latter half of the story. In a larger symbolic sense, Bel and Nergal are equivalent menaces, in that the union of the good couple is threatened by the human representatives of both male gods. In contrast, Ishtar ends up being beneficent to the good couple, which follows from her consecration of their unofficial marriage.

Without going into too much detail, suffice to say that the Babylonian fantasy-world does not endure, and all of its occupants, including the one alien to that domain, meet their doom as well. Merritt presents this doleful demise with an upbeat note, implying that Kenton and Sharane will be united in some Babylonian heaven. I consider SHIP to be Merritt's strongest novel for two reasons. For one, he weaves a strong sexual myth out of his take on ancient pagan beliefs. And for two, Merritt takes all the old gods seriously, rather than depicting them as too many authors of the time did: as super-scientific entities from Atlantis or the planet Pluto. 

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE SHIP OF ISHTAR (1924), PT. 1

 THE SHIP OF ISHTAR was the third of eight metaphenomenal novels which journalist Abraham Merritt wrote between 1919 and 1934. I think it fair to say that none of Merrit's essays, poems or short stories have enjoyed any repute with either his contemporaries or later generations it's all about the novels, or the three movies adapted from the books. 

SHIP is the only Merritt novel that I categorize as a "magical fantasy," specifically the subtype described in this essay by the "portal into another world" category, where a character (or characters) will pass out of the mundane world into a fantasy-realm, spending nearly the whole narrative in the otherverse. SHIP's hero, archaeologist John Kenton, is an extreme example of such a protagonist. He has no background aside from his profession and one very minor reference to his Irish-American heritage. Kenton encounters the fantasy-portal in a room at his private residence, and he returns to that very room only for brief transitions out of the fantasy-verse, but never goes anywhere else in the "real world" for the entirety of the book.

Kenton receives a Babylonian artifact from an archaeological colleague, a stone block. When Kenton taps the block with a hammer, it splits apart, and inside is a highly detailed crystal carving of a ship at sea. As Kenton studies the carving, he physically transitions to the fantasy-world represented by the carving, a world where Babylonian gods and magic still exist, even though the Babylonian civilization has fallen to dust in Kenton's time. 

I'll note in passing that while the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books in 1912 made it sound as if hero John Carter's spirit might have left his mundane body to manifest on Mars, Kenton's real body definitely makes the journey. Whenever he returns to his room in the real world, he retains any changes that occurred to his form in the Babylon-verse, such as physical wounds.

Like most Burroughs books, Merritt's novels are usually about heroes undertaking grand adventures for the sake of winning a beautiful woman. Unlike most Burroughs works, SHIP manages to make the quest for romance serve a deep metaphysical myth-thread-- one complicated enough that it will require a separate post to explore. 

Sticking to the plot only then, Kenton finds himself on a ship that might be called a "mobile temple," and one devoted to two warring deities. (This might be an extension of a frequently used trope in Burroughs; that of warring sister-cities.) Kenton's romantic interest, beauteous Sharane, rules over the light-hued half of the ship, which is dedicated to Ishtar, Goddess of Love, and in this she's served by a small coterie of warrior-maidens. The black-hued half of the ship is ruled by Nergal, Babylonian God of Death, and his servants are an ugly gang of black-robed monks, ruled by their leader Klaneth. Three good males-- a Persian, a Norseman and a Ninevite-- serve as unwilling bondsmen to Klaneth, so inevitably they end up being Kenton's allies in his quest to defeat the death-god's servant and to woo the servant of the love-goddess.

Part 2 will go into the metaphysical setup as to why the bisected temple-ship exists at all. Here I'll confine myself to the base action. After being cruelly treated by Klaneth, Kenton leads a rebellion with his allies, tosses Klaneth and his men off the ship, and wins Sharane. However, the Nergal-priest survives being deep-sixed, possibly thanks to his deity. He comes back to attack the Ishtar-ship with a Babylonian bireme, presumably taken from the only other location in this fantasy-world, the sorcerers' isle Emaktila. Kenton happens to get spirited back to his own world by chance while the attack transpires. When he returns to the ship, he learns that Klaneth's forces have abducted Sharane and have taken her back to Emaktila to suffer some dire fate. No one will be surprised that the rest of the story concerns how Kenton and his friends launch a rescue mission. This naturally involve san encounter not only with a Babylonian society-- apparently preserved in its otherworld by the gods-- but also the other five deities in Babylon's septet of planetary rulers.

I'll pass over the fates of Kenton and Sharane, because those tie into the deeper metaphysical myth of the novel, which I tend to codify as "cosmic sex," and which I'll detail further in Part 2. I think anyone can enjoy SHIP just as a kinetic adventure story, though Merritt's prose won't be for all tastes. I find him able to paint enchanting visual pictures better than the majority of prose writers, but I imagine a lot of modern readers would find Merritt a little too rococo.

 

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 4

 For reasons I'll enlarge upon shortly, I was able to finish STORIES WITHIN STORIES, including the chapter I skipped earlier. The reason is simple: the latter chapters of the book concentrated on explicating several modern fantasies I hadn't read, and since I'd already got the overall sense of Attebery's project, I could give them all no more than a cursory once-over.

Even though I broke this review into sections for ease of posting comments, that procedure has one distinct advantage over the usual summary approach: it allows me to anticipate some of the directions in which the argument seems to be trending. In Part 3, even though I'd not seen Attebery use the word "appropriation" in the sense popularized by Roland Barthes, I recognized that this was essentially the argument Attebery was promulgating. Before that chapter, the author had mentioned the word "appropriation" once in the introduction, but in a fairly neutral manner, which MIGHT have been merely discussing the overall political climate for fantasy fiction (or, for that matter, any fiction).

So I feel some vindication when I reach Chapter 5, with the forbidding title, "Colonial Fantasy." and find Attebery discussing Australian author Patricia Wrightson. Attebery gets fairly exercised at Wrightson's hubris, as a White Australian, for having utilized Aboriginal religious concepts in her fantasy novels, and the "A" word is not far from Attebery's lips:

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

Any comparison between (a) a fantasy-author invoking religious concepts not strictly part of the author's heritage to (b) a general process of colonial officials enforcing "assimilation and genocide" on real people is, quite clearly, a thoroughly reprehensible equation. But, for what it's worth, in the same chapter Atteberry claims (despite his earlier negative remarks on an Alan Garner book) that he has no problem with fantasists using "myths of vanished civilizations." Though earlier he criticized Campbell's monomythic interpretation of such myths, here he claims that such myth-tales "no longer belong to anyone but are legitimately part of a cultural commons." But the stories of "living traditions," like those of the Aboriginal native, are different. "They are still surrounded by rituals and obligations; they demand that the listener live by their rules."

But do they, really? When an Aboriginal native orally relates the myth-stories of his people to a group of Australian tourists, certainly the tourists are expected to listen seriously and not critique the stories. But if a modern Aboriginal fiction-writer did what Patricia Wrightson did-- creating a entirely fictional story in which the myths of his people were (presumably) depicted with the same fidelity as the oral storyteller-- what "authority," to use Atteberry's favorite word, does a purely fictional story have over listeners not of the Aborigine's tradition? 

Attebery's mistake is ironic, given that elsewhere he expressly distinguished between traditional myth-narratives and fictional stories based upon them. For instance, in Chapter 1 he states uncategorically that the most famous works of Ovid and Apuleius "function as fantasy to the degree that they are not authorized or reverent retellings of myth... they play with the material, inventing details, rearranging incidents, and inviting a response of amusement rather than awe." 

Tangentially, Attebery never mentions the financial motives for "in-tradition" authors to nullify "extra-traditional" competitors. But the motive remains present, nonetheless. I gave a real-world example of such motives in this 2017 post.

A fuller discussion of the chimera of "appropriation" must await a separate article. Therefore I'll wrap up this part of the review by stating that i the latter sections of the book Atteberry very much thumps the tub for numerous new authors of fantasy who meet his political criteria, while granting older authors either negative assessments (Zelazny, Lewis) or cursory attention (A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard). And there's nothing wrong with this priority in itself. Attebery should absolutely champion the books he likes best. But his politicized justifications for his tastes are up for counter-critique.

I said "this part of the review" because at the end of Part 3 I said that I would speak to another of Atteberry's mistakes regarding "the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture." 

Though Attebery is undoubtedly aware of the tremendous difference between the two cultures, he doesn't make much of the matter. In Chapter 4 he states that "oral traditional stories are always formulaic," though he does a bit of a take-back by claiming that traditional tale-tellers can still choose "the lesser known among alternative formulaic elements." This breeds a somewhat tortured comparison to the interaction in modern stories' "formulaic elements" and "nonformulaic components." But whenever he praises deeper psychological insights in modern fantasists, as against the usually flat characterizations seen in traditional tales, Attebery plows over the question of differing venues. In dominantly oral cultures, a traditional storyteller has no motive for memorizing deep psychological insights for Sleeping Beauty or Rumpelstiltskin; they're just baggage that slows down an orally relayed story. Such fine details are only valuable to literate cultures, who inculcate the habit of reading their stories in static media, where detail can be accurately preserved.

Similarly, at the end of Chapter 2, he gives approbation to the just-discussed works of Hope Mirrlees and Charles Williams because each creates a viewpoint character who "brings to the world of myth and magic a contemporary sensibility and skepticism." This is part and parcel of Attebery's attempt to bestow upon 20th-century fantasy some of the gravitas of Modernist literature. But I definitely do not think that the fantasy genre is typified by authors' emphases of "contemporary sensibility and skepticism," even when those attitudes are rejected. Again, Attebery is entitled to prefer fantasies that signal questions of Modernist skepticism. But his analysis fails any strong test of logic.