THE READING RHEUM: THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA (serialization 1927, book 1929)

 

In  my review of DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted Wikipedia's "Sax Rohmer" essay, which alleged that Rohmer's novel THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA-- first serialized in 1927-- was an abortive attempt to write a sequel to 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU, in which EMPEROR's female villain would be revealed as Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee. However, based on the information I culled from the Rohmer biography MASTER OF VILLAINY, the Wiki article seems full of unsubstantiated speculation. The biography establishes a clearer line of circumstances. Collier's Magazine, which had serialized the previous Fu Manchu novels in America, approached Rohmer about a Fu sequel sometime in 1925, possibly in response to the appearance of two silent-movie adaptations of the devil-doctor in the preceding years. Sometime between 1925 and 1927, Rohmer completed one segment of DAUGHTER, but for some reason Collier's wouldn't pay him for individual segments, and Rohmer needed cash. So he offered the magazine a different serial, one for which the editors presumably did pay on a serialized basis, and only after that was finished did Rohmer return to DAUGHTER. It seems obvious to me that EMPEROR must have been a stand-alone concept from the first, and that Rohmer probably would have roughly plotted out part or all of DAUGHTER when he first thought he was going to serialize the whole novel in (say) 1926.

I also commented in my review that I'd read EMPEROR once before and that I didn't remember much about it. On occasion I've reread a work that didn't make  much impression on me initially, only to find in the second reading that I'd missed this or that interesting quality in the first read. Not this time, though. 

EMPEROR's problem is an exceeding thin premise, possibly not well worked-out because Rohmer devised it in haste. The novel takes place solely in New York, and posits, not unlike the much later teleseries BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, that a labyrinth of caverns exists beneath the city. A vast organization known as "The Zones" has its central HQ within these caverns, and though the organization has sanctuaries in other cities, none of the others are important to the story. The supreme ruler of the Zones is usually called "Great Head Centre," though in one defiant note to the police, the villain assumes the title "Emperor of America."

Though Rohmer tosses out about five potential protagonists, he spends the most time with a policeman, Drake Roscoe, and his everyman-buddy Dr. Stopford, who gets the novel's obligatory romantic arc. Aside from the occasional amusing line, the protagonists are boring, and the villains are made tedious by the fact, despite their immense tactical organization-- the sub-commanders all oversee different parts of New York-- Rohmer never explains what methods the Emperor means to use in conquering America. Thus EMPEROR is a novel that suggests high stakes but fails to make them seem credible.

Possibly because Fu Manchu was on Rohmer's mind at the time, he teases readers with a "Head Centre" who seems to be a yellow-skinned mummy. However, this is a fake-out, since the mummy is a dummy, a prop for the villain. The Emperor uses one Fu-like method to deal out death, that of a poisonous spider, but I don't remember anyone actually getting killed, partly because Rohmer spends so much bloody time with the intricacies of the evil spy network. 

The only good thing about EMPEROR OF AMERICA is that its existence allowed Rohmer to get this weak premise out of his system so that he didn't use it in any of the Fu Manchu books. He must have had some affection for his hero Drake Roscoe, for later he made this character an opponent in some if not all installments of a book-series devoted to yet another villainess: the Sumuru saga.

TRAILS OF SUSPENSE

"The concept of a protagonist who is not in control thus seems virtually universal to the [suspense thriller] genre"-- Charles Derry, THE SUSPENSE THRILLER, p. 19.

In his 1988 analysis Charles Derry restricts his observations purely to the medium of films in sussing out the genre he terms "the suspense thriller." But though he doesn't analyze any thrillers from the prose medium, Derry does quote a number of prose-thriller writers in support of his observations, such as Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, and Boileau-Narcejac. In addition, Derry, influenced in part by the genre-theorist John Cawelti, provides a rigorous schema by which he attempts to separate out the essence of the "suspense thriller" from other genres with conceptual overlap, principally the detective/mystery genre and (to a much lesser extent) the horror genre. In doing this, Derry follows in the footsteps of both the thriller-writers and other academics, who seem to more or less agree that mystery and horror are the genres most often confounded with the suspense genre. This is basically accurate as far as it goes, but I think Derry and his fellow academics neglect another genre (also a "mythos" in my Fryean system), which would give some of their conceptualizations wider literary applicability. Obviously, I can't devote more than a broad outline as to how the genre/mythos I term "adventure" stacks up against that of "suspense," but Derry has given me some intriguing starting-points.

Early in the book Derry, careful to state that he wishes to deal only with the suspense-genre in its cinematic manifestations, advances a Caweltian definition based on the content of suspense-thriller films:

"Perhaps the suspense thriller can be perceived not so much as a group of films which thrill their audiences (although this may often be the case), but as a group of films whose content consists essentially of thrills."

Though Derry later devotes a chapter to his concept of the thrill, he never quite arrives at a way of distinguishing the unique thrill of the suspense-genre from those of other genres, such as horror and adventure. This may render certain aspects of his argument problematic, since in my essay THRILLER KILLING I observed that "even a glance at Wikipedia gives one of a cornucopia of subtypes-- action-thriller, horror-thriller, erotic thrillers-- that wander all over the genre-map." Indeed, if one were to define a thriller in the manner that one of his citations, Basil Hogarth, does-- as "any type of fiction... in which the sensational element preponderates," then almost every genre conceived in the last hundred years could be called a "thriller."

Plainly, a given sensation-- say, the threat of a entity that means harm to the viewpoint-character-- will be pretty much the same in any genre. What distinguishes the "thrills" of a suspense-story, a horror-story or an adventure-story must then be the way the narrative presents the thrill to the audience.

It's understandable that Derry doesn't attempt to say much about distinguishing the thrills of either horror or adventure from those of suspense. For one thing, Derry correctly sees the suspense-thriller as belonging to a greater category of "the crime-genre," and so he spends most of his energy distinguishing his chosen subject, suspense, from other categories of crime-tale, particularly the detective/mystery genre. I don't fault him for having done so, for the sake of his argument's clarity; I merely wish to expand the size of the lens Derry uses.

For instance, in Chapter 4, he posits a schema by which one can view crime-stories according to how much they emphasize the victim, the "detective," or the criminal. As long as one is only speaking of the crime genre, which almost always takes place in contemporary urban settings, this is appropriate. Stories that emphasize a "detective"-- and I will explain my added quotes shortly-- include such subgenres as the "classical detective," "the hard-boiled detective," and "the police procedural."

Derry's definition of the last of these, the "police procedural," is the main reason that I put quotes around his concept of the "detective." Derry defines this genre too broadly, saying that it is "composed of all those works which emphasize a professional policeman (or police detective's) adventures as a member of society's law-keeping forces." This is a problematic definition because although many policeman-heroes are technically "detectives" in terms of their official rank, such as Derry's first-mentioned example of DIRTY HARRY, many are not "detectives" in the narrative sense seen in either the classical detective tale (Sherlock Holmes) or the hard-boiled version of same (Philip Marlowe). Dirty Harry's labors to determine what villain to blow away constitute "detection" about as much as do a medieval knight's labors to find out the location of a dragon for the killing.

Moreover, my concept is that the police procedural is usually a good deal more realistic in tone than either DIRTY HARRY or various other examples Derry cites. And sure enough, a minute's search on Google brings me to a more precise definition than Derry's, from current crime-writer Jim Doherty:

A police procedural is nothing more than a piece of crime fiction (in any medium) in which the main, or at least a major interest, is the authentic depiction (or at least the APPEARANCE of the authentic depiction) of the profession of law enforcement.

Toward the end of the chapter in which Derry sets forth his victim/criminal/"detective" schema, Derry does recognize a thematic difference between the genre he seeks to define, "the suspense thriller," and those genres that critics insist on calling thrillers but which aren't relevant to Derry's concept of suspense. Derry seeks to define these other thrillers as expeditiously as he can:

"These genres on the left of the triangle [schema] should not be called thrillers, but if critics insist on occasionally doing so, they should be aware that these genres are more 'process thrillers' than 'suspense thrillers.'"

He further notes that the "leftie" thrillers tend to "present some distinct moral ethic... as a consistent value from beginning to end, whereas the suspense thrillers tend to examine and investigate an existing morality or individual commitment to a new code, arriving at some final position by the end." He doesn't address "process thrillers" again for the greater part of the book, except for a couple of pages in Chapter 9, where he notes the appearance in the early 1970s of "a new kind of thriller... exploring violent, almost fascist sensibilities." Among the films cited in this grouping are DEATH WISH (which is compared to DIRTY HARRY), RED DAWN, and RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II.

Putting aside the value judgment in Derry's "fascism" canard, it seems obvious to me that many if not all of the works Derry struggles to disentangle from his suspense thrillers (again, thanks to the mislabellings by other critics) are best seen through the generic lens of the adventure-mythos. In this mythos, as Northrop Frye pointed out, protagonists do not usually alter their basic moral stances as much as do some (though not all) suspense-heroes, and the reason ties back to Derry's pronouncement in the first quote referenced above: narratively it's just as important for the adventure-hero to essentially remain in control as it is for the suspense-hero to lose some degree of control.

That said, there are of course any number of exceptions. One may argue that on one level the first adventure of Dirty Harry ends with a certain loss of control in that after killing the villain he flings away the badge that represents his ties to law enforcement. Conversely, the suspense-hero of 1977's BLACK SUNDAY-- a film Derry surveys in his "political thrillers" section-- does undergo more doubts than Dirty Harry during the course of the story, but at film's end he "mans up" and decisively kills the villain, as Derry himself points out.

Exceptions often don't either prove or disprove the rule, however. I've noted in earlier essays that I deem the suspense-genre to be most strongly affiliated to the mythos of drama. In this characterization I follow Frye's remarks on the type of protagonist dominantly seen in tragedy:

He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.

This clearly contrasts with Frye's remarks on the concept of the hero seen in the romance/adventure mythos:

...the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended...

In a future essay I hope to go into greater detail as to how the *mythoi* of adventure and drama are at once "natural enemies" and "rival siblings." For now, I'll end by saying that although Derry's SUSPENSE THRILLER's focus prevents it from framing the suspense genre within the totality of possible genres, Derry's analysis of the genre itself remains both formidable in its scope and inspiring as to the author's ability to suss out common themes in a variety of disparate-seeming stories.

THRILLER KILLING

"I think the biggest thing that separates horror and thriller is the supernatural. If a movie has supernatural stuff in it, to me it's automatically horror. Even though there are horror movies that are reality-based and not supernatural. So it's tough."-- B-Sol, from this 3-25-10 post on THE VAULT OF HORROR.

The problem of the generic colloquialism "thriller" is indeed a tough one. As an actual name for a genre "thriller" is pretty much useless, for even a glance at Wikipedia gives one of a cornucopia of subtypes-- action-thriller, horror-thriller, erotic thrillers-- that wander all over the genre-map. However, the debate between B-Sol and Merilyn Merlot isn't concerned with any subtypes that aren't directly related to horror. B-Sol's suggestion of a divide between natural/supernatural is an attempt to find a dividing line between the pure horror film and what Wiki would probably have termed the "horror-thriller," as per some of the examples discussed, like JAWS and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

Parenthetically let me suggest a different term in place of the scattershot colloquialism "thriller." I used said term in this essay earlier:

In some ways, THE HAPPENING shares elements of both horror and suspense films. The idea of city-dwellers thrown into a mammoth catastrophe evokes the suspense-oriented narrative of the disaster film, with a side-dish of terrorist-fantasy flavoring. However, the theory about the source of the malady is presented in so oblique a way that it partakes less of the well-defined threats of a suspense-film and becomes more of a *mysterium*

The "suspense" genre, I said in a related post, was oriented not on seeking to scare the audience, but to "startle and disorient." In my own conception the pure horror film doesn't necessarily need the element of the supernatural, but it does need the element of the *mysterium,* which is my shortened form for the two Latin phrases invoked by Rudolf Otto is his classic IDEA OF THE HOLY, where he explains the numinous experience in terms of the *mysterium tremendum,* the overwhelming mystery that compels fear and trembling in the viewer, and the *mysterium fascinans,* which compels the viewer to be attracted to the fascinating mystery.

Like B-Sol, I find many non-supernatural films have enough of a "mysterioso" aspect to them that they remain conceptually within the bounds of the pure horror film. Hitchcock's PSYCHO is one example. Nothing supernatural occurs in the story, but the disintegration of Norman Bates' mind seems to be a transformation of normality as profound as if he had been possessed by a demon or the like.

However, while the horror film needs the *mysterium* in some form, the suspense film-- which is what I'd hazard is really what most people mean when they say "thriller"-- does not in general dwell on any overwhelming mysteries, as I would say is the case with both PSYCHO and the film I originally discussed in the above citation, THE HAPPENING. The Shyamalan film does have a *mysterium* at its core that aligns it with the pure horror film, but 1971's ANDROMEDA STRAIN is still a textbook example as to how to craft a suspense film that does have metaphenomenal (though not supernatural) underpinnings.

For that matter, the SILENCE OF THE LAMBS film also seems to have more in common with the suspense genre than that of horror. Hannibal Lecter is certainly mad, but it's questionable as to whether his madness is as grotesque and transformational as that of Norman Bates. Both characters inhabit essentially realistic worlds, but Hannibal's madness has far less mystery to it.

More on these matters later, probably.


ADDENDUM, 2-26-14: Just a note to myself that currently I do regard SILENCE as having its own "mysterium," albeit not one as overt as that of PSYCHO, and that therefore SILENCE does effect a "transformation of normality."