COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 7

Most support-characters, like most the subordinate villains discussed in Part 5, default to "static alignment" with whoever or whatever is the "Prime" icon of the story. In the vernacular, they continue to dance with whoever brung them. But there are examples of subordinate characters who shift their alignment into a dynamic form.

In contrast to the interlocutor-types discussed in Part 6, here I will discuss the sort of figures usually described as "viewpoint characters." In my essay OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD, I distinguished two narrative approaches to viewpoint characters, who usually (though not always) merge with the viewpoints of the readers:

In place of "ego-oriented," I'll speak of the *endothelic,* meaning that the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests.

In place of "object-oriented," I'll speak of the *exothelic,* meaning that the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.

I'll mostly focus here on exothelic stories, but just for more context, two instructive examples would be Conan Doyle's novel THE LOST WORLD and the 1933 film KING KONG. Both are stories involving intrepid adventurers voyaging to obscure parts of the Earth in order to uncover rare phenomena. But in LOST WORLD, Challenger's merry band of explorers are the focal icons of the story, despite the copious detail author Doyle provides on the phenomena of The Lost World. Therefore, LOST WORLD is endothelic. However, in KING KONG, the phenomenon is Kong, and Kong is the star. The ensemble of explorers-- Carl Denham, Ann Darrow, and Jack Driscoll-- are all vividly sketched, but they're all support-characters in an exothelic film.

Neither Kong, Darrow nor Driscoll made an encore performance in any film from the original KONG production company-- but Carl Denham did, rearing his head for one more official appearance in THE SON OF KONG that same year. While the junior giant ape never assumed the mythic resonance of his theoretical "old man," there's no question that he is the star of this exothelic show. Denham and one or two other crewmembers are the only icons linking the two films, but because they shift their support-duties from one Prime to another, they're my examples of "dynamic alignment" as it relates to support-characters.

A parallel example appeared first in THE MOON POOL, which began in a short story with viewpoint character Walter Godwin, who has a close encounter with an eldritch alien being. Author Abraham Merritt then incorporated this tale into the context of a full novel, in which Godwin and an ensemble of other characters find their way to the hidden city where the bizarre entity, The Shining One, dwells. Despite the heroic activity of some of the explorers-- not including Godwin, who's essentially a "floating eyeball"-- the author emphasizes the exothelic presence of the Shining One. The novel ends much as the short story did, with Godwin excluded from the fantasy-world and consigned to mundane reality.

That, however, doesn't keep Godwin from going on the hunt for more supernormal phenomena, and he comes across a totally different lost world in 1920's THE METAL MONSTER. I frankly don't remember what happens to Godwin at the end of that novel, but MONSTER too is exothelic, focusing upon Norhala, a young human woman who has become the thrall of an inorganic metal-intelligence. So Godwin shifts his alignment from The Shining One to Norhala, who aren't even as interrelated as the two Kongs of Skull Island.

My tentative judgment, then, is that just as I've said that there's a "crossover-vibe" when a villain introduced in one feature makes an appearance in another-- even if that villain's alignment is not static in nature-- there's also a crossover-vibe, albeit minor, in both SON OF KONG and METAL MONSTER,

Wrapping up, I should note that even though THE LOST WORLD is definitely endothelic, I'm not sure all of Doyle's other Professor Challenger stories also qualify, not having read them in some time. It's possible that in some of those, Challenger takes a back seat to whatever phenomenon he's expounding upon. But that's a question for another day.

ADDENDUM: For all Sub characters, they can only generate a crossover vibe once when first "jumping" into another cosmos. Going back to my hoary Cobra-Hyde example, their first encounter with Daredevil, after having been foes of Thor, is a crossover-- but not their second, third, or fourth encounters with Daredevil. The same rule applies to their first appearance in a Captain America feature, and so on. This concept parallels my observation about the transition of subordinate characters into Primes starring in a given feature; only the first appearance counts as a crossover.

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.

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE MOON POOL (1918-1919)

Abraham Merritt’s THE MOON POOL first appeared as an open-ended short story, followed by a novel that concluded the story, both of which were printed in ALL-STORY WEEKLY. This fantasy-drenched "lost race" tale was largely responsible for the author’s meteoric rise to fame for a relatively small number of fantasy-novels. Because the revised novel was a “fix-up” of two related stories, close analysis shows some problems with overall tone, though in the end Merritt manages to bring the sections together in terms of his dominant myth: that of modern man being ravished by elder mysteries.

The short story, the first work to carry the title “The Moon Pool,” is narrated by a botanist, Walter Goodwin, who journeys to Polynesia to gather information for a book in his field. Goodwin meets a colleague, Throckmartin, who within the last year journeyed to the same area for his own research. Twice in the novel Merritt draws attention to Throckmartin having been accompanied by his “youthful” wife and an “equally youthful” junior collaborator, and in so doing, the author manages to suggest some extra-marital impropriety, with the older man made to wear the cuckold horns.

But although Goodwin perceives that Throckmartin has become “one who had borne some searing shock of rapture and horror,” the older man’s catastrophe has nothing to do with sexual betrayal as such. Throckmartin’s research party encountered a transcendent, godlike entity known as “the Dweller,” who manifested in a “moon pool” located within ancient ruins. The Dweller then spirited away everyone but the older man, leaving Throckmartin traumatized by the experience. Goodwin does not know what to make of his colleague’s story, or the fact that Throckmartin has a strange brand on his chest, one which seems hard as stone. As if anxious to prove the truth of Throckmartin’s claim to Goodwin, the Dweller manifests, this time spiriting Throckmartin away as well, leaving Goodwin to ponder his weird encounter with something that seems both of Heaven and of Hell.

In the novel-sequel, originally titled “The Conquest of the Moon Pool,” Goodwin speedily puts together a rescue-party to probe the ruins of Nan-Tauach, which seems to suggest construction by ancient builders with great technological prowess. On his way Goodwin picks up three other investigators. One is a Norwegian sailor, Olaf, whose wife and daughter were also spirited away by the mysterious Dweller. The second is Larry O’Keefe, an Irish-American pilot whose “hydroairplane” was knocked out of the sky by a cyclone, forcing him to drift on the sea-waves until being rescued. The third is Marakinoff, a Russian provocateur conducting his own one-man investigation, who infiltrates Goodwin’s expedition but proves to be a general troublemaker. The four of them investigate a strange “moon door” in the ruins, and pass through it, leaving behind the rest of the rescue party.

The door apparently transports the travelers through time and/or space, for they find themselves in a strange civilization, utterly isolated from the modern world and possessed of a formidable super-science, including disintegrator weapons. This civilization, run by a privileged class called “ladalas,” also worships an energy-entity called “the Shining One,” who happens to be identical with the Dweller witnessed by Goodwin. The women of Nan-Tauach are all beautiful elf-women, but the men tend to be short and almost dwarfish (perhaps owing something to the tropes used in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Opar” stories). O”Keefe instantly falls in love with the first woman he sees, despite the fact she’s got a humanoid frog in her company, but the woman, name of Lakla, disappears from sight and from several chapters thereafter.

The modern-day quartet then get introduced to the hidden city’s wonders by the high priestess of the Shining One: Yolara, a cruel-looking beauty. This character continues Merritt’s theme of uniting rapture and horror, since Goodwin refers to her as “a queen of hell and a princess of heaven—in one.” However, unlike the virginal Lakla, Yolara’s been around, and has apparently enjoyed as her lover one of the dwarf-men, Lugur (whose name, incidentally, resembles that of the mythic villain Loki, whom the Norwegian Olaf thinks responsible for all of his suffering). Lugur is less than pleased with the outer-world visitors when Yolara begins pursuing O’Keefe, and such is the priestess’s beauty that O’Keefe does come close to forgetting all about the story’s “good girl.” In this development one sees Merritt morphing the suggested theme of the short tale—two men in conflict over a woman—into one involving two women fighting over a man.

The outworlders get to witness a summoning of the Shining One, who pulls sacrificial victims into his own world, where it feeds off their energies. Later Goodwin and company will learn that both Throckmartin’s group and Olaf’s relations exist in a “dead-alive” state from which they never return. Marakinoff makes common cause with Lugur and largely departs the main storyline, implicitly contributing to evil plot-hatching. Yolara drugs O’Keefe in order to make him marry her, but Lakla finally shows up, and reveals to the reader that she’s the priestess of another group of ethereal entities, “the Three Silent Ones,” and she upsets Yolara’s plans. However, the things that Yolara has learned from O’Keefe inspire her to follow the example of Rider Haggard’s famed villainess She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. She plans to unleashing her super-scientific weapons, as well as the Dweller, upon the modern world. Goodwin pictures the entire world being reduced to “a ruined planet” by the seemingly unstoppable power of the Shining One.

Some “lost city” stories place the heroes in the position of bringing down a corrupt hierarchy of “haves” in order to liberate the “have nots.” This theme is minimally suggested in MOON POOL, but Merritt doesn’t pursue it, and indeed, none of the characters in Nan-Tauach are strongly drawn except for Yolara, Lugur, and Rador, a dwarf-man who allies himself to the travelers. The travelers are no better. Goodwin is a colorless scientific theorizer. Marakinoff is a standard Russian schemer, and Olaf is a standard Nordic berserker. As for Larry O’Keefe, he’s positioned as the story’s male romantic lead, but he’s certainly no Leo Vincey. Indeed, O’Keefe may be the crappiest hero ever to bring down a lost city. At heart O’Keefe is a standard Irish stereotype, just as Olaf is a standard Nordic stereotype. But because O’Keefe’s entire being is made up of banshees and blarney stones, he seems like a blathering blockhead rather than an admirable heroic figure. Merritt gives O’Keefe a loopy way of speaking, interspersing his words with exclamations of “Yip” and “Yow,” and he wearies both Goodwin and most readers by stubbornly insisting that the Irish “little people” are real but that scientific speculation is all ‘superstition.”

Thus none of the characters from modern-day Earth are anything but useful props for the author. Lakla the good girl and Lugur the spurned lover are equally flat. Because Merritt expends a lot of effort delineating the charms of Yolara’s cruel beauty, I was tempted to see her as the novel’s “starring villainess,” a deliberate parallel to Haggard’s SHE. But though Yolara dominates the middle third of the book, she fades in importance with respect to the revelations of the novel’s final chapters, detailing what the Shining One is, and how it was brought into being by the endeavors of the Three Silent Ones. By this I make the determination that the Shining One, rather than any of the humans fighting for or against it, is the focal presence of the novel.

Though that history posits that the city of Nan-Tauach pre-existed the coming of the Shining One—implicitly, as a survival of the even more archaic continent Lemuria—in a symbolic sense the sinister beauties of the ancient city is one with the fallen nature of the Shining One. Everything in the city, like the Shining One, is depicted as a series of prismatically-colored, lapidary beauty, but it’s a beauty like that of the Gorgon (to which Yolara is often compared). 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. Here, however, he fudges his own aesthetic somewhat by using dull sticks like Lakla and O’Keeffe as his romantic pair. Some theorists have argued that H.P. Lovecraft’s concepts of his “Great Old Ones” may owe something to the amorphous beauty of the Shining One. But if Lovecraft read THE MOON POOL, I imagine him being dismayed by the novel’s resolution: that of having the monster-god weakened by the love-feeling of hero and heroine, prior to its being destroyed by its creators.

Appropriately, though, Merritt does bring the novel full circle by having Goodwin exiled from the land of wonder as was Throckmartin. Oddly, the vehicle of this exile is Marakinoff, who attacks Goodwin on a bridge to prevent his Western rival for enjoying the fruits of his research. In the fall the Russian dies and Goodwin returns to the mortal world. He’s unable to access the Moon Pool again, but gets another shot at delving into worlds of wonder in a follow-up novel, THE METAL MONSTER.