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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        

VARIATIONS STRONG AND WEAK

 Though I've used the terms "strong" and "weak" at times to denote the way later authors render their variations on originary fictional propositions, a better pair of terms would be "continuous" and "discontinuous."

The continuous variation, usually (though not always) produced by a succeeding author dealing with an earlier author's originary proposition, makes some effort to make it seem as if what he the secondary author writes is largely "in continuity" with most or all of what has gone before.

The author of the discontinuous variation, however, makes little effort to assert continuity with the originary proposition, and may even call attention to the lack of continuity.

To illustrate this, I will mostly concentrate on the examples I used in the two VARIANT REVISIONS essays from last July.

One example cited was the intertwined propositions of DC's first two Green Lanterns. The Hal Jordan Green Lantern was initially "out of continuity" with the Alan Scott Lantern, because the Jordan-creators had only borrowed a few tropes from the Scott version, be the tropes visual (hero wears a ring he can use to conjure up weapons) or explanatory (hero has one specific weakness to his powers). However, DC editor Julie Schwartz decided that since he and John Broome had introduced a spiritual connection between the then-contemporary Flash and his Golden Age ancestor, there should be a similar association between Scott and Jordan. I'd say this never panned out because the rationales for each hero's powers were too different, making it harder to play one off the other. However, from then on the two characters shared an intertwined continuity that most if not all subsequent authors respected. 

 

Not much later, though, Bob Haney attempted to bring back a character he created, The Gargoyle, for a second appearance. But although this second story only took place a few years after the first one, Haney either forgot aspects of the originary proposition or just ignored those elements in order to churn out a quickie filler-tale. This second story was discontinuous with the first proposition, and yet became accepted as the reigning continuity, on which at least one other author based his variation.  

   

In contrast to both, though, when Grant Morrison concocted his new version of Animal-Man, he intended from the start to play up the fact that he was producing a variation on another author's concept. Thus, when he has the current Animal-Man encounter the previous avatar, there are no attempts to paper over the discontinuities. Indeed, putting said discontinuities on display is the whole point, and arguably the entire "Deus Ex Machina" arc in that title is meant to question the validity of an overly niggling continuity-consciousness.

I also pointed out the example of HEKYLL AND JEKYLL. There's no way to imagine a "retcon" that would resolve the differences between the first magpie pair, a married couple, and the second, a pair of mischievous males-- unless one wanted to follow the multiversal path, and claim that they existed in separate universes, having parallel sets of adventures-- though who would want to bother?  

Yet even when there is no direct benefit to observing continuity, it's interesting to see that some franchises generate an expectation of continuous variations. Sherlock Holmes is a public domain character and has been for some time. Yet most authors, like Cay Van Ash in the above pastiche, seek to keep some continuity with the Doyle canon-- and this seems to be the case even with the more preposterous propositions, in which Doyle encounters vampires and Martians and so on. There are a few examples where an author seeks to upend the usual setup, as with the 1988 movie WITHOUT A CLUE, in which Watson is the brains behind the mystery-solving and Holmes is just an actor hired by the doctor.

In contrast, Dracula is just as much in public domain as Holmes, but only a minority of authors seek to abide by the Stoker canon, the most obvious being FRANCIS COPPOLA'S DRACULA. Possibly the early success of the stage play and movie variations, which did not closely follow the original story, encouraged the majority of authors to riff on the bare bones of the vampire, so to speak. Hundreds of discontinuous variations of Dracula have been produced over the last century, often making Dracula a member of a monster-mash and nothing more. Dracula too often gets crossed over with assorted icons, ranging from Billy the Kid to the Filmation Ghostbusters, but in these crossovers, unlike the ones for Holmes, Drac is little more than a shadow of his original self. Marvel's TOMB OF DRACULA falls somewhere in the middle. The comic book's plots don't abandon all the backstories from the Stoker novel, but the emphasis is upon all the new characters devised for the Marvel version of the vampire lord. Similarly, Marvel-Dracula's character is only loosely similar to the one in the Stoker proposition, the better to make him blend somewhat with the multitudinous icons of Marvel, like Doctor Strange and the Silver Surfer.      

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: TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET (1984)

 

Over a decade after Cay Van Ash, former secretary to Sax Rohmer, completed the only book-length Rohmer biography, he published this work, a major crossover of the iconic figures of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. 

The title, TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, clearly spotlights the superior fame of the Great Detective, who had remained immensely popular through numerous film, TV and prose pastiches, while the Devil-Doctor had his notoriety stoked only by a handful of films and a Marvel comic book. But there was a substantial connection between the two characters, even though Holmes had debuted roughly 25 years before Fu. When Rohmer began the Fu Manchu series around 1912, the first stories emulated the pattern of almost all of Doyle's Holmes stories, in that the stories were "told" to the reader by the assistant of a heroic crusader, a sidekick who purports to be narrating real exploits. Thus, where Holmes had Doctor Watson, Nayland Smith (main opponent of Fu Manchu) had Doctor Petrie. Given Sherlock's immense popularity in the Victorian era and beyond, there's little to no chance that Rohmer wasn't sedulously imitating Doyle's narrative formula, though after the first few novels other characters take Petrie's place, simply telling the story of their involvement in a given adventure, with no pretense of "recording adventures."

Speaking of the recorder-pretense, Author Van Ash claims that both this book and its only sequel (to be reviewed separately) were compiled by him from notes left behind by the fictional Doctor Petrie in the years before the character's role as amaneunses was usurped. Van Ash in his "fictional" role even makes the interesting claim that unlike Doctor Watson-- who claimed that the final Holmes adventure occurred in 1914, in the months before World War Two broke out-- Doctor Petrie never dated anything he wrote. This conceit allows Van Ash to imagine a story interpolated between the histories of Doyle and Rohmer's characters. According to Van Ash, BAKER takes place during the months in which the Great Detective is completing "his last bow," that of completing a massive espionage plot against England's enemies. This has a salubrious effect of not contradicting Doyle as to Holmes' final exploit. And even though Rohmer's HAND OF FU MANCHU was published in book form in 1917-- the same year Doyle published "His Last Bow"-- Van Ash fudges the dates in the Rohmer work, claiming that this story also transpires in 1914. Indeed, the whole of BAKER takes place over the course of a few months between Chapter 29 and Chapter 30 of HAND. 

All this fine attention to dating-detail would of course be wasted if the author had not managed to get the best out of having two titanic popular-fiction icons cross paths. Happily I can "record" that Van Ash accomplished this aim. Without going into an extensive contrast of the literary legacies of Doyle and Rohmer, I'll generalize that Doyle's detective stories, even with their use of blood-and-thunder, often emphasize what Faulkner called "the problems of the human heart." By contrast, most of Sax Rohmer's thrillers, though they often appeared in high-prestige "slick" magazines, are more pulpish and extravagant in tone and content. Amazingly, Van Ash manages to blend the two approaches.

So, the plot. In 1914, Nayland Smith disappears, and it's clear to Doctor Petrie that the agents of Fu Manchu committed the deed. Lacking any leads, and not being a detective himself, Petrie just happens to have met John Watson at a medical conference, and so imposes on Watson to write an introduction to Holmes. Petrie meets Holmes, who has officially retired from the profession of consulting detective, but who as noted earlier is still covertly pursuing his espionage aim. However, Si-Fan agents learn of the meeting. One of them, fearing that Holmes will ally himself to Petrie, tries to kill Holmes but murders one of the detective's servants. Thus Holmes comes out of retirement to avenge the man's death, teaming up with Petrie to track down Nayland Smith-- which inevitably leads to the uncovering of Fu Manchu's latest scheme to cripple Western Europe.

I distinguished between "tone" and "content" above. The content of BAKER is indisputably that of Rohmer, as Petrie and Holmes chart a peripatetic course, exposing various Fu-crimes, often following the "rational Gothic" pattern in which supernatural-seeming events are explained by some quick of improbable "science." But Van Ash infuses the novel with the humanitarian (if still melodramatic) tone of Conan Doyle's stories. I haven't read every Rohmer story, but I would be surprised to find one in which any of that author's heroes empathize with societal underdogs, as Holmes and Petrie empathize with the short, nasty lives of Welsh coal-miners. Rohmer just didn't put those sort of humanistic touches into his stories.

Van Ash pays just as much close attention to place as he does to time. Every setting comes alive so well, I would find it hard to believe that Van Ash himself didn't visit the locations described. And he does a good job of playing Holmes off Petrie, in that the two of them have never worked together and are more accustomed to their own respective partners. 

But again, all of the lesser challenges faced by the two heroes would have been for naught, if Van Ash failed to deliver on his "clash of titans." In keeping with the Rohmer books, Fu Manchu rarely appears "on stage," which serves to increase the sense of his omnipotence-- though Van Ash pays more attention than did Rohmer to the limitations of the Devil-Doctor's resources. For that matter, Holmes himself excuses himself from the investigation, but it's only so that he can don a disguise, BASKERVILLES-style, and pull a fast one on both Petrie and their opponents. There's only one face-to-face encouiiter between Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu, but it's a small masterpiece. The two are of course aware of each others' stellar reputations, and Fu Manchu-- who has not yet found his "fountain of youth"-- expresses regret that Holmes is too old to be of service to the Si-Fan, or else he Fu would be happy to turn Holmes into one of his brainwashed slaves.

Van Ash also brings in Petrie's future wife, the Egyptian slave-girl Karameneh, who I believe gets liberated from her servitude to the Doctor in the later chapters of HAND OF FU MANCHU. Amusingly, because all the events of BAKER take place just before Chapter 30 of HAND, there are no references in Van Ash's book to Fah Lo Suee, because Petrie has his first fleeting encounter with the daughter of Fu Manchu-- in Chapter 30 of HAND!

For all the uses of "uncanny science" to explain Fu's various enterprises, Van Ash climaxes with a dynamite example of Devil-Doctor super-science (essentially, one of the many "death rays" that became popular in early 20th century pop fiction). Holmes contributes a crucial effort to foiling Fu and then returns to finish out his last adventure a la Doyle-- while the Manchurian mastermind is just getting started on his long career of venerable villainy.

In closing I'll note that Van Ash also responds to critics who correctly pointed out that Sax Rohmer knew next to nothing about Chinese culture when he created Fu Manchu. In compensation, Van Ash has his heroes interview a prominent Sinologist, who works out some enthralling ideas as to how Fu Manchu came to be, without contradicting any of the intriguing hints Rohmer himself provided.

And so the curtain falls upon this meeting of literary masterworks. I'll probably briefly revive my old blog-project, THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME, just long enough to append BAKER to that list. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE LOST WORLD (1912)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Where the real sex feeling begins, timidity and distrust are its companions, heritage from old wicked days when love and violence went often hand in hand.-- THE LOST WORLD, p, 7

I've made a few random comments about Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD on this blog over the years. I recognized how Doyle had produced a seminal SF-idea-- that of prehistoric beasts surviving into modern times, even though a few earlier authors, such as Verne and Haggard, had contributed related notions. At the same time, I was rather conflicted about the novel's conclusion. I've frequently said that I don't reject out of hand stories that express controversial opinions on race and sexuality; these can be as "mythic," and sometimes more so, than stories that express "correct," theoretically more humane sentiments. But since LOST WORLD concludes with the modern-day explorers helping a tribe of Indian settlers in the Lost World wipe out a tribe of ape-men, I had to wonder whether or not Doyle's story reflected his real-life opinions on racial politics. I'd read a few accounts claiming that Doyle was ultra-conservative, and I'd seen occasional glimpses of such political leanings in his fiction. Was LOST WORLD meant to be a defense of imperialistic aggression? 

I have glimpsed one online essay that makes the opposite claim, but I only spot-read a few sections of that article so that I wouldn't be unduly influenced. That caveat made, I'd already noticed a number of discontinuities in WORLD that argued that Doyle was playing a larger game than simply validating the status quo of his time. One such discontinuity is the opening quote, though I'll come back to that a little while after providing a quick summary of the novel's action.

The line about "real sex feeling" goes through the mind of young Irish reporter Ned Malone when he attempts to propose marriage to a woman named Gladys. Gladys refuses Ned, expressing the desire for a mate with some glorious record of accomplishments. Fortuitously, Ned's job causes him to cross paths with eccentric (and pugnacious) biologist George Challenger, who suggests that prehistoric creatures may still exist on a remote plateau in Bolivia. When Challenger gathers an expedition, he allows Ned to come along, as well as a rival scientist, Summerlee, and a far more experienced adventurer, Lord John Roxton, who in many ways exemplifies the pattern of male courage and fortitude to which Malone aspires. Suffice to say that the expedition finds the plateau, but they're marooned atop it by conniving guides. While trying to find a way off the escarpment, the Englishmen confirm that assorted prehistoric animals have indeed migrated here, particularly saurians and pterodactyls. The explorers also encounter two humanoid species, though contrary to later "caveman films," no one implies that the primitives evolved alongside the dinos; rather, both sets of humanoids migrated to the plateau at very different times. One group are simply a branch of an Indian populace native to South America, but the other tribe consists of "ape-men," who are explicitly compared to the evolutionary notion of "the missing link" between apes and men. When war breaks out between the two tribes, the Englishmen side with the Indians, and with their superior weapons they all but massacre the ape-men. That done, the heroes escape the Lost World and return to London, exhibiting to fascinated Londoners the proof of their findings: a live pterodactyl. However, during the time of Malone's long absence, the changeable Gladys has married another suitor, a solicitor's clerk with absolutely no claims to adventurous stature.

Though WORLD is not a comedy, it means something that Doyle frames its story of high adventure between a woman's capricious challenge and her equally capricious renunciation of her supposed standards for a mate. Moreover, even the early sections include some japes at the idea of racial purity. During Malone's first interview with Challenger, the irascible scientist claims to see a "suggestion of the Negroid" in Malone's skull. A page later, when Challenger speaks of a previous South American trip where he conferred with a tribe of Indians near the disputed territory, Challenger says that their mental powers had degenerated. Racial animus, right? Except that in the same sentence Challenger says that the Indians' mental acuity was "hardly superior to that of the average Londoner." 

Somewhat later, Malone learns something of Roxton's history. The nobleman volunteered for the expedition because he's passionate about everything about South America, except one custom partly furthered by colonial Spaniards: that of slavery. Roxton has carried out a jeremiad against slavers, who according to him are all "half-breeds." Many racist authors have used the figure of the half-breed ti signify the evils of miscegenation, but Doyle doesn't seem concerned with that possibility, as he's focused purely upon the evil of Indians being enslaved. It's possible Doyle knew his readers might not accept all-white villains, and so used half-white, half-red ones instead. Still, the people being maltreated are full "red men," though it's true that many modern readers would be averse to Roxton performing the function of "white savior." Roxton's past crusade, by the bye, is responsible for getting the explorers stranded on the plateau, in that one of the bearers joins the expedition looking for a chance to avenge himself on Roxton for the latter having executed his relative.

To say the least, once Malone is stuck on the plateau with his three companions, he gets his "baptism of fire" in spades. Doyle keeps his tone varied, including some superb "sense of wonder" scenes as the explorers take in the Edenic wonders of the primitive domain, as well as many moments of comedy. But the Lost World is a land of almost constant danger, where the strong devour the weak with no reservations. Fittingly, Malone is the first to encounter one of the ape-men while climbing a tree for scouting purposes. Though the single ape-man flees, he brings his people later while Malone is off exploring, and the brutes make an unprovoked attack, capturing Challenger, Summerlee, and Roxton. Roxton escapes, finds Malone, and the two of them use their firearms to assault the ape-tribe in order to free the two remaining prisoners. 

This escapade is also not without comedy, given that Challenger, who has a hirsute, apelike appearance for an Englishman, is seen to be the spitting image of the ape-men's ruler. However, Roxton's crusade against injustice has been ignited once again, for during captivity he witnessed the true degeneracy of the anthropoids, as they amused themselves flinging Indians off a nearby cliff. And thus the Englishmen lead the Indians in a major assault upon the missing links, with only a few women and children surviving the violence. Challenger celebrates the victory, saying that "upon this plateau the future must ever be for man." Malone, detailing the many horrors he witnesses on both sides of the conflict, thinks to himself, "It needed a robust faith in the end to justify such tragic means." This is the climax of the novel and everything that follows is just a long coda.

With all this plot-action explicated, I can return to Malone's curious expression at the book's opening. Long before he meets Challenger, much less any of the missing links the scientist resembles, the reporter is aware of what happened in the "old wicked days." Malone is of course not directly referencing the clash of civilizations as Challenger is. Yet what does he mean by saying that "love and violence went often hand in hand?" He *might* be thinking that in the wicked days men just took women as they pleased and the women had nothing to say about it. Then again, men competed with other men over women, and so that may be the real "violence" being associated with "love"-- which could well mean more like not romantic love, but the consummation of sexual union predicated on the rule of the strong, which primitive women may have accepted for the same reasons Gladys expresses. Gladys does not ask Malone to fight any other suitors for her favor, but arguably her whole fantasy of his winning some great glory translates into the same thing: she'll yield him sex if he distinguishes himself with acts of bravery-- which usually must be backed by violence. Of course, she's playing with Malone because she doesn't really want him, and the actual denouement suggests that she might have wanted a mild-mannered type all the time, and she gave Malone a formidable task to get rid of him. 

Thus, my verdict is that, even if Doyle's characters may make remarks moderns would deem problematic, the writer has given those characters a lot more "wiggle room" than any doctrinaire racist would. Doyle is at least partly serious about stating that all human endeavor comes down to these ongoing civilization-clashes. Yet the unison of love and violence in human nature is not limited to any particular subdivision of humankind. Doyle's constant comparisons between his contemporaries and primitive peoples establish that he believes that all humankind is implicated in the struggles of Eros and Thanatos, and that recognizing this is the true "challenge" one derives from a visit to the Lost World.

GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 3

In GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2 I said:

But although "density/complexity" is the primary criterion of fictional excellence in any potentiality, there is a role for Raymond Durgnat's "aesthetic of simplicity." Simplicity is the mode or modes through which an author seeks to communicate complexity in a pleasing manner, so that the reader absorbs the complexity without the sense of having it forced down his throat. More on this point later.

I invoked the base idea of simplicity-- though not as an "aesthetic"-- in a February 2008 essay, MOVING FURNITURE, TRADINGS SYMBOLIC SPACES.  

To repeat what I said in “Myths Without Fantasy,” any kind of story may attain to the complexity of myth, and any element of narrative storytelling—a plot-event, a setting, a piece of dialogue, or a turn of characterization—can have the potential to go from a simple variable to a complex one. At the simple level, such elements are manipulated by the author to serve the ends of the story, which (as per this article’s title) I consider to be akin to the simple act of moving one’s furniture from one place to another. However, where one encounters the author bringing in extra levels of associational complexity, often not necessary as such for the story’s smooth functioning, one is dealing with another level of symbolic discourse, where the simple is “traded” for the complex, rather than simply being moved from one spot to another.

 I didn't mention Frye in this essay, but he was credited for the "complex variable" insight in a related essay, DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE, where I further built upon the simple/complex dichotomy.

Back in this essay I spoke of functions without any great associative complexity as "simple variables," akin to narrative "furniture" that an author had to move about. Somewhat later I used "null-myth" as a term of evaluating such simple variables in terms of their lack of mythicity. "Function" is meant to be more inclusive. Say that I consider Sherlock Holmes mythic while I deem August Derleth's imitation-Holmes "Solar Pons" to be null-mythic. That does not mean that I might not be amused in some way by a Solar Pons tale, depending on how well the author presents his material on the purely kinetic level. But I would not expect the level of associative complexity that makes the Sherlock stories generally more appealing.

Both Holmes and Pons stories share functions that their respective authors did not "invent." The Holmes stories, because of their added associative qualities, may be said to be "super-functional" in that author Doyle forges more felicitous associative connections within the literary elements of his tales than Derleth does. But Doyle doesn't escape the need for narrative functionality.

"Narrative functionality" means that whether a story is symbolically simple or complex, it has to satisfy certain some audience's narrative expectations, even if that audience might be limited to the author's idealized image of "the perfect audience." This is easy to descry with genre-stories: once Conan Doyle establishes (but does not invent) the trope that every detective-story concludes with the detective solving some mystery, then most other stories in that genre will follow the same pattern, in order to be "pleasing" to the reader. And though many literary elitists like to think that artistic fiction is immune to this sort of narrative expectations, I've noted the same distinction between complex and simple forms of art-fiction on assorted occasions, as per my unfavorable comparison of Daniel Clowes to Harvey Kurtzman here.

In the second part of DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE, I also associated the simply functional elements of literature with the linguistic concept of the *denotative:* 

Even I, a pluralist, would rather read works that strike me as "super-functional" rather than only functional. But that which is purely functional informs every narrative ever conceived, if only insofar as all narratives need the denotative as a buttress for the connotative. So fearing and/or hating the functional is, in the final analysis, not much more profound than the activity of moving around one's old furniture.

Nowadays, I would not associate my idea of the "null-myth" with this base denotative functionality: over time it's come to mean a work that had "super-functional" potential coded into the narrative but which became denatured by authorial confusion or misjudgment. I note that in these older essays I only referenced the potentialities of "the kinetic" and "the mythopoeic." However, I've given other examples in recent essays as to how the other two potentialities are also embraced by the concepts of narrative complexity and simplicity.

To return to the last two examples cited above, the better work of Harvey Kurtzman has a desirable level of complexity, but it is presented in such a way that the author does not "force [the complexity] down the audience's throat." In contrast, though I do not consider Daniel Clowes' to be very complex in terms of any potentiality-- though I suppose it's strongest in the domain of "the didactic"-- it also sins in regard to the aesthetic of simplicity, by conveying his intellectual take on life in a poorly executed emulation of Alfred Hitchcock's storytelling practices.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2

This is not so much a follow-up to the first ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS essay as to my recent myth-analysis of LOVE IN HELL-- reason being that this is the first mythcomic I've examined in which one might argue that the locale is just as important to the story as the two principal characters.

Environment varies in its amplitude throughout the mythcomics, just as that of any presence, even a focal character. In one of my earliest essays on focal presences, I mentioned that in Arthur Conan Doyle's original novel THE LOST WORLD, Doyle's heroes were the focal presences, but that the Lost World itself became the focus in the 1925 film.

There's great precedence for this sort of "man vs. nature" opposition, but this formula has never been nearly as popular as "man vs. man." It's not uncommon, even in the most strongly mythic narratives, for the environment to fade into the background, even if that environment is sometimes a major generator of mythic content. Thus, even though many THOR stories describe the power of the Lee-Kirby Asgard to generate all manner of Nordic strangeness, in "The Mangog Saga" Asgard might as well be the Pyrenees for all the impact that the locale has upon the struggle between main character Thor, his various allies, and the seemingly invulnerable Mangog.

In some situations, the environment retains its mythic nature within a given narrative, but its myth-power stems from a particular character. In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

 There's also a sort of ambiguous middle ground. as seen with"the Palace of Ice," In this extended dream, Nemo experiences what I termed "a child's version of the metaphysics of ice and snow, taking in from juvenile pleasures like toboggan-riding and snowball-fights as well as the more profound wonders of the Northern Lights and the mysterious North Pole." McCay probably does not mean to assert that either Jack Frost or his realm possess any reality independent of Little Nemo's imagination. Nevertheless, this ice-world possesses far more amplitude than most real dreams.

In contrast, the Hell of LOVE IN HELL does not seem to be an expression of any character's imagination or personality. Hell does have its ruler, Japan's traditional hell-lord King Enma (who according to some references is actually female), but Enma only makes one appearance in the narrative, and then only toward the very end, where the ruler's gigantic foot intrudes upon the inferno to mete out justice. Rintaro, the "new fish-soul" in Hell, is not especially mythic in himself, any more than any other "everyman" character, given that most such characters are meant to heighten the significance of other characters by their ordinariness. The demoness Koyori serves to explain the ways of Hell to Rintaro, but she's new to the job of being a soul-torturing demon, so she's not a pure representative of Hell, in the same way Darkseid is a pure representative of the ethos of Apokolips.

All this said, though much of LOVE IN HELL's narrative is devoted to describing the infernal domain, I would not go so far as to say that Hell is the"main character" of the story, in the manner that I've said that Wonderland is the "main character" of Carroll's Alice books. In this essay I said that the Alice books were *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.' LOVE IN HELL comes very close to this, but in the final analysis it's still more focused upon the evolving relationship of Rintaro and Koyori as they interact both with each other and the strange requirements of their domain-- so that LOVE IN HELL is as *endothelic,* wherein "the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests."


Note: since writing the above I've changed my mind: Rintaro and his sins comprise the series' focal presence, with Koyori qualifying only as a support character.