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.      

CURSED FROM THE EARTH

 In the comments for my essay on THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST, AT-AT Pilot posted the following:

What is the mythical significance of the fire-fall crystals and Kryptonite? Why is it that the remaining fragments of his doomed planet hurt Superman? Is it supposed to be interpreted as a painful reminder of a past that he wishes he could forget? But of course, Superman has been written to be appreciative of his Kryptonian roots, with the Fortress of Solitude serving as a museum for his mementos. (The one time I can recall Superman distancing himself from his Kryptonian self was the last issue of the Byrne series, where--if I recall accurately--Superman asserts that he is now earth's son, not Krypton's.)

Kryptonite may have the most involved backstory of any element in the Superman mythos. 

One of the most egregious mistakes about kryptonite is that it was introduced because Superman was so mighty that he had no weaknesses. That may be true of Superman as he had developed in 1949, when kryptonite officially entered the comics-canon in SUPERMAN #61 (1949). However, the Superman who had been produced for DC by the studio of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster did not need a specific weakness. Throughout the eight-or-so years that the studio elaborated the nature of the Man of Steel, the hero was occasionally seen being stymied by energy-rays or mental powers. (The moderately famous "Powerstone" story even shows him being briefly mesmerized by the hypnosis of guardian serpents.) I don't know at what point the hero became so godlike that he could fly into the heart of Earth's sun without taking harm, though I'm reasonably sure that it took place after DC kicked Siegel and Schuster to the curb in the late 1940s. But the point is that Siegel himself never thought of his pre-eminent creation as being invulnerable in the way later DC editors defined the term.

And yet, in 1940 Siegel birthed the basic idea of kryptonite in a story rejected by DC's editors and then squirreled away in a vault for the next fifty-plus years. "The K-Metal from Krypton" only came to the light of day because in 1994 Mark Waid, working on staff for DC, encountered the story in the files and made known its contents to comics-fandom. It's been further theorized that though DC never published the story (except for a very brief excerpt in a 1960s annual), Whitney Ellsworth made all Superman material available to the writers of the 1940-51 SUPERMAN radio serial, and that one of those writers used Siegel's K-metal story as a template for the 1943 episode "The Meteor from Krypton," in which the name "kryptonite" was first used for the radioactive mineral that could bring death to Krypton's only surviving son.

Since the Siegel story was not completed at the time of its composition-- though the aforementioned site provided a modern interpretation-- we can't know exactly why Siegel introduced the K-metal. But as I mentioned above, Siegel's Superman did not need a specific weakness, because he was already vulnerable to a handful of esoteric menaces. The most likely reasons are that (a) Siegel wanted to inject a new level of drama into Superman's adventures, in part by revealing his identity of Clark Kent to Lois Lane, and (b) to get that drama, the hero would find his mighty powers endangered by metal from his homeworld. Siegel could have conjured up any kind of power-draining entity or material, but I'm sure that on some level he appreciated the irony of Superman being weakened by a fragment of his own world. Indeed, on page 15 of the modern interpretation, Clark Kent muses that originally he derived "great strength and powers from the planet," which might be the only time Siegel had ever advanced that particular explanation of Superman's powers.

I'm not aware of any examples from folklore or myth in which a hero's strength is either increased or depleted by contact with native soil. The only example in which native soil increases a character's mojo would seem Bram Stoker's 1897 DRACULA. To the best of my knowledge, Stoker made up the idea of the vampire needing to rest in his native Earth out of whole cloth. But there can be no question that Stoker gave the idea special significance, for I just happened to cover the matter in depth in my 2008 AA essay A MOVABLE FEASTER. I wrote in part:

Early in the novel, Dracula tells Jonathan Harker:

"Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders."

Naturally, at that point in the novel, the vampire does not dwell on how this "blood-enriched" earth is going to make it possible for him to pick up stakes (so to speak) and invade merry old England. But much later in the novel, Van Helsing goes into greater detail about Dracula's literal need for earth that has been sanctified (as well as ensanguinated) by the past:

"There have been from the loins of this very one [Dracula] great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest."

So in Stoker's mythos the sacred earth of Dracula's Transylvania is replete with both "the blood of the heroic dead" and "memories of great men and good women." Blood, then, is not just plasma and platelets in Stoker's cosmos, but rather the objective correlate of life itself, a sort of vitality that doesn't vanish with the deaths of individual humans but which seeps into the earth and sustains the life of a vampire quite as much as feeding off the blood of the living. This "sacred earth" explanation may explain how Dracula and his vampire brides managed to survive without exsanguinating every last mortal left in the region, especially given that Stoker's Transylvania often seems like a barren Hades-on-Earth, lacking the vitality that Dracula praises in past generations of his land. Stoker, in formulating this notion of the vampire needing to take his native soil with him when he departed for other climes, was thus overcoming the folkloric notion that a vampire had to return to his grave. Thanks to Stoker, Dracula could take his grave with him as he travelled.

To be sure, Stoker never has any scenes which directly prove Van Helsing's assertion about Dracula's dependence on Transylvanian soil-- that is, scenes like having Dracula try without success to sleep in English soil. But apparently whatever "blood-memories" in Dracula's native soil nourish the vampire, that vitality can be trumped by a greater vitality, as Van Helsing uses holy wafers, presumably blessed by the Catholic Church, to make some of Dracula's earth-filled coffins useless to him. (Side-note: the "holy water" device popular in many later vampire-tales appears nowhere in the original novel.) Still, the original folklore-limitation does crop again with respect to Dracula's only vampiric convert in England, for apparently Lucy Westenra can't just go anywhere she likes, but is obliged to return to her mausoleum at daybreak. Stoker does not emphasize her dependence on being close to English soil, but one must presume that she has some such dependence on returning to her original grave.

 I think it's pretty likely that by 1940 Jerry Siegel had read DRACULA, though I don't know that he ever committed to posterity any comment on Stoker's greatest work. A long time ago I read a vampire story Siegel did for his 1930s series DOCTOR OCCULT, but I don't recall any special Stoker quotes therein. But writers are packrats, and I think it very likely that he picked up the symbolism of "beneficial earth" from Stoker and later transformed it into "inimical earth" for his superhero.

Oh, and though it has nothing to do with the derivation of kryptonite, the title of this essay I rook from the King James Bible, wherein God tells the murderous Cain that he's "cursed from the earth"-- meaning not that the earth is literally poisonous to Cain; just that the earth won't give him sustenance. Readers of this blog should know that a day without a myth-quote is like a day without sunshine.

THE READING RHEUM: THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1911)

 

LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM was Bram Stoker’s final novel, published the year prior to his death. Like DRACULA, the author’s most famous work, LAIR drew upon archaic folklore, specifically the Celtic story of the Lambton Worm, a tiny creature that grows to the size of a rampaging dragon. Onto this slender folktale Stoker grafted a shapeshifter story, in which a monstrous worm, a survival of ancient times, somehow gains the ability to take on the form of a human woman.

Had Stoker focused upon this intriguing presence, LAIR might have been one of his finest works, as well as an anodyne to his next-to-last book, THE LADY OF THE SHROUD, a dull Ruritanian romance with mild Gothic touches. Instead, LAIR is a jumble of mismatching story-tropes, some of which possess great mythic potential, while others merely serve to express contemporary prejudices about race and sexuality. LAIR is still better than SHROUD, in the sense that chaos can be more entertaining than predictability.

Perhaps because Stoker was already ill when he penned LAIR, the book’s plot wanders all over the place. Yet the lack of a rigorous plot is probably less injurious than the thinness of all of the characters, even though the reader will observe Stoker re-using some of the character-tropes he employed so memorably in DRACULA. The dramatis personae include:

ADAM SALTON is a young Englishman long absent from his native land. He returns in order to be groomed as the heir to an estate in a territory known by the Roman-era name of Mercia. Though Adam meets with the current lord of the estate, his grand-uncle, most of his conversations in the novel take place with NATHANIEL DE SALIS, a neighboring landowner who knows much of the involved history and folklore of the land and its various peoples.

One of his neighbors is LADY ARABELLA MARCH, occupying an estate known as “Diana’s Grove.” For almost half the novel, she appears to be an ordinary human woman with a few odd habits, and at first her only motivation is to make a good marriage to allay the debts of her estate. She wishes to marry—

EDGAR CASWALL, another local lord who, like Adam, has come to his estate “Castra Regis,’ after having it managed for years in his absence. However, he shows nearly no interest in Arabella, focusing all of his attention on—

LILLA WATFORD, one of two granddaughters of another local landowner. She has no interest in Caswall, and she receives help against his predacious intentions by her cousin MIMI WATFORD, whom Adam eventually marries.

Parallels with DRACULA should be obvious. Adam is a forthright young man like Jonathan Harker, and Nathaniel plays the part of Van Helsing, instructing the young man on the theory of ancient “wyrms.” Lilla and Mimi emulate Lucy and Mina beyond the resemblance of their initials, for Lilla is as doomed as Lucy while Mimi is a more defiant figure like Mina. Yet Stoker strayed from the parallel by splitting the book between two villainous presences. Whereas DRACULA centers upon the depredations of one monstrous antagonist, a true homme fatale, in LAIR Stoker includes a human homme fatale and an inhuman femme fatale. Yet Stoker doesn’t succeed in making either of these inimical characters a tenth as interesting as the vampire count.

Neither of the villains possesses a clear goal. When Caswall is introduced, Stoker draws parallels between the lord and the ancient Romans who conquered Great Britain for a time, and who left their stamp upon the territory of Mercia. One of Caswall’s ancestors studied under Mesmer, the father of hypnotism, and somehow Caswall seems to have “inherited” an intrinsic ability to dominate the wills of others. However, Caswall only demonstrates this talent three times in the novel, always while visiting the home of the Watfords. During these visits, while pretending to make small talk, Caswall attempts to mentally dominate the weak-willed Lilla. It’s not even clear whether or not the cold-hearted aristocrat intends to make Liila into either his wife or his mistress, for every time he’s there, so is Mimi, who manages to thwart Caswall with her own willpower. The lord doesn’t make any other attempts, even financially based, to control Lilla, and for most of the novel he does nothing but to go fly a kite. In one of Stoker’s oddest conceits, Mercia becomes victimized by flocks of migrating birds, mostly doves and pigeons, with a strong implication that they’re reacting against the presence of a serpentine “devil.” To scare the birds away, Caswall creates a kite in the shape of a hawk. The kite succeeds in its scarecrow purpose, but for vague reasons Caswall becomes preoccupied with this new hobby. He starts sending “messages” up the kite-string, and Stoker doesn’t really explain this, though given the conservative Christian sentiments expressed throughout the book, it may be that Caswall’s activity is somehow seen as blasphemy against Heaven.

But if Caswall ends up seeming more dotty than dangerous, Lady Arabella comes off as a monster without a cause. For half the novel, Stoker plays it cagey. Arabella has a few odd snakelike aspects—for instance, when Adam brings in mongeese to exterminate ordinary snakes, the mongeese show unreasoning hostility toward the noblewoman. Then, in the latter half of the novel, the author drops the whole megillah on the reader. Arabella may look like a human being, and she even married a now-deceased lord in order to gain control of Diana’s Grove. But in reality, she’s a giant worm who has lived beneath Diana’s Grove for thousands of years. Though the Nathaniel character goes into great detail to justify the existence of such an antique survival, no one in the novel explains how a giant worm can change into a human woman, either via biology or Satanic magic.

But as noted earlier, Arabella, like Caswall, has no raison d’etre. In DRACULA, Stoker gave his royal Rumanian a forceful characterization, so that he continued to dominate the novel despite his being offstage for most of the narrative. But Stoker refuses to tell the reader anything about the internal workings of Arabella’s mind, except in one section, where she’s seen to share the xenophobic prejudices of contemporaneous Englishmen (more on that later). What does the Worm-Woman want? The readers won’t be able to tell from what Stoker provides them. The author strains to convince readers that the White Worm is a biological creature—she’s even “white” because of burrowing through caves of white clay—but he never bothers to address the question of what the Worm feeds on to keep its bulk together. Stoker might’ve done better to make the Worm a creation of The Devil himself, for certainly the creature’s associations with the underworld give her a diabolical aspect. Though a serpent-woman would seem to suggest all sorts of psychosexual undertones, Arabella is never a sexual threat to anyone, though it's hard to believe that Stoker didn’t name his protagonist in keeping with the associations between a certain serpent and the original “Adam.” There’s one scene in which Adam convinces himself to marry Mimi because he thinks the act of marriage will protect Mimi from Arabella somehow, but Arabella makes no moves on Adam, and maybe the marriage is meant to protect Adam from some concealed lust on his part. After the marriage, Arabella does try to kill both Adam and Mimi, but the motivation behind the attempt is to keep Adam from revealing her snaky secrets. Because Arabella is such a black hole as a character, Stoker has her do things that make no sense, just to fill plot-holes. The worst appears at the conclusion, when the two villains bring destruction on themselves. Caswall attaches his kite to his mansion by a metal wire, insuring that Castra Regis will be destroyed in a thunderstorm. Adam witnesses Arabella extending the metal line to her own home—which means that the storm’s fury will destroy both her and Diana’s Grove. Why Stoker didn’t just have his protagonist do this, instead of one of the villains, is more than I can speculate upon.

Backtracking a bit, the only time Arabella shows real emotion is when she apparently forgets she’s an inhuman creature and reacts with indignation when a crude African servant dares to propose lovemaking to a “white woman.” Said servant is Oolanga, brought to Castra Regis from Africa by Caswall, though it’s never clear what the black man’s duties for Caswall might be. Oolanga is a former “witch finder,” and he shows a propensity for “sniffing out” scenes of death past and present. Stoker makes no bones about his contempt for Negroes, calling Oolanga (among other things) “ostensibly human,” while Adam jokingly calls the servant a “Christy Minstrel.” Presumably this is wishful thinking, because the death-obsessed Black African is certainly not as subservient as a character in a minstrel-show, given that he tries to initiate sex with a woman above his station. In fact, after Arabella scornfully refuses Oolanga’s suit, Adam and Arabella are briefly allied against the violent African, and Adam first witnesses Arabella’s transformation when Arabella drags Oolanga down to death in her underworld. Oddly, though Stoker can’t stand Black people, he does make Mimi “half-Burmese,” though apparently the author only did this so that he could work in a reference to Burmese snake-charmers.

There are a few powerful moments in LAIR. One is the “plague of birds,” of doves and pigeons whose “cowled” appearance Stoker likens to the habits of Christian nuns (even though Stoker was raised as a Protestant). Nathaniel’s ruminations about the Celtic traditions about underworld dragons and “worms” are modestly compelling, Stoker was clearly trying to construct a multi-leveled metaphor regarding human beings being seduced, if not by Satan himself, by devilish impulses. Yet, to invert William Blake’s encomium on Milton, it seems Stoker was too much “of the angel’s party” to really delve into the realms of the forbidden, particularly that of serpentine sexuality. Perhaps the shadow of DRACULA doomed Stoker’s last novel, making it impossible for him to venture ever again into those realms of transgressive feeling.

THE READING RHEUM: THE LADY OF THE SHROUD (1909)

 

SPOIILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I don’t know what was going on in the mind of Bram Stoker in 1909 when he wrote his second-to-last novel THE LADY OF THE SHROUD (succeeded by THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM). I don’t even know how he felt about his 1897 masterpiece DRACULA, given that one account claimed the book didn’t sell all that well. But the first time I read SHROUD over thirty years ago, my impression was that Stoker was re-purposing old story-tropes and turning them on their heads, while unfortunately showing little awareness of what the tropes appealing in the first place.

SHROUD, like DRACULA, is a novel told via the letters exchanged by various characters. The action of the novel is the geographical reverse of DRACULA, since (aside from a short prelude) the story starts in England and then shifts for the remainder of the narrative to Eastern Europe. Instead of setting the novel in a real country e.g. Transylvania, Stoker takes a page from Anthony Hope and invents a small Balkan nation and gifts this fictional locale with the wordy cognomen “The Land of the Blue Mountains.” (In my review I will just call it “that Balkan place.”) Whereas DRACULA only devoted fleeting attention to the culture of Transylvania, SHROUD reads like a Balkan chamber of commerce report, with the author constantly extolling the steadfast charms of the locals.

SHROUD also includes vampirism, but (remember my spoilers) it’s of the fake variety. Stoker doesn’t even concoct a decent Gothic hoax, for his main interest is in providing a wish-fulfillment fantasy for his main character, an impoverished young adventurer who ends up becoming the ruler of this untamed Balkan land. Rupert Saint Leger, a poor relation to a rich family (whose history is given in exhausting detail in the novel’s first fifty pages), lives the life of a footloose adventurer, which includes investigating a lot of cultures and their claims to making magic. Then he’s summoned to England to receive a rich relative’s bequest. I’m not sure who was the first author to have a legatee forced to stay in an old mansion to gain his inheritance, but Rupert may be among the first. Rupert inherits his uncle’s castle in the Balkan place, but only if he stays there a year, overseeing all of the uncle’s business affairs with the Balkanians. Rupert happily accepts, for he has almost no real family ties. His father perished as a soldier in India at some unspecified time, and Rupert was twelve when he lost his (never named) mother. He does have strong ties, though, with his maternal aunt and surrogate mother Janet, who eventually joins Rupert in his new castle.

Rupert, who immediately appreciates the Balkanians for being as flawlessly noble and generous as he is, only encounters one impediment to success. One night a beautiful woman clad in grave-clothes wanders into his castle. She doesn’t give him her name or her history, and then wanders away again. On her second visit Rupert trails her and finds that she’s sleeping in a mausoleum, which is enough proof for Rupert that she must be a vampire (though she never claims to be such). Considering that the young man dismisses most occult beliefs as superstition, his credulity might raise a few eyebrows. Naturally love takes Rupert by storm, and he even marries the unnamed shroud-lady believing she’s undead, before eventually learning that she’s participating in an involved (but non-malicious) hoax.

The charade is so transparent, and Rupert is so dumb, that I’m tempted to banish LADY OF THE SHROUD from the annals of metaphenomenal literature. However, dull though all the pseudo-vampirism stuff is, I suppose the book still qualifies as an uncanny Gothic. But Stoker’s passion is clearly not for the phantasmal but for the political, for he devotes many sections to the role of the Balkan state in the European political scene of the time. Over time noble-souled Rupert becomes a noble in truth, for his phony vampire-lady is actually a real Balkan princess, and Rupert’s courageous defense of the Balkan people against invading Turks propels him to the position of the Balkan place’s king. But even as a political thriller, LADY OF THE SHROUD feels like a poor man’s PRISONER OF ZENDA—at least in part because Rupert is so fearsomely dull.

Given that DRACULA has been subjected to a thousand and one psychological readings, one would hope that SHROUD would at least hold some interest in that department. But Big Sigmund would have found little of interest here. Rupert’s father is barely mentioned, nor does any character serve as a credible paternal surrogate. Rupert’s mother is equally under-characterized, with Aunt Janet serving as the maternal substitute. The fact that Rupert brings Janet to the castle to live with him could be interpreted as “desire for the mother,” but there are only two suggestive moments. In one scene, Rupert observes that his very aged aunt has nevertheless kept her “girlish figure.” In another scene, he imagines his aunt (who is irritated with him for some reason) trying to spank him, a grown man, the way she did when he was a child. But this reflection is played for comedy, as are Aunt Janet’s unsubstantiated claims to “the second sight.” Since Rupert’s mother died when he was twelve, he ought to remember her, and Stoker could have drawn some parallels between the lost mother and the recrudescent Lady of the Shroud. Such parallels could have been maintained even once the revenant-fantasy was dispelled. But Stoker’s characters are such stock types that even this line of thought leads nowhere, and the novel is at best a curiosity, being an attempt to crossbreed tropes from both political thrillers and “fake supernatural” Gothics.