THE READING RHEUM: NADA THE LILY (1892)

When I was growing up, I occasionally saw cartoons make short jokes about "The Vanishing American," usually showing a Native American slowly fading out of existence. I knew that this was some arcane adult reference, and eventually I learned that the phrase was the title of a 1922 serialized novel by Zane Grey about the vicissitudes of a Navajo tribe, and of a 1925 silent film adapting said novel. Whereas the novel and the film depicted Native Americans being victimized by White Christians who were either condescending or avaricious, the phrase by itself took on the implication that Native Americans were doomed by their own primitivism, a verdict also articulated much earlier in Fenimore Cooper's 1826 LAST OF THE MOHICANS.

In 1892 H. Rider Haggard gave the English speaking world NADA THE LILY, which might be said to be his version of "The Vanishing African." Haggard had lived and worked in Africa for several years, and thus knew enough about the terrain and the customs of the African people to lend verisimilitude to his two best known novels, KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885) and SHE (1886). The star of SOLOMON'S MINES, big game hunter Allan Quatermain, became the subject of seventeen other works-- and the one sequel, ALLAN QUATERMAIN (1887), is also widely regarded as the first novel to feature a "lost civilization." That novel also introduced the mighty, axe-wielding Zulu warrior Umslopogass as a boon friend to Quatermain, though both heroes die at the end of the book.

However, the death of his characters didn't keep Haggard from writing prequel-novels, and just as he wrote several for Quartermain, Haggard also wrote an "origin story" for Umslopogass, of which he is the sole star.

To be sure, his story is told by an interlocutor: Mopo, a witch doctor with apparently real divinatory skills. Mopo's life becomes intertwined by the formidable warlord Chaka during the latter's reign ot terror in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Chaka marries Mopo's sister, but the warlord is ferociously paranoid about being overthrown by kindred, and he regularly slays any of his male progeny. Mopo and his sister arrange a deception by which Chaka thinks his son has been executed, when in fact he is raised as the son of Mopo and Mopo's wife. Umslopogass grows up believing that couple to be his real parents, and that their real daughter Nada the Lily is his sister (when she is in truth his cousin).

Umslopogass and Nada fall in love despite believing themselves siblings, but assorted circumstances keep them apart until their tragic ending (inevitable in terms of continuity, since Nada doesn't exist in the future life of the Zulu hero). Despite being unaware of his royal lineage, Umslopogass pursues a heroic destiny. He journeys to a rival tribe to undergo a ritual combat, in which he wins his formidable axe from the tribe's chief. In his one ambigously supernatural adventure, he encounters a pack of wolves that may or may not be evil human spirits reincarnated as jungle predators. He also befriends a weird "witch man" known as Ghazali, who is an ally to the wolves but also becomes the Zulu's companion. Umslopogass does not get to contend with his wicked father Chaka, who is assassinated more or less in keeping with historical record. 

There are no named White characters in the novel until Quatermain is mentioned at the very end. However, various references make clear that the Zulu way of life is doomed due to colonial encroachment and the superior firepower of Europeans. Nada, who is not especially mythic except as a support-character to the main hero, is also said to have some distant White ancestry. I'm not sure Haggard included this detail in support of his theory of "The Vanishing Zulu," or because he didn't think his readers would buy into the narrative of Nada's incredible beauty if those readers thought she looked like the average Black African woman. 

I'm sure Haggard's work, and his association with European colonial rule, would win him no fans with many modern readers, though it's a vivid tale of love and war in a vanished culture. Nevertheless, to the best of my knowledge NADA is the first prose novel to focus entirely upon the actions of a Black African hero-- who, given his one encounter with the supernatural, might also be rated "the first Black superhero," or "superhero-adjacent," should one prefer a less general term. 

COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE

 Though I'm sure I've made assorted comments on both the ARCHIVE and my movie-blog about the many difficulties in adapting prose works into other media, it seems I've not codified anything regarding how the process of cross-media adaptation affects mythicity. The 2023 essay MASTERING EPISTEMOLOGY probably comes closest to providing possible criteria.

I have been reasonably consistent about showing how different literary works display different levels of mythicity because their authors either do or do not render the four epistemological patterns with a sense of their complex possibilities. In 2018 I dubbed the process of mythic coalescence as "concrescence," and attempted to link it to the Aristotelian concept of "the unity of action," even though I almost immediately revised that standard phrase into a "unity of effects."

From this basis, a successful translation of a work's mythicity would have to maintain concrescence, though inevitably the second media effort must alter much of the first work's content. Often this means leaving out content that supports the original work's symbolic discourse, and so, while the media translation may reproduce the original's lateral meaning, it's unable to achieve the same vertical meaning.

Nevertheless, I have seen examples where a given secondary work must adumbrate a primary one, but still manages to achieve concrescence of the symbolic discourse, and thus realizing high mythicity. 

There are probably assorted examples, but the one that most comes to mind is the 1925 silent film adaptation of Rider Haggard's novel SHE. In my review I noted the impossibility of a film of standard feature length being able to deal with all the detail of the book. But I judged that the filmmakers had managed to keep ENOUGH details to keep a commensurate level of conscrescence. Of the 1925 film I wrote:

Though the film is only able to suggest bits and pieces of the novel’s romantic grandeur, on the whole its co-directors manage to suggest at least some of that grandiosity despite the lack of dialogue. They did so by resorting to silent cinema’s potential for suggesting more than it shows, and as a result the city of Kor, of which we see very little, comes alive through the bearing of the queenly Ayesha.

I speak of “bearing” rather than beauty, because actress Betty Blythe is only fair in the looks department, never seeming to be a truly bewitching figure. But the script does let this version of Ayesha be a true sorceress, rather than just a sexy white queen. For all the divergences between book and movie, I was impressed by the fact that the script kept a vital scene, When Ayesha curses a female rival, she does so by touching the other woman’s hair, so that the imprint of the queen’s fingers whitens the hair touched.

So where secondary adaptations are concerned, they may not be able to duplicate the concrescence of the primary work, but they CAN muster a lesser concrescence with its own integrity. For a forthcoming film adaptation review, I will use the term "secondary concrescence" unless something better comes to mind.

 

 

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2

My first crossover-category is that is THE HIGH STATURE CROSSOVER. This is usually a crossover of two or more characters/presences that have embodied PRIME stature in earlier narratives, though there are some exceptions to this rule.

An early example of a literary crossover is that of Rider Haggard's SHE AND ALLAN, in which Haggard's two most famous characters encountered one another for the course of one novel.

In comics, of course, Timely Comics provided a major model for the future when its editors crossed over two of its continuing features, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. However, the character's intermittent encounters were not limited to one interaction, but went on for much of both characters' original runs.

These characters also briefly crossed over in the very short-lived team title, ALL WINNERS SQUAD-- which factoid leads me to mention that I've reversed the position I expressed in THE LOGIC AND APPEAL OF CROSSOVERS, where I said that I did not deem "hero-teams" to be crossovers. Now I tend to say that they definitely are when the majority of the team-members maintain their own separate features. The principle may even extend to characters who had moderately substantial features of their own before being revived by other publishers. Thus the Golden Age character "Miss Victory," who lasted for about five years as a backup feature in an anthology comic, was "ret-conned" to stand alongside a bunch of newbie characters in the Americomics title FEMFORCE (which would later pursue many other similar public-domain revivals).

All of these characters are incidents of two Primes interacting. However, in some cases a Prime may appear in another Prime's series in such a way that the former becomes a Sub-- but without a concomitant loss of charisma. For instance, Donald Duck was conceived as a 1931 animated cartoon character long before Uncle Scrooge appeared in a 1947 comic book. Yet whenever Donald and his three nephews appeared in the UNCLE SCROOGE stories, Scrooge was the Prime, as the stories were primarily about him. Yet in a sense Donald and the nephews were an integral part of the Scrooge mythos, in part because regular readers always had some knowledge that Donald existed in his own cosmos alongside that of Scrooge.

To conclude this post, I'll add that on occasion an iconic character will be partly revised for the needs of a later crossover. The original King Kong has but one story, at the end of which he perishes, never to return, at least not at the hands of his creators. However, when the company that owned Kong leased him out to Toho Studios, Kong was revised in many respects-- most significantly, making him large enough that he could stand toe to toe with the Big G. This Kong is not really the original Kong, but there exists a sort of "crypto-continuity" between the two, so that I regard this crossover as a crossover of two Primes, simply because Kong II is meant to be a strong echo of the original icon.

More to come.

THE READING RHEUM: KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1885)

 

In my essay WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED SUPERHERO OUGHT TO WEAR I wrote:

In the pop-culture world as we know it today, there are a lot of characters who have superhero-like powers, weapons or adventures, and who wear commonplace attire. James Bond may be the foremost example of this type, and there's no doubt that the prose novels qualify as adult-oriented pulp. However, Bond's enormous popularity across many cultures stems principally from the movie adaptations, which may have caught fire from being culturally "in the right place at the right time." Before Bond, popular fiction-- prose fiction, movies, comic strips-- played host to innumerable characters who wore ordinary clothes but enjoyed extraordinary adventures, whether they chased down weird masterminds (Doc Savage), mystic menaces (Jules De Grandin, Mandrake the Magician), or just freaky-looking criminals (Dick Tracy).

 By my lights, the character in serial pop-fiction who represents the earliest flowering of the superhero idiom is Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain. I've not investigated every 19th-century claimant to the status of "first superheroic type," but my general feeling is that most of them tend to be "one-off" concepts, like THE BLACK MONK from 1844. Not only was KING SOLOMON'S MINES wildly successful as a stand-alone book, its repute lasted long enough that Haggard continued to add adventures to his protagonist's history, though most were prequels, since the author killed off the character in the second book, ALLAN QUATERMAIN. Quatermain himself possesses no special powers or weapons, but he does encounter a smattering of weird opponents. The antagonists of the second Quatermain novel, for instance, come from the city of the Zu-Vendis, a white-skinned people whose ancestors colonized a part of Africa in archaic times and continued their customs uninterrupted into modern times. Thus Haggard invented "the lost race novel," which Edgar Rice Burroughs and others further promulgated.

KING SOLOMON'S MINES does not precisely concern a "lost race," though it does conform to the uncanny version of the trope I call "exotic lands and customs." Purportedly Haggard wrote MINES as a response to the popularity of Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND. But whereas everyone in the Stevenson book is anxious to claim the titular treasure for pure gain, only one Haggard character goes to Africa to make his fortune by finding the fabled mines of King Solomon-- and when he goes missing, white hunter Quatermain is hired to search for the missing man by Sir Henry Curtis, brother of the treasure-seeker. During their trek across a hostile desert, Quatermain and Curtis are accompanied by two other major characters: Captain Good, who serves more or less as comedy relief, and a mysterious Black African named Ignosi. When the four men succeed in crossing the desert, they find themselves in the isolated domain of the Kukuanas, a Zulu-like people. Because these Africans have been cut off from modern developments, they have a superstitious feeling toward the three white men, though the Kukuana's tyrannical leader Twala is quite willing to chance killing these interlopers. The white men find themselves drawn into a dynastic struggle when they learn that Ignosi's true name is Umbopa, and that despite an exile from this land since childhood, he, not Twala, is the rightful ruler of the land.

What makes the Kukuanas uncannily exotic is not their isolation, though, but their custom of witch-finding. Chief Twala has no problem with sacrificing dozens of tribespeople to the gods when his henchwoman Gagool fingers her victims as witches. Gagool, an incredibly ancient woman, claims to have lived for centuries (making her a figurative predecessor to Haggard's creation She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed) and claims that she can only be killed by accident, though both of these claims are left ambivalent. Even after the white adventurers help Umbopa's loyalists overthrow the reign of Twala, they almost meet their doom when they force Gagool to lead them to the mines of Solomon, marked by statuary from Biblical times. Though Gagool meets her end here, she's weird enough that I deem her as much an ancestor of the "supervillain" as Quartermain is to the "superhero."

Naturally, there are aspects of MINES that could never pass the political correctness test today. Yet it is not a racist novel, or even what some pundits would call a "white savior novel." (The white guys score some points against Twala's forces, but in the end the victory is that of the loyalists allied to Umbopa.) Umbopa is also a heroic personage, probably the first black hero of English-speaking literature (if one uses "hero" according to the combative mode I've outlined here). In the second Quatermain novel, Haggard introduces Umslopagaas, a Zulu hero who's a support-character in that novel but later gets his own solo story, NADA THE LILY, which I've not yet read. 

Not all novels called "classics" deserve that title. But like SHE, KING SOLOMON'S MINES richly deserves the accolade.

THE MOST FAMOUS SUBCOMBATIVE ADVENTURE

In ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT.2, I detailed some of the problems with which I’d grappled in terms of assigning ROBINSON CRUSOE its place within my literary system. I didn't have any problems in stating that CRUSOE qualifies as “the first major work of popular fiction.” The book’s mode of communication is markedly different from the mode of earlier elite-culture works that happened to become popular with the masses, ranging from Shakespeare’s PERICLES to Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE. I also view CRUSOE, as well as its first sequel, as touchstones for the modern development of the adventure-mythos. However, this distinction must be qualified. Readers during the Enlightenment may have believed that chivalric romances belonged to an outmoded genre, but both “high” and “low” readers remained aware of how that type of fiction worked, how knightly heroes disported themselves. As I remarked earlier, Crusoe is anything but knightly in his bourgeois orientation, and though I do consider Defoe’s two Crusoe-novels to fall into the mythos of adventure, Crusoe himself is at best a demihero, and not a very impressive one. Even Friday, describing how he took the life of a wild bear just for kicks, comes closer to the model of the combative knight than does Robinson Crusoe.

Now, as my essay-title portends, Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND (published as a book in 1883 but serialized in a kids’ magazine two years previous) is also subcombative in terms of the dynamicity of its protagonist Jim Hawkins. However, while not all readers may think of ROBINSON CRUSOE as a pure adventure-novel, TREASURE ISLAND is practically a watchword for the mythos. To be sure, it’s preceded by many other classics in the same mythos, particularly the Big Three Perennials: Scott’s IVANHOE, Dumas’s THREE MUSKETEERS, and Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Yet though there had been numerous adventure-tales—now mostly unread—that featured juveniles as protagonists, ISLAND seems a breakthrough in terms of creating a true hero who simply happens to be a juvenile. By “true hero” I mean the type of character who fits the persona of “the hero,” more devoted to glory than immediate survival.


Hawkins is not utterly without economic motive. As much as his “good mentors” Livesy and Trelawney, and his ‘bad mentor” Long John Silver, Hawkins wants to profit by uncovering the lost treasure of pirate captain Flint. But there’s a sense in which the treasure gives Jim an excuse to get away from the mundane life of running an inn with his widowed mother. To be sure, he doesn’t expect to meet danger during the voyage to the isle of treasure (called “Skeleton Island”). Peril only looms its head when Hawkins learns that Silver has brought hardened pirates into the crew, who are willing to murder or maroon all of the ship's honest citizens, once the pirates have acquired Flint’s treasure. Nevertheless, twice in the story Hawkins boldly strikes off on his own, first to explore the island, and then to recapture the ship when it’s set adrift. Hawkins can’t fight or shoot, and he’s saved from being killed in his only battle-scene by losing his footing and falling down a hill. Nevertheless, Hawkins displays both the honor and courage of a hero. The sense of honor extends even to the duplicitous Silver, for Hawkins refuses to break his word to the pirate even to save Hawkins’ own life, and his courage is all the more remarkable because of the very real fears he experiences. Cinematic adaptations sometimes are accurate in conjuring with the terror-aspects of the boy’s early encounter with the fearsome Blind Pew, or Hawkins’ life-or-death struggle against the murderous Israel Hands. But the island itself is rarely shown as Stevenson shows it, as a place of potential malarial sickness, inhabited by “huge slimy monsters” (sea lions, unfamiliar to the young Englishman). And I’ve never seen a film that ended as the novel ends; with Jim Hawkins, years later, still haunted by nightmares of piratical iniquity, summed up by the memory of Long John’s parrot, mindlessly screaming “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Like many of Stevenson’s works, TREASURE ISLAND was originally directed at young readers, for its original title was THE SEA COOK: A STORY FOR BOYS. I for one did not read the novel in my youth. My first memory was that of seeing a thirty-minute cartoon adaptation as an episode of THE FAMOUS ADVENTURES OF MISTER MAGOO, in which a version of Magoo, an actor rather than a blind old coot, essayed the role of Long John. The cartoon, like many live-action adaptations, played up Silver’s charm and wit, and downplayed the consequences of his intentions toward the honest treasure-seekers. I didn’t read the book until I was in my fifties or thereabout, when I sought to sort out the book’s relationship to the literary form of “the romance.” Indeed, Stevenson’s epigraph alludes to “the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way,” which I take to be a reference to the chivalric romances, whose spirit Scott had revived in IVANHOE. To be sure, I doubt if any medieval romance ever had a villain as ambiguous as Long John Silver, who is the dark side of Hawkins as much as Hyde, five years later, would become the alter ego to Jekyll. Ironically, while Jekyll and Hyde perish together, Stevenson allows Silver to escape the fate he’s earned and to steal a sack of coins for his trouble, while Hawkins on the contrary is too haunted by his experience of “man’s inhumanity to man” to enjoy his share of the pirate treasure.

Despite the many horrific images in the novel, TREASURE ISLAND is entirely naturalistic, just like the Big Three Perennials. However, the book is indirectly responsible for spawning the cornerstone of the nineteenth century’s formulation of the superhero idiom. After reading ISLAND, H. Rider Haggard bet a friend that he Haggard could write a novel as good as Stevenson’s work. While there had been pirate adventures before ISLAND, KING SOLOMON’S MINES instituted the subgenre known as the “lost race novel.” Perhaps more importantly, MINES introduced one of the nineteenth century’s first serial characters whose adventures were both (1) predominantly metaphenomal in nature, and (2) predominantly based around the agon of combat. Allen Quatermain, star of MINES and the eight books that followed, does end up chasing a legendary treasure as does Hawkins. But Quatermain is a seasoned campaigner rather than a beardless boy, and though Haggard killed off his character in the second book, the series was popular enough for the author to bring Quatermain back in six “prequels.” To my knowledge Stevenson never wrote anything that belongs to the superhero idiom, but TREASURE ISLAND remains an important link in the chain of events that led to that idiom, ranging from Nick Carter to Tarzan and John Carter and on through the costumed offspring of four-color comics.

THE READING RHEUM: THE HAND OF DR. FU MANCHU (1917)

While Karameneh is unquestionably the most significant female character in the first two Fu Manchu books, she takes a back seat in HAND to the daughter of Fu Manchu, even though the character is not named and only makes sporadic appearances in the story. Indeed, though Karameneh recovers her memory of Petrie and Smith near the end of the second book, in HAND Rohmer marginalizes her by packing her off to Egypt for her supposed safety. This provides no protection whatever, as the recrudescent Fu Manchu easily abducts her and uses her as a pawn against his enemies. Her signal accomplishment at the end of RETURN-- where she shoots her former master and almost kills him-- is nullified by a life-saving surgical operation, and though Fu evinces a desire for vengeance upon his erstwhile slave, he sets this aside in order to use her as a bargaining-chip with Petrie.

While RETURN pictures Fu Manchu becoming the world's emperor, in HAND the advent of Fah Lo Suee as a female ruler is foreshadowed by Nayland Smith. For the first time, he bestows a name upon Fu Manchu's network of spies and assassins, the Si-Fan. Though the name is said to refer commonly to a community in Tibet, Smith claims that it actually represents an organization that advocates the rule of the world by an empress. Smith's description of this legendary empress sounds quite a bit like Rider Haggard's "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed," in that this empress is said to be "incalculably ancient." To be sure, the empress renews herself through a "continuous series of reincarnations," and though Smith does not believe the legend literally, he suspects that Fu Manchu plans to manipulate the Si-Fan's desire for such a goddess-like figure by using his own daughter to that end.

Petrie meets the future Fah Lo Suee early in the novel, but has no idea as to her significance, since she creates the illusion that she's simply an ordinary servant-woman. In truth she's operating in London to help her ailing father obtain surgical help for the wound Karameneh dealt him, and Petrie finds himself and another surgeon forced to save the great enemy of the Western world, in part to save Karameneh's life. Fah does not appear in this scene, for Rohmer is focused on building up the uncanny mentality of the devil-doctor, who's able to coerce the doctors to do his will despite still having a bullet lodged in his skull.

Since Karameneh is largely passive in HAND, and Fu's daughter is usually offstage, Rohmer makes up for the loss of resourceful women by introducing Zarmi, a Eurasian woman serving the devil-doctor's entourage. In contrast to Karameneh's feminine modesty, Zarmi is an ostentatious flirt, though she's entirely loyal to Fu's schemes. Since Fu is implicitly compared to the Satanic serpent from the Bible, Rohmer follows through by giving Zarmi an equally snaky aspect.

She was lithe as a serpent, graceful as a young panther, another Lamia come to damn the souls of men with those arts denounced in a long dead age by Apolloinus of Tyana.

Despite this mythic association, Zarmi remains a stock villain and nothing more. For several chapters, Rohmer puts aside menacing women and introduces a new subsidiary male villain, the mandarin Ki-Ming. Ki-Ming claims to represent a faction of the Si-Fan that has turned against Fu Manchu, but Smith places no faith in this claim. Sure enough, Ki-Ming only approaches Petrie in order to use Tibetan psychic practices-- which Rohmer refers to as "animal magnetism"-- in order to bewitch Petrie into killing Smith.

Petrie's second encounter with the future Fah takes place by sheer accident, when he boards a train and seeks a compartment. He ends up sharing one with the elegant daughter of his archenemy, though he never realizes that he's seen her before. He's unable to determine her national origins, and only later will Rohmer specify that Fah is half-Russian.

Finally, Petrie spies on a convocation of Orientals who are being invited to witness the advent of "the Lady of the Si-Fan," who is of course Fah masquerading as the legendary empress. Yet it's not until after this event-- wherein Fu buys his freedom from Petrie by giving up Karameneh-- that Rohmer specifies, over two-thirds of the way in the novel, that the Lady of the Si-Fan is Fu's daughter. Smith does not specify whether or not he's ever had any personal acquaintance with this personage. However, the same passage in which Petrie admits how he freed the master villain for the sake of love, Smith makes an oblique confession: "I understand, old man. That day came in my life, long years ago."

The novel then winds up with the return of support-character Lionel Barton, the poor man's Richard Francis Burton, and once again, he serves the purpose of being the "Asianized European." (That said, Barton does utter the first racial slang-epithet to appear in the series, calling a minor character a "dago.") Barton also leads the intrepid heroes to Fu's current hideaway, which happens to be in a defunct devil-worship sanctuary, which in turn was built on the ruins of an ancient Phoenician site. This sequence is one of Rohmer's most suspenseful passages, and although Fu and Fah escape in a Chinese yacht, the novel concludes by implying that the wrath of heaven itself rises up against them. A massive storm wreaks havoc upon the seas near England, and the novel ends when Petrie and Smith behold some of the wreckage of the yacht, implying that once again the devil-doctor may have finally met his final fate.

And for nearly fourteen years, Fu remained dead. Ostensibly Rohmer brought back his Chinese villain simply because nothing the author wrote in the intervening years sold better than the doctor. The revival may have also stemmed from Hollywood's renewed interest in the character, beginning with THE MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR FU MANCHU in 1929. Though the film owed little to any of Rohmer's original work, it probably deserves some credit for encouraging the author to expand on his most memorable character, whose series would continue into the late 1950s.

THE AMAZING TRANSITIVE MEDITATIONS

Currently I have only three entries listed under the rubric "transitive effect," but said effect has been implied in many of my posts throughout the years. In this post I'll try to bring some of these jumbled concepts together, starting by repeating my favored definition of "transitive" from the Free Dictionary:

Expressing an action carried from the subject to the object;

requiring a direct object to complete 

meaning. Used of a verb or verb construction.

Without re-reading my blog from the beginning, I would guess that the earliest post in which the transitive effect was mentioned, but not specified, came about when I tried to decide whether or not within a given fictional work the mere presence of an *agon,* a major combat-scene, determined that the work would belong to the mythos of adventure. The 2010 essay DOMINANCE, SUBMISSION drew comparisons between two works by the author Rider Haggard: KING SOLOMON'S MINES, which does feature "a battle at the center of the plot-action," and SHE, which has some very invigorating fight-scenes but "does not center around a final battle between a hero and {an] antagonist." To reword this argument in new terms, KING SOLOMON'S MINES clearly falls into the mythos of adventure because the climax forms a "transitive effect" between the subject-- that is, the "significant value," or theme, behind the story-- and the object, consisting of the "narrative values" of plot and characters.

Though in later essays I would debate as to whether the later Haggard work SHE qualified as an "adventure" or "drama," in this essay I still favored the idea that it was an adventure-story. Yet I observed that:

...the agonistic radical in SHE has become relatively submissive compared to its manifestation in KING SOLOMON'S MINES-- though of course the agon-radical of SHE is more pronounced than it is in a work dominated by another radical. 

Or to restate it in current terms: despite all the elements that give SHE the semblance of an adventure, the possibility of a climactic conflict becomes "submissive"-- I would say "intransitive" now-- because there's a greater emphasis upon the titular character meeting her fate through sheer hubris. Thus the narrative values of plot and character, which suggest the culmination of adventure, are undermined by the significant value, the theme of Ayesha's hubris. 

I continued over the years to emphasize the importance of judging the completion of the myth-radical in terms of the narrative's climax, best epitomized by my 2013 essay-title PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX. At the same time, I've also pointed out how elements that are established at the beginning of a given work can also have an "intransitive effect."  I devoted three essays-- here, here, and here-- to the topic of 'subcombative superheroes," which is to say, characters who might seem to participate in the combative mode of the "normative superhero" but who do not do so. Part 3 is of particular interest to the manifestation of the "intransitive effect" in that I dissect three superhero comedies-- one of which is truly combative, one which is subcombative because it lacks the significant value of the combative mode, and one which is subcombative because it lacks the narrative value of the combative mode.

I've also devoted a great deal of space to the transitive or intransitive effects of characters who are only allies to the central heroes, rather than belonging to an ensemble of featured characters. PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX makes reference to the final scenes of Tim Burton's 2012 DARK SHADOWS. The film ends with the main character Barnabas being defeated  by his foe Angelique; however, that villain is then destroyed by forces that are strongly allied to the protagonist. Another example appears in my review of the 1968 film BARBARELLA. The heroine displays an efficient level of dynamicity when she shows off her ability to fight off foes with a ray-gun, but it is the rebels she inspires, rather than her personally, who defeat the main villain.

However, in these examples the transitive effect is only possible because the main protagonists demonstrate that they participate in the highest, "megadynamic" level of dynamicity, even though, going by the categories established here, Barbarella would only be on the "exemplary" level of megadynamicity, while the Burton-Barnabas would be on the "exceptional" level.

In contrast, I have repeatedly demonstrate an "intransitive effect" when the main hero is not megadynamic, even if he or she is aided by megadynamic allies, as seen in this essay. where the "underperforming" protagonists of DOCTOR WHO and of MIGHTY MAX receive aid from megadynamic assistants, respectively "K-9" and "Norman." The same principle applies to stand-alone works like 1962's THE THREE STOOGES MEET HERCULES, where the titular strongman is outfought by a modern muscle-guy allied to the weakling Stooges. The sense that the central hero rates only as a mesodynamic or microdynamic figure undermines the significant value of the combative, even when said hero may briefly command megadynamic forces, as seen in my analyses of the "genie-allies" seen in the 1934 film BABES IN TOYLAND and the 1961 film THE WONDERS OF ALADDIN.  The latter film is of particular relevance because its subcombative conclusion is clearly derived from the climax of the 1924 THIEF OF BAGDAD-- which is, of course, maintains a combative mode because the hero himself is of a megadynamic nature.

EGO, MEET AFFECT

"The word realism has one meaning in logic, where its opposite is nominalism, and another in metaphysics, where its opposite is idealism."-- C.S. Lewis, AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM, "On Realisms."

 I speculate that Jung simply mentions this interesting formula because his concern in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES is with finding a "middle ground" between the extremes of what he terms "nominalism" and "realism," which he uses as exemplars of his concepts of the "extravert" and the "introvert" respectively.-- AFFECTIVE EFFECTS.

Though I was satisfied with the answer I gave Charles Reece regarding his overly limited definition of the term "realism," Lewis' quote is the sort of thing I would have liked to have pulled out as a quick rebuttal.  On the whole when I've used the term "realism" in terms like "thematic realism," or the related term "verisimilitude," my usage generally relates more to what Lewis calls "metaphysics" rather than to the realm of propositional logic to which Lewis refers, and to which Reece may have been referring.

In PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES Jung also uses "realism" in both senses, though in the above quote his "realism" belongs to the domain of logic, and is meant to signify the domain of the introvert, for whom:

"the idea of the ego is the continuous and dominant note of consciousness, and its antithesis for him is relatedness or proneness to affect." (p. 90)

The extravert, in contrast, lines up with the logical schema of nominalism:

"For the extravert, on the contrary, the accent lies more on the continuity of his relation to the object and less on the idea of the ego."

A page later Jung formulates this difference in "accent" into a figurative religious attitude:

"[The introvert's] god, his highest value, is the abstraction and conservation of the ego.  For the extravert, on the contrary, the god is the experience of the object, complete immersion in reality..."

Jung's well-known distinction between his formulation of the "introvert/extrovert" dynamic interests me in that it also applies well to the structure of literary "focal presences," even though Jung's only application of the theory to literature in this book is to cross-compare the psychological outlooks of famous authors like Goethe and Schiller.  I suggest that the distinction between a psyche being "ego-oriented" or "affect-oriented" also applies to narratives.

In FOCAL GROUPINGS: RESOURCE, I said:

For [Dwight V] Swain, the "focal character" is the character through which the reader perceives these reactions, and initially Swain seems to be talking about the commonplace notion of what is called variously the "protagonist," the "main character," or the "viewpoint character." However, Swain soon departs from this identification:

"Does this mean that the term 'focal character' is a synonym for 'hero?' Not unless Sammy Glick is a hero in Budd Schulberg's WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN. Or Macbeth. Or Dracula. Or Elmer Gantry." Swain then adds that though readers are accustomed to focusing upon heroes who have "positive" aspects, "a focal character may prove the opposite, yet still intrigue us even as we loathe him."

Since my idea of narratological analysis rests heavily on the notion of the analyst being able to determine the nature of any narrative's *centricity"-- which on occasion becomes relatively complicated-- Jung's distinction may prove useful.

This 2009 essay contains one of my earliest's formulations of the "combative" and "subcombative" modes of conflict, but these modes do not in any way correlate with the prospective "ego/affect" formula.  I revisit Rider Haggard's two classics, KING SOLOMON'S MINES and SHE because they contain many nearly identical plot-elements-- European explorers finding a lost land and dealing with the hostile rulers thereof-- and were written within roughly a year of one another.  Even the viewpoint characters of the two novels, Allan Quatermain and L. Horace Holly, have similar physical descriptions and misanthropic outlooks.

Of the two terms I've extrapolated from Jung, KSM would be "ego-oriented." Though the novel goes into great detail describing the isolated country of Kikuanaland-- a land so remote that the black Africans can be tricked into thinking the white explorers to be star-gods-- the narrative focus is not upon the Kikuanas, or even on the return of the exiled king Ignosi, who successfully regains his throne.  The emphasis is always upon Quatermain's fortunes and activities, with a lesser emphasis upon the other explorers.

In contrast, SHE is an "affect-oriented" novel.  Although the reader may well worry about the fate of narrator L. Horace Holly, the imaginative center of the novel is the titular SHE. (I should mention that a work's title should be any kind of indicator of centricity, especially given the counter-example of KING SOLOMON'S MINES.)  Once Haggard has sketched the backstory of Holly and his relationship to his surrogate son Leo Vincey, they develop no further, and once they reach the lost city of Kor, they become no more than satellites to the complicated mystery of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.  I should note that in KSM Haggard tosses off the idea that the villainess Gagool may be a deathless immortal as well, or that she may just be a descendant of a heritage passed down through generations, like Lee Falk's Phantom.  But Gagool is meant to be a flat character, less explored than Kikuanaland or King Ignosi.  In SHE the character of Ayesha is the "affect," the "reality," about which all of the main characters orbit.

Of  course it should be taken for granted that despite Jung's privileged use of the term "reality," he is manifestly not claiming that the "extravert" orientation is more "realistic" than that of the "introvert."  He's merely showing two forms of validation, without claiming the superiority of one to the other, which once again demonstrates his pluralistic philosophical nature.

TEN DYNAMIC DAEMONS

Having put forth the idea of "coherent improbabilities" here, it occured to me that though I've given examples of particular tropes or literary works that fit this category, characters are probably more accessible as exemplars.  Thus here are ten characters to match each of the ten tropes with which I've illustrated the manifestation of the "uncanny" phenomenality.

In all but one case, I chose an exemplar who appeared during the period that gave birth to the phenomenon of popular fiction, though a few of my choices come from canonical literary works.

ASTOUNDING ANIMALS-- Moby Dick, from Herman Melville's MOBY DICK.  Melville's book technically remains within the causal realm in a cognitive sense-- that is, the colossal cetacean is constantly compared with godlike beings, but there's no evidence that he's anything but a formidable animal.  But the Great White Whale, like his obsessed co-star Ahab, dwell in a world that constantly pushes into the metaphenomenal in a purely affective sense.

BIZARRE CRIMES-- Juliette, from the novel of the same name by the Marquis deSade. Sade is, in his way, something of an apostle of naturalism to the extent that he constantly denies the ideas of divinity.  Nevertheless, for Sade as for Goethe the motto is, "In the Beginning was the Act!"  But for Sade the act is not creation, but the obsessive need to find new and more exotic ways to destroy human beings-- a need which seems embodied most strongly in the character of Juliette, the blood-hungry sister of the innocent Justine.

DELIRIOUS DREAMS AND FALLACIOUS FIGMENTS-- Alice, from Lewis Carroll's two books starring that prodigious dreamer.  Within this trope, even though causality seems to win the game when Alice wakes from her descent into meaningful nonsense, it's the dreams that become more real to us than the reality.

ENTHRALLING HYPNOTISM AND ILLUSIONISM-- Svengali, from the 1894 TRILBY by George DuMaurier.  As yet I haven't reviewed any of the films starring literature's most famous
hypnotist, though most moderns know the Svengali of the movies if they know him at all.  As noted elsewhere, both "hypnotism" and "illusionism" have the effect of waking persons that dreams do upon the dreamer; making the impossible and improbable become real for the subjects.

EXOTIC LANDS AND CUSTOMS-- Allen Quatermain, from H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel KING SOLOMON'S MINES.  The novel is famous for launching the genre of the "Lost World story," in which an archaic civilization has managed to survive in some remote corner of the world without contact with the onrush of history.  I have not read any of the "Allen" books aside from the one in which Haggard encountered Haggard's other great character, "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed," but have gained the impression that most of the other Allen books possess an uncanny phenomenality, rather than a marvelous or naturalistic one.

FREAKISH FLESH-- Quasimodo,from Victor Hugo's 1831.  Though Hugo's original novel hews closer to the genre of the "historical novel" than that of horror, the image of the hunchback-- be it Quasimodo's or that of some lesser epigone-- has become a familiar icon of horror.  In contrast to a naturalistic exhibition of a "freak of nature," as one sees in the 1980 David Lynch film THE ELEPHANT MAN, Quasimodo's physical freakishness in the novel is constantly tied to the dark nature of humankind as a whole.

OUTRE OUTFITS, SKILLS, AND DEVICES-- These three aspects do not always occur together in a given character, though I group them together because weapons and costumes, as much as a character's physical skills, are extensions of his persona as an uncanny spectre.  One character who combines all three in significant fashion is The Lone Ranger, spawned by a 1933 radio series.  Although the hero moves through a largely naturalistic world in most of his incarnations, the very notion of an Old West champion able to dispense justice despite wearing a bandit's mask and firing silver bullets with flawless accuracy, is a figure who resides only in an uncanny domain.

PERILOUS PSYCHOS-- Norman Bates, from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel PSYCHO.  Though Jack the Ripper is a more famous psycho-killer, he's disallowed here by virtue of being a real character, however mysterious.  The Norman birthed by Bloch and midwifed by Hitchcock seems to have the fictional psycho who, directly or indirectly, spawned the greatest number of imitators.  Some of these may be considered merely naturalistic versions of the original, as with the current BATES MOTEL teleseries.  But an uncanny psycho is always discernible by his ability to invoke more "dread" than simple physical "fear."

 PHANTASMAL FIGURATIONS-- The Phantom of the Opera, from Gaston Leroux's 1909 serial novel of that name.  Leroux also employs the trope "freakish flesh" for this famed monstrous presence, but the trope that most informs the novel is the character's ability to lurk beneath the Paris Opera House, pretending to be "the Opera Ghost."  Regardless as to whether readers believed or did not believe in the existence of this particular ghost at the outset, the Phantom remains far more than the sum of his impostures.

WEIRD SOCIETIES AND FAMILIES-- Fu Manchu, first appearing in Sax Rohmer's 1913 MYSTERY OF FU-MANCHU.  Admittedly, even in that first novel, Fu Manchu displayed more "marvelous" characteristics than any of the other characters cited here, in that he often controlled assorted weapons of "mad science." At base, though, Fu Manchu's greatest appeal to readers was one that did not depend on the marvelous elements of the series: his status as a sort of "Alexander the Great" of Oriental Evil, in that his "Si-Fan" organization embraced a wildly diverse group of Asian fiends-- Indian thuggee, Burmese dacoits, the Sea-Dyaks of Borneo, and so on.  This vast conspiracy by itself stands as one of the period's best evocations of a "weird society" that goes beyond the bounds of a mere criminal organization, and sometimes seems more like a "Pandemonium" presided over by the Satanic genius.

DOMINANCE, SUBMISSION (RADIOS APPEAR)

Here's a little history on how I came to perceive the need for "submissive" versions of the "dominant" significant values derived from the four narrative myth-radicals.

Though Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM proves vital to one's understanding of literature's mythic radicals, the ANATOMY usually defines a given mythos by the process of deduction. That is, Frye reasons from general principles as to how a mythos works (or is said to work) as a whole, and then applying it to particular examples within the mythos. I consider this a perfectly valid choice, but some might view the ANATOMY as deficient in that it rarely follows the inductive path. The approach of genre-studies academician John Cawelti takes just such an opposing course. When Cawelti tries to determine the parameters of a mythos (though he only uses the narrower term "genre") he begins with particular examples commonly held to belong to the same genre-category and susses out their likenesses as a way to define the genre. Most of the structuralists use largely inductive methods as well. Perhaps significantly, in Cawelti's ADVENTURE, MYSTERY AND ROMANCE, the author pointedly disavows any attempt to address Frye's theories of genre, though Cawelti certainly doesn't attack Frye. It may be that he simply realized that their methodologies were too far apart to make fruitful contact. I do not know if the late Professor Frye had any opinion on Cawelti, but one of Frye's early essays (which I do not have to hand) displays little enthusiasm for the structuralist approach and places emphasis on the critic's purpose to ferret out the "total vision" of literature.

All that said, I do think both methods of reasoning can play off one another in rewarding fashion, which will be my goal in sussing out some of the dimensions of the mythos of adventure. I choose it for this essay because, as I've noted before, so little of value has been written about this mythos.

By continuing to use the work "mythos," of course, I continue to subscribe to Frye's deductive vision. "Adventure" (which Frye called the "romance") is not to me a genre, or even a "supergenre" like horror or science fiction. "Adventure considered as a mythos" implies that all the works under its rubric share the fundamental aspect Frye imputes to the mythos: that the protagonists dominantly have a power-of-action greater than that of the average man.

And yet, worthwhile though this insight is, one must admit that Frye never quite defines parameters for the adventure-mythos, which he calls the "romance." His meaning as to what works belong in the category have to be reached more or less inductively from his deductively-arrived-at statements about the mythos.

In the first of the three analytical essays that make up the bulk of the ANATOMY, Frye starts with his "theory of modes." "Modes" in this chapter describes the power-of-action used by a given author of a given type of work, whereas the four *mythoi* that he describes later in the "theory of myths" essay are the categories to which the works themselves belong. Moving right along to the topic of the romance, here's what Frye first writes on the subject:

"If [the hero's power of action is] superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, marchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives."-- AOC, p. 33

After elaborating his list of modes (which I won't touch on here), he comments that "fictions of romance" dominated literature until Renaissance times, after which other modes began to emphasize protagonists of increasingly diminished power-of-action. Frye does not trace the extent to which romance/adventure continued to appear in literature in more realistic forms, such as those propagated by Stevenson and Walter Scott, or for that matter the "lower" forms of literature that flourished as the lower classes gained a degree of literacy. Frye's main concern is to show how literature in general is informed by principles of art derived from myth and ritual, which have common ground with canonical literature in its emotional/expressive spectrum. Additionally, he wishes to show that these modes (which naturally inform his *mythoi*) are not means by which one isolates one category from another in an absolute manner:

"Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must then learn to recombine them. For while one mode constitutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the other four may be simultaneously present. Much of our sense of the subtlety of great literature comes from this modal counterpoint."-- AOC, p. 50.

This statement, more than any other made by Frye, justifies the concept of Literary Genetics I've mentioned in earlier essays, but on which I haven't yet expounded. But back to Frye and the qualities of his romance-category:

From the first quote it would seem beyond dispute that Frye's romantic protagonist is superior to the average man in terms of power-of-action. A few pages after the opening of this essay, he goes on to describe this hero as "still half a god," but does not give many more specifics about romances in this essay because he's principally concerned with describing modal action rather than particular works.

In the "theory of myths" essay, Frye does become somewhat more detailed about the structure of the romance-category (though obviously not after the fashion of the structuralists). The first mythos he surveys is that of comedy, and then follows romance, though oddly enough, it's in the latter of these two sections that Frye warms to his topic enough to describe the four mythoi and their principal aspects in detail. His comments on the romance privilege its agonistic nature:

"The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which means that romance is naturally a sequential and processional form, hence we know it better from fiction than from drama. At its most naive it is an endless form in which a central character who never develops or ages goes through one adventure after an other until the author himself collapses. We see this form in comic strips, where the central characters persist for years in a state of refrigerated deathlessness."-- AOC, p. 186.

"The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero."-- AOC, p. 187.

"A quest involving conflict assumes two main characters, a protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy."-- AOC, p. 187.

I share Frye's belief that the category of the romance/adventure is certainly dominated by martial conflict, and that this is the reason to emphasize the radical of the *agon.* But perhaps in keeping with his Spengleresque view that romance as such has passed out of its historical moment, most of Frye's examples of romances hail from either medieval or Renaissance periods, and when he does make comparisons between aspects of the romance and more modern works, it tends to be works that are not actual romances, such as Melville's PIERRE and James' SENSE OF THE PAST. Frye's reasons for so doing is to show that the expressive power of romance's archetypes does not vanish simply because the culture turns toward more realistic fare. In a felicitous combination of terminologies drawn from both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Frye asserts that the archetypes (Jung) have simply been displaced (Freud) into more realistic forms or motifs. Perhaps a close examination of the romance's survival in Stevenson and Scott might have weakened Frye's schema of historical/cultural succession. Interestingly, Frye does make a tangential allusion to THE SUNDERING FLOOD, one of the Victorian-era works of William Morris, usually credited as the first English writer to revive the form of the medieval romance as a means for telling new stories. This breakthrough led to later generations deeming Morris as the progenitor of the modern "high fantasy," though admittedly fantasies like SUNDERING FLOOD were probably not as popular with Victorians as the most well-known exemplars of fantasy (LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY POTTER) are with modern audiences.

So Frye never really gives one much of a definition of "adventure" save that it is primarily about "some kind of battle." However, as I noted here, it's possible that even two works by the same author, about roughly the same subject matter, could have very different approaches to the centrality of the *agon.* Haggard's KING SOLOMON'S MINES places such a battle at the center of the plot-action, and so I view KSM as a work thoroughly dominated by the agonistic radical.

However, Haggard's SHE, though indubitably an "adventure" story due to its emphasis on peril-filled journeys and armed conflict, does not center around a final battle between a hero and his (or her) antagonist. Ayesha, the immortal "She Who Must Be Obeyed," certainly functions as an antagonist, albeit an ambivalent one to the viewpoint-protagonist Holly and his surrogate son Leo. But when Ayesha is defeated, it is certainly not by anyone's forceful action: she simply steps into the Flame of Life that first bestowed on her immortality, and finds that it has as much power to take as to give. Haggard suggests some ancient emnity between Ayesha and a long-deceased female rival, and intimates that it may have something to do with Ayesha's ill fortune, but this motif never becomes a literal conflict. Thus, I come to the conclusion that the agonistic radical in SHE has become relatively submissive compared to its manifestation in KING SOLOMON'S MINES-- though of course the agon-radical of SHE is more pronounced than it is in a work dominated by another radical. In this essay I described examples of a drama, a comedy and an irony that all had adventure-elements but were not primarily of the adventure-mythos. SHE is not any of these simply because its agon is "submissive," but it does require some special attention.

I plan to discuss another form of mode-dominance when I deal with the question of works in a serial mode. For all Frye's awareness of the "refrigerated deathlessness" of comic strips and similar pop-cultural media, I suspect he would have found challenging the question as to how a given serial could vary its significant values from story to story, and sometimes mutate from one mythos to another right before one's eyes.

AGON IN SIXTY SECONDS

Though neither Rider Haggard's SHE or KING SOLOMON'S MINES are much-read today, they make a convenient example of my combative and subcombative modes.

As far as I can think, the "noncombative" mode doesn't apply to the adventure/romance mythos at all, given the strong emphasis of the mythos upon physical striving. When an author takes a genre with strong adventure-associations, such as the western, and seeks to de-emphasize the "man vs. man" pattern in favor of the "man vs. himself" approach, he's moved from one mythos to another. Peter Fonda's 1971 THE HIRED HAND would be an example of a western that (to the best of my recollection) falls more properly into the category of the drama, for example.

Both SHE and KSM were enormously influential on the development of European and American adventure-fiction, and, being works written in a popular idiom, both are usually given short shrift in the world of literary criticism. To be sure, KSM is a much simpler novel than SHE, and possesses far less mythicity as well, but neither can be understood properly without appreciating how well they capture the spirit of their mythos, for all that their modes are different.

The plot of KSM is clearly the more combative of the two. Allan Quatermain-- who if not for Alan Moore would now be remembered as "Richard Chamberlain's INDIANA JONES" by modern audiences-- is the archetypal great white hunter who leads his employers into the search for a missing white man in Africa and ends up both finding a fabulous treasure and making it possible for a noble black monarch to regain his throne from a usurper. For all the side-action of the missing European and the treasure, the novel builds to the climactic action of the battle, in which the Europeans help the noble African regain his throne.

There are, to be sure, important scenes of combat in SHE. However, there is no particular combat toward which the novel builds, no *agon* which decides the fates of all and sundry. Ayesha, the *She* of the title, is at times frustrated from reaching her goals by meddling fate, but despite her intentions of conquering the modern world once her lost love returns to her-- intentions which make her something of an early "super-villain"-- she is defeated not by any particular opponent but by another twist of fate: stepping into the Fire of Life a second time reverses her gift of immortality (making for a rather graphic illustration of Heraclitus' admonition that one may not step twice into the same river). Still, though there is no definitive battle in SHE, the efforts of the protagonists to survive in her world, as well as to avoid becoming the chattel of Ayesha, still mark SHE as belonging to the mythos of adventure, albeit in a subcombative mode.

Interestingly, for all that Alan Moore did an atrocious job realizing his version of She in BLACK DOSSIER, his method often reminds one more of the Haggard of SHE than that of KING SOLOMON'S MINES, as DOSSIER in particular is devoted less to perilous adventures and more toward windy woolgathering. But that's another essay.

SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-REREAD PART III (Spoilers)

As the novel progresses past the middle point, the mythology of *She* becomes more and more the novel's focus, as both Holly and Leo eventually fall in love with her. Clearly each of them represents half of her nature, with Leo equalling her in physical beauty while Holly is her intellectual equal. Later in the novel, *She* will even suggest making both of them as immortal as she is,which would certainly make for a literal "eternal triangle."

Pages 104-05 are interesting in suggesting the broadness of the immortal's intellect: as *She* apparently needed something to fill her time while waiting for Leo's reincarnation, she has apparently experimented on human beings like a later figure of literary myth, Wells' Dr. Moreau. Readers see only a collection of deaf-mutes who serve Ayesha, but she claims to have also bred a race that was so ugly she did away with it, and "giants" who were expunged not by her will but that of "Nature." A page or two later Holly compares her to Circe.


One thing about the literary *She* that I've never seen in other media-adaptations is that she is among the early figures of post-industrial literature who can project vital force from her body, in a manner roughly analogous to the millions of ray-blasting SF-aliens and superheroes that have crowded the pages of popular culture. *She* initially warns off Ustane, a rival for Leo, by striking Ustane so that parts of the girl's hair turn white. And when Ustane still won't give up Leo, *She* kills her outright with that vital force, and then hurls Leo (who attacks Ayesha in defense of Ustane) away with that force. *She* is careful to distinguish her powers from magic, however, and Etherington hypothesizes that Haggard was probably inspired by similar "vital force" theories in Bulwer Lytton's THE COMING RACE.

Most of the novel's other symbolic tropes are well-covered by Etherington, but I will say that I find it interesting that the mysterious cave where She gains her immortality from an equally-mysterius "Flame of Life" is called"the very womb of the Earth." Clearly, given the earlier comparisons of *She* to classical goddesses like Circe and Artemis, symbolically *She* is a goddess of the Earth. And even though this novel ends with her falling victim to mortality, one can easily view it as an ascension like that of Hercules, who dies mortally but ascends to Mount Olympus. And indeed, of the three later *She* books Haggard wrote-- two of which are prequels-- the last in temporal occurence,AYESHA:THE RETURN OF SHE, does grant this "goddess" a new form of life, albeit one as fraught with frustrations as the old immortal-seeming one.

SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-REREAD PART II (Spoilers)

Continuing with the chapter "The Feast, and After!"--

One comment Etherington makes here concerns a minor female character whose purpose is to provoke the cannibal feast as indirect revenge on Holly's party after she has been snubbed by Holly's comic manservant Job. Etherington comments that during the violent melee that results from the attempted hot-potting, it's surprising that the first person Holly shoots is not either of the men attempting the execution, but the unnamed female cannibal. Etherington comments on how unchivalrous it would be thought in Haggard's time for an Englishman to shoot any woman, even a cannibalistic one, but does not comment on the fact that prior to the attempted sacrifice, the lady cannibal tries to deceitfully sooth the sacrificial victim with sweet words and caresses. This, more than the victim's fate, is more likely what motivates Holly's death-dealing reaction: that the native woman has proven herself a Delilah-like temptress, not unlike the one love of Holly's life who callously rejected him with the "Beauty and Beast" comparison.

The violent melee contains a strange episode, as well. As Leo and Holly combat the rest of the cannibal band, Haggard has an interval where he needs Holly, his viewpoint-character, to be off to the side so that he can witness the splendor of Leo's Herculean battle against several foes. Most writers would have achieved this by simpling having Holly get clubbed and knocked to one side, so that he could get clear of the battle but still be a witness. Instead, Haggard has Holly grapple with not one but two men, hugging them both like the ape Holly resembles, albeit again off to the side in some way, so that none of the two cannibals' friends come to their aid. This strange stalemate, in which Holly keeps trying to crush the two men for fear that they will recover if he lets up, is certainly one of the stranger scenes in SHE. Eventually Leo is borne down, but is saved from slaughter by one of She's servants, at which point Holly collapses. Later, in recovery, Holly is told that he did indeed succeed in killing both men gorilla-style. It's hard to say why Haggard chose to construct his scene in this singular manner, but it probably relates to a desire to distinguish the fighting-style of Leo, who fights like a noble man, with that of Holly, who fights more like the beast of which he seems to be an atavism.

PAGE 83 has an interesting poetic motif: when Holly dives into a swampy pool to rescue the elderly Amahagger patriarch Billali-- whose sons ignore their father's plight -- Holly thinks to himself that the sodden patriarch looks like "a yellowish Bacchus with ivy leaves." Since Dionysus-Bacchus is usually one of the least patriarchal Greek gods, this might almost be seen as a regenerative image, though of course Billali is not literally made younger. Still, in a novel concerned with a woman who stays young for thousands of years, the comparison's hardly a stretch. Narratively speaking, Holly's rescue serves to bond him to the older man in a son-father relationship so that Billali's aid in later chapters seems well-motivated.

I stated earlier that Haggard's *She* doesn't actually rule any black Africans, as did the majority of her literary epigoni, but it's still pretty clear that Haggard does equate blackness with savagery in many instances. However, he saves his most overt attacks for the Jews on page 99, where Ayesha characterizes the Jews of her original pre-Christian era as followers of "many gods." It's true that many Old Testament books characterize the Jewish people of this or that time as fickle to the One God, but Haggard's presentation ignores any countervailing cultural tendencies. Oddly, much later, even after Holly has told her about how her modern-day descendants have become monotheistic Muslims (*She* is Arabic by heritage), Ayesha also speaks of her own people as innately polytheistic. Most likely this was in Haggard's mind another mark of unredeemable savagery, not much more evolved than the cannibalistic tendencies of Negroid (or part-Negroid) peoples.

Oddly, though, *She* also seems to have desired the high regard of the Jews for some unstated reason, and centuries later is still peeved at having been reviled as a witch by them for trying to show them her mystic secrets. Possibly this is because she recognized the Jews as a kindred people, though one would think that she would have valued her own Arab kindred more.

SHE-WHO-MUST-BE-REREAD PART 1 (Spoilers)

I'm currently re-reading the 1885 Rider Haggard classic SHE, which will forevermore be known as the book that jumpstarted the literary idea of a mysterious white queen lording it over a tribe of black Africans.



To be sure, though I'm only on chapter 20 now, so far the titular queen *doesn't* rule any black Africans, since she and her people dwell in an isolated area where her tribe kills all strangers (except the English explorers who are the heroes of the book). Haggard describes the lost people of Kor, the Amahagger, as having more white than "Negroid" features, though the Amahagger also have varying shades of skin color and have therefore probably interbred at some past time with natives of Africa.



I'm reading the annotated Indiana University edition, which features an excellent introductory analysis by Norman Etherington, who also authored a 1984 book on Haggard and his work. In making some of my own notations on SHE, I'll attempt to distinguish those of my observations that build on Etherington's analysis and those original to me. My notes pretty much presume a familiarity with the story, hence the spoiler alert.

NOTE 1: The first page introduces the book's main two heroes, handsome Leo Vincey and simian-looking Horace Holly, and Haggard makes much of the contrast between the one's good looks and the other's apish appearance. However, though one might expect them to be instantly paired as "Beauty and the Beast," the first use of this phrase is in flashback, when a woman pursued by Holly rejects him, styling herself "Beauty" and then letting poor Holly figure out where he stands in the equation. Holly later becomes an adoptive father to Leo, which causes him to become take another form of Beauty (albeit male beauty) into his household, establishing with Beauty a rapprochement that resembles the psychological notion of "interjection." But introjection's usual partner "projection" is here as well, as psychologically Leo is an idealized self through which Holly can experience love with a beautiful woman, i.e, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.

It's also interesting that the two are opposites intellectually, with Holly an esteemed Classics professor and Leo a merely adequate student who often seems a trifle thick. As intellect doesn't play a role in the well-known tale of "Beauty and the Beast," one may find interesting a stronger parallel with an archaic tale of the Welsh goddess Cerridwen, who, having birthed a gorgeous daughter and an ugly son, tries to compensate for the son's fate by giving him mystical knowledge. (FTR, it doesn't work out any better for the ugly son than it does for Holly.) In more recent years this archetypal contrast was used for the purpose of low (but very funny) comedy in the dyad of Kelly and Bud in Fox's MARRIED WITH CHILDREN.

NOTE 2: Etherington comments on the recapitulation of *She* as the beauteous mother Leo never knows, since he never sees her after her death in childbirth. However, the sole female whom we see caring Leo is an unnamed elderly woman, who weeps bitterly at being forced to leave baby Leo in Holly's care. Arguably both the mother Leo never sees and the mother-substitute who (perhaps) rears him are recapitulated in *She*, the beautiful queen fated to age to death at the novel's conclusion.

NOTE 3: On page 63, Ustane, an Amahagger tribeswoman who becomes the rival of *She* for Leo, tells Leo and Holly that, though the Amahagger's queen is reputed to be immortal, Ustane has a theory: that *She* is really a succession of queens who have ruled throughout the ages, each taking a mate in secret until bearing a female child, who then assumes the role of *She.* This is of course not the truth in the story, though it may be based on stories about archaic rules of legend. But one wonders if the book SHE might have been read by Lee Falk prior to his use of a similar theme for the PHANTOM comic strip.

NOTE 4: The chapter "The Feast-- and After!" has one of Haggard's most brutal scenes, in which some cannibalistic Amahagger try to "hot-pot" Holly and Leo's Muslim servant: that is, kill him by fitting a white-hot pot over his head. At least, in the finished book, all they do is try; in the original MS, the poor Muslim guy does get offed in this grisly manner. Interestingly, the gory scene is re-inserted in the 1935 adaptation produced by Merian C. ("King Kong") Cooper.