THE READING RHEUM: FRIDAY (1982)

 

The most interesting thing to me about this 1982 Heinlein novel is that its fairly shapeless narrative is not unlike some of the 21st century novels that I've found equally shapeless. I've often thought that many 21st century SF authors have lacked the ability to "up the stakes" for their characters, to make the characters' travails meaningful through involved conflict. Yet here's one of the authors from the Classic Era of American SF, and he's not doing any better.

There's no indication that Heinlein wanted to give main character Friday Jones anything but a series of intermittent small conflicts. In a future where America has become balkanized into separate states, Friday works as a courier for an undercover organization, whose boss, we'll later learn, is more or less her adoptive father. Friday doesn't know this, because she was a "test tube baby," grown from genetic material and tinkered with so that she has superior strength and speed in comparison to a female human. Neither capacity helps her when she's captured by a small group of enemy agents, who interrogate, torture and rape Friday. Given that Friday cannot conceive, the latter ignominy doesn't bother her that much. She's rescued by her fellow operatives, who wipe out most of Friday's captors-- which should signal instantly to the reader that Heinlein does not intend to make his heroine's detainment any big deal in the life of a secret agent.

Instead, her superior, whom she always calls "Boss" (and who apparently appeared in any earlier Heinlein story), briefly tries to convince her to become an assassin. If the reader thinks this was introduced for purposes of plot development, he should guess again, for after Friday demurs, the subject never comes up again. Friday goes on an "R and R" trip which, in essence, never properly ends, because the rest of the novel is just one sight-seeing episode after another, as Heinlein takes his heroine into various future-scenarios in order that he can make whatever witty analysis he cares to. (Not that the future-society holds together as a SF-concept, compared to famous Heinlein works like THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS.) She does hook up with Boss again for a while, who suddenly decides she ought to make a great researcher, and Friday does that job for a little while. Boss dies for some reason and his bequest reveals to Friday some history of her origins. There are a handful of action-scenes, but they're all very brief and, as I said, none of them lead to any major plot developments.

FRIDAY was nominated for (but did not win) both a Nebula and a Hugo, and that may be because the book's a good read in its meandering way, as long as one doesn't expect a lot. I found myself thinking of the novel as a *picaresque* tale, in that such novels are structurally loose and depend largely upon exposing the hero (or heroine) to a variety of situations until he or she eventually finds a stable home. Defoe's MOLL FLANDERS is one of the few works in this vein I've reviewed here, and I think Heinlein *meant* FRIDAY to be equally formless. I don't believe there were any direct quotes of Defoe's more famous novel in this book, but there's really no other work that has made famous a character with the first name "Friday." (Clearly Joe Friday does not count.)

Just to close with a snipe at another 21st-century work, I also finished 2015's THE LONG WAY TO A SMALL ANGRY PLANET by one Becky Chambers, and although that too is pretty formless, there was hardly anything intellectually bracing about it. Even weak Heinlein is still stronger stuff than most of the posers of recent years.

HETERO FORMATIVE

The idea that sex functions to provide variation for natural selection to act upon was first advocated by August Weismann and it has dominated much discussion on the evolution of sex and recombination since then...  In summary, although Weismann's hypothesis must be considered the leading candidate for the function of sex and recombination, nevertheless, many additional principles are needed to fully account for their evolution.-- NIH abstract.

All normal human beings have soi-distant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not. --Robert Heinlein, FRIDAY, 1982.

I haven't written as much as I used to about the excesses of academic "queer theory" since the Hooded Utilitarian site closed down. But HU's demise was not an indicator of a general trend. This is confirmed by a recent jeremiad from London's School of African and Oriental Studies regarding philosophers who were too "white" and "heteronormative."

SOAS, perhaps after thinking deeply about this for the past seven years, is now reviving the debate. It has issued a “toolkit” for secondary schools and universities who wish to teach philosophy (although you’d hope that other universities would have ideas of their own)... The toolkit sets out its position from the start. “Much academic philosophy in the UK, US, Australasia and continental Europe masks its structural antagonism to everything that is not white, bourgeois, male, heteronormative and able-bodied,” it begins. The document continues along very much the same lines for 27 pages.-- Roland White, THE TELEGRAPH, 2024.

The only possible defense for anyone to use a term as stupid as "heteronormative" is that they've allowed their minds to be polluted with Mickey Marx bullshit, and the knee-jerk inclusion of the word "bourgeois" confirms as much. And this narrow-minded, neo-chauvinist screed is rendered even more fatuous than usual when one views "normative sex" through the lens of evolutionary theory.

On a slight tangent, I read a lot of academic film criticism in the eighties and nineties. I'm not sure when I realized that almost all of the critics worshipped at the altars of either Marx, Freud, or some syncretic combination of the two, possibly to be named "Marfreud." Film critic Richard Grenier was a welcome exception. While I didn't agree with every essay in Grenier's 1990 collection CAPTURING THE CULTURE, he made clear how much the academic world had been influenced by Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who used the phrase "capture the culture" to describe the devious social conditioning of the bourgeoise. Grenier wittily pointed out that modern Leftist academics were just following the same program Gramsci projected upon "normative" culture, by undermining everything that "normals" valued. An example, from some book whose title I forgot long ago, was the assertion that the "romantic clinch" seen at the conclusion of countless Hollywood movies was merely a social construction designed to please the bourgeoise-- which was stupid even if the forgotten author didn't use the word "heteronormative."

I probably read that lunkheaded judgment sometime in the nineties, long before anyone thought of using four-or-more letters to mainstream the idea of "homonormative" pride. But even then, the judgment struck me as amazingly presumptuous. If there was no heterosexuality, there would be no human race to give birth to new offspring of any sexual proclivity. Heterosexuality was not something that existed to shore up non-Marxist values, as one might argue with some logic regarding racism. Nevertheless, some thirty years later, Marxists are still whining that if most of the world still trends boy-girl, it's a terrible sin against the Marxist ideal of totally capturing the culture so that homosexuality of one kind or another becomes "the norm."

Now, had evolution not chosen the path of heterosexual conjugation as August Weismann theorized, asexual reproduction might have continued, but there's little if any reason to suppose those life-forms would have arisen to their current level of complexity. Thus heteronormativity, which gets such massive disrespect, is the factor that promoted the immense variety of life-forms on this planet.

Now stating that fact in no way supports real bigotry against any of the many paraphilias-- which includes LGBT etcetera in my book-- that also evolved alongside vanilla old hetero sex. Contrarian conservative Robert Heinlein was certainly being facetious when he had the fictional characters of his novel speak of "mixed up glands." I largely included the quote because I happened to read FRIDAY for the first time while planning this essay. Yet even back in the early 1970s, Heinlein somewhat charted the course for many non-Marxists, who simply looked upon "gay rights advocates" as justified in their rhetoric, striking back against a chauvinism that often made the homosexual paraphilia illegal. This aspect of history should always be acknowledged, not least for the many abuses perpetrated by various types of heteronormative chauvinism. But the answer to one chauvinism is not another chauvinism, and statements like those of the SAOS are nothing but a chauvinism that exaggerates the significance of homonormative behavior at the expense of the entire range of human sexual behavior.

I feel sure, for example, that there exist other persons with non-homosexual paraphilias who view their sexual persuasions as being just as opposed to "the normal" as are homosexual paraphilias-- but some if not all of these may be able to produce offspring. For instance, a macrophiliac who's stimulated only by very tall women may not have a large range of potential mates, but mating and producing offspring is not impossible. But if he (and it's usually a "he") only gets stimulated by literal giants, then he will probably contribute no more to the gene pool than anyone confined to purely homosexual hookups.

 But paraphilias like macrophilia will never get courses devoted to their kink as universities, partly because most of them keep a much lower profile than LGBT. A truly liberal philosophy would embrace all sexual variations-- with the obvious exception of the one that will and should remain illegal-- without regard to who's given the most attention by lunkheaded academics.

THE READING RHEUM: METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN (1941/1958)

 On some occasions, like this one, I've used Dave Sim as an example of an artist dominated by the didactic potentiality. But a writer of Robert Heinlein is probably a better example of such domination, particularly in the case of works like METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN.

The novel appeared in three consecutive issues of John W. Campbell's ASTOUNING magazine in 1941, and Heinlein later added who-knows-what new material for book publication in 1958. CHILDREN is part of Heinlein's vaunted "Future History" project of interrelated stories, one of the more organized "continuous universes" in 20th-century science fiction.

The events transpire in the 22nd century, in what I would call one of Heinlein's typical quasi-Libertarian societies. (Only the society of the future United States is seen.) Unbeknownst to all the level-headed citizens, amongst them dwell a secret subgroup, "the Howard Families," an amalgamation of familial groups that have voluntarily "bred" themselves to have extremely long lives. They've kept their practices secret from the general public by having family members fake aging and death before assuming new identities. I believe other writers had conceived this basic practice for individual immortal characters, but Heinlein might be the first to have extended the idea to whole families.

Lazarus Long, the plain-talking oldest member of the families, is on the scene when the Howards' secret is exposed. Suddenly the rational members of the future-world lose their cool, believing that the "children of Methuselah" have some secret potion or device to delay aging. Long comes up with what he believes to be the only solution: the families must hijack the government's interstellar craft and try to find new lodgings. Long and some of his similarly competent (and similar-talking) allies even have to shanghai many of the other members because the family's fate is too important to be left to individual whim. Not unexpectedly, neither Long nor anyone else faces any blowback from this decision.

For the other two-thirds of CHILDREN, Long and company journey to a couple of habitable worlds, but they find that both have extremely alien occupants. Heinlein's aliens don't have interior lives or culture as such and can best be viewed as intellectual abstractions, representing an Earthman's attempt to conceive of alien nature. Possibly the author was reacting against thousands of earlier SF stories in which alien cultures are no more than Ruritanian romance-characters with purple skin. In any case, most of the would-be colonists determine to journey back to Earth. On returning, the prodigals must sort out their new position amid a changed Earth-populace, though this occupies only the last couple of chapters. (I'll just note that the fugitive families find themselves in a situation analogous to victims of "The Snap" in MCU films.)

My vague memory of reading CHILDREN some forty years ago is that I felt thrilled by the potential adventure of the colonists' plunge into uncharted space, even if they didn't end up colonizing anything. Now I find the second two-thirds of the book the least interesting, and the most intellectually arid, lacking the sense of wonder I could get from contemporaneous works. The conflict of the long-lived families with the covetous normal people strikes me as the strongest aspect of the novel, and I wonder how Heinlein might have handled things if the families had chosen to fight for their legal rights on Earth. The alien visitations now seem deadly dull, in part because the story substitutes talk, talk, talk for action. And as I noted above, all the focal characters sport the same "crackerbarrel" way of speaking, so there's barely any dramatic interaction. To be sure, this was one of Heinlein's first long works and later novels showed better pacing and characterization.

One of the subordinate characters in CHILDREN, navigator "Slipstick" Libby, was the star of Heinlein's second-published short story, "Misfit," making the novel a minor crossover. But Heinlein would later revive Long as a protagonist  in four other novels, one of which, THE NATURE OF THE BEAST, dealt with the idea of fictional worlds having extra-dimensional veracity.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 1

To preface this essay, I'll quote myself once more on the topic of negative and positive equity:

'In finance the word "equity" transmuted from connoting a principle of social fairness to something closer to a properly modulated exchange of capital.  The financial term has also begotten the offspring "positive equity" and "negative equity." On this site I found a felicitously simple definition of these secondary terms: from the point of view of a bank, "positive equity adds value to the bank, while negative equity takes value away"... In short, "positive equity" is achieved when someone points out a genuine abuse of fairness, while "negative equity" is achieved when someone uses the concept of fairness incorrectly, to be unfair to someone else.'

In Part 2 of January's essay-series EMANICIPATION VS. FREEDOM,  I commented on the opening chapters of Alex Nevala-Lee's ASTOUNDING. I commented upon the promising nature of a book on the "neglected topic" of the effect of John W. Campbell's editorial reign at ASTOUNDING SCI-FI, but I also found fault with the author's need to "virtue signal" on what Campbell should or should not have done in his heyday with respect to racial matters.

As I've now finished the book, my early anticipations of the work's quality as a cultural biography of the men profiled was fully justified. Further, though I do not retract anything I wrote about Nevala-Lee's opening remarks, I should note that he does not "virtue signal" throughout the text, which would certainly have damaged the credibility of the work. Only in the last chapter (not counting an epilogue) does Nevala-Lee substantially return to the topic of "race in modern America" that he raised in the first sections.

In my remarks, I made this statement:

Campbell may have been racist in specific ways-- and this is something Nevala-Lee may well be able to demonstrate in future chapters-- but he certainly was not racist because he didn't have some visionary apprehension of another generation's concept of equity.

In that last chapter-- titled "Twilight" after one of Campbell's most famous short stories, and referencing the editor's declining years and death-- Nevala-Lee does indeed demonstrate that John W. Campbell was more than a casual racist. To be sure, I had heard the accusation once or twice from other sources, though I personally would not have been able to weigh in with any informed opinion. I had read a fair number of Campbell's reactionary editorials from the last decade of his life, when ASTOUNDING had been remolded into ANALOG. Said editorials usually stayed away from the topic of race, though I do remember one essay in which Campbell inveighed against the "burn baby burn" politics of Stokely Carmichael and gave his approval to the accomodationist approach of Martin Luther King Jr. And Nevala-Lee does not reference Campbell's editorials either, finding more than circumstantial evidence both in Campbell's letters and in anecdotes from people who knew the editor. There is, for instance, more than enough evidence to state that Campbell nurtured an animus against the Negro race, and that even some of his favorable judgments-- as when he told Jewish writer William Tenn that he Campbell considers the Jews "homo superior"-- were also couched in racist diatribes. In my earlier essay I scoffed at Nevala-Lee for suggesting that Campbell could have made any difference to American racial politics in the 1940s with his little SF-magazine, and I still scoff at that. However, I also argued:

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were marginal changes that went against the cultural grain, such as Sidney Poitier movies and the presence of non-white heroes in ensembles like those of I SPY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and Marvel Comics's THE AVENGERS. During this period, perhaps one might fairly fault a given editor or writer for keeping things too WASPy

And, mirable dictu, one anecdote attests to Campbell's having resisted the currents of the new cultural paradigm, in that he reportedly refused to publish Samuel R. Delany's NOVA because it had a non-white protagonist.

So, it would appear, from everything I've summarized about Nevala-Lee's disclosures, that the balance of his complaints against Campbell should constitute "positive equity." And for the most part, this holds true. Except---

See Part 2.

EMANCIPATION VS. FREEDOM PT. 2

At the end of Part 1 I said:

In Part 2 I'll address some of the ways current popular fiction devotes itself to universal recognition /equity without showing any insight as to the "quality" of said emancipatory representations.

I decided to put off the examples I had in mind at the time in favor of a quick look at an example of what I've called "negative equity" not in popular fiction, but in a non-fictional work about popular fiction.

I've just started reading Alec Nevala-Lee's 2018 book ASTOUNDING, which purports to chart the historical development of American science fiction through the medium of the magazine ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION. The book's subtitle specifies that Nevala-Lee concentrates on the intersections of three major figures of science fiction-- writers Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, and ASTOUNDING editor John W. Campbell Jr.-- and one figure of cultish notoriety, L. Ron Hubbard. Having finished only the prologue and first chapter, I have no doubt that he's put a huge amount of research into the lives of these four intersecting figures, and as of this reading, it seems like this is going to be a very good read into a very neglected topic.

In the prologue, however, Nevala-Lee feels the need to "virtue signal," by attacking early science fiction for being too WASPy:

Campbell's writers and their characters were almost exclusively white, and he bears part of the blame for limiting the genre's diversity. At best, this was a huge missed opportunity. ASTOUNDING, which questioned so many other orthodoxies and systems of power, rarely looked at racial inequality, and its lack of historically underrepresented voices severely constrained the stories that it could tell.

This is, in a word, garbage. I might qualify it as well-intentioned garbage, but it's still garbage.

That all or most of Campbell's writers were white is a half-truth. Some writers, like Isaac Asimov, were descendants of European Jews, so they did look "white," though by virtue of their descent they were not necessarily deemed "white" by the time's more conservative standards. One can certainly argue that even Jewish writers still created characters who were dominantly WASPs, which may be an overstatement, though not by much.

But Nevala-Lee's attempt to place blame bears no relation to any truth, save that of ideologues who mouth truisms like, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." To such ideologues, it's always easy to tell someone else to sacrifice their livelihoods on the altar of social justice. If John W. Campbell bears "part of the blame," then it's a blame shared by not only popular culture of the thirties and forties but also the majority of so-called "high culture." During these two decades, and most of the next two as well, there was essentially no mass market for non-white characters. If one wants to indict as racist the whole of American culture for the first half of the 20th century, one can certainly do so. But John W. Campbell's share of blame for that cultural racism is so  infinitesimally small that it's hardly worth mentioning-- unless one wishes to show off one's own virtuousness.

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were marginal changes that went against the cultural grain, such as Sidney Poitier movies and the presence of non-white heroes in ensembles like those of I SPY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and Marvel Comics's THE AVENGERS. During this period, perhaps one might fairly fault a given editor or writer for keeping things too WASPy. But in the 1930s and 1940s, no one could have fought against the current of white privilege without drowning-- certainly not the editor of a science-fiction magazine, back in the days when the genre was deemed little more than "Buck Rogers stuff." It's really not a "missed opportunity" if the opportunity wasn't there at all.

Particularly egregious is the cant about "historically underrepresented voices." Nobody in the 1930s or 1940s would have even understood what that meant, for those were the days of the diametrically opposed cultural concept of "the melting pot." Campbell may have been racist in specific ways-- and this is something Nevala-Lee may well be able to demonstrate in future chapters-- but Campbell certainly was not racist because he didn't have some visionary apprehension of another generation's concept of equity.

Nevala-Lee's prologue also sings some sad songs about the marginalization of female voices. There may be a little more evidence for women being kept out of science-fiction's "boys' clubs," though even then, most of the evidence comes from women of Caucasian heritage who managed to write professionally under ambivalent cognomens like Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore. I've seen no evidence to suggest that persons of color, of either gender, had that much interest in breaking into the science-fiction magazines. Often it takes a cultural revolution before any marginalized outgroup starts thinking seriously about crashing the gates of the favored ingroup.

I also object to the politicized thinking that asserts, even indirectly, that a given genre's worth can be measured in terms of how many "underrepresented voices" it champions. But I'd need a whole nother essay to do justice to that topic.

DISCOURSES WITH DEAD MEN

At the beginning of last year's THE QUANTUM THEORY OF DYNAMICITY, I said:

From the beginnings of this blog I've maintained that a narrative's "mythicity" inheres in its ability to focus on *symbolic discourse;* which is another name for the author's use of narrative to explore the way his (or her) symbolic representations interact with one another.

It occurred to me that I ought to refine this a little. While the statement by itself is not incorrect, it neglects one of the author's main reasons for "exploring the way his (or her) symbolic representations interact with one another," and that is for the purpose of communicating to persons other than him/herself.

For commercial writers, it goes without saying that the main purpose of writing any sort of narrative is to make money. Robert Heinlein famously boiled down the author's purpose by saying, "Let's not kid ourselves; we're fighting for [our readers'] beer money." This brass-tacks statement isn't all that well exemplified by Heinlein himself, since he established himself from his earlier works as a writer primarily invested in one type of fiction, whose works always followed his personal conception of ethics. Indeed, Heinlein's career seems almost "artsy" next to the practiced cynicism of the genuine formula-writer, who may toil under a number of pseudonyms, writing whatever the market will bear at a given time, be it hard-boiled crime or ladies' Gothics.

At the other end of the spectrum. we find a smattering of works produced by authors who had no expectations of circulating them to a general public. at most showing them to selected acquaintances. Shelley's play PROMETHEUS UNBOUND is a "closet drama" in that it was never meant to be performed on stage, though of course it did see book publication. Franz Kafka published very little of his writing in his lifetime, and ostensibly told friend Max Brod to destroy his works after Kafka passed-- which Brod chose not to do. Shelley and Kafka may have desired acclaim at one time or another, but patently both wrote certain works that were more about pleasing themselves.

So any artistic narrative always has this dual potential: it can be produced for a wide audience, or for the author alone. Psychic mediums notwithstanding, artistic narrative-- which term here subsumes also music and the visual arts-- is almost the only way that artists can keep "talking" with people long after the artists themselves are dead. To some extent non-fictional narrative shares some of the power of the arts, but artistic narrative seems to hold much more power to remain relevant to audiences born long after the narrative was originated.

Though my writings on "discourse" go back at least to 2008, I began writing about the topic more frequently in essays like QUANTUM THEORY because I found that the word had applications beyond what I call "the mythopoeic potentiality." Though I have generally focused on the ways in which "super-functional" elements in a narrative interact, I've also come to the recent conclusion that one cannot escape the use of elements that are more purely functional, if only for purposes of contrast. I alluded to this aspect of narrative most recently in GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 4, stating that characters who are "simple" rather than "complex" can provide an audience with much-needed diversion. Indeed, one may observe similar phenomena in real-time discourse. What speaker, having delivered a monologue on something of Great Import, does not seek to "lighten the mood" with a joke or two?

I'll note in conclusion that some of the most interesting literary discourses to have taken place came about because an audience wanted more of something that a given author never meant to pursue. If (a) an author decides to do a "one-off," after which (b) the audience says, "We want more," and (c) the author complies by giving them more, then--

Who then is in control of the discourse?

SUBCOMBATIVE TROOPERS

"Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition.  Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics-- is nonsense.  Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is-- not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be."-- Robert Heinlein, STARSHIP TROOPERS.

Reading this quote in isolation, one might think that Heinlein was seeking to make some point comparable about will and "the will to power" akin to the philosophical insights of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.  Heinlein, however, is pursuing more limited goals.  STARSHIP TROOPERS might be termed a "bildungsprop."  That is, on a superficial structural level it resembles the literary genre called the "bildungsroman," the novel which primarily describes a young man's maturation.  However, though a young man of a far-future era is indeed the viewpoint character of TROOPERS, and he does undergo a maturational process, that process is not oriented on showing his personal progression, but the positive effects of the era's meritocratic military upon his unsentimental education.  Hence, the intent is closer to being a propaganda-speech on the virtues of the military, which Heinlein constructs with enough sophistry to elide any possible flaws-- and with enough panache that the novel won science fiction's Hugo Award in 1960.  In addition to the novel's controversial merits in terms of its philosophical viewpoint, TROOPERS is also known as the first SF-novel to extrapolate the concept of "powered armor suits" to be worn in battle, as opposed to a warrior simply clad in some form of armor, with or without additional gimmicks.  Heinlein's term "mobile suits" became so well circulated that it entered the name of the later Japanese manga franchise MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM.

My reason for recently rereading TROOPERS, though, was to determine whether or not it fit the combative mode, as did the 1997 film adaptation of the novel.  I suspected that it did not, but I certainly hadn't even begun to think in terms of the combative mode when I first read it, much less formulating that it required both a *narrative* and a *significant* value. 

To cite the short verdict, TROOPERS possesses the *significant* value, in that there are at least two exceptional forces pitted against one another: the highly skilled soldiers of Earth, sometimes though not always garbed in mobile suits, and the alien "Bugs" who represent the "competition" of which Heinlein speaks in the above quote. Yet the narrative value isn't there, for the book is really not constructed around the conflict.  The novel opens with Earth taking military action against an unrelated group of alien combatants, during which POV-character Rico makes considerable use of his mobile suit.  After that, the novel moves back in time, describing in great detail the events that led to Rico's military service.  Eventually the novel shuttles back to real time, and the so-called "Bug War" begins, in which the aliens assail Earth by blowing up Buenos Aires, which coincidentally happens to be Rico's home city.  Eventually Rico takes part in a raid on one of the bugs' world, as he and his men attempt to take prisoner one of the "brain bugs" in the aliens' hierarchy. In the film STARSHIP TROOPERS, this battle is the culmination of the Earthpeople's endeavors.  However, because in the novel Heinlein is seeking to illustrate the chaotic quality of military action-- the better to underscore the true heroism of the ordinary soldier-- the battle is rendered fragmentary by Rico's limited POV.  Rico's part in the action ends when a roof literally falls in on him, and though the mission is judged a success, the battle itself is secondary to Heinlein's focus on the military outlook.  This strategy of eliding the potential for a combative climax compares somewhat to the ending of CORIOLANUS, a work I described in MYTHOS AND MODE 2 as also possessing the significant value but not a narrative one.

Once I finished reading, though, I also assessed the novel in terms of the Rico persona, and decided that he was more dominated by the quality of persistence rather than glory, despite Heinlein's many assertions of the military's glorious record.  This would make him a "demihero" rather than a "hero."  Further, this returns me to a line of thought I formulated in April of this year:

On a tangential note, I think that in general most works that focus on the military-- be they naturalistic or otherwise-- tend to emphasize the "emotional tenor" of "persistence" rather than "glory," as those terms were defined here. The military is more often defined by the quality of winning conflicts through group effort rather than individual excellence, and that may be one reason I couldn't view the heroes of STARGATE as fully in the genre of adventure, despite some superficial likenesses.

I did not claim that military characters could not possess the persona of the hero.  However, such characters' adventures must, in keeping with my alignment of "glory" with the concept of "megalothymia," must show a much more personal stake in a given conflict than one sees in STARSHIP TROOPERS.

For example, I cited one "heroic military" example, that of Marvel Comics' Sergeant Fury. From SGT. FURY #5, here's Fury's very personal reaction to his being challenged by the evil Nazi officer Baron Strucker.

It strikes me that this aspect of "personal glory" is exactly why, in KNOWING THE DYNAMIS FROM THE DYNAMIC, I didn't want to regard the protagonists of STARGATE as "heroes."  At the time I tried to rationalize that the Stargate heroes seemed unheroic because they belonged to the "dramatic" mythos.  In contrast, I had no difficulty in regarding drama-centric Harry Potter as a "hero," even though I had not at that time fully evolved my concept of the four personas.

Now I'm not saying that the various STARGATE heroes-- none of whose names I can remember-- never get mad or offended as Sgt. Fury does above.  But the narrative focus of the teleseries is upon "group effort," and hence victory through persistence, rather than personal glory.  There's no doubt from the first pages of the Fury-Strucker story that there's going to be some monumental combat between Fury and Strucker.  Occasional STARGATE stories may set up such a conflict.  But the narrative emphasis in the teleseries, as in Heinlein's TROOPERS novel, is upon subsuming one's personal goals into the traditions of the military.  Thus all or most of the STARGATE characters qualify as combative demiheroes.


The Johnny Rico case is more complicated.  The original template for Rico is that of a subcombative demihero, but the character-- as well as those featured in the film adaptations-- are combative demiheroes, who deviate from Heinlein's original template.  Thus far, I've seen TROOPERS movies fall into three of the four mythoi-- excluding only "comedy"-- and in all of them, the main characters are extremely combative.  But their mental orientations emphasize the concept of "isothymia," of "emptying out elements of will that seem excessive to one's society or environment."

FUNNY BONERS

"I had thought-I had been told-that a 'funny' thing is a thing of a goodness. It isn't. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. Like that sheriff without his pants. The goodness is in the laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery . . . and a sharing . . . against pain and sorrow and defeat."-- Valentine Michael Smith, from Robert Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

I recently reread Heinlein's STRANGER. I was probably in college when I first read it, and I recall being very impressed with it. I don't remember how long ago I gave the novel a second read-through, but I remember thinking that it wasn't nearly as philosophically deep as I'd thought in my earlier years. The third re-reading was no different: Heinlein's cracker-barrel philosophy doesn't stand up to strong analysis, as it's often structured as if Heinlein's version of Socrates, Jubal Harshaw, were doing a stand-up vaudeville act where he got all the punchlines.
"Say there Mister Bones, what you think should be the limits of personal responsibilty in a free society--?"

However, one scene that still works for me is the one where Smith, the Martian-educated Earthman, finally "groks" what it means when human beings laugh. Not merely "smile," though. Prior to the quote cited above, Smith makes very clear that his understanding of humor depends on the explosiveness of the belly laugh:

Perhaps I don't grok all its fullness yet. But find me something that really makes you laugh, sweetheart . . . a joke, or anything else-but something that gave you a real belly laugh, not a smile. Then we'll see if there isn't a wrongness in it somewhere and whether you would laugh if the wrongness wasn't there."

In essence Heinlein has presented, in fictional form, the so-called "relief theory of humor," pioneered by Freud, which argues that the human impulse toward comedy is a way of venting social and psychological pressure. In the novel Smith comes to his conclusion at a zoo, as he watches one monkey take out its frustrations on another monkey less able to fight back. This, rather improbably, leads to Smith's conclusion that humor is a coping strategy that helps one deal with injustice and "wrongness."

The problem of the relief theory, though, is that in order to work, it has to disinclude the phenomenon of the "smile" that may be best explained not by Freudian pressure-relief, but rather by Schopenhaurer's theory of incongruity.

Take as example this Jack Cole POLICE COMICS cover-- one of many he did which feature Plastic Man transforming himself into some playful object, with or without Woozy Winks, and often without any criminals to fight.



It's certainly not impossible that covers like these may have caused some members of their audience to laugh out loud. But it seems much more likely that the incongruity of a man turning himself into a boat or a sled or a ball is much more likely to have inculcated no more than an amused smile.

Now, Cole isnt' the best proponent of this type of humor overall, for as gentle as many PLASTIC MAN covers are, a lot of the stories inside *do* generate their humor from the sort of "wrongness" Heinlein considers the sum and substance of comedy. In my essay RAPT IN PLASTIC I noted how greatly Cole seemed dominated by "violent and transgressive materials."

Yet on another level PLASTIC MAN might serve as a better means to prove the superiority of the incongruity theory of humor over the relief theory. It's one thing to have a humor feature like BARNABY or FRED BASSETT that never ever conjures with anything stronger than the "gentle smile" brand of humor. However, the fact that Jack Cole had in him the capacity to produce both gentle and savage forms of humor demonstrates that as a professional artist he could master the demands of both disciplines.

And to do, he had to be able to imagine any number of incongruous situations in order to keep producing both the covers and the interior stories: to imagine Woozy harmlessly bouncing a Plastic Man-ball on the cover, and then to turn around and have him imperilled by some grotesque villain, to whom Woozy naturally reacts with the expected comic cowardice.

Both are fascinating aspects of Jack Cole. He wouldn't be the artist he was, without both sides.

Just as the human sense of humor can't be restricted to the desire to laugh alone. The simple smile at harmless incongruity, in fact, may be not as inconsequential as Heinlein imagines.

As the child is father to the man, might not the smile be father to the laugh?