THE READING RHEUM: THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR (1819)

 

Though I'm acquainted with various Walter Scott works through adaptation, until reading BRIDE the only things in his oeuvre I'd read were THE TALISMAN (over thirty years ago), IVANHOE, and THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, the latter two having been blog-reviewed here.  LAMMERMOOR is one of the better-known Scott titles, partly due to being translated into a famous opera, and it was written immediately previous to the classic IVANHOE. Therefore, it ought to stand as a novel produced by Scott at the very peak of his powers.

Well, it's not terrible, but it's a large disappointment, and it certainly fails my mythicity smell-test. Going on what historical knowledge I have of LAMMERMOOR's composition, two big problems arise. One is that at the time of composition, Scott suffered a severe attack of gallstones, so he was in a great deal of pain while he sought to keep the pot boiling. (He also made some problematic claims about what he thought of the finished work, but these don't affect my judgment.) The second difficulty is that Scott sought to take an old legend of a Scottish family tragedy and turn it into his ROMEO AND JULIET, with various touches of Shakespearean supernaturalism. Intent on following the outlines of the legend, Scott forgot the bring the characters to life.

Set in the years just before England and Scotland united, the clan of Ravenswood is stripped of its title thanks to the patriarch's alliance to deposed King James VII. The clan loses Ravenswood Estate, which is then bought by a minor Scottish lord, Sir William Ashton, a lawyer. The Ravenswood patriarch dies soon after this humiliating event, and his only son Edgar-- who inherits only a dilapidated castle known as Wolfscrag--swears to avenge his father. Armed with a pistol, Edgar seeks out Ashton on the estate. However, Ashton happens to be out and about with his sole daughter Lucy, and both are attacked by a wild bull. Edgar shoots the bull, succors Lucy, and falls in love with her, as she does with him.

So far, the setup sounds like a lot of "unite the clans through marriage" plots, including that of Scott's first original publication, LAST MINSTREL. However, since Scott was following the template of ROMEO AND JULIET, all the emphasis falls upon the forces that keep the lovers apart. This might have been fine had the lovers been interesting characters for whom one might root. But Lucy is just a simpering damsel, with none of the intensity of Ivanhoe's beloved Rowena. Edgar gets more scenes in which Scott might have built him up. Yet he still seems one-note: eternally mordant and pessimistic.

In the Shakespeare play Juliet's father wants her to make a better marriage than with Romeo, but William Ashton, somewhat guilty over the death of the Ravenswood patriarch, encourages the relationship. However, his wife Margaret Ashton, who left her own clan to marry Ashton, is the proverbial iron fist in the velvet glove, and like her model, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, her devotion to power politics will spell the doom of both clans. Yet though she provides a hissable villain, she too seems a stereotype. The same is true of two adventurers who try to insinuate themselves into Lucy's life, and Scott's unfunny comedy-relief, Edgar's seneschal Caleb, whose heavy dialect would challenge even the most devoted defender of Scottish culture.

As noted, Scott throws in a lot of portents, and even a trio of beldames clearly intended to evoke the witches of MACBETH. But LAMMERMOOR contains one definite metaphenomenal presence, though the oracle she gives is as useless as those of Macbeth's hags or of Hamlet's father. Alice, a former retainer of the Ravenswood clan, lives in a hut in the forest, and despite her blindness seems to possess a witchy second sight. She repeatedly warns of an evil fate if Edgar marries Lucy, and Alice apparently believes this so deeply that after her death-- of which Edgar is not aware-- her unspeaking specter appears to warn Edgar again. And yet the novel ends with both of the lovers dead, neither getting the sort of evocative death scene accorded to the doomed Montague and Capulet. It's hard to imagine the fate Alice foresaw as being much worse than this. So her status as an oracle is probably just as informed by her prejudices as are the actions of Lucy's mother, who brings about the doom of the daughter she seeks to control.         

On the (slight) plus side, Scott's scene-painting talents are as cinematic before there was cinema. One scene involving a bleeding raven, slain by Lucy's dipstick younger brother, betokens the evil that will befall Lucy when later she's forced to enter the wrong marriage-bed. Scott might even have intended some hymen-symbolism there, though there's not much sexuality, healthy or otherwise, in LAMMERMOOR. In contrast to IVANHOE, which boasts two memorable female leads, LAMMERMOOR is drowned in negative femininity, and the combative struggles of (some of) the males can't escape the morass (which is more or less the evil fate of Edgar, self-immolated in quicksand). LAMMERMOOR seems in most ways a repudiation of the adventurous spirits Scott had summoned forth in 1817's ROB ROY and would summon again in IVANHOE. LAMMERMOOR was popular in its day-- Wiki says it gave new popularity to the mostly dormant name "Edgar"-- but anyone seeking to learn the essence of Scott's importance to literature would do better to look elsewhere.         

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 3

 Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.

In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. But I missed an important insight, and it's a strange oversight on my part, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic." In the overlooked insight, Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.

...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.

Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, as Fiedler says of the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.          

What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from the era of the Crusades. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and after he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.

During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There existed a few broad fantasies like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.         

WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even when the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.                  

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 2

 Following on the heels of both my review of THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL and the first part of this two-part series, here's a longer exploration of the relevance of MINSTREL to my concept of the superhero idiom.

My criterion for both "de facto superheroes" (those that everyone agrees to be superheroes for whatever reasons) and those characters who are "superhero-adjacent" is that they must always satisfy the connotations of "super" and "hero" thusly:

For a character to be a hero, he or she must possess, or have access to, *megadynamic* combative abilities. This can mean abilities that go beyond those of ordinary mortals, or they can be an ordinary mortal's abilities taken to extraordinary heights. 

As indicated above, the character does not himself or herself have to be "super" in the common connotation of possessing either natural super-powers (Superman) or artificially enhanced powers (Iron Man). But the hero who possesses megadynamic capabilities must move within a world where "super" phenomena are possible, whether the hero opposes those phenomena or receives aid from them.

Now, to the latter category, there's no question that the world of Scott's MINSTREL is one where supernatural phenomena are readily accepted, even though the events take place in the late 16th century-- which, ironically, is about the time that stories of chivalric romance began to die out for the most part. In this respect, MINSTREL may resemble a lot of the literary fairy tales that proliferated in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th. I say "may" because I'm talking about only original literary creations by particular authors, not retellings of oral narratives, and I've not read many works in the former category, not even the best-known of them, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST from 1741. 

Still, because Walter Scott was a historian, he doesn't emulate the tendency of oral stories to take place in generic times and places. The 13th-century scholar Michael Scott is given an anachronistic makeover, so that he has perished only some years previous to the poem's main story, and here all the ahistorical legends about his having been a benign wizard are completely true. Lady Scott, who desires to possess Michael's magical book for unspecified reasons, is herself educated in magic, and the author even claims that she learned the skill from her father, himself educated in Padua-- which is generally more information than one gets about your generic bad witches and conniving faerie queens.

MINSTREL's main hero, loose though the poem's structture is, is the loyal bondsman William of Deloraine, whom Lady Scott sends to fetch the thaumaturgic tome from the warlock Michael's tomb. It's a spooky episode, though Deloraine doesn't end up fighting anyone or anything until he gets back from his mission. He crosses swords with Henry, boyfriend of Lady Scott's daughter Margaret, and Deloraine is wounded. He loses the magical book to Gilpin, the goblin-servant of Henry and Henry's family, though Gilpin takes this action on his own recognizance, since no one in Henry's clan even knows anything about the book. The book's only function in the story is that when the goblin gets a brief look at one page, it teaches him an illusion-spell that Gilpin is able to use later.

Clan-war breaks out while Deloraine is convalescing under Lady Scott's care, and one of the demands of the enemy clan is that they want Deloraine's life for his having previously killed the brother of an enemy lord. Deloraine has the choice of being tried for murder outright, or fighting in a one-on-one with Redgrave, the lord who lost his brother. So, will Deloraine be forced to drag himself from his sick-bed to prevent total clan-war? No, because Henry-- who's such an insubstantial character, he almost seems like Deloraine's shadow -- gets Gilpin to cast an illusion-spell that makes Henry look like Deloraine, so that the unwounded young warrior can triumph over Redgrave.

It's not hard to imagine how a later melodrama would have jacked up the duel of mystic powers, maybe having Henry's clan using the goblin's powers against Clan Scott, and Lady Scott retaliating by seeking the warlock's magic book. Assuming that everything in MINSTREL is original to Walter Scott and not borrowed from some unremembered oral source, Scott just wants Gilpin to be a mischievous imp instead of a major threat, and that does keep the poem's stakes on a low side. Deloraine doesn't get to shine in a final combat scene, any more than does his descendant Ivanhoe. But he is, by all indications, a doughty warrior, and he receives supernatural aid that saves him from being slain by another skilled fighter. Deloraine doesn't request the help, the way archaic Greek heroes would request weapons from their goddess-patrons. But structurally, Deloraine is a "hero" aided by a "super" phenomenon, even though his substitute is in reality an ordinary skilled man fighting another ordinary skilled man. But once all the goblin's business has been finished-- both petty pranks and benign actions-- his supernatural master arises from his tomb to reclaim him. This is not quite a moment akin to Shakespeare's "I'll drown my book," but it may not be a total coincidence that the main story is being related by an old minstrel, who appears to live in "our" world, a world in which magic has become only the stuff of literary fantasies.   

    

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM

I suppose the following "wish" might be deemed by some self-fulfilling-

I may as well as mention that the writer I **wish** had some strong candidates in this idiom is Sir Walter Scott. It looks to me like he single-handedly reinvented the adventure genre in the early 1800s, after the Age of Enlightenment made most of the fiction very talky and didactic, even when one sees occasional glimmers of adventure in Gothics or Byron's proto-swashbucklers.

-- because, after I read various summaries of Walter Scott works online, and chose to analyze the 1805 LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, I found what I wanted on my first try. "What are the odds?" a skeptic might say.   

Still, I'm fine with admitting that MINSTREL is not the ideal "first post-Renaissance almost-superhero." While Scott's narrative poem was popular in its day, its status as a long poem probably kept it from being influential on genre fiction of the 19th century. This stands in contrast to the way, say, Scott's novel IVANHOE unquestionably influenced the 1844 penny dreadful THE BLACK MONK. So other candidates for "first almost-superhero," such as one finds in the French crime-novel THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS or the fictionalizations of the English "urban legend" Spring-Heeled Jack, would seem much more credible as DIRECT influences on the superhero idiom that would eventually include such later 19th century proponents as Allen Quatermain and Nick Carter.

However, in a purely FORMAL sense, MINSTREL has most of the right elements for what might be termed a "fantasy-hero" if not a superhero. The poem has one supernatural creature in it-- a goblin with magical powers-- and a combative conflict between powerful opponents who can be loosely framed as "hero and villain." The fly in the ointment is that though the goblin might be said to be allied to the side of the "villains" in a general sense, the creature is not opposed to the hero in the way readers now expect from most fantasy literature following the birth of "sword-and-sorcery." MINSTREL also has a sorcerer, but he's not specifically helpful or harmful to either heroes or villains. In essence I think in MINSTREL Scott was trying to meld elements of "feuds between rival Scottish clans" with those of "people encountering the supernatural"-- both of which elements appeared in the older ballads Scott had been translating before he wrote MINSTREL, his first notable original work. One may argue that the two sets of elements don't quite cohere as one might desire.

Still, since I don't imagine I'll ever be devoted enough to this topic to read the entire Walter Scott oeuvre, I'm pleased that even on the purely formal level, the author has some skin in this particular literary game. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL (1805)

 I recently commented to a poster on CHFB that if any author deserved to have the honor of reigniting "the superhero idiom" since its suspension at the end of the 16th century, it would be Sir Walter Scott, who as far as I can tell also reignited the combative mode in canonical literature. I made this comment, however, having only read two Scott novels-- IVANHOE and THE TALISMAN-- though I'd also seen various film adaptations of Scott novels. Up to this point, I would have said that 1812's IVANHOE was Scott's most significant work, as it brought back the "chivalric romance" that had been destroyed by the early 1600s release of DON QUIXOTE's two sections. Yet I was intrigued to read on Wikipedia that after Scott gained a measure of fame translating old Scottish ballads, often about border wars between feuding clans, his first attempt at an original ballad was an immediate success with 1805 audiences.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), in medieval romance form, grew out of Scott's plan to include a long original poem of his own in the second edition of the Minstrelsy: it was to be "a sort of Romance of Border Chivalry & inchantment".^[28] He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited by John Stoddart. (It was not to be published until 1816.)^[29] Scott was able to draw on his unrivalled familiarity with Border history and legend acquired from oral and written sources beginning in his childhood to present an energetic and highly coloured picture of 16th-century Scotland, which both captivated the general public and with its voluminous notes also addressed itself to the antiquarian student. The poem has a strong moral theme, as human pride is placed in the context of the last judgment with the introduction of a version of the "Dies irae" at the end. The work was an immediate success with almost all the reviewers and with readers in general, going through five editions in one year.^[16] The most celebrated lines are the ones that open the final stanza:

 The Wiki article also described enough of the plot for me to surmise that MINSTREL might be in the combative mode, which could potentially make it relevant to the superhero idiom, if not necessarily "superhero-adjacent." That, however, will be a separate argument for another post, and from here on it, I'll simply set down my impressions of Scott's first big hit.  

The word "lay" in the title connotes a narrative poem, traditionally sung by a minstrel in various European cultures, and the titular lay here is a framing-device for the main story, as it is related to a court full of listeners by a minstrel. I have no idea why Scott dubbed the unnamed singer "the last minstrel," unless he simply wanted to suggest the idea of a time that was passing in the shadow of the Industrial Age. Following the introduction of the framing-device, the minstrel only pops in at the end of each of the ballad's six cantos, as he takes a rest from his narrative.

The main story is set in historical Scotland, apparently of the 16th or 17th century. I'm sure that MINSTREL contains dozens of references to real Scottish and/or English history that simply went right past me, though I don't think Scott kept complete fidelity to historical sources. For one thing, a major part of the story involves a famous Scottish scholar, one Michael Scott, who though deceased is treated as if he had been a contemporary of the other characters in the narrative. In real history, Michael Scott lived in the 13th century, and though various legends made him a wizard there's no indication of occult knowledge in the real scholar's history. Still, English readers of the period would have recognized dozens of Renaissance-era historical figures worked into the story, even though I assume some though not all of the principal characters were fictional.

As the story opens, the Clan Scott has just suffered a grievous loss thanks to their enemies Clan Kerr, as Lord Scott has been killed in combat. The widow Lady Scott is not a happy camper.

Vengeance, deep-brooding o'er the slain

Had lock'd the source of softer woe;

And burning pride, and high disdain,

Forbade the rising tear to flow

Lady Scott, who is said to possess magical talents (she's seen listening to voices of local spirits), orders a trooper, William of Deloraine, to undertake a macabre mission. Deloraine must ride to the crypt where the wizard Michael Scott (no relation to the Scott Clan so far as I could tell) lies buried. Deloraine must descend into the crypt and remove a Book of Magic from the corpse of the wizard and bring it back to Lady Scott. The author never puts into words what Lady Scott plans to do with the book. though "vengeance for the slain" seems a not unreasonable conclusion. 

Deloraine journeys to the site of the crypt, and with the help of a monk (who claims to have known Michael Scott in life) the young man successfully liberates the magic book. Though the author puts in a lot of eerie descriptions, nothing specific happens during the crypt-raid, though the monk passes away a day or so later-- again, not from definite sorcerous causes.

Deloraine only gets into trouble in Canto 3, when he gets closer to his home base. Prior to the slaying of Lord Scott, his grown daughter Margaret fell in love with Henry, the heir apparent of Clan Kerr. Naturally, Lady Scott is not much inclined to entertain a clan-uniting marriage after her husband's death. Henry has however managed to contrive a secret if brief meeting with Margaret, and as he leaves the castle of Clan Scott he runs into Deloraine. The two fight, and Henry wounds Deloraine. Henry calls upon his page Gilpin to transport wounded Deloraine into the castle without detection, which is something Gilpin can do, because Gilpin is a goblin.

The author provided a loose history as to how the head of Clan Kerr came to be served by a goblin of magical talents: apparently Gilpin just appeared to the Kerr lord one day and insisted on becoming the lord's servant. Toward the poem's close, we finally learn, more or less, that Gilpin was originally in the service of Michael Scott, and that after the wizard perished, Gilpin apparently had to offer his services to some mortal. Or maybe Gilpin does so just to have opportunities for mischief, for while transporting Deloraine back to the castle, Gilpin also steals the magic book. He never does anything with the book, because it's bound with iron clasps he can't open, but he keeps it for the rest of the story. I'm not sure the author didn't forget about it, since Lady Scott, tending Deloraine's wounds, never asks any questions like "what happened to the book" or "how'd you get in the castle without anyone seeing you?"

Moreover, once Gilpin is on "enemy territory" as it were, he feels free to make more mischief. He lures the unnamed small son of Lady Scott into the forest, and though Gilpin would like to kill the kid, the goblin fears some retaliation from the boy's mother. So while the kid wanders in the forest, Gilpin assumes his appearance, returns to the castle and begins committing acts of childish destruction.

But although Prince Henry returned to his own lands without incident, his kindred have decided to march on Castle Scott for past grievances. Some outriders find Lady Scott's wandering son and take him hostage, since the boy is good enough to inform them of his lineage. Clan Kerr's forces and their English allies clash a few times with Clan Scott's soldiers. Then during a parley Clan Kerr reveals its hostage and proposes one of two outcomes. They'd like to try Deloraine for past acts of malice against their clan. However, since one of those acts included slaying the brother of a lord named Musgrave, Kerr is amenable to letting Musgrave and Deloraine settle their quarrel in one-on-one combat. However, Deloraine still suffers from wounds that might make it tough for an equal battle. (The author uses this trope again in IVANHOE.)

Miraculously, wounded Deloraine appears to fight and slay Musgrave. But big reveal time: the man beneath the helmet is Henry, who wanted to spare the life of the man he wounded. Henry somehow came across Gilpin and compelled the goblin to use his powers of illusion to make Henry appear to the other knight. In fact, Deloraine makes a belated appearance after Henry kills Musgrave, highly offended that someone else swiped his identity.

The final canto starts off with familiar lines that almost no one can ever quote the origins of--

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

--and the sentiments seem appropriate here, because the main action of the poem has been to provide a happy ending to a story of warring families. Henry and Margaret, the discount versions of Romeo and Juliet, receive permission to marry from the mollified Lady Scott, and apparently everyone in Clan Kerr is fine with it too, now that someone has died as a sort of scapegoat-that-solves-the-problem. The unnamed son of Lady Scott is of course returned, leaving just one difficulty, that of Gilpin-- which is solved when his master apparently leaves his unquiet grave to claim the goblin (and maybe the book too, for all I can tell). While the lords and ladies are feasting in a grear hall, Gilpin is seeking to make mischief again, when there's a flash of lightning and the goblin disappears, as well as a supernatural intrusion that out-otrantos OTRANTO.

Some heard a voice in Branksome Hall,

Some saw a sight, not seen by all

That dreadful voice was heard by some,

Cry, with loud summons, "Gylbin, come!"

And on the spot where burst the brand

        Just where the page had flung him down,

Some saw an arm, and some a hand,

        And some the waving of a gown.

The guests in silence pray'd and shook,

And terror dimm'd each lofty look.

But none of all the astonish'd train

Was so dismay'd as Deloraine

His blood did freeze, his brain did burn,

'Twas fear'd his mind would ne'er return;

For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,

Like him of whom the story ran

Who spoke the spectre-hound in Man.

At length, by fits, he darkly told.

With broken hint, and shuddering cold,

That he had seen, right certainly.

A shape with amice wrapp'd around,

With a wrought Spanish baldric bound,

Like pilgrim from beyond the sea;

And knew--but how it matter'd not--

It was the wizard, Michael Scott.

But once the dread apparition has passed, everything returns to normal, the happy couple is wed, and the frame-story of the minstrel's lay comes to an end. And I will deal with the ramifications of this story for the superhero idiom in a separate post.       

                  

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS

 A random thought struck me the other day: that, if I was trying to convey what distinguished a story's centric icon (assuming there's just one) from all the other icons in the story, I might have said that all centric icons were "organizational matrices." As soon as I thought this thought, I realized that even to most literary pundits the phrase would be about as clear as the view from beneath the La Brea tar pits.

The thought did take me back to some of the various ways I'd attempted to think about centricity in terms of categorical abstractions, at least going back to this key essay, 2018's KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY, PT. 1. In that essay, I cited a remark by author Nancy Springer about her conviction that the true hero of Scott's IVANHOE was not Ivanhoe:

Who is the real hero of Ivanhoe? Certainly not Wilfred of Ivanhoe himself, for never was a title character more palely drawn. Even though he is the common thread that strings the novel together, he is all but invisible... He is a pawn, exercising no control of the events around him, a piece of plastic with almost no personality...

 I refuted this in part by comparing Ivanhoe, a monadic centric icon, with the example of The Spirit, a serial centric icon:

From all my statements on centricity, it should be plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own. For me Ivanhoe is as much the star of Scott's only story with the character as the Spirit is of his long-running serial adventures. Springer's metaphor of a "common thread" catches some of the sense of Ivanhoe's role in the narrative, but she apparently does not realize how often famous works may be organized around an essentially unremarkable character. The Spirit is not really any better-characterized than Ivanhoe-- Eisner tended to refer to his hero as something along the lines of a "big dumb Irishman"-- and as I mentioned above, most of the mythicity of the Spirit's serial adventures inhere in his supporting characters, just as figures like Rebecca, Richard and Robin Hood are more mythic than Ivanhoe himself. In both cases the under-characterized, under-mythicized character functions as an organizing factor.   

Later in the same essay, I admitted that there were times in which a viewpoint icon might be very dull and NOT be the center of the story, using the example of Lemuel Gulliver. But Gulliver does not provide an "organizing factor" as do Ivanhoe and The Spirit. That's because GULLIVER'S TRAVELS is not about Gulliver, but about the exotic places to which he travels, making it *exothelic* rather than *endothelic." I've discoursed about these structural distinctions elsewhere, but they're not germane to the problem under discussion here, which concerns defining the nature of centricity.

However I may choose to define centricity in light of the "organizing factor" thesis, this line of thought puts paid to my brief consideration of centricity as a form of resonance, which I advanced in this 2023 essay, and then barely used thereafter. The metaphor of resonance, as I expressed it there, was something like whatever voice in a narrative happened to be the loudest-- which is not unlike the poor logic I critiqued Nancy Springer for. In future, if I use resonance at all, I'll try to keep it closer to the cited definition by Northrop Frye, where resonance connotes a reader's ability to see the universal in the particular.  

So if centric icons within a narrative are "organizational matrices," is there a better term to assign to the organizing principle? Astute readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) will guess that the previously unused term of "eminence" will now assume that position, but the rationale must wait until Part 2.  

    

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE BLACK MONK PT. 1

This review will cover two separate aspects of the 19th-century penny dreadful THE BLACK MONK, much as I did with Part 1 and Part 2 of my Fu Manchu-review. As usual, I discuss stuff about the ending, so SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS:

When a post on CLASSIC HORROR suggested that this serialized novel might be "the first superhero novel," I naturally had to give it a try. Though a prologue specifies that the book may've had more than one hand contributing to its rambling structure, the credited writer is the English author James Malcolm Rymer, best known for other "penny dreads" like VARNEY THE VAMPIRE and one of the first SWEENEY TODD books. 

Though MONK is not a rewrite of Scott's 1819 IVANHOE as the prologue claims, both stories take place in or around the 12th century, ostensibly the time when England's King Richard had gone off to the Crusades, leaving his brother John to run the country. MONK has definitely borrowed a Scott subplot. The primary plot of IVANHOE concerns the young titular knight's attempt to claim his bride Rowena while incidentally rescuing the Jewess Rebecca from an evil Templar Knight. However, a major subplot involves the cover return of Richard the Lion-Hearted to England. Scott imagines that Richard, after being ransomed from captivity in Europe, makes a clandestine return to his native land, hobnobs a little with Robin Hood, and then finds time to restore his rule over England and oust his ambitious brother John from the throne. 

I don't know how conversant the average "penny dreadful" reader would've been with IVANHOE by the time BLACK MONK was being serialized in 1844-45, so maybe the revelation of its mysterious "crusader's" secret identity was a really big surprise for that reader. Maybe I wouldn't have seen this plot-thread so transparent had I not recently read IVANHOE for the first time. Suffice to say, though, Richard is even more dilatory here about getting back to his throne, as he stops for several days at the fictional "Brandon Castle."

Brandon Castle is a great Gothic domain. First of all, there's one section of the castle, "the Grey Turret," where no one goes anymore because it's rumored to be haunted. The novel begins as the castle's lord, Sir Rupert Brandon, mourns over the untimely death of his wife Alice, and eventually leaves the castle to expunge his sorrows in the Crusades, Once he leaves, the castle is the site of two contending forces. One faction is made up of the various servants and men-at-arms who are loyal to Rupert (and who, though clearly viewed by the author as "good guys," were a little too "bully-boy" for my taste). The other faction is overtly represented by two of the lesser nobles who were siblings to the deceased Alice: the domineering Agatha and her cowardly brother Eldred. But the only reason that the two of them have any chance to gain dominion over the castle is because they have their own resident demon: the titular Black Monk, an evil Jesuit priest. Though banished from the castle by Rupert, the Black Monk conspires to have revenge upon the absent knight through the use of conspiracy, apparent hauntings (which he *may* create through psychic projection), alchemy, poisons, and his own Herculean strength.

Or so we arrive at the reason THE BLACK MONK is not IMO the "first superhero work," even if by that one means the first thing to emerge after the decline of the chivalric romances, circa the 15th-17th centuries. It might technically be called "the first supervillain work," though, for the novel is not based around a hero, but a villain. MONK has less in common with IVANHOE, which is the story of a hero's conflict with a memorable but subordinate villain, than with the popular Gothics of the previous generation, where fiends with named like Manfred and Montoni were the most powerful presences. The Black Monk himself, given the single proper name Morgatani, is not any deeper than any of the novel's other one-note characters. But Morgatani is definitely not just a mundane villain on the level of Dickens types like Uriah Heep and Daniel Quilp. Morgatani, thanks to his metaphenomenal attainments, is definitely an ancestor to the "super-villain"-- and unlike many other Gothic villains, Morgatani's even a combative type, able to stand toe-to-toe in a swordfight with his major opponent, a mad forest-dweller named Nemoni (possibly named for Heracles' beastly foe the Nemean Lion). When, toward the end of the novel, he declares, "I am the evil genius of Brandon Castle," he takes his place at the head of early super-villains like Robur and Fu Manchu.

Now, I've written in other essays that I believe that the superhero and the supervillain are part of the same idiom, so in THAT sense, THE BLACK MONK has some importance to what I've termed "the superhero idiom." Still, on balance I feel that MONK is more of a transitional work to the fully formed idiom, much like (to name an even earlier putative ancestor to the superhero) Rudolf Raspe's 1781 wonder-working fictionalization of the real-life Baron Munchhausen.

As to the claims of any of the book's heroes to be a "superhero"-- see Part 2. 

KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2

Though it's possible that I'll encounter some exceptions, there seems no way to demonstrate the persistence of the narrative combative value [in a given work] unless there is some sort of spectacle-oriented struggle at or very near the climax.-- PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX.

"Centricity" with respect to the Walter Scott novel IVANHOE, was addressed in Part 1, and in this section I'll be addressed the other subject in the post-title: combat-- or, more specifically, the way combat is handled at the climax of IVANHOE.

I wrote PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX in 2013, about a year after I settled on a definition of the combative mode in this essay. For the most part, I've been satisfied with the broad applicability of the statement seen above, but now that I've read Scott's most famous work, I'm glad that I hedged my bets somewhat with the statement about "exceptions." In this case, the exceptions don't "prove the rule," but they do make it necessary to expand the rule somewhat, to account for special cases.

For most of the novel, Scott arranges events that lead the reader to expect a major fight-scene at the novel's climax, between the title character and the principal villain, the Templar Knight Bois-Guilbert. It's established that the two of them previously clashed, with Ivanhoe coming out the victor. Their quarrel is not specified, but given that much of the story concerns the cultural tensions between English Saxons like Ivanhoe, and their Norman, French-speaking overlords, like Bois-Guilbert, it stands to reason that the knights probably quarreled for cultural reasons. Scott knows that by novel's end the truculent Saxons will be relatively placated when the righteous Norman Richard the Lion-Hearted ousts his bad Norman brother John. But even with that foreknowledge, Scott gives the reader every reason to want to see another "bad Norman," Bois-Guilbert, bested in direct combat.

Further, the two men are indirectly romantic rivals. Bois-Guilbert falls in love with the lovely Jewess Rebecca, and after taking her and her father prisoner for purposes of ransom, Bois-Guilbert is even willing to sacrifice his position with the Templars if Rebecca becomes his willing consort. However, Rebecca has conceived a "forbidden love" for Ivanhoe, though he is engaged to another woman, one of Christian upbringing. Ivanhoe's first encounter with Rebecca is marked by attraction on his part as well, but unlike Bois-Guilbert, Ivanhoe represses that attraction, obedient to the cultural laws forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Christians. (This is probably one reason a lot of readers don't like Ivanhoe, for not flouting those laws, though admittedly he's already defied his father earlier, by opposing that noble's intention to make a political marriage for Rowena.)

But later events oblige Ivanhoe to play the knightly rescuer to this "forbidden fruit." A group of Templars, having seen the extent of Bois-Guilbert's affection for the Jewess, accuse Rebecca of literal witchcraft, and plan to execute her. She can save herself only if a champion fights on her behalf, and Bois-Guilbert is assigned to oppose any champion she may summon. At this point Rebecca has once again rejected him, but he's still in love with her, and he tells himself that as long as he doesn't actually have to fight an opponent, her murder will be the fault of the Grand Templar. Then, Ivanhoe appears, and the two square off for a joust. The reader expects that Ivanhoe, even though he's taken wounds in a previous battle, will call upon inner reserves of strength and best his formidable enemy anyway. But that's not how Scott handles things.

The trumpets sounded, and the knights charged each other in full career. The wearied horse of Ivanhoe, and its no less exhausted rider, went down, as all had expected, before the well-aimed lance and vigorous steed of the Templar. This issue of the combat all had foreseen; but although the spear of Ivanhoe did but, in comparison, touch the shield of Bois-Guilbert, that champion, to the astonishment of all who beheld it reeled in his saddle, lost his stirrups, and fell in the lists.

Ivanhoe, extricating himself from his fallen horse, was soon on foot, hastening to mend his fortune with his sword; but his antagonist arose not. Wilfred, placing his foot on his breast, and the sword’s point to his throat, commanded him to yield him, or die on the spot. Bois-Guilbert returned no answer.

“Slay him not, Sir Knight,” cried the Grand Master, “unshriven and unabsolved—kill not body and soul! We allow him vanquished.”

He descended into the lists, and commanded them to unhelm the conquered champion. His eyes were closed—the dark red flush was still on his brow. As they looked on him in astonishment, the eyes opened—but they were fixed and glazed. The flush passed from his brow, and gave way to the pallid hue of death. Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.

“This is indeed the judgment of God,” said the Grand Master, looking upwards—“‘Fiat voluntas tua!’”

Scott does not enlarge upon the "contending passions" that cause Bois-Guilbert to expire without taking any real injury, though the author devotes a great deal of space before the death to showing that the Templar's desire for Rebecca torments him. He has the power to kill Ivanhoe, but if he does so, Rebecca also perishes-- and since he cannot simply surrender to Ivanhoe, his only alternative is apparently to "will himself to death." The mythopoeically inclined reader may choose to view Bois-Guilbert as the "negative image" of Ivanhoe, given that he can act on the desire that Ivanhoe will not countenance.

But what does the Templar's death mean, within the structure of the novel? There's no shortage of fight-scenes throughout the story, for IVANHOE is a novel aimed primarily at male readers. True, there are a number of scenes that take issue with the 13th-century code of honor, not only with respect to the treatment of Jews but also regarding the noblemen's nasty habit of raising money by ransoming people. Rebecca is every bit a spokesperson for the feminine penchant for peace as Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert are proponents of the masculine penchant for conflict.

And yet the central appeal of the novel is not really a critique of the knightly codes of honor and combat; it's more of a side-comment. In the past I've shown how certain works proved subcombative precisely because the author led readers to expect a major conflict, and then undermined that expectation. In MYTHOS AND MODE 2 I wrote this of Shakespeare's CORIOLANUS:

Despite the suggestions that [longtime enemies Coriolanus and Aufidius] may finally sort out the question of superiority by play’s end, CORIOLANUS is, unlike MACBETH, not centered around a combat.  Instead, Coriolanus’ arrogance brings about his disaffection from his fellow Romans, leading to a temporary alliance with Aufidius and the Volscians, and finally to an ignomious demise rather than a heroic confrontation.

Shakespeare goes after the "warrior code" in TROILUS AND CRESSISA with even greater vigor, as I suggested in THE TOILS OF TROILUS.

So, in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel [between Achilles and Hector]-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who orders his personal guards, the Myrmidons, to chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor. 

Clearly, in a narrative sense, Scott undercuts reader-expectations for a rousing final fight-scene in IVANHOE just as Shakespeare does in the cited plays. But-- does Scott do it for the same reasons that Shakespeare does it?

The answer is obviously no. The fact that Ivanhoe, even though he's not yet recovered from his wounds, is willing to risk his life for the gentle Rebecca clearly validates the better values of the knightly code; values which are entirely negative within both CORIOLANUS and TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. So how should my statement from PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX be amended?

Technically, I've already implied a solution in earlier essays. In KNIGHTS PART 1 I made a loose comparison between Scott's Ivanhoe and Will Eisner's Spirit only in terms of the relative simplicity of both starring characters. For the most part, it would be awkward to draw more extended comparisons, particularly because Ivanhoe was intended to be the star of one stand-alone work, while the Spirit was devised as a serial hero, intended to last over the course of potentially endless adventures.

However, it's often occurred to me that the Spirit himself might not be a combative hero, were I going purely by the 51 percent rule. Yet over the years I've refined this theory to take in the possibility that a series, such as that of the Spirit, may participate in the combative mode even if the majority of the character's individual adventures are not combat-oriented. In my final post on the LOST IN SPACE series, I mentioned that the series, despite various spectacle-oriented episodes, had a "dominant ethos" that was "directed away from combative resolutions." This is pretty much the same as saying that the dominant "significant value" of a series can overrule any disparate elements in the series. I have not yet applied this principle to stand-alone works like IVANHOE, but I have already implied that the subcombative significant value of TROILUS overrules the effect of any battle-scenes in the play. Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY, PT. 1

One of the great curiosities of comic-book mythography is that even though the heroes-- and occasionally, the demiheroes-- are the protagonists with whose will the audience identifies, often much of the mythicity resides within the villains and/or monsters who are in the position of supporting players....as I detailed here, Will Eisner's feature THE SPIRIT was such a genre-chameleon that it's arguable that the titular hero had little myth to call his own, and most of his villains were no better.-- BAD WILL ON TOP (not a reference to Will Eisner), April 2016.

I touched on the importance of the Sir Walter Scott oeuvre in this 2013 essay, but the truth is that I had not then and do not now have a deep acquaintance with Scott's works, unless one counts film adaptations. I did read one book, THE TALISMAN, over thirty years ago, but despite enjoying the work, I wasn't moved to keep reading Scott, probably because he wrote little or no metaphenomenal fiction. I've now finally amended this lack somewhat by finishing what is arguably Scott's most famous novel, IVANHOE.

Though there haven't been that many film/TV adaptations of IVANHOE in comparison to assorted other classics, it's still a name to conjure with, even among people who don't know much about Scott or 19th-century literature. It seems to be the first novel to successfully revive the medieval tradition seen in European courtly romances, but in a naturalistic world, without dragons, faeries, etc.  But according to writer Nancy Springer, who penned both a foreword and an afterword to the 2000 Tor edition of the public domain novel, the knightly hero himself is something less than successful.

Who is the real hero of Ivanhoe? Certainly not Wilfred of Ivanhoe himself, for never was a title character more palely drawn. Even though he is the common thread that strings the novel together, he is all but invisible... He is a pawn, exercising no control of the events around him, a piece of plastic with almost no personality...

Springer then goes on to argue that the true heroes of the novel are two of Scott's supporting characters. One is Richard the Lion-Hearted, newly returned to England following his captivity during the Crusades, a "vibrant, quirky personality" who makes common cause with Robin Hood and his Merry Men in order to recover his throne from Prince John. (IVANHOE is said to be a key influence on the 20th century's development of the Robin Hood narrative.) The other hero is Rebecca, a beautiful Jewess and daughter of money-lender Isaac. Rebecca is easily the most vivid character in the novel. She's also, to bring in my concern for mythicity, the most mythic character, for it's through Rebecca and Isaac that Scott addresses the contemporary sociological concerns of his culture, regarding the emancipation of the Jews in England. Although the novel takes place in a 12th-century England where such an emancipation is not possible, Scott constantly calls attention to the travails of the Jewish people through the experiences of the Jewess and her father. For years prior to my reading of the novel itself, I occasionally encountered statements that Ivanhoe, who inspired romantic interest in both Jewish Rebecca and his Christian inamorata Rowena, should have wed Rebecca. I share the sentiment, though Scott sets things up so that such a marriage is socially impossible, which may well have been the state of the real world in those days.

Since my opening quote references "villains and monsters," who are usually the carriers of what I call "bad will," I should note in passing that not much of IVANHOE's mythicity inheres in its villains. These are largely the Norman overlords allied to the reign of Prince John, but except for one, most of them seem to me to be standard bad guys, only differentiated by their particular circumstances. The exception is the Templar Knight Sir Brian deBois-Guilbert, who, like Ivanhoe, has returned to England from the Crusades, though the two apparently clashed for some reason even though they were on the same side. At one of John's tournaments Sir Brian espies the lovely Rebecca, and he spends most of the novel trying to win her over. Scott does devote some attention to the torments of the lovelorn knight, whose affection is not reciprocated even before Rebecca falls for Ivanhoe. But Sir Brian doesn't sustain much of a symbolic discourse, for all that Scott makes an effort to critique the elitist and "bigoted" order of the Knights Templar through the evil knight.

From all my statements on centricity, it should be plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own. For me Ivanhoe is as much the star of Scott's only story with the character as the Spirit is of his long-running serial adventures. Springer's metaphor of a "common thread" catches some of the sense of Ivanhoe's role in the narrative, but she apparently does not realize how often famous works may be organized around an essentially unremarkable character. The Spirit is not really any better-characterized than Ivanhoe-- Eisner tended to refer to his hero as something along the lines of a "big dumb Irishman"-- and as I mentioned above, most of the mythicity of the Spirit's serial adventures inhere in his supporting characters, just as figures like Rebecca, Richard and Robin Hood are more mythic than Ivanhoe himself.

In both cases the undercharacterized, under-mythicized character functions as an organizing factor. In place of Springer's thread-metaphor, I've repeatedly used the image of the circle with diverse elements swirling about inside it, as when I described these elements as incarnations of "centric and eccentric will." My formulation suggests that there is no firm rule that the hero of a given narrative, whether it is of a serial or a stand-alone nature, must be "the most interesting man in the room." At the same time, there's no rule that he cannot be. Further, the narrative's centric will may include an ensemble of characters who are at least strongly interconnected in some way, be it no more than two or so many that their number is functionally indeterminate.

(Examples of the former, the "no more than two," would include pairings like those discussed in ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE: the two monstrous enemies in 1934's BLACK CAT and the literal monsters in 1968's THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS. Examples of the latter would include "swarm-types" like the Aliens from the ALIEN franchise and the Martians from Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS. The latter category also takes in what I'll tentatively call the "diversified swarm," in which the entities have a common origin but take on diverse-looking appearances, like the Cartagrans from the two-film WAXWORKS franchise.)

My screed is obviously not a one-on-one response to Springer's assertion: she's concerned only with vividness of characterization. Her meditations on Ivanhoe, according to my system, concern only "the relationships of discrete personalities" and so belong to the potentiality I've called "the dramatic," while "the mythopoeic" deals with the "relationships of symbols." Further, "the dramatic," like "the kinetic," belongs in a different bailiwick than "the mythopoeic" and its kissing-cousin "the didactic."

From THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL:

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking" finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* 

(I note, with yet another digression, that the opposite of "lateral meaning" ought to be "vertical meaning," which takes in both underthought and overthought, in keeping with my use of the term "vertical" here. More on this in another essay.)

Thus, I reject Springer's thesis that a work's "real hero" must be its most dramatically interesting person. A given author may merely wish to use the "centric will" of a given protagonist as an organizing factor, and nothing more, and there have certainly been other good stories that starred protagonists even duller than either Ivanhoe or the Spirit. Still, this should not overlook one last structural quibble: that a dull viewpoint character is not the same as a dull centric protagonist. Ivanhoe is the star of his show because he provides this linking function, and this contributes to what I've called an *endothelic* status, wherein the "narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests." A contrary example of this would be Lemuel Gulliver. He's every bit as dull as Ivanhoe but Gulliver's not at the center of his narrative, which is focused rather upon the worlds Gulliver explores. Thus GULLIVER'S TRAVELS fits the category of the *exothelic* in that the narrative is focused on "something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them."