THE READING RHEUM: THE SCARLET GOSPELS (2015)

I'm glad I got some of my takes on author Clive Barker set down in an earlier essay, so that here I can focus more on the specific problems I had with SCARLET GOSPELS, one of Barker's rare crossovers between two of his icons.

First I'll say that even though GOSPELS isn't well-plotted and its characters are under-realized, Barker succeeds in creating enough of a linear sense of menace that the novel is a decent read, though I don't envision ever wanting to reread it. The criticism I voiced in the earlier essay-- that often Barker's works are just catalogues of sex-and-sadism scenes, without much narrative "glue" to hold them together-- particularly applies here. Because Barker doesn't care about delving into individual characters, he often tosses in new ones without any attention to context. For instance, one of Harry D'Amour's allies is a female body builder, name of Lana. This makes it possible for Barker to throw in a little femme-formidable action. But who is Lana? Is there a story about why her character devoted herself to muscle-building? Not at all, and so even though Barker might have included her as a change from his studiously swishy characters, she comes off as just another "freak flag" getting flown.

This is even more evident with one of Barker's starring icons, Harry D'Amour. D'Amour isn't exactly a well-known figure outside Barker fandom, for the author has only placed the detective in a handful of short stories, one major role in an unfinished novel-series (THE BOOK OF THE ART), and an unsuccessful stand-alone movie, LORD OF ILLUSIONS. Yet Barker wants to play up D'Amour as if he's a fascinating "everyman" (his word) type of character, who becomes enmeshed in occult situations far beyond his means. Barker doesn't arm his detective-hero with any special weapons or skills, so he clearly wanted him to be the sort of protagonist who just muddles through situations far beyond his compass. I for one just found D'Amour terminally dull, and his relationships with his various allies didn't improve his character. D'Amour doesn't really have the mojo to be dealing with the more famous icon of the story, and so he usually comes off as a glorified viewpoint character rather than an icon with his own stature.

There's actually zero reason for D'Amour to be involved in the story of the Cenobite mastermind Pinhead (whose movie-name I'll use for convenience, since Barker's name for him, "The Hell Priest," is cumbersome). Pinhead has a master plan to take control of Hell, and to that end, he spends a lot of time invading the sanctums of mortal magicians to plunder their secrets. One of these forays brings Pinhead into contact with D'Amour, and Pinhead hatches some contrived idea that D'Amour should be the witness of the Cenobite's grand scheme. Thus Pinhead lures D'Amour and a handful of helpers into Hell to witness his grand scheme in action. Said scheme involves the revelation that Satan, after centuries of ruling Hell, committed suicide due to his estrangement from Heaven. Pinhead uses this opportunity to steal Satan's armor, with which he can channel even greater mystical powers and thus take control of the infernal realm. However, for some obscure reason Satan comes back to life when his armor's removed, and the two demons fight. Without giving away too much, Barker seals the fate of his best-known icon here-- and I wouldn't mind that, except that Barker's Hell Priest isn't much more interesting than Harry D'Amour.

I may finally take time to read the original novella on which Barker based his HELLRAISER movie concept, but without question, Pinhead of the movies is far more famous than his prose predecessor, much less this 2015 version. The first HELLRAISER is indubitably Barker's best venture into cinema, just on the strength of his interbreeding between Hell's standard association with suffering and the new idea of demons informed by sadomasochistic obsessions. But I also admired how HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II-- an original story not derived from a Barker story-- created a Hell with a much more impressive visual appearance. Barker may not have wanted to emulate that approach for either legal reasons, aesthetic reasons, or a little of both. But his Hell is utterly routine and visually unimpressive. 

On my movie-blog I've reviewed all eight of the HELLRAISER movies starring Doug Bradley as Pinhead. While only the first two films are better than average, all of them contribute to a fairly consistent cosmos in which Pinhead only intrudes on reality under special conditions and depends on tempting mortals in approved Satanic style. Barker doesn't abide by any particular rules in his book, much less having any deeper appreciation of the deeper myths informing Hell and, by extension, the rest of the Judeo-Christian cosmos. So his idea of a new Gospel is more like a heresy against the superior iconicity of the cinematic HELLRAISER. 

THE READING RHEUM: LIGHT IN AUGUST (1932)

So they looked at the fire with that same dull and static amaze which they had brought down from the old fetid caves where knowing began, as though, like death, they had never seen fire before.

LIGHT IN AUGUST is definitely the most singular "Christmas" story I've reviewed on this blog, being that it's a highly ironic parody of the story of Jesus Christ set in the rural American South of the 1930s. Despite the fact that the novel is entirely isophenomenal, Faulkner constantly refers to interior states of mind that, like the quote above, suggest some primeval ethos that predates not only the racial matrices of the South but of organized religion as such. LIGHT is also a mystery loosely in the vein of the detective fiction that was becoming a major American genre in the 1930s, but the "mystery" Faulkner aspires to solve relates to the nature of human identity, more in keeping with the "mystery plays" of medieval European Christianity.    

The narratives of three principal characters intertwine to give LIGHT its mythopoeic structure, though many of the supporting characters are no less mythic. One is defrocked Christian minister Gail Hightower, who resides in the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi and who lives a lonely existence isolated from the other citizens, aside from one confidante. The other two main figures are relative newcomers to Jefferson. One is the very pregnant hillbilly girl Lena Grove, who has hitchhiked from her home in Alabama, looking for Lucas Burch, the man who knocked her up. The other is the main target of Faulkner's Christological parody, petty criminal Joe Christmas (note the initials), who is also the vehicle of the author's views on the simmering racial matrix of American culture, mostly that of the South though not without some trenchant commentary on the Northern states as well.     

In a use of coincidence that most genre-mysteries would scorn, Lena finds her way to Jefferson by asking passersby if anyone has encountered her not-yet-husband Lucas Burch. Someone tells her to seek a "Burch" working in Jefferson, but the speaker is thinking of a man with a similar last name, Byron Bunch (the minister's one Jefferson confidante), who in most ways is the ethical opposite of Lucas Burch. The coincidental part is that Lucas Burch truly is working in Jefferson as well, but under the assumed name of Joe Brown, possibly to avoid Lena or anyone tracking him down. Burch/Brown has been in Jefferson to enter into a partnership with Joe Christmas, who runs a covert bootlegging operation there.  

Whereas the Jesus Christ of scripture was always sure of his divine parentage no matter what any mortal thought, Joe Christmas was raised an orphan and accused of being half-Black. The reasons behind this accusation constitute a secondary mystery, but the main mystery concerns the apparent murder of a Jefferson citizen, rich Joanna Burden, the spinster daughter of a Yankee abolitionist family. Burden allows Christmas and Brown to dwell on her land because she's carrying on a secret affair with Christmas. When she's killed and her house burned, Brown makes public the rumors of Christmas's racial heritage, the better to enflame the public against the fugitive-- less for his having killed a rich abolitionist than for having slept with a white woman. Further, in the last third of the novel supporting character Epheus Hines reveals his part in the evolution of Christmas' situation, in a development so entangled as to make GREAT EXPECTATIONS seem straightforward.

There are far too many symbolic complexities in LIGHT to explore in a blogpost, far more than one would ever find in a simple novel about racial justice. Faulkner compares Southern Whites' constant persecution of the Negro race with the sufferings of the Christian savior, even though the likeness is ironic given that Joe Christmas is anything but saintly. For Faulkner it's only a small step between societal scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, and Christmas-- whose mixed heritage is never definitively proven-- suffers a martrydom that deeply impresses those who lynch him, as Christmas "seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever." And yet, as noted earlier Faulkner sees the same scapegoating process in the Christianity of the allegedly more liberal North. One of Joanna Burden's ancestors speaks the following convoluted rant about the intertwined destiny of Whites and Blacks in the New World:

The curse of the black race is God's curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God's chosen because He once cursed Him.

Faulkner leaves this skein tangled, probably because he believes that it represented the confusion of sentiments in American religion. Is the speaker comparing American Blacks to the Bible's "chosen people," the eternally persecuted Jews? Or is "the black man" of the passage comparable to the name Puritan settlers used for Satan, also "The Black Man"-- and if so, is the curse of God (the first "He") the curse that hurled "Him" (Satan/Lucifer) into perdition? Or does the speaker have in mind some muddled notion of the Biblical Curse of Ham by God's prophet Noah, a curse which originally had nothing to do with African Blacks but which was used to justify the subjugation of Black slaves?

And this fraction of Faulknerian analysis doesn't even touch on the author's view of the multitudinous conflicts of male and female natures, which could engender a separate post or two by itself. I'm also skipping most of the details on Gail Hightower and Lena Groves, though as one might expect, nativity myths are implicitly invoked with respect to Lena, with naive Byron Bunch standing in for "cuckolded" Joseph.      

Of the many mythopoeic prose novels out there, literary or otherwise, LIGHT IN AUGUST is one of the densest and most rewarding. It doesn't beat out the champion, Melville's MOBY DICK, but even Herman's own BILLY BUDD looks rather simple next to this Faulkner masterpiece.

                 

MY THOUGHTS ON CLIVE BARKER

 I could write overall evaluations of a lot of writers given that I've read all or most of their repertoires. But I can't do more than make general comments about English horror-writer Clive Barker. I'm currently about to finish SCARLET GOSPELS, which I'll review separately, but what I have finished didn't impress me much-- the 1985 DAMNATION GAME and the 1988 CABAL (reviewed here) and one of his short story collections. I certainly didn't feel that he was "the future of horror" as Stephen King fulsomely claimed decades ago.        

At first, I thought the only thing I didn't like about Barker was that I found most of his characters superficial. Yet I've enjoyed a lot of authors who aren't particularly good at characterization and who depend mostly on "types." But reading GOSPELS makes me realize that a lot of my problems with Barker depend on his heavy dependence on projecting his oft declared S&M fetish into his fiction. This would not be a problem if he was able to make his characters come alive, to sound as if each of them has specific motivations. But without a sense of individual character, Barker's constant barrage of hyperviolence and (usually gay) sexuality becomes wearying and takes me out of his stories. True, I sometimes have the same reaction to the works of Sade, the author whose name begat the term "sadism." But whenever I enter Sade's world, I know in advance that sex-and-violence scenarios are pretty much all he offers.                 

In my review of the last firm that Barker both wrote and directed, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, I remarked that the Barker stories I've read don't "hold together" because of his lack of ability to empathize with the world of ordinary people, in contrast to the occult demimonde in which his characters move. I have not read the story Barker used as the source of his movie HELLRAISER, but I note that in the movie Barker did an admirable job of showing how the ordinary folks Kirsty and her father get trapped in the bizarre domain of the Cenobites and their votaries. Yet Barker also scores fairly low in the realm of imaginative play when he's not depicting his sadism scenes, as the version of Hell he depicts in GOSPELS is not nearly as interesting as the one in the HELLRAISER sequel that was given to two other raconteurs, Tony Randel and Peter Atkins.                        

In conclusion, there's some irony that Barker is just as hemmed-in by his dependence on his demimonde tropes as a more conservative creator-- say, Frank Capra-- might be by his concentration on tropes of middle-class life. The moral of the story might then be, as Captain Kirk sagely said, that "too much of anything isn't necessarily a good thing."                                           

COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL

The overall conclusion of last month's EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series was my affirmation that the elements of "play for play's sake" in literature were largely immune from accusations of "bad influence," while elements of "play for work's sake," which encourage audiences to take a particular real-world action, could be either a good or bad influence. In Part 2, in order to get across a distinction between types of literary evil, I cited this passage from Bataille:

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Now, I also said in Part 2 that "Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature..." Yet even though I've specified that Bataille was not offering a general non-literary definition of evil, his statement deserves some consideration as it might apply to all human experience, both "common and uncommon."

Take the proposition: "If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it." I see why Bataille would use the term "purely evil" for a literary reflection of a human action, but the statement is dubious at best regarding common human experience. The Menendez Brothers killed their parents, but the killers' act of gratuitously taking life does not in itself become less evil if informed only by self-interest. If anything, I would guess that the majority of human beings are most often victimized by acts of evil stemming from self-interest without any particular intent to inflict suffering for the criminal's Sadean pleasure. Grifts and robberies are some of the most common experiences that the average law-abiding adult copes with, and that's without even getting into the political realm, where legislators may commit evil acts as a result of "good intentions."  

With the possible exception of the crucible of middle school and high school, where many immature students indulge in overt sadism to gain the approbation of like-minded peers, most "First World" citizens at least aren't often subjected to any Sade-like forms of evil. Consider how absurd it sounds when the speaker in the following comics-panel prates about the "purity" of killing a victim for no reason.

Of course, this sort of purity does exist in the "uncommon" world of literature, and author Michael O'Donoghue is having fun with the notion that poor, imperiled Phoebe Zeitgeist is trapped in a world where no one who oppresses her is motivated by the "lackluster treadmill of goal-oriented drives." Thomas Hobbes may have distinguished between human motivations of gain and reputation. But when he also popularized the phrase "the war of all against all" to sum up the human condition, most persons involved in that war are worried about people with "goal-oriented drives" like theft, not about chimerical acts of gratuitous cruelty. And sometimes the "thieves" are protecting their own lookout, as with the doctor who makes a mistake in treating a patient and then fails to confess his wrongdoing because it would put him at a financial disadvantage.

Given that so much human evil in common experience is depressingly banal, I think it fair to state that self-interest causes more needless suffering than sadism ever has. Of course, in literature both forms of evil are "good" (as per my earlier essay title) because they are necessary to establish conflict and thus make storytelling possible. But it's peculiar that Bataille downplayed the evils of self-interest in the above quote. I've frequently cited him for his insights on the dynamic of work and play, where work is always oriented on achieving real-world goals, and play exists for its own sake, achieving nothing purposeful with its activity. It would be one thing to say that the Evils of Sadism trump the Evils of Self-Interest within the sphere of literature, because there, a fictional sadist like Heathcliffe or Hannibal Lecter knows how to play "the game of sadism" far better than even real sadists like Ted Bundy. But in this quote, Bataille is unusually generous toward the sins of the self-interested, of "goal-oriented drives"-- especially since it might be fairly said that indifference to the suffering of others is just the other side of the coin from reveling in said suffering.

CURIOSITIES #40: WONDER WOMAN'S "NEW GOLDEN AGE"

 

In WONDER WOMAN #156 (1965), editor/writer Robert Kanigher endeavored to goose sales by announcing a "New Golden Age" for the heroine. This brief reboot of the low-rated WW series only lasted about eight more issues, in which the words "Golden Age" would often be used on covers or splash pages. Kanigher revived a smattering of villains introduced by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s, and he even had his regular artists, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, emulate the drawing-style of the feature's original artist H.G. Peter. Once sales came in, probably indicating little if any improvement, Kanigher and the artists largely went back to what they'd been doing on the title in years previous.

One might think that Kanigher, who was himself a graduate of the Golden Age hard-knocks school, might have been able to capture something of the resonance of the Marston series. Indeed, for some years after Marston's passing, Kanigher even wrote scripts for Peter before DC gave the older artist his walking-papers. Since I haven't read every Kanigher WW script from his run of twenty-plus years, I can't make a decisive statement about why the feature began to lose readers over time, and I can't even say when the decline began. But my considered opinion is that Kanigher generally imitated the daffier aspects of Marston's scripts-- things like having Amazons riding kangaroos-- but he couldn't deliver on the heartfelt meaning that Moulton conveyed in his scripts. I'm not saying that any of Moulton's 1940s readers were necessarily converted to his unique feminist philosophy, or even that those readers understood what Moulton was talking about. But young readers are often attracted by the sense of an author's conviction in his principles, as long as he makes those principles into good stories. That's something Moulton was often able to do, in contrast to the modern generation of Progressive political comics-writers.

In summation, I think Kanigher looked around at the sales success of other DC revivals of Golden Age characters-- one of whom, THE FLASH, Kanigher had written at the dawn of the Silver Age, circa 1956. But the FLASH stories produced by dominant writer John Broome did possess a strong conviction in the types of science fiction and fantasy appropriate to juvenile audiences. In contrast, Kanigher writing a WW script in 1965 wasn't much different than a WW script in 1956: almost non-stop wackiness with a small moral sop tossed in. Kanigher looked at the success of some (though not all) of the Julius Schwartz line of DC magazines, and he thought all one had to do was mindlessly emulate the outward form of Golden Age stories-- which was exactly what the Schwartz line did NOT do. It's at least of passing interest that 1965 was the same year as the first full comic-book convention in New York, which is probably why Kanigher worked in a lot of references to the comic-collecting hobby in #156.

BTW, the fact that I have no comments on the featured "novel," "Brain Pirate of the Inner World," should be enough to signify my opinion of it.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE TALE OF THE CLAWS OF ATHENS" (UNICO, 1978?)

I copied these scans from a 2013 edition of the eight stories Osamu Tezuka completed for his series UNICO, about a hapless little unicorn consigned to travel from era to era, where he solves the problems of innocents like himself. Without further information, I assume that the translated stories are unaltered from the 1976-79 originals, aside from translation choices and the addition of color. 

While I've reviewed some of Tezuka's more ambitious works here, UNICO is a serial devoted to one overarching plotline that loosely unites eight done-in-one stories. Of those stories, only one satisfies my criteria for a mythcomic, so I'll devote most of my critique to the tale with the odd title CLAWS OF ATHENS.

The structure of the series slightly resembles the American show THE TIME TUNNEL, in which the protagonists were thrust into a new environment in every episode. Venus, the Greek goddess of love, resents the way the locals value the younger deity Psyche over her, and Psyche thinks that Psyche's power stems from having a pet unicorn, Unico. Venus calls upon the West Wind, telling the spirit to transport the young unicorn to another era, where Psyche can never find her pet. In whatever era Unico appears, he loses his memory of all past events, recollecting only his name and the fact that his magical powers are enhanced whenever someone shows Unico kindness and/or love. And every time Unico finishes helping some marginalized person-- or trying to, at least-- the West Wind shows up and transports the unicorn to his next adventure. Only in the last one is suggested that Unico may be able to be reunited with Psyche.

CLAWS is interesting in that though it invokes the story of the Sphinx and her riddle, almost nothing about the associated Oedipus narrative proves important. Unico gets deposited in a desert where the Sphinx dwells. (Possibly Tezuka was thinking more about the Thebes in Egypt than the one where the Sophocles play transpires.) The monstrous female tries to subject the amnesia-stricken child to questions, but the exhausted Unico simply collapses. The Sphinx interprets this failure as her victory and takes the unicorn to her lair to feed to her only offspring, Piro. 

Piro doesn't care for meat and lets Unico go. However, Unico gets turned around in the desert and ends up back at the lair. The unicorn learns that in his absence, the sage Oedipus accepted the Sphinx's challenge. He correctly guessed the answer to the riddle and used the wish he won to slay the Sphinx. (In some Greek stories the monster kills itself, but apparently there are variants wherein Oedipus does the dirty deed.) On the verge of death, the Sphinx asks Unico to help Piro become a healthy, powerful Sphinx.

Oedipus is mentioned in passing once more, but CLAWS is all about Piro's pedagogical journey, the "claws" symbolizing the young monster's ability to be aggressive. Unico, despite his own youth, is a pretty severe taskmaster, but Piro is dilatory and self-indulgent. 

Then we finally learn why Tezuka worked in a reference to Athens, because the bulk of the story from then on is a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. We never see Athens itself, only "Athens Forest," where the elf queen Titania reigns with her husband Oberon. Titania wants to make Piro her pet, and when Unico puts his spade in, the queen gets her henchman Puck to trap the busybody unicorn. With Unico out of the way, Piro gives in to his worst instincts, inflated with self-importance.

Even while Unico is out of the picture, though, Oberon meets Piro and gives the Sphinx the same message Unico, telling him to "make yourself stronger." Humiliated, Piro tells Titania that he wants to leave, and she places on him the curse of Bottom in the Bard's play: making an ass of him. Oberon, tired of his wife's high-handed ways, gets into a fight with her. Meanwhile, ass-Piro seeks out Unico. Unico tells him to fetch an axe from a nearby mortal's cabin, but not to touch anything else. Once again Piro's self-indulgence gets the better of him; he filches some of the mortal's food gets captured and sold to a donkey-skinner.

Unico makes a deal with Puck, and the elf frees the unicorn. However, before they can find Piro, the West Wind obeys one of Venus' chimerical orders and comes to transport Unico to another realm. To the unicorn's good fortune, night is about to fall, and the Night Wind's power trumps that of the West Wind.

Puck gets the ides to run an impersonation scam on Oberon, so that he'll cancel out Titania's spell. Much Midsummer's tomfoolery ensues, but Titania finally removes the spell. Restored to Sphinx-hood, Piro finally stands up for himself against a pack of savage dogs. Having at last honored the wishes of his mother, Piro also plans to build a great statue to her-- but then the West Wind returns and spirits Unico away to his next exploit.

The rest of the stories in the collection are all good melodrama, but CLAWS is the only one where Tezuka manages to work a good epistemological pattern into his very eclectic approach to three unrelated narratives.

NEAR-MYTHS: "EUSTACE THE TURKEY" (THE SPIRIT, 1943)

I'm aware of no fully mythic Thanksgiving stories. But Will Eisner managed a cute near-myth with a tale of a turkey who is seemingly spared his grisly holiday fate, but who ends up sacrificing his life to save his fellow birds (sort of). Strangely, Eisner does not make the predictable comparison to the Nazarene, but to-- that gloomy Dane, Hamlet?

Just for good measure, here's a bit from GIGGLE COMICS in which an endangered turkey pleads for the main cat-hero to become his "Lincoln."