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 have *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 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.       

                  

MYTHCOMICS: "THE (SECOND) ORIGIN OF THE CHEETAH" (1944)

 'density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."'  -- GOOD WILL QUANTUMS 

Thanks to my acquisition of IDW's collection of the complete run of the 1944-45 WONDER WOMAN newspaper strip, I found a good example of a prominent author-- i.e., William Moulton Marston  -- taking a second shot at an early story and infusing it with greater density. 

Though Marston put a lot of (shall we say) mature content into the Golden Age WONDER WOMAN comic book, often the creator of the Amazon heroine tended to write down to his audience in terms of plotting. This was true of most raconteurs of the era: they assumed kids who bought comics just wanted as many marvels to gawk at as possible. But Marston took a different tack with the newspaper strip. He knew there was at least a chance of reaching an adult audience-- a chance eliminated by the strip's cancellation-- so in many cases he dialed down the sheer quantity of wild inventions. And in the case of his rewrite of the 1943 comics-story "Wonder Woman and the Cheetah," he upgraded a story with only fair mythicity into an exemplar of good myth. Unfortunately, there are almost no free scans of the newspaper strip available online. Thus I'm flung back to my practices during this blog's early days: depending on textual description with minimal illustration, partly taken from the 1943 story.

In the original CB story, Marston starts out by having Wonder Woman show off her prowess at a stateside benefit. However, she doesn't show up on time, and the chairman of the relief fund tries to placate the anxious audience by introducing debutante Priscilla Rich. This only exacerbates the audience's fervor to see the Amazon, and there's just one panel devoted to Priscilla being slightly miffed that the audience ignores her. Then Diana Prince shows up on stage, demonstrates her inability to move a heavy piano, and then cedes the stage to her powerful alter ego.

But in the CS version, Marston takes a more layered approach to introducing Priscilla. In a sequence that took up two weeks of daily strips, Priscilla shows up at the office of General Darnell, barges past his secretary Diana, and asks the officer to put her in contact with Wonder Woman, to ask her to appear at the benefit. This establishes a slight animosity between Priscilla and the heroine, but Wonder Woman quickly shows up and agrees to appear. However, on the night of the benefit, Diana Prince goes out dancing with Steve Trevor and just happens to forget her commitment. Thus, not only is Priscilla personally embarrassed by the absence of the special guest, Marston subjects the upper-class woman to more humiliation. She tries to placate the audience by performing "The Death of the Swan" with her balletic skills, but she earns only catcalls. Then the heroine shows up, curiously in both her guises, and satisfies the audience's desires.

 In the CB story, Wonder Woman proposes a second stunt-- apparently one she arranged with the relief effort in advance-- which involves her being chained and submerged in a tank. CB Priscilla, for no reason, decides to bind WW with her own magic lasso, making the heroine's escape more difficult. But in the CS story, Priscilla does have a reason to resent WW for her superior popularity. 

In both versions, Wonder Woman escapes despite the added difficulty, and Priscilla pretends she didn't mean to endanger the Amazon's life. In the CB version, Priscilla is merely miffed because the heroine goes to dinner with the benefit chairman, though there's no real indication that Priscilla cares about him in a romantic sense. Out of nowhere, the rich girl simply looks into a mirror in her room at home and her "evil self" manifests in the mirror. There's no particular reason for Imaginary Evil Priscilla to wear a cheetah-costume, except that there happens to be a cheetah-rug in the room, and Evil Priscilla tells Normal Priscilla to make it into a costume.

The CS version is much more psychologically compelling. After WW breaks free, she lets Priscilla off the hook, but Steve Trevor and a half-dozen other people accuse the girl of attempted murder. This sort of attention Priscilla did not want, and she flees, thinking, "Everybody adores Wonder Woman and hates me... I feel so low, so inferior!" She hides in a theatrical prop room, and there she encounters the dummy of a woman in a cheetah-costume. In this arrangement, Marston juxtaposed Priscilla's desire to escape her inferior feelings with her discovery of the dummy, and thus a more believable symbol-association is made, whereon she again imagines herself talking to her evil self, convincing her to become a costumed criminal.

In the 1943 story, Cheetah steals the benefit money and tries to improbably frame both the chairman and Wonder Woman for the crime. Since Priscilla doesn't really care about the chairman, the next five pages of the cops arresting the accused are nothing but filler. However, the 1944 continuity has Cheetah set fire to the theater-- which arguably involves her taking vengeance upon the audience that rejected her. In the former tale, Cheetah lures the heroine into a death-trap, while in the latter, the villainess captures the Holiday Girls, friends of her nemesis, which amounts to a more personal attack. 

In the CB, Marston then devotes two separate sections to Cheetah finding new ways to assail Wonder Woman. One involves using a beauty salon and a mind-reader to learn military secrets, which leads WW into a tangential battle with Japanese troops in the Pacific. In the final section, WW gets involved with training female soldiers on Paradise Island, and Cheetah infiltrates the program. There are several moments in which the villainess continues to express the hatred of all Amazons for their athletic superiority, but this twist means that Cheetah is no longer specifically focused on her star-spangled nemesis. She steals the magic girdle of Aphrodite, which empowers her to battle WW on her super-strong level, but she's defeated and consigned to an Amazon reformatory. The first section of the 1943 tale garners at least fair mythicity, but I'd probably rate both of these sections as poor, being just a collection of random incidents.

As for the remainder of the CS story, Cheetah imprisons all the Holliday Girls at her mansion and subjects them to various humiliations (with copious bondage of course). Cheetah also lures WW to the mansion, and despite various upsets, finally binds WW with her own lasso and forces her to make an Amazon "shocking-machine." This device (admittedly the most ludicrous item in the story) brings out the "subconscious personalities" of the Holliday Girls in a manner supposedly analogous to the way Cheetah was born, though in the case of the Hollidays, they actually become anthropomorphic animals. (Etta Candy naturally becomes a pig-girl.) WW finally defeats Cheetah and restores the girls to normal. However, when Priscilla is arraigned at trial, WW's personal lie-detector, the lasso, can't prove that the rich woman's the Cheetah, because in the Priscilla ID she no longer remembers being a super-villain. And so ends the career of Comic-Strip Cheetah, as Priscilla is sent to an asylum for examination. Obviously, it was Comic Book Cheetah who became an enduring opponent for the Amazon Princess, but the "Second Origin" provides an interesting example of a revision being more symbolically complex than the original, which is generally not the norm.  

      

                  

 
                                                            

THE READING RHEUM: BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1785)

 I gave this oddball quasi-novel a second read after having buzzed through it years ago. I tried this time to take notes about some of the highlights in this very episodic conglomeration of tall tales, but they all read about the same and there's no unity between them. Since there is not, I'll start out by listing a few episodes that stood out for me in a creative sense.

Many of the incidents in the novel feel like callbacks to the once popular "travelers' tales," of which the 13th century "Mandeville's Travels" is representative. Like ancient authors such as Pliny and Herodotus, Mandeville mixed genuine historiography with all sorts of bizarre, supposedly real marvels. Here's author Raspe using his narrator, his fictionalized version of the real Baron Munchausen, making up crap about things he saw in Antarctica.

We had not proceeded thus many weeks, advancing with incredible fatigue
by continual towing, when we fell in with a fleet of Negro-men, as they
call them. These wretches, I must inform you, my dear friends, had found
means to make prizes of those vessels from some Europeans upon the coast
of Guinea, and tasting the sweets of luxury, had formed colonies in
several new discovered islands near the South Pole, where they had a
variety of plantations of such matters as would only grow in the coldest
climates. As the black inhabitants of Guinea were unsuited to the
climate and excessive cold of the country, they formed the diabolical
project of getting Christian slaves to work for them. For this purpose
they sent vessels every year to the coast of Scotland, the northern
parts of Ireland, and Wales, and were even sometimes seen off the coast
of Cornwall. And having purchased, or entrapped by fraud or violence,
a great number of men, women, and children, they proceeded with their
cargoes of human flesh to the other end of the world, and sold them to
their planters, where they were flogged into obedience, and made to work
like horses all the rest of their lives.

This is of particular literary interest since the peculiar trope of "Black People in Antarctica" proves of inestimable importance to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."      

And here's a crossover I certainly didn't remember from the earlier reading. 

I proceeded with the same retinue that I had before--Sphinx,
Gog and Magog, &c., and advanced along the bridge, lined on each side
with rows of trees, adorned with festoons of various flowers, and
illuminated with coloured lights. We advanced at a great rate along the
bridge, which was so very extensive that we could scarcely perceive the
ascent, but proceeded insensibly until we arrived on the centre of the
arch. The view from thence was glorious beyond conception; 'twas divine
to look down on the kingdoms and seas and islands under us. Africa
seemed in general of a tawny brownish colour, burned up by the sun:
Spain seemed more inclining to a yellow, on account of some fields of
corn scattered over the kingdom; France appeared more inclining to a
bright straw-colour, intermixed with green; and England appeared covered
with the most beautiful verdure. I admired the appearance of the Baltic
Sea, which evidently seemed to have been introduced between those
countries by the sudden splitting of the land, and that originally
Sweden was united to the western coast of Denmark; in short, the whole
interstice of the Gulf of Finland had no being, until these
countries, by mutual consent, separated from one another. Such were my
philosophical meditations as I advanced, when I observed a man in armour
with a tremendous spear or lance, and mounted upon a steed, advancing
against me. I soon discovered by a telescope that it could be no other
than Don Quixote, and promised myself much amusement in the encounter.

Cervantes would turn over in his grave. But maybe he deserved a little static, since DON QUIXOTE's greatest feat in the literary world was to kill off the chivalric romance-- albeit only temporarily, since Walter Scott brought the genre back to life in the 1800s. My main interest, one might anticipate, is to ask how relevant the tale-telling Baron is to the superhero idiom, given that he performs feats like this one:

Having made a track with my chariot from sea to sea, I ordered my Turks
and Russians to begin, and in a few hours we had the pleasure of seeing
a fleet of British East Indiamen in full sail through the canal. The
officers of this fleet were very polite, and paid me every applause and
congratulation my exploits could merit. They told me of their affairs in
India, and the ferocity of that dreadful warrior, Tippoo Sahib, on which
I resolved to go to India and encounter the tyrant. I travelled down the
Red Sea to Madras, and at the head of a few Sepoys and Europeans pursued
the flying army of Tippoo to the gates of Seringapatam. I challenged him
to mortal combat, and, mounted on my steed, rode up to the walls of the
fortress amidst a storm of shells and cannon-balls. As fast as the bombs
and cannon-balls came upon me, I caught them in my hands like so
many pebbles, and throwing them against the fortress, demolished the
strongest ramparts of the place. I took my mark so direct, that whenever
I aimed a cannon-ball or a shell at any person on the ramparts I was
sure to hit him: and one time perceiving a tremendous piece of artillery
pointed against me, and knowing the ball must be so great it would
certainly stun me, I took a small cannon-ball, and just as I perceived
the engineer going to order them to fire, and opening his mouth to give
the word of command, I took aim and drove my ball precisely down his
throat.

Now, one reason MUNCHAUSEN is not a combative work is because it varies too much between occasional combative scenes like this one and incidents where Munchausen is just (say) standing around describing the giants of (his version of) Swift's Brobdingnag. This stands in contrast to at least two of the feature films that adapted Raspe, the 1943 MUNCHAUSEN (an excellent fantasy movie tainted by having been released under the aegis of Nazi Germany) and Terry Gilliam's ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN-- both of which imposed some comparatively greater degree of unity on Raspe's wild imaginings.

But though I don't have a problem with viewing those two Barons as combative heroes, there's a second reason I don't think Raspe's original character qualifies to be included in the superhero idiom. The diegesis doesn't actually state outright that Munchausen is relating a bunch of tall tales, but it's perhaps implicit, because the Baron's world is just as mutable as his abilities. The book, for instance, starts out by having Munchausen claim that he witnessed how a great storm uprooted several trees, which flew into the air, and which fell to earth when the storm passed. But one tree in particular harbored a man and his wife who happened to be picking cucumbers at the time the storm hit, and when their tree falls to the ground, it happens to crush a local tyrant, after which the couple become the realm's new rulers.

This sort of "anything for a laugh" aesthetic fits Bugs Bunny more than Superman. Even some of the Baron's feats anticipate animated cartoons. When the Baron is attacked by a wolf and has to stave the critter off by jamming his arm into its open mouth, he solves the problem by-- pulling the wolf inside-out! 

Summing up, I don't think the superhero idiom works if the characters involved don't have some sort of limits, however variable they might be. Nothing's at stake for the hero without those limits, and so Raspe's wacky Baron doesn't even belong in the same company as funny-animal superheroes like Mighty Mouse-- who at least takes a hit once in a while-- but rather with Bugs, Porky, and all those zombies.      

     

INNOCENT SADISTS, BROADLY PT. 2

 I'm reasonably sure that I've only used my term "innocent sadist" for fictional characters who commit sadistic acts, or express sadistic sentiments, while giving the impression that they are innocent of sadistic intentions. All of my earlier examples, both in earlier essays, in the two recent THYMOS BE DE PLACE essays, and in the previous INNOCENT SADISTS installment, have concerned characters in slapstick comedies. A couple of counter-examples, Sakura and Hatta Mari, committed their violent acts for reasons I judged be epithymotic, and thus not true sadism. I also noted that Kelly Bundy did not initially conform to the "innocent sadist" trope but eventually developed to become one, so that the majority of her acts were thymotic in that she either explicitly or implicitly took pleasure in their damaging results.

However, there are other forms of innocent sadist, and the one I'll address here might be termed the traumatized psycho-killer, who may have started out as an innocent but who is changed by trauma into a murderer, either for epithymotic or thymotic reasons.

The 1964 STRAIT JACKET provides an example of the epithymotic type. Murderess Carol Harbin appears to have suffered childhood trauma as a child, when her mother Lucy murdered both her unfaithful husband/Carol's father and the husband's lover. Years later, after Lucy is released from an asylum, Carol sets plans to get revenge on Lucy by making her appear to have committed new murders, but in such a way that one of the victims is her fiancee's mother, thus ending the mother's opposition to Carol's marriage to her rich suitor. In my review I acknowledged some ambivaence in STRAIT JACKET's script, asking, "is Carol really acting for sheer gain, or is she recapitulating these images as a sort of repetition-compulsion?" At present, though, since there's no indication that Carol would have gone through so much trouble to execute serial murders just in order to frame her mother, I'd say that gain was a primary motive for her repetitious murder-rampage, though her early trauma predisposed her toward crime.

 With the titular character of the 1981 OLIVIA, we see a psycho-killer more informed by a need for thymotic satisfaction-- and, oddly enough, her need takes the form of both an "accommodation narrative" and a "confrontation narrative" in one. As a child, Olivia witnesses her hooker-mother slain by a berserk customer, one who's apparently not caught and punished. Having been told by her mother to play the part of Rapunzel in the fairy tale, Adult Olivia finds her "prince" in an abusive husband, which suggests her trying to accommodate herself to a world where men have superior physical power over women. However, Olivia has an episode where she subconsciously dresses up as a prostitute, lures a john into a compromising position, and then confronts her buried demons by killing him for the actions of her mother's murderer. Olivia only does this once, and then happens to meet a "real prince," with whom she has a brief affair-- also a confrontation with the force of negative masculinity represented by both her mother's killer and her husband. The two men in Olivia's life contend, and both the husband and wife disappear in one way or another. The Real Prince eventually meets Olivia again, who has tried to lose herself in a second identity. But the evil prince comes back into Olivia's life too, and this time the victim of trauma gets the chance to extirpate at least one source of her anxieties. From the way the film cuts off after Olivia has her revenge, one might assume that this victim of trauma actually finds thymotic closure in murdering the right target this time and so doesn't go on to further killing-sprees like so many of her kindred. Of course, those that keep killing for satisfaction also fall into the thymotic category for the most part.                  

MOORE ON LOVECRAFT

 

Over the past few days I've been reading three intertwined Alan Moore comics he devoted to HP Lovecraft. Like the LEAGUE books different chapters occur in different eras. The first two, entitled THE COURTYARD and NEONOMICON, didn't strike me as very ambitious, being content to quote a lot of HPL names but not making much of a story out of them.

The third part, entitled PROVIDENCE, is much more venturesome, though at bottom I think it fails my acid test as far as incarnating its own literary myth. If one has read PROMETHEA, one will recognize Moore treating the mythology of Lovecraft as he treated Western occultism in the previous comic, trying to concoct a master narrative that unites a lot of different cultural/literary phenomena. In PROVIDENCE, he starts in 1919 with a Jewish author named Robert Blake (obviously named after for the protagonist of "Haunter in the Dark," who was in turn named for Robert Bloch). Moore has a theme much like PROMETHEA-- the nature of the real world's indebtedness to dreams and fictions-- only the fantasies of HPL, and a few fellow travelers, are the source of the breakdown between objective and subjective. Moore doesn't have Blake encounter the Usual Suspects like the Great Old Ones or the Innsmouth natives, but obscurities like The Terrible Old Man and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Is it good? Well, in the sense of holding my interest, yes. The art is very restrained, which sometimes works to enhance some of the ghastly horror-pieces. It's very talky, like PROMETHEA, but though I could see Moore's "voice" informing everything, I was interested to see how he handled both the mythology and its creator. I have seen Moore get rather smug and mannered when adapting characters he didn't like, as with James Bond in LEAGUE. However, he's generally fair to Lovecraft, who appears as a character in the story-- much fairer than the yutz who wrote LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. (That name pops up in the last couple issues of PROVIDENCE but I'm not sure Moore was referring to the bad novel or to some slang term that preceded the novel.) And since HPL played a lot of continuity games himself, Moore's extensions aren't objectionable on that level. But at times the daunting research Moore put into PROVIDENCE serves no purpose greater than spotting continuity-points, like some of Roy Thomas' more involved exercises. 

My verdict is that I can't give it my highest recommendation. But anyone who likes both HPL and Moore will probably like this.