NULL-MYTHS: SPIDER-MAN * THE HULK AT THE WINTER OLYMPICS (1980)

 Since I just reviewed CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS, I took a quick first-time look at the Marvel Treasury Edition that preceded it, #25, in which Spider-Man and the Hulk found themselves brought into a conflict centered around the Winter Olympics. 

It's an even more average story than CONTEST, with the same story-concept stemming from Steven Grant, Mark Gruenwald and Bill Mantlo, with Mantlo scripting dialogue and the always dependable Herb Trimpe supplying pencils. The two heroes are largely pawns in a war between two underground-dwelling villains, Queen Kala and the Mole Man, and the story, unlike a lot of the Treasury stories, is firmly in mainstream continuity, following up a story featuring both villains in the pages of the FANTASTIC FOUR. For good measure Mantlo also thrown in another Lee-Kirby creation, the subterranean Lava Men, as well as three real-life Olympic champions turned into super-powered combatants and a handful of mutant characters whom I don't think ever appeared again. So the crossover of Marvel's major down-under characters is the main feature of interest here.

NEAR MYTHS: CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS (1982)

I wondered if a review of this 1982 curiosity-- put together when Jim Shooter still ruled Marvel Comics with an iron editorial hand-- might be the first to show up on the Internet, at least by Google search. I didn't remember much talk about this three-issue mini-series on any of the boards I used to visit, even though it precedes the more famous mega-crossovers of 1986, Marvel's SECRET WARS and DC's CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. However, I did find one essay here, which articulated a few facts not present in the explanatory writeup furnished in issue #1 of the actual comic.

From the comic itself, I knew that writers Mark Gruenwald, Steven Grant and Bill Mantlo conceived the CONTEST storyline (with Mantlo alone credited with the dialogue). I did not know before reading the Science Fiction.com essay that the same threesome had authored a 1980 Marvel Treasury Edition which had Spider-Man fight the Hulk with the Winter Olympics as a background. For CONTEST this team brought together all, or nearly all, extant Marvel heroes for a contest that also would have been  Olympic-themed had the U.S. not withdrawn from 1980's Summer Olympics. This was at least one reason that the completed John Romita Jr. art for this planned Treasury Edition was shelved for a couple of years, until Marvel finally published it as a limited series in regular comics format-- albeit after many corrections to the art were made to bring it in line with 1982 continuity.

The most interesting thing about CONTEST from a contemporary POV is that John Romita Jr's art looks nothing like what readers expect of his work today. At this point in his career, Romita Jr.'s art didn't even look that much like that of his famous father. If only because of the need of stuffing dozens of heroes into one narrative, here he looks a lot like George Perez, particularly in this two-page crowd scene:

(Note: in the real Marvel Universe, Sub-Mariner would probably squash Ant-Man if the latter stood on his shoulder. And maybe the Werewolf, off to the far left, is relatively calm because his human half in control, though the script never says so.)

The art on average is just adequate, though it's still better than the Mike Zeck pencils on SECRET WARS-- though it's been rumored that Zeck was obliged to follow thumbnails from his scripter-and-boss Jim Shooter. I can see Shooter advocating such a project because he was aware that Marvel's strength was its shared-universe of long-underwear characters, and he may well have modeled SECRET WARS on this mini-series-- with one important difference.

In SECRET WARS, every character abducted to "Battleworld" has something to do, no matter how banal the actions might be. Here, nearly all the 1982 heroes are abducted to partake in a game played between two cosmic beings-- but of those dozens of heroes, only twenty-four are active participants. The two game-players, the Grandmaster and a mysterious entity revealed to be the Marvel incarnation of Death, decide that they will play four games with Earth superheroes with their pawns, pitting three of Grandmaster's choices against three of Death's in a treasure-hunting schtick. All of the other characters apparently just chill out in some bunker until the four games are done, and eventually everyone's allowed to go home.

The motive for the game is that the Grandmaster wants Death to revive his brother The Collector. Mantlo et al try to give this boring idea a twist at the end, but clearly the only real attraction of the story is the crossover aspect. And because Mantlo et al were modeling this selective conflict on the real-world Olympics, they created a bunch of newbie non-American heroes-- Australian, French, etc.-- who get heavily featured in the match-ups. I interpret this as the authors' awareness that the New X-Men's success was partly attributable to its multi-national makeup. However, to the best of my knowledge none of the newbies went on to great fame, at best showing up as guest-stars here and there-- so the writers didn't quite manage to tap into Marvel's new mythos of Superheroes, International Style. 

Though the story is routine and the characters deliver long expository lectures at the drop of a hat, Mantlo does keep the characterizations relatively consistent and even pens a few funny bits here and there. And for my purposes, CONTEST provides an apt illustration of my theory about the  difference between superordinate and subordinate ensembles. In other mega-crossovers that I've analyzed, I have to show how particular "starring" characters stand out from "supporting" characters. But in CONTEST, it's clear that only twenty-four characters comprise the serial's superordinate ensemble, while everyone else, no matter how winsomely Romita Jr draws them, is relegated to the subordinate bunker.

THE READING RHEUM: THE MAN OF BRONZE (1933)

 

One of the most interesting thing about Doc Savage's first novel is how much of the mythology was in place from the first. 

Naturally, I knew that author Lester Dent-- billed throughout the hero's pulp-magazine run as "Kenneth Robeson"-- established right away the backstory of Doc Savage and his "Fabulous Five" aides in basic nutshell-fashion, which "shells" he and other raconteurs would continue to re-use for most if not all subsequent stories. But I'm rather surprised to note that Dent articulated the idea of Doc's "Fortress of Solitude" in the first novel. In contrast to the use that DC's Superman made of the idea-- where the fortress was just sort of a "Superman museum"-- Dent's hero states that this refuge was "the secret of [Doc's] universal knowledge," because the hero needed intense "periods of concentration." One assumes that this concentration was the source of his polymath facility with all of the sciences, though a cynic might say that it was also a way of distancing himself from common humanity. 

BRONZE is also all about establishing the righteous quest of the six heroes, even if it's framed in somewhat juvenile terms, as Doc tells his men, "We first got together back in the War [i.e., World War One, though none of them ever seem old enough.] We all liked the big scrap. It got into our blood. When we got back, the humdrum life of an ordinary man was not suited to our natures." This account slightly skirts a separate motive, in which it's asserted that Doc's father, a rich philanthropist, subjected his son to intensive training in physical and mental development for the express purpose of having Doc become a world-beating do-gooder. In any case, at the beginning of BRONZE, Doc and his men learn that the senior Savage has been killed, thus giving the sextet a concrete case to investigate.

Not coincidentally, the solution to the elder Savage's murder also leads the six champions to an almost endless fortune in gold that funds Doc's endless supply of crimefighting toys. The heroes journey to Central America and find that their enemies are linked to a Mayan civilization that, in true Rider Haggard fashion, has remained intact and isolated from the vagaries of colonist incursions. Yet though that bald summary suggests that Doc and friends may take the form of "ugly Americans" joining in the colonial project, Doc himself is very outspoken about disagreeing with said project. 

It's a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage's land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of deal, you know.

When the good guys meet the Mayans, the natives are mostly well-bred and intelligent, including a sexy princess named Monja, who immediately falls for the unapproachable Doc Savage. The only exceptions are a corrupt warrior class who are behind various assassination attempts on Doc and friends, all with the long-range goal of taking control of the Mayan redoubt away from the rightful rulers. The villains are easily the weakest aspect of the novel, though it's an interesting sociological motif that Dent made ambitious professional warriors his bad guys, in marked contrast to the knightly purity of Doc's group. In the end, once the villains are defeated, the Mayan rulers become the de facto sponsors of Doc's war against evil. This sponsorship is certainly is a fate better than their getting annihilated just to make the hero look like a tough guy, which was a common fate for lost civilizations in thirties pop fiction, as seen in 1935's THE PHANTOM EMPIRE.

A minor surprise: I remember groaning when I watched a scene in the 1975 DOC SAVAGE film wherein Doc pays a sort of left-handed compliment to the beautiful female lead by telling her, "Mona-- you're a brick!" It was a corny line, but its derived from a scene in the book, where Doc says much the same thing to Monja. But it does have a little more psychological heft in prose. Doc is also a chaste knight who won't engage with the female sex to avoid threatening his mission, and since he's slightly aware of Monja's affections, he seeks to distance himself from the sexy young woman by treating her like one of the boys.

PRIME STATURE, DEPENDENT STATUS

In my review of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1930 novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, I mentioned that I was reluctant to call the book a crossover simply because the book includes one or two scenes in which new hero Tan Hadron interacts with the main hero of the first three Mars books, John Carter. 

There's no question that in this particular book, Hadron is the main, or Prime, character, while Carter, despite his having greater fame, has been demoted to a subordinate, or Sub, role. This was not by any means the first time Burroughs had employed this technique. In my review of the 1915 SON OF TARZAN, I pointed out that SON was the only book in the series not to star Tarzan, though the original ape man does get more scenes than John Carter does in FIGHTING MAN. But by the logic I asserted in A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 1, Tarzan's role in SON would have to be a crossover just because he does have a little "activity" in the novel. 

The idea of having one character appear just long enough to introduce a newer one has precedent in a film like the 1972 BLACULA. In this movie's opening scenes, the original Dracula is around for ten minutes or so at the outset, talking turkey with Prince Mamuwalde. Then the vampire decides to make the African prince into an undead creature, sticks the newly vampirized unfortunate into a tomb for the next seven decades, and even gives the neo-vamp a sarcastic version of Drac's iconic name. During the main action of the film, when Blacula revives in the early 1970s, the Count does not reappear, nor is he mentioned again. To the extent that any viewer thinks about the matter, said viewer probably assumes that the racist vamp gets knocked off some time before Blacula revives in 1972. But because Dracula is such a major fictional figure, BLACULA (but not SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM) is a crossover-- though again, a very low-charisma type, since the iconic vamp makes only a token appearance.

Nevertheless, in crossovers of such low charisma, I find myself compelled to speak of such crossovers as "stature-dependent." In other words, Blacula exists because of the stature of Dracula, and Korak exists because of the stature of Tarzan. And so it's easy to see the relatively obscure hero Tan Hadron as being "stature-dependent" on the greater repute of John Carter. But this dependent status, in contrast to crossover-status, would not necessarily depend on whether or not John Carter had any scenes in the new hero's novel. It's been a year since I re-read THUVIA MAID OF MARS, which I reviewed here, but I recorded that John Carter was entirely absent. Yet because the novel's male hero Carthoris was the son of Carter, obviously any fame he accrued was borrowed from his famous peer.

A different form of Prime Yet Dependent Stature can be viewed in some of the hero-groups I've called "Semi-Inclusive Ensembles" in CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 5. In this and other crossover-essays I mentioned that such ensembles were defined by their blending of both new and previously established characters into a new ensemble-franchise. Arguably the most famous example of this sort of franchise in comics history is the Silver Age AVENGERS. For fifteen issues, this series focused on heroes who either starred in ongoing serials (Thor, Iron Man) or who had been franchise-stars but didn't currently have a berth (The Hulk, Giant-Man and the Wasp, and Captain America). Then in issue #16, editor Stan Lee decided to push out almost all established stars, except for Captain America, who became the mentor to three "superhero trainees," Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.

Though I have not looked at sales figures, I would assume that AVENGERS sold decently after the change, since "Cap's Kooky Quartet" plugged on in this "semi-inclusive" mode for thirteen issues. When the lineup was changed, it was not to bring back relative heavy-hitters like Thor or Iron Man, but to provide a berth for failed franchise-heroes Giant-Man and Wasp (with the former getting a new cognomen, "Goliath.") Without belaboring the obvious, from then on THE AVENGERS continued to follow this model, sometimes cycling in "big name" heroes, sometimes playing up extreme obscurities like Doctor Druid.

This raises yet another wrinkle: since such characters as Hawkeye, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch had no stature prior to the Avengers, is their stature not also dependent upon being members of the super-group? Over time, the Scarlet Witch had a few more stabs at starring status, either by herself or in combination with the Vision, while neither Hawkeye nor Quicksilver ever enjoyed great fame as solo acts. Over time a number of heroes appeared in such semi-inclusive groups who would never have any stature outside such a group, and so they too would be even more "stature-dependent" than a protagonist who does later get a shot at a solo outing. 

In some cases semi-inclusive ensembles might even be used after the fashion of TV's "back door pilots." For three issues of THE INVADERS, writer Roy Thomas took the two juvenile members of the group, Bucky and Toro, and lined them up with two new similarly aged heroes, Golden Girl and the Human Top. The more famous members of the group-- Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner-- did appear in selected scenes within the story, but clearly these issues were meant to emphasize the new team. In a much later interview Thomas admitted that he created the Kid Commandos as a means to shuffle Bucky and Toro out of the group, since he didn't like having to cope with the teenaged characters. Yet for the space of three issues, the Kid Commandos do acquire at least a dependent form of stature. Yet because their group never became independent of the Invaders, they are best seen as an adjunct of the Invaders group.

Next to lastly, I used THUVIA MAID OF MARS as an example of a novel within the "John Carter series" even though Carter did not appear in it. Similarly, the DC comic GOTHAM CITY SIRENS teamed up three of Batman's femme-adversaries: Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn. Yet in the third issue of the series, the three of them barely appear, and writer Scott Lobdell focuses rather upon The Riddler as he tries to solve a serial killer case. A version of Batman-- actually Nightwing disguised as the Caped Crusader for continuity-reasons-- has like the Sirens a subordinate role in the story. If anyone behind this comic had some thoughts of giving the Riddler his own series as a quasi-hero, his "dependent stature" role here could have served as an adequate "pilot."

I might also add that "dependent stature" also attends to a lot of characters without their own serials who appear in discontinuous team-up titles like THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD and MARVEL TEAM-UP. Some of these characters included former villains, also discussed in A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 3, and some were characters who never stood a chance at getting a series, like the entirely forgettable "Bat-Squad" from BRAVE AND BOLD #92.

THE READING RHEUM: A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS (1930)

My main reason for delving into this Martian novel after finishing my survey of the first four last year was to assess its crossover potential. It is one of five books written from 1929-30 in which Edgar Rice Burroughs loosely linked some of his franchises, as I noted in my review of one such book, TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE:

AT THE EARTH'S CORE, like other books in the ERB canon, opens with the conceit that its narrative-- the story of how David Innes and his colleague Abner Perry found a huge primitive environment at the center of the earth-- is actually a true story related by Innes to Burroughs himself. However, for the crossover project ERB decided to create a fictional character, Jason Gridley, to serve as a linking element between his disparate fictional worlds. In two of crossover novels, radio-technician Gridley is just an onlooker. First, in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (the third in that series, and the first to center on a hero other than David Innes), Gridley uses his advanced radio to receive a transmission from Abner Perry, which tells the story of the titular Tanar and his adventure. Later, Gridley also receives a similar transmission from Mars, which allows him to relate the story of 1930's A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the seventh of the "Mars" series, but there too Gridley merely relays information. 

There were no surprises when I reread FIGHTING, in that the interlocutors Gridley and ERB only appear in an introductory scene. However, the story that Gridley receives from Mars is not related by the main hero of the story, but by an Earthman, Ulysses Paxton, who now lives on Mars and who had been the star of the fifth and sixth books in the series after ERB shunted John Carter off to one side. Paxton has no real role in the story, and one wonders why ERB didn't simply have Gridley talk with John Carter, since Carter has a very minimal involvement in the main story. Carter's appearance might also qualify FIGHTING as a low-stature crossover story, though I'm of two minds about this. I'll detail this ambivalence in a separate essay.

The aforesaid hero of the story is a native Red Martian, Tan Hadron of Hastor. (I've no idea if ERB was aware that H.P. Lovecraft had used the name "Hastor" for one of his elder gods, having borrowed that name from an Ambrose Bierce tale, but it seems more likely that ERB acquired the name from Bierce.) ERB always calls his hero "Hadron" as if he thought the hero's surname more impressive than "Tan,"  despite the first name's slight resemblance to "Tarzan." Hadron is a poor soldier in the capital city of Helium, and despite being the "fighting man" of the title, he's initially defined not by war but by love. Hadron loves above his station, courting a beautiful noblewoman, Sanoma Tora. Sanoma toys with the earnest young soldier but clearly wants to marry the richest of her suitors. Then mysterious intruders steal Sanoma from Helium, and the besotted Hadron finds a way to give pursuit.

The reader sees what Hadron will not; that Sanoma Tora is a treasure not worth seeking. However, Hadron's pursuit causes him to cross the path of Tavia, a runaway female slave wearing men's garb, causing Hadron to briefly mistake her for a boy. Tavia just happens to have come from Jahar, the Martian city to which Sanoma had been taken. Tavia explains to Hadron that both she and Sanoma were abducted by the emissaries of Jahar's monarch Tul Axtar, as were many, many other women taken to serve in the king's harem. Tavia remained a prisoner in Jahar several years, though to her good fortune Tul Axtar had so many women around that he just never noticed her. In fact, some of the local soldiers even trained Tavia in swordsmanship and in piloting Martian flight-ships. But when Tul Axtar sent for Tavia, she escaped. 

Hadron remains fixed on his quest, and because he saved Tavia from marauders she pledges her service to him as his slave. Her real reason, of course, is that she has immediately fallen in love with the impetuous warrior, though she does manage to talk him into trying to find other allies before storming the gates of Jahar. This gambit leads to the first of many misadventures for both Hadron and Tavia as they make their erratic course toward Jahar and the rescue of Sanoma Tora. One adventure takes Hadron and a new ally into the laboratory of mad scientist, who's invented a method to make airships invisible to detection. Though Hadron makes frequent use of one such ship throughout the story, he's morally opposed to the use of such deception and ends up destroying both the evil scientist (who aspires to control all of Mars) and the invisibility process. 

Eventually Hadron does find Sanoma Tora, but she ends up betraying him to Tul Axtar, because she thinks she may be able to become a queen in Jahar. During all of his exploits, Hadron becomes attached to Tavia but doesn't realize that he's falling in love with the martial maiden. Most readers will cut him a break on this lack of self-awareness, though other scenes tend to make Hadron look like one of ERB's stupider heroes. At one point he foolishly lets Tul Axtar steal the invisible airship, and Sanoma, who sees the theft coming, fails to warn the hero even though the evil king flies away, leaving both Hadron and Sanoma to the tender mercies of a furious mob. So maybe Hadron and Sanoma are about even in the brains department.

The deferred love-story between Hadron and Tavia is a little better than a lot of ERB's other formulaic romances, and FIGHTING provides a lot more lively action-scenes than many other Martian novels. Tavia is interesting in that ERB, an author who didn't favor martial heroines, even devotes a scene to the young woman defeating a couple of male adversaries. In fact, there's a very short mention late in the book that Tul Axtar has a cadre of female soldiers who exist to guard his harem. Nothing more is said about these harem-Amazons, who may have existed simply because ERB wouldn't have wanted to allude to the Middle Eastern custom of eunuchs. Maybe even the mention of dismasted guards would have been a little too spicy for ERB's perceived audience. But it's an interesting, possibly accidental parallel between Hadron and his kingly enemy, given that ERB hardly ever allowed any parallels between his relentlessly moral heroes and his generally decadent villains. 

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 3

 Another note on the topic of cosmic alignment...

I discussed more than a few western-related examples of alignment in the first essay in this series, and here I'll discuss a largely forgotten western with crossover aspects. 

In the first essay, I noted that a character like Doc Holliday became a "Sub" in at least one of his fictional re-creations, where he regularly assisted buddy Wyatt Earp in the 1950s TV show of the same name. Holliday seems to have only rarely garnered solo status as a Prime, an exception being the 1971 DOC, in which the dissolute former dentist was portrayed by Stacy Keach. I also mentioned that Holliday accrued Prime stature in a 1999 TV-movie, PURGATORY, though only by teaming up with three other deceased gunfighters.

Like Holliday and Billy the Kid, Jesse James has generated numerous innominate texts about his supposed career. One such is the 1960 B-western YOUNG JESSE JAMES, in which Jesse is re-imagined as a young hothead in the "juvenile delinquent" mode still popular during the period. The film resembles little about the real lives of the James Brothers or their allies the Youngers, except in stating that they all rode at one time or another with Quantrill's Raiders. The film shows Jesse gaining vengeance on a man who killed his father, after which he tries, not very successfully, to live a just life, only to be pulled back into outlawry. 

The subject of alignment applies particularly well to the way that all other members of the James-Younger gang became "Subs" to the "Prime" presence of Jesse (Ray Strickland), including older brother Frank, Major Quantrill, and all of the Younger Brothers. For whatever reason, most depictions of the two gangs tend to make Jesse James the center of attention, whatever the realities of history.

The most curious insertion, though, is that of Belle Starr (Merry Anders). The real "shady lady" had nothing to do with Jesse James, though a disproven story did circulate about her having married the uncle of Cole Younger. I'd conjecture that the story of that tenuous relationship was the reason the writer shoehorned Belle Starr into the story, though she only has a few scenes in which she gives the outlaws a haven and has a romantic interlude with Cole Younger himself. I can imagine that the movie-makers wanted a little extra sex appeal in the mix, if only for promotional ads, since there's one moment in which Jesse makes a pass at Belle and she slaps him down, calling him a "young colt." (Amusingly, Strickland was six years older than Anders.) So in my system, while Frank James and the Youngers are normally aligned to the story-cosmos that was Jesse James, Belle Starr was "out of alignment" with Jesse's cosmos, much like the interaction with the four gunfighters in the aforementioned PURGATORY are out of alignment with one another, not having been associated either in real history or in legend. Thus YOUNG JESSE JAMES would not be a crossover film if it had confined itself to subordinating the real associates of Real Jesse James to the narrative authority of Fictional Jesse. But Belle Starr's presence makes the film a crossover, however minor.

THE READING RHEUM: TORTURE GARDEN (1899)

For horror fans. the name "Torture Garden" calls to mind a 1967 film-anthology that adapted a bunch of unrelated Robert Bloch terror-tales. Even in 1967 I doubt many readers remembered the 1899 fin-de-siecle novel by French writer Octave Mirbeau. Thus I've no clue as to why any of the film's producers thought the title worth conjuring with for contemporary filmgoers, in contrast, say, to titles borrowed by Edgar Allan Poe. For my part, I'd read a few remarks about this 19th-century book in Mario Praz's study of transgressive literature, THE ROMANTIC AGONY. Yet I didn't really expect much of a story, so I didn't get round to reading GARDEN until now, though I'd had a second-hand copy lying around for over ten years.

My intuition was correct: Mirbeau's work is a nearly plotless meditation on the human fascination with diverse kinds of torture, structured much like a travelogue. There's not much question in my mind that Mirbeau was grappling with issues raised by the Grand Master of Literary Sadism, the Marquise de Sade, though Mirbeau's ambivalence to the topic makes unclear as to how much he was of Sade's party. The novel might be considered the last of the European decadent movement of the 19th century, and the fact that Europeans were still emulating Sade might be deemed a compliment of sorts, given that most of Sade's major works had been completed (if not always published) before the end of the previous century.

Sade's works are so fervid in their description of torture that they verge on falling into the domain of naturalistic horror, and even possibly even the uncanny variety at times. GARDEN, however, is too meandering to sustain a mood of horror, and despite some description of inventive tortures, Mirbeau's work is too reality-based to rise to an uncanny level of artifice.

So what's it about? After a framing-device in which several men debate morality in a French men's club, one man, whom I'll call NoName because he refuses to give one, tells the story that fills the rest of the novel, without ever coming back to the frame-story. He briefly describes himself as a young layabout who imposes on a friend and gets a sinecure to study biology in Ceylon, though he's not at all a biologist, and is really just scamming the system. 

There are assorted comments about torture before NoName tells his story, usually in the context of people talking about using extreme measures to enforce colonial dictates. Mirbeau *may * be satirizing French colonialism in these segments, or he may be simply contrasting these functional uses of torture with Sade's uncompromising fascination with the subject-- though to be sure Sade is never mentioned. However, while taking a ship to Ceylon, NoName hooks up with Clara, a wealthy young European woman. Implicitly NoName becomes her gigolo, and he abandons his plans, following Clara to her home in an unnamed city in China prior to the Boxer Rebellion.

Clara is in essence Mirbeau's take on Sade's Juliette: a wealthy woman who is unregenerately fascinated with suffering and torture. In the city closest to Clara's estate, the Chinese authorities maintain a palisade known as "the Torture Garden," wherein criminals are subjected to harsh punitive torments even though they're surrounded by meticulously managed flower-gardens, replete with peacocks. While NoName merely flirts with transgression, Clara is orgasmically obsessed with the pain of others, celebrating the Chinese for their inventiveness in this art. "No other race," says Clara late in the novel, "knows how to tame and domesticate nature with such painstaking skill." The parallel between culling both flowers and rebellious citizens will probably strike contemporary readers as a pretty backhanded compliment to the Chinese. But one might note that Mirbeau speaks only through the voice of Europeans: there are almost no Chinese characters who get any dialogue to articulate their beliefs or obsessions. I tend to think that NoName is an unserious dilettante, who merely flirts with transgressive topics yet still has vestiges of conscience. Clara-- whose total fascination with human suffering remains undiminished by the novel's end-- stands comparison with those Sade characters who manage to liberate themselves from all conscience-considerations. Since the author does seem at times to be satirizing the deeds of European colonizers, maybe there was a part of Mirbeau that envied a Sade-like being who could look upon horror without any pangs of remorse or empathy.

Just as the tortures are too realistic to stand as uncanny crimes, Clara is never bizarre enough to stand alongside the many "fatal women" who, according to Mario Praz, throng the pages of European prose and poetry during this period. The one advantage GARDEN has over most of Sade's works is that, precisely because Mirbeau may have been ambivalent on the torture-topic, he doesn't become as obsessed as Sade with chronicling acts of cruelty until they become profoundly boring. That said, TORTURE GARDEN, while it has the virtue of brevity, is still just a mediocre fiction-travelogue with a few mildly memorable passages. Despite its subject matter, it belongs neither to the genre of horror or to any category of metaphenomenal fiction.