THE READING RHEUM: A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA (1968)

 I probably first read A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA and its two sequels no later than the 1970s. Within the last ten years I re-read them all for a book-group. I confess that despite that re-read I remember little about the sequels. I emphasize this reading history to underscore the fact that even though I seem to remember liking Ursula Le Guin's ambitious, arguably anti-Tolkienian trilogy, I don't think I tended to re-read the series, as I did with similar serials by Frank Herbert and the aforementioned Tolkien.                                                                                       

 I won't chart the loose plot of the novel here. What LeGuin presents to the reader are a loose series of incidents in the life of an islander in the fantasy-world of Earthsea: Ged, who comes from humble origins but who advances, sometimes in spite of himself. to become one of the foremost wizards in the world. I'm more concerned with pinpointing the major themes and tropes found in EARTHSEA. I find these to be "anti-Tolkienian" in that LeGuin is not concerned with the major good-vs-evil conflicts characteristic of most epic fantasy, but with an exploration of interiority, of what some call "the self."                                                                                                             

The defining problem Ged faces in his youth, and in his early years mastering the skills of wizardry, is that of his own pride. His pride leads him to unleash upon himself a pursuing Shadow, a form of "second self" which provides much of EARTHSEA's narrative drive. Roughly halfway through the book, while Ged is fleeing his personal demon, he takes refuge with his teacher Ogion, who tells him:                                                                                                                          

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”                                       

     Passages like this one demonstrate that LeGuin, in contrast to the Judeo-Christian focus found in Tolkein and Lewis, advocated the monistic approach of Taoism, at least as she understood it. This is not to say that Ged is a non-combative protagonist. EARTHSEA includes fascinating sections where the young wizard, once he's gained greater control of his own psyche, forces a powerful (and intelligent) dragon to yield to Ged's will, and overcomes the temptation of an archaic evil spirit. (To be sure, there's the suggestion of a Faustian trope, but by this time in the novel Ged, unlike Faust, has advanced beyond worldly temptation.)                                               

While I enjoyed my third reading of EARTHSEA, I concluded that I find the morality of LeGuin too arid. I noticed on this reading that although two or three of Ged's teachers seem to intuit the great mistakes he's going to make, none of them ever proffers any advice to guide him away from those errors. Had any of them done so, of course, that might have prevented Ged from bringing about the book's central conflict, which could have been a major problem for LeGuin. But I still find her actual approach overly schematic, as if she wants to put Ged under a microscope to observe the things he does. Though EARTHSEA probably has a much better literary reputation than the 1970s teleseries KUNG FU, I find that the better scripts of that program more involving that this fantasy-novel, particularly with respect to how the hero Caine is advised by his perceptors. The hero's Shaolin teachers are always seen in flashback, rendering bits of abstruse philosophy to Young Caine, which insights Modern Caine reflects upon in order to draw current conclusions about how to act in a current situation. Caine's absent teachers don't do his thinking for him, but they pass on their knowledge so that he can take advantage of it later. Ged is like one of the many islands that make up the world of Earthsea, isolated from his fellow humans even though he chooses to perform good deeds on their behalf. In both her non-fiction and her fiction, LeGuin abjures the visceral in favor of the intellectual-- which doesn't always make for the ideal re-reading experience. Incidentally, the first EARTHSEA book is definitely a candidate for a category of proposition/postulate I discussed here: one which "includes a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates."        

CURIOSITIES #46: A TALE OF TWO MATTS

 I happened to read a scanned copy of TWO GUN KID online and noticed that about five times in the text, the Kid's secret identity of "Matt Hawk" is addressed as "Matt Murdock." DAREDEVIL #6 was out at the time, so I don't find it hard to believe that Stan Lee was quickly typing the script and forget which Matt he was writing about. Presumably all was corrected in reprints.                                                          

MYTHCOMICS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SCROOGE MCDUCK (1994-96)

 There's a certain irony that for many decades the Disney Corporation invested heavily in promulgating its version of "Americana" to the American public, through adaptations of historical events like "Davy Crockett at the Alamo" and theme-park attractions like "Frontierland." Yet, when their widespread commercial interests resulted in producing their own genuine Americana-- something with arguably deeper roots than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck-- the corporate gatekeepers treated both the creator of the work, and the creator's most ardent disciple, with something less than approbation.                                           

 I confess that though I read most of the important Carl Barks "duck books" when they were just comics that cost a dime or so, I recognized their special quality. Yet I did not become passionately devoted to the duck-world as did my rough contemporary Don Rosa. He started out simply doing fannish pastiches of Barks, but over time Rosa graduated to submitting his own art and scripts to publishers-- not to Disney, which didn't allow artists to keep original art, but to the European publisher Egmont, who kept the Disney funny-animal brand circulating overseas even when such "kids' comics" were fading from American comics shops. And his grand project, "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," was Rosa's ultimate homage to Barks. Barks had taken the originally rough character of Scrooge, in large part the epitome of the Skinflint Scot, and made him into a paean to the American success story. Rosa took the next logical step: to assemble all the data that Barks had conveyed about Scrooge in a panoply of largely discontinuous stories-- and make it into a biography that was a more organized portrait of American capitalistic triumph.                                                    

All twelve of the stories in LIFE are stand-alone stories, beginning with Scrooge's childhood in late 1800s Scotland. During these formative years, the boy becomes obsessed with making his fortune, and he keeps the first dime he ever made-- his "lucky dime," as some Barks stories called it-- as a marker of his intention to amass wealth rather than spending it.                                                                                            

One thing that distinguishes Rosa's project from simple continuity-building is that once Scrooges makes his inevitable journey to the United States to seek his fortune, Rosa exerted himself to research each historical situation in search of unique factoids, like the perils of navigating steamboats on the Great Mississippi, or a unique law about laying claims to mining property.                                                   

   

 Just like Barks, Rosa also points out both the dramatic and comedic consequences of making money, as when Young Man Scrooge finds his fair-weather friends turning away from him once he's become a man of means.                                                                                               
 

Like many fortune-hunters, Scrooge's primary relationship to the many exotic lands he visits is that of hunting for precious metals in the earth. However, on occasion the young adventurer encounters some of the metaphysical mysteries of older cultures in spite of himself, as with this Close Encounter of the Dreamtime Kind.                              

Now, in general Scrooge deals fairly with those who deal fairly with him and wreaks vengeance on those who seek to rob or swindle him. He's not the typical capitalist exploiter of the land and native cultures-- except once, when it's funny.                                                        

Rosa continues his trope of "money makes no one friends" when Scrooge returns to his native Scotland, now a millionaire. He's unquestionably arrogant about his success, but the humbler denizens of Scrooge's burg are something less than charitable. And though the above exchange was written in the early 1990s, it sounds very contemporary, with one Scot insulting the rich duck, getting insulted in turn by Scrooge, and then complaining that Scrooge is "repressin'" him.                                                                                                         

Scrooge soon returns to his adventuring ways, with his two sisters in tow (since none of his future wage-slaves, nephew Donald and Donald's own nephews, have been born yet). This time the arrogant billionaire, still focused on making more money but only through his own personal efforts, runs up against a fearsome native who's fully aware of how Scrooge means to exploit him.                                                  

This tale is also Rosa's partial rewrite of a famous Barks story, "Voodoo Hoodoo," in which the billionaire duck cheats the above-shown native chief Foola Zoola. In the Barks story, Scrooge shows no regret for his actions, but Rosa attempts to make his deviation from honest if hard-dealing labor to be a lapse in judgment-- one that Scrooge briefly regrets, only to conveniently forget about making things right.                                                                                                       

 In the final story Rosa retells the story in which the elderly, reclusive billionaire at last meets his nephew Donald and his three grandnephews, with whom he will go on to a new series of world-spanning adventures. In his notes for this story, Rosa attributes to Barks the central idea: that Scrooge's real reason for holding on to all his self-earned wealth is that every dollar, every coin is a memento of the uncompromising life he's lived. I leave it to Duckworld scholars to determine if Rosa is being overly modest on the subject. I think it's possible that Rosa is more deeply in historiography than Barks was, not least because Barks's editors may have encouraged him to avoid any topics not appropriate to children's comics-- though, because Barks was a genius, such topics made their way into the mix anyway. Incidentally, Rosa's passion for real-world history leads to the only crossover aspect of the work, apart from the final-story appearance of Donald and the nephews. As I said, all of the stories in the volume are fundamentally stand-alones, so that none of the Scottish mallard's famous foes-- Flintheart Glomgold, Soapy Slick, and the Beagle Boys-- "cross over" with one another in a given story. However, in one story Scrooge has a brief encounter with none other than the legendary Wyatt Earp. True, it's Wyatt Earp depicted as a funny animal-- but it's a charisma-type crossover all the same.      

ICONS AND IDENTIFICATION

In MY SHORTEST POST YET I sated that what I term "icons" are the parts of narrative through which readers identify with various presences in fictional narrative, and without such identificatory figures, no one would ever invest any thought or feeling into the broad plot-scenarios called "tropes." This assertion brings me back to an elaboration of my "law of identification," which I gave its first full elaboration in the 2011 essay HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN WITHOUT IDENTITY.                                                                                                                                                                                   Briefly, the essay addressed a speaker's failure to define fictional characters as vessels of identification, choosing to simply deem them "unreal" by a positivist philosophy. I responded by contrasting my law of identification with the "law of identity" attributed to philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, to wit:                                                           

"Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

Rather, the Man Without Fear is, like all other purely fictional characters, is governed by "the law of identification."

Now, there is a "law of identification" out there in the Googleverse that has been coined in respect to religious matters. However, my current usage applies principally to literature. It can be *applied* to religion with some alteration, which may make for some future essay.

My law goes like this: Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."                                                                   

I have sometimes wondered if, before Plato wrote down a sentence or two that Socrates may (or may not) have spoken, these respective philosophers were aware of pre-Socratic traditions, or even religious concepts, that asserted that two unalike things could be the same in some quasi-mystical fashion, and that the later philosophers were reacting against that idea in forming the rudiments of the "law of identity." Be that as it may, art, particularly in the form of literature, was already devoted to forging identification between fictional characters who did not exist and non-fictional readers/audiences who enjoyed at least a temporally fixed existence. In any event, it should be further noted that no individual's identification with a fictional character is completely identical with another reader's identification. It's only the broad process of bringing a character "to life" that is identical in all "real readers." The reader takes his cue from the expectations that the author sets up as to the "reality" of the text. But that reality can fluctuate, as noted in this essay: '"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.' By extension, this means that although in the real world, Old Gene Phillips sustains "the law of identity" with Young Gene Phillips, there is no such law governing Superboy and Superman, or Dick Grayson Robin with Dick Grayson Nightwing. The latter pairings have different end-results for their identificatory processes, even if the overall process remains the same, and so Superman can be "phase shifted" into the different identity of Superboy-- even though anyone reading the stories of either character knows that they are the same character at different age-ranges.         

THE READING RHEUM: LAND OF TERROR (1939/1944)

 When I blogged my review for SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR, I mistakenly thought that it was the next to last of the series, since the first three parts of SAVAGE were printed in magazines in 1942, while LAND OF TERROR didn't get any serializations whatever and went straight to book publication in 1944. However, I didn't note the year in which ERB is supposed to have completed TERROR, which is recorded as 1939. What may have happened is that ERB submitted TERROR to all of the usual magazines, got turned down over a period of years, and started SAVAGE in 1942 despite TERROR's failure to generate serialization income. Then, possibly due to constraints on ERB's time, he didn't finish writing the last part of SAVAGE until 1944-- and then either it didn't get submitted to magazines (about two years after the third SAVAGE-section was printed) or it just went into a safe, until getting printed very belatedly, both in AMAZING STORIES (where I first read it) and in an Ace Books publication. According to Wiki, 1944 was also the last year in which ERB produced a substantial amount of writing, his productivity naturally declining in his final six years of life. A final irony is that in my estimation, TERROR is the best of the adventures to focus only upon David Innes, and I see no good reason for the SF-magazines of the forties to have turned it down, unless the ERB brand was just getting a little "old-timey" even in that time-period.                   

   I complained in my review of the first two David Innes books that Innes seemed too much "an incarnation of Manifest Destiny" than a person. This wasn't an explicit critique of the colonial mindset that informs a lot of Burroughs works, though. My stance is that it is possible for an author to produce good literature even if the author subscribed to problematic beliefs, and though ERB has often been pilloried for his politics, often his critics make snap judgments based on incomplete knowledge. For instance, I mentioned in reviewing AT THE EARTH'S CORE that the first human species Innes encounters is that of "Black monkey-men with tails," which to many would seem a slam-dunk proof of racism. Yet late in TERROR, even though ERB again mentions the monkey-men in a stray recollection by the hero, Innes also spends a protracted period as the somewhat-unwilling guest of a tribe of "handsome" Black humans, who only spare him the fate of slavery-- which fate they usually extend to white Pellucidaran captives-- because he can teach them useful techniques. Yet if ERB were a thoroughgoing racist, could he write a somewhat satirical passage like this one:                                               

The men are monogamous and very proud of their bloodline. Under no circumstances will they mate with a white, as they consider the white race far inferior to theirs. I could never quite accustom myself to this reversal of the status of the two races from what I had always been accustomed to; but it really was not as difficult as it might appear, for I must admit that the blacks treated us with far greater toleration here than our dark-skinned races are accorded on the outer crust. Perhaps I was getting a lesson in true democracy.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        ERB doesn't entirely repudiate his screed about trying to advance the Stone Age world, but in the later novels he includes many more acidulous remarks comparing the violence of primitives versus that of "sophisticated" humans, like this one.                                                   

 

Silently I fitted an arrow to my bow and waited until the entire file was well within the ambush. I bent the bow and took careful aim. This was savage warfare, warfare of the Stone Age. Of course, we lacked poison gas, and we couldn't drop bombs on women and children and hospitals; but in our own primitive way we could do fairly well; and so I released my arrow, and as it sunk deep into the body of the last man in the file, I gave the signal for the Ruvan warriors to attack.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       And though TERROR is not the first novel to include such observations, it's the only one I considered to possess high-mythicity, due to establishing a strong symbolic opposition between Innes' "Yankee ingenuity" and the bizarre rules of the Earth's Core. For instance, for most of the series, ERB established that every native Pellucidaran has an innate ability to "home in" on his place of birth, no matter how far he may be from said locale. Most of the time, this concept just made it easy for the heroes to get to a given destination with the help of a native guide from said domain. But during Innes' sojourn with the Black people known as Ruvans, this becomes problematic because the Ruvans inhabit one of several "floating islands," meaning that Innes' navigation problems become extremely complicated-- all in an entertaining manner, of course.       

               

All that said, TERROR is, like all the other books in the series, very episodic, and two of the shorter episodes may owe something to ERB's 1924 TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN. In that story, the ape-man meets a tribe of hairy women who dominate their weak menfolk, and a race of humans who use technology to become as small as ants. Innes is briefly enslaved by another tribe, the hairy, man-dominating Women of Oog, but unlike Tarzan, Innes doesn't stay in the Oogians' domain long enough to reform their aberrant culture. And instead of men as small as ants, Innes also encounters ants as large as men, who hold Innes and a Ruvan tribesman prisoner. How do the embattled humans escape? Well, there's this giant ant bear, and...                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Innes and his wife Dian also remain captives of the Jukans, who are  all more or less crazy and may be a spoof of the madness of civilization. Dian doesn't get as much action here as she would in the final novel, but toward the end, when ERB was in a hurry to wrap things up neatly, she's said to have slain the man who kidnapped her before being reunited with Innes-- surely one of the few times a Burroughs heroine brought about her own rescue.    

THE READING RHEUM: SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR (1942/1944)

I've still not read all of the ERB oeuvre, but SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR definitely comes at the top of any list of "the women-led books of Edgar Rice Burroughs." It might also be the only one on the list, But Still...                                                                                                                   

By saying this, I'm not by extension agreeing with the modern idea of "equity:" that there ought to be, in boys' entertainment, just as many female heroines as there are male heroes. Burroughs wrote rousing adventures for male readers, though unlike some similar writers, he did include a fair amount of romance that could in theory appeal to female readers. I'd argue, though, that often, once ERB finished hooking up his male heroes with their romantic interests within the bonds of marriage, he sometimes didn't know what to do with them, with the obvious exception of Tarzan. So often, as in many of the serials, he would "spin off" a new hero with nominal connections to the "parent hero," and said hero would then have his own romantic arc. In the Pellucidar series, this pattern applies to both the preceding novels to SAVAGE: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR and BACK TO THE STONE AGE.                                                              

  Yet, although there is a new romantic arc in SAVAGE for young warrior Hodon (who serves in David Innes' army) and the feisty tribeswoman O-aa, technically this novel is still a David Innes novel, even though he doesn't have a major role until the latter half of the tale. Moreover, his mate Dian the Beautiful gets as much narrative emphasis as he does. Usually, even the more tempestuous ERB ladies tend to exist to test the hero's resolve. But in this novel, I would say that Innes, Dian, Hodon and O-aa share ensemble status in this novel alone.                                                                                         

Like all of the other Pellucidar novels, the story is comprised by an episodic series of "escapes from captivity" and "search and rescue missions." Thus there's no point in summarizing the incidents, though the best sequences are those in which both Dian and O-aa are forced to serve as "earthly goddesses" to superstitious city-dwellers. Unlike many ERB heroines, these Stone Age beauties are unflinchingly violent in defending themselves. When Hodon steals a kiss from O-aa mere hours after having first met her, she cuts a slit in his chest with her stone knife, and later she stabs one of her captors to death with a spear. Dian and a male warrior have a standout scene having a bloody battle against a plesiosaur, and both females prove clever in playing upon the foolish ways of civilized people. Not that Stone Age cavepeople haven't been as dotty in previous books in the series, but we just don't see many of them this time out.                                                                                                     

           
    SAVAGE also offers ERB's best comical villain. This is an old man from 1800s Connecticut, made functionally immortal by his time in Pellucidar, but because he can't remember his name after so many years, the Pellucidaran natives dub him "Ah-Gilak," meaning "old man." Sometimes ERB calls him "the old man whose name was not Dolly Dorcas," which I won't explain but which I found moderately funny. Even before landing in the Stone Age world, Ah-Gilak was forced to eat from human corpses to live, and he delivered a strong liking for the flesh of his own species. ERB gets a lot of mileage from this goofy old codger, who's only an ally out of convenience but always poses some degree of menace.                           

  Though ERB started this novel in 1942, following it in 1944 with LAND OF TERROR, the last in the series, for many years it was not fully extant. To explain, I'll content myself with linking to this excellent writeup of the novel's history and conclude by stating that SAVAGE stands as one of the best books in the series, eclipsed only by the TANAR novel. Oh, and though this is a David Innes novel, I deem it a minor crossover because it does include a brief scene with Stellara, the female mate of Tanar-- and the two of them, by my logic, exist in their own "sub-universe" rather than being part of Innes' regular cosmos.                                               

ADULTERATED COMICS

I was about to write a comment to this post on Rip Jagger's Dojo but decided to make that comment into a whole post here. The respondent to Rip's post asked the question as to whether it might not have been counter-productive for the early adult collectors of Golden Age comics to focus so much upon the very elements that anti-comics pundit Frederic Wertham vilified: elements like "cross dressing" and "injuries to the eye."                                                                                                 

As far as Wertham was concerned, such things were adult material that did not belong in comic books aimed at children. One might say that the introduction of such elements "adulterated" the pure state of material aimed at innocents, going by the dictionary definition:

ADULTERATE: "render (something) poorer in quality by adding another substance, typically an inferior one"

Now, I've provided an ample number of posts here to demonstrate that the purity Wertham defined was "purely" in his own imagination, and, by extension, in the imaginations of the parents and teachers who either got on board with Wertham or, in some cases, anticipated his jeremiad. What interests me here is the question raised: did adult readers of comic books in any way "adulterate" their own reputations by making commodities of the very things that Wertham considered pernicious influences?                     

The short answer to that question is "no, because the Overstreet Price Guide didn't begin until 1970, and by that time, 'normies' had already formed their generally negative opinions of comics-nerds by that time." Since I became a hardcore comics-fan in the mid-1960s, I kept a pretty good weather-eye on "normie culture's" attitude toward comic books, and I don't think that even in the 1970s non-fans were aware of collectors looking for Werthamite trigger-points. Remember that although sustained comics-fandom in the U.S. started in the very early 1960s with the activities of Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, not until 1965 did John Q. Public even become aware of grown men (and a few women) collecting and reading old comic books. The first convention for comic book collectors appeared in New York in 1965, the same year that Jules Feiffer's THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES was published. At most there had been some earlier Sunday-supplement essays about the weird adult comics-readers, but for most of those writers, the Wertham Crusade was yesterday's news. Even after the surprise of the "Bat-fad" the next year-- which certainly did not validate comic books in the eyes of sixties adults, however much it influenced later generations-- normies just didn't know much about adult comics-readers.

In subsequent decades others attempted to revive anti-comics  crusades, but I don't remember anyone making an issue of perverted collectors obsessed by gouged eyes and spanking scenes. At most I recall that a few comics-fans didn't approve of listing such trigger-scenes. But as the subculture got further and further away from Wertham, I think such triggers lost a lot of their appeal.

And what was the appeal for those who did look for such pernicious influences, whether or not the comics-creators had intended the scenes to be transgressive? I don't rule out collectors with particular fetishes, of course. But I think that for most adult readers, they commodified the supposedly salacious scenes as a way of mocking Frederic Wertham's screed. The very things he inveighed against, as the practices of sinful adults taking advantage of innocent children, became selling-points for comics-dealers. "Step right up and see the naughty cross-dressing Wonder Woman villain!" In my view, it's on the same level as the sinful sights of your basic carnival, which are "innocent" on a level that Frederic Wertham would never have understood.