VERTICALLY CHALLENGED

 

In 2012 I blogged an essay entitled VERTICALLY CHALLENGING, but it bears little in common with the subject of this essay except for using the ideas of "vertical meaning" and "lateral meaning," derived from my reading of Aldous Huxley. 

This is not a proper review of Jodi Picoult's NINETEEN MINUTES, but is more my attempt to grapple with its "vertically challenged" nature. By that I mean that while it's not possible for an organized work of fiction to lack all vertical meaning, MINUTES focuses so thoroughly upon the journalistic minutiae of its narrative that there's barely any vertical meaning beyond a truism like "do as you would done by."

A Picoult interview in the back of the book informs the reader that she undertook the story-- dealing with a school shooting in a fictional New Hampshire high school-- because her own children had to cope with bullying. The main character of MINUTES is student Peter Houghton, who's been relentlessly victimized for years by thoughtless classmates. The novel starts after Peter has sought revenge by killing students, but Picoult shuttles across her timeline, showing quick cuts of his experiences and those of other townsfolk within his orbit. In the end, Peter is quite logically convicted for his crimes, but Picoult works in a surprise or two to increase narrative tension.

Still, to use my alternate terms for the two meaning-forms, Picoult concentrates almost exclusively on "what things happen" as opposed to "how things happen." Because I usually read both considerable amounts of canonical literature and metaphenomenal fiction, I haven't encountered quite so exclusive a focus upon lateral meaning, which I defined here thusly:      

 I think the "literal meaning" is not something that looms "over" the poem, as a dialectical theme can be descried 'from above." The literal meaning is, amusingly enough, also the "lateral meaning;" one arrives at it by following the progression of events and expressed feelings from point A to point Z, and that is "what happened."

To be sure, there have been many similar isophenomenal works in which one could not easily draw out a vertical meaning. Earlier this year I reread Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES, and the most I can say is that all the disparate events in the lives of Hemingway's characters suggest a leveling of the previous era's certainties about life's meaning-- even if Hemingway had no countervailing meaning to promote.

MINUTES, though, doesn't have any reference to history outside the years prior to the book's publication in 2007. Because of that limitation, I find it hard to deem MINUTES to qualify as canonical literature, though it's too well done to deem it no more than simple "melodrama" along the lines of, say, PEYTON PLACE.

Though MINUTES doesn't possess a vertical meaning that might grant it the sheen of literature, it's a well-wrought drama about a sociological problem. Years after its initial publication, the book's was banned from over thirty school districts in the 2022-23 semester, apparently over some very brief sexual depictions. Since most school boards will not testify as to their reasons for banning, one can only speculate on those reasons. MINUTES is not a sex-book, but it's possible that it got swept up in general bans of more intentionally provocative works, such as the 2019 graphic novel GENDER QUEER. An alternative reason might be that MINUTES is fairly critical of the fictional school system that allows Peter to be bullied for years, and that might be a depiction that many real-world school systems might not like to have in their school libraries.       

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD (1932)

 

TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD, the sixteenth in a series of twenty-four tales about the ultimate noble savage, was almost certainly the second Tarzan novel I read, following a paperback of TARZAN OF THE APES. Yet I might have formed a lesser impression of the ape man had I read any other books past the halfway mark of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan oeuvre. Not a bad impression, for ERB at his most formulaic was always entertaining. But most ERB books aren't emotionally moving, and GOLD was. I haven't read all the books he authored, but I would not hesitate to consider GOLD ERB's best work after Tarzan's origin tale.

Before this novel, ERB had Tarzan get involved three times in stories where he had to sort out the differences between two warring cities inhabited by White colonists-- sometimes "lost cities" that reproduced some earlier era's culture, sometimes fantasy-domains with no relation to real-world history. GOLD includes two warring cities, but this time the ape-man spends the whole time in Cathne, the City of Gold, and never visits Athne, City of Ivory, aside from learning of the latter from an Athnean denizen, Valthor. After Tarzan rescues Valthor from bandits in the first few chapters, Valthor guides Tarzan to the locale of the two cities, but floodwaters separate the two. Tarzan then spends the rest of the novel interacting with the greatest of Burroughs' pagan queens.

Tarzan gets captured by Cathnean soldiers and hauled before Queen Nemone on suspicion of his being a spy. ERB then has the ape-man compare Nemone to the first pagan queen he ever met: La, Priestess of Opar, who first appeared in the second TARZAN book. This is more than Tarzan's wife Jane gets, as she's not even vaguely referenced in the entire novel. La is not much more than a reference point, for in all of that character's appearances, she doesn't have much more than beauty going for her, so that La always comes off as a roadshow version of Rider Haggard's lost-city queen She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.

Nemone, however, represents ERB's attempt to produce a psychology for a female ruler with nearly unbridled power and no moral compass. When everyone else in the courtroom kneels in Nemone's presence, Tarzan does not, thus piquing her interest in him. Still, she accepts her counselors' opinions that the stranger is a spy and sentences him to face death in an arena at the hands of Cathne's strongest man. When Tarzan inevitably trounces his opponent, the ape man becomes even more attractive to Nemone.

The pop-fiction woods are of course full of stalwart heroes who nobly refuse the attentions of corrupt female monarchs, but ERB is going for something subtler. Through Tarzan, the reader becomes interested in what factors make Nemone act cruelly even toward her own subjects-- for instance, levying death or disfigurement to any Cathnean woman whose beauty might rival Nemone's. To be sure, everyone in Cathne is barbaric. Poor and rich alike hunger for the bloodsports of the arena, and no one opposes ritual sacrifice, since long before Nemone's birth, the nobles train lions to hunt human prey. One might argue that their city might be better called "City of the Lions," as their mining of gold is not that important to the story, while Athne is the City of Ivory as a consequence of their totemistic worship of elephants. Indeed, in an early chapter, Valthor, though a "good guy," tells Tarzan that both cities regularly raid each other, and remarks, "There is a sport for men!"

At no point does Tarzan seek to broker peace between the warring cities, and though he does abet a romance between a young man and a young woman, that part of the narrative is very minor. Once Nemone becomes smitten with Tarzan, she gives him enough liberty that the ape man could escape Cathne with the greatest of ease. He's given an excuse to stay, that of protecting a local noble made responsible for keeping the ape man confined to the City of Gold. But the hero's real reason is that he admits to being fascinated by Nemone despite her cruelty and insecurity. Three times in the novel the stalwart savage comes close to yielding to Nemone's seductions, until at last he exhausts her patience. Tarzan almost meets his doom, hunted by Nemone's totemic lion Belthar, and the ape man is only saved by his own "beast-mastery," in that his pet lion Jad-Bal-Ja shows up and slays Belthar.

Most of Tarzan's villains are one-dimensional power-seekers and rapists. But ERB constructs a history for Nemone rich in racial and sexual mythology, for behind the loveliness of this African White Queen is a spectre of Blackness. Nemone's mother is a raddled old Black woman and former slave who somehow convinced all of Cathne that her child was the true heir of the previous king-- a king whom Nemone's mother and the counselor Tomos probably poisoned on their path to power. A confidante tells Tarzan that some Cathneans believe Tomos to be Nemone's true father, and adds, without much condemnation, that it's believed Tomos would like to marry his queenly offspring. But Tomos is distinctly secondary to the mother of Nemone, to whom ERB gives a name suggestive of negative femininity: "M'duze."

It's plain that, even if Tomos was not Nemone's real father, he and M'duze have raised her to be their puppet, indifferent to her happiness, and this has contributed to her massive insecurities despite her glamorous attainments. And yet ERB is so in love with his character that he allows her to speak truth on her political situation. When Tarzan argues that a true ruler should show her subjects mercy, Nemone cannily replies, "If I were gracious and merciful they would think me weak; then they would take advantage of me and eventually they would destroy me." Tomos and M'Duze, being inferior villains, merely meet bad ends. Nemone, being ERB's greatest villain, meets a memorable fate. Convinced that she has a mystical connection to her lion Belthar, she dies when he dies, and none of her subjects mourn her. Only Tarzan does so, with the conviction that in death she has found the happiness that eluded her in life.

                                      

MYTHCOMICS: CIVIL WAR II (2016)

 

CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. When I wrote my mythcomicsreview of CRISIS, I was more than a little aware of the serial’s numerous flaws, from the bland scripting of Marv Wolfman to the drably functional manner in which the story tossed together nearly every famous or semi-famous character in DC Comics history. Those subplots that even came close to vertical meaning were frequently botched, as with a maudlin encounter between Kamandi—Jack Kirby’s “Planet of the Apes” swipe—and Solovar, one of DC’s seemingly endless supply of intelligent gorillas. However—there was one master thread I discerned, one in which Wolfman built upon the “devilish” character of Krona and contrasted this character’s impiety with a “holy trinity” of characters implicated in the death of the old cosmos and the birth of the new.-- MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2.

Where to start? I suppose by saying that I'm not the least concerned with the twenty-plus comics tied into the core tale of CIVIL WAR II, only with the nine issues written by Brian Michael Bendis and dominantly drawn by David Marquez. And even that core tale suffers from many more flaws than appeared in the twelve-issue core story of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

Flaw 1: This 2016 clusterfubar modeled itself on the previous CIVIL WAR series, meaning that it sought to duplicate the same base narrative of Marvel heroes divided over a political issue. Though I don't remember reading much of the original CIVIL WAR core story or any of its derivatives, what little I read led me to believe that it was irrelevant to my concern with symbolic discourse.

Flaw 2: It's drawn by David Marquez, who specializes in a lot of grandiose Alex Ross panoramic panels. While Marquez's up-close renderings of human expressions are good, most of his fight-scenes are static and uninvolving.

Flaw 3: It's written by Brian Michael Bendis, who makes ALMOST all of the characters sound the same-- sort of a "Buffyspeak" without the humor-- though I'll come back to the "almost" shortly.

Flaw 4: CIVIL WAR II is deeply implicated in what may stand as Marvel Comics's most fucked-up creative decision, though admittedly the policy was imposed upon them by their Disney overlords. In GENETIC FREAK-OUTS I wrote about the monumentally stupid "build up the Inhumans" decision that reigned throughout 2016, only to be reversed the next year, partly because of the spectacular failure of the INHUMANS live-action TV show, but mostly because Disney bought Fox and made the X-Men their property. WAR II's narrative depends absolutely on a running plotline where the Inhumans' "terrigen mists" got loose and started randomly transforming humans into super-powered Inhumans. One such human, Ulysses Cain, provides the narrative motor in WAR II, much as the Superhero Registration Act did in the first CIVIL WAR.

Yet, two virtues ameliorate WAR II's flaws. One pertains to the "almost" above, in that whereas the previous WAR was about Iron Man and Captain America butting heads over the Registration Act, while here the two major buttheads are Iron Man and the current Captain Marvel. With these two characters alone does Bendis transcend his habitual Buffyspeak, for he does catch the sense of how both Tony Stark and Carol Danvers ought to speak given their respective histories. This is particularly impressive with respect to Carol Danvers, who was thrust into the position of a New Captain Marvel less as an organic process than as a strategy for feminist virtue signaling.

The other virtue in WAR II is that Bendis' narrative motor is more than just political. It's true that one can reduce the quarrel of Danvers and Stark down to an intellectual opposition between "security" and "freedom." But Bendis-- whom I've never found philosophically stimulating-- ventures here into the domains of a non-political myth, the myth of free will. Danvers embraces the mutant (yes, I'm calling it that) prognostication talent of Ulysses, because it seems to offer her the ultimate means of ferreting out crimes before they happen. However, Stark is less than pleased with the results, since pro-active measures bring about the deaths of his friends War Machine and The Hulk. (I have no idea what later raconteurs did to bring the Hulk back, and even less interest.)        

The nature of the Hulk's killer comprises a subplot that probably got more development in one of the ancillary titles, and it proves very unsatisfying here. It's only in Part Four that Bendis brings forth Tony Stark's analysis of the prophet's mutant power, with a considered emphasis upon Stark's own status as a "futurist." Frankly, this section is the heart of WAR II, and all the rest is just the usual Marvel meshuga-ness. Yeah, there's a big end-fight between Iron Man and Captain Marvel, but it doesn't really add anything to the story. Further, Bendis dilutes some of his own theme with a lackluster and contradictory conclusion, so no one should take my appreciation of Bendis' "master trope" for approval of all the stuff around it.        

NEAR-MYTHS: BATMAN/TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES 1-2 (2017/2018)

 

I finally got around to reading BATMAN/TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES years after having reviewed the OAV years ago. 

Plot-wise, there's not much to add, since the video closely followed most of the beats of the GN. The Turtles, Splinter, Shredder and the Foot Clan cross from their dimension into Batman's Gotham. While Shredder makes an alliance with Ra's Al Ghul, Batman and Damian-Robin fight the Turtles before becoming buddies. There's no Batgirl in the GN, but there's an early section in which Killer Croc meets the Turtles. I guess that there would have been no point for Croc to appear in the Arkham scene in which a bunch of Bat-foes get turned into half-animals. The physical action of the OAV was more bracing, but artist Freddie Williams II, by chance or design, has an art-style reminiscent of the way the original TURTLE-artists drew the characters with a rough Corben-esque style.

My OAV review does not mention writer Tynion's subplot re: all the action taking place on the anniversary of the deaths of Batman's parents, and without checking I think it a safe bet it was excised. This lends the GN a gravity the OAV does not possess, particularly in a scene where the Caped Crusader gives the hothead Turtle Raphael a primer on Why a Filthy Rich Plutocrat Became a Crimefighter.  

The success of the first series begat a follow-up the next year. The first one was light on theme since so much of the story was characters meeting each other and taking one another's measure. #2 is obliged to repeat the basic trope where a villain from one universe invades another one, and since Shredder invaded Gotham last time, this time Bane invades "Turtle-New York." Bane isn't a great villain, but he suits the theme here because he's a ruthless believer in dominion through pure strength. His absolute conviction in his power contrasts with the character who gets the most attention: Donatello. As the "big brain" of the four terrapins, he's somewhat less skilled at ninjustsu than his brothers, and that lack of confidence leads him to indirectly place power in Bane's hands. Tynion packs in some solid character moments, and works in Batgirl and Nightwing just because. Ryan Ferrier takes over art duties, and again there's a loose Corben-esue feel, but he's a bit weaker than his predecessor re fight-scenes.

I also read the third and last of these crossovers, but there's not much to say about it. The Turtles' enemy Krang causes the universes of the Turtles and DC-Earth to merge in weird ways, and things must be sorted out by story's end. I'm not putting this one in the title since it's not a near-myth, and as a null-myth it's not worth analyzing. I got more entertainment out of the "Amalgam" titles DC and Marvel executed in the 1990s.     
      

NEAR MYTHS: SWORD OF SORCERY 0-8 (2012-13)

 

When I encountered this collection of the nine-issue series SWORD OF SORCERY, I'd forgotten that DC had used the same title in the early 1970s for a five-issue series adapting Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and Grey Mouser" prose stories. The re-use of the old title was appropriate, given that all three of these "New 52" features are either outright reboots or loose callbacks to DC features from the seventies and eighties.

All nine issues of SOS include an installment of a reboot of the eighties series AMETHYST PRINCESS OF GEMWORLD. I've detailed my estimation of the original series in another essay, so here I'll just say that the basic idea-- that of royal houses in a dimensional otherworld using gemstones for sources of magic power-- was a decent gimmick, but that neither the storytelling nor the characterization proved anything special. In the new series, titled just AMETHYST, we're still dealing with a teenaged Earth-girl who finds out that she's a magic-using princess in another world, but in the original, she "aged up" from thirteen to become a near-adult, while in this version, she's 17 on Earth and 17 when she goes to Gemworld.

Artist Aaron Lopresti brings a fluid style to the series and proves generally good with individual facial characterization. Writer Christy Marx, though, didn't break her back re-inventing the Gemworld concept. This time, Earth-Amy's father is dead and her mother trains her for years until she's old enough to take to the otherworld to battle the enemies of the House of Amethyst. Marx-- who worked more in animation than in comics-- has a certain notoriety in being one of the writers who contributed to the Saturday-morning neutering of Conan the Barbarian. Marx works out all the details of her revised fantasy-world well enough. But given that she wasn't going to own the property, she doesn't bring a lot of passion to her buckling of swashes and spells. Originally Gemworld was independent of the DC Universe but became affiliated with continuity in late iterations. Here the editors decided to include crossovers with DC regulars John Constantine and Eclipso right away. I don't think it helped, as it sounds like the concept was rebooted once again in the 2020s.

 Two shorter backup strips appeared in the nine issues. One, BEOWULF, has nothing to do with an entirely dissimilar 1970s series from DC, but I deem it a callback just because older fans might wonder if the two have anything in common. Actually, whereas the seventies comic was an endearingly goofy take on the Old English poem, "New 52" Beowulf initially looks like it might actually be a serious (if loose) adaptation by writer Tony Bedard and artists Jesus Saiz and Javier Pina. However, it's no big reveal that the world of the savage Beowulf really takes place in a technological future, though I have no idea why the people of the era should sport Old English names. In the last installment Beowulf visits modern DC-Earth but meets no famous characters, though superhero images are mimicked by a shapechanger. The final part suggests a new direction for future installments, though I doubt BEOWULF got a second chance. Art and writing is better than average here, making it the best of the three features here.

 STALKER, unquestionably a reboot of a four-issue sword-and-sorcery series of the seventies, focuses upon an adventurer who's lost his soul and goes through hell to regain it. His fresh hell takes him out his archaic time into the present-era of what seems to be DC-Earth yet again. At least, it may be modern DC-Earth since the devil with whom Stalker deals is Lucifer Morningstar-- though this character doesn't seem much like the one popularized in Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN. I found the art by Andrei Bressan ugly and the script by Marc Andreyko muddled.           

THE READING RHEUM: THE LIVING SHADOW (1931)

 

The opening scene of THE LIVING SHADOW--in which the mysterious crusader confronts would-be suicide Harry Vincent and convinces him to devote his life to crimefighting-- is one of the best pieces of writing in the pulps, outclassing even some early stories of Ray Bradbury. I wish that the rest of the book was as mythic as this. But since I'd read it before, I knew that after a few blood-and-thunder moments, the novel would settle down into a fairly routine crime thriller with some unremarkable villains and a forgettable crime. I will give Walter Gibson credit for writing a valid mystery, though, as I've also read a few SPIDER stories where Norvell Page shows that this was not his strong point.

Since the magazine was a response to further monetize an ongoing radio show with a radio-host named "The Shadow," it was no surprise that a few chapters suggest that the heroic Shadow actually relays information to his aides through an ongoing radio program. I have the impression that this device soon falls by the wayside.

It's astounding as to how much of the Shadow's mythology appears in the first book, indicating that Gibson devised the base concept more thoroughly than most pulp-heroes were conceived. The Shadow has his girasol ring here, though he doesn't use it to hypnotize anyone, and in lieu of the reader "hearing" the Shadow's thoughts, the solitary hero expresses his thoughts by writing out casefiles to himself. The laugh of course is there, but there's less of the illusionism and more of the disguise-mastery. 

As this novel commences, the public (and police official Joe Cardona) don't know of the Shadow's existence, but the underworld has a hazy idea of his menace to their projects. In fact, one chapter discloses much more of the Shadow's potential backstory than I would have expected this early in the game. A thug testifies:

This time I looked for his face. I saw nothing but a piece of white that looked like a bandage. Maybe The Shadow ain't got no face to speak of... There was a young guy once who the crooks was afraid of-- he was a famous spy in the War, and they say he was wounded over in France-- wounded in the face, I think. I think The Shadow is this guy come back--

I don't know how much Gibson did with these nuggets, though Robert Sampson says the author called the gimmick "the horror face." Apparently Michael Uslan remembered the device, since he and ER Cruz re-used it in THE SHADOW #11 (DC, 1975):

   

       

GOOD IDEAS, BAD IDEAS

 I'm composing a forum-response to the following assertion here before posting it to said forum. The comparison of Western and Middle Eastern culture originated with me. 

The only difference between western culture and the Middle East today is that western culture has learned to be open to new ideas, experimentation, and cultural change. It learned not to be afraid of change and learned how to grow, while the Middle East has continued to want to stick to its “traditional values” and “ultimate truths”.

First, there are comparably new ideas, but new ideas are not inevitably good ideas. In fact, there is no idea that is so good-- however one defines "goodness"-- that human beings cannot make it bad, at least in particular applications. 

Granting that there are no *purely-good* new ideas, the only way to distinguish between the *dominantly good idea* and the *dominantly bad idea* is the method of statistical predominance. 

Back in the 1800s, Marxist socialism was a new idea. Marxist adherents cannot claim, statistically, that the idea has been predominantly beneficial in its various applications in the last century-plus. They can only claim that (a) it's still better than the capitalist alternative, despite abuses, or (b) it will all become better once the world as a whole has become socialist. These are both sophistic arguments, so socialism is dominantly a bad idea, even its adherents *may* be able to point to particular applications that they deem *good."

The question of inherent human rights was essentially a new idea-- which bears directly upon the discussion of feminism here-- when it began to dominate European intellectual discourse in the 1700s. Before that, the basic credo of most if not all cultures was "what's good for my ingroup is good," and women generally believed it as much as did men. That "old idea" has never gone away and it never will. But the newer idea of inherent human rights has become an inexorable counterbalance. Has the new idea engendered a lot of strife? Sure, but arguably that was in the nature of "growing pains," and only outliers argue that we should all go back to the days when "the ingroup was always right." In contrast to socialism, one can point to dominantly positive effects of the human-rights idea, even if, as I specified, there's nothing so good that humans can't misuse it.

Statistical dominance is also demonstrated by the fact that in the US at least, both sides on the political spectrum represent their enemies as conspiracies oriented upon creating a tyrannical new world order. This use of the same rhetoric, whatever the specific differences, indicates that both sides are speaking to the fear of having one's rights nullified. It's become part of the implied social contract that such rights exist within the sphere of culture, or the myth wouldn't appeal to both sides. In this thread I'm sure I can find at least a half-dozen Leftie attempts to project the tyranny angle on the Right. But only a really dishonest Leftie would pretend that the Right doesn't utilize the same model and speak to the same fears.