Wednesday, February 9, 2022

MYTHCOMICS: CARNIVORA (1994)

 



Some time back the Italian album-series DRUUNA was recommended to me, and I finally found time to read the series, this time on COMIC ONLINE FREE.COM. 

My first thought is that it would have been easy to read the albums out of order, because creator Paolo Serpieri wasn't especially concerned with inter-album continuity. While keeping in mind that the literary term "picaresque" may have been misused in many instances, the adventures of the titular heroine Druuna would seem to conform to that model. That model focuses on the wanderings of unattached protagonists seeking to make their way in the world, whether by hook or by crook-- often crook, since the genre takes its name from the Spanish word "picaro," meaning a rogue who lives by his (or her) wits. Female protagonists may tend to be somewhat more innocent as they flee the attentions of lustful predators; some can be fairly called rogues, like Defoe's Moll Flanders, while others exist to be repeatedly attacked and abused, like the 1965 parody-character Phoebe Zeitgeist.  Serpieri's Drunna follows the latter model, and like Phoebe she spends an inordinate amount of time being stripped of her clothing and being subjected to numerous indignities-- though unlike Phoebe, Drunna seems to be able to "relax and enjoy it," even though she doesn't seem to be a syndromic masochist.



I found Volume 4, CARNIVORA, to be the volume that most succeeds in assigning a psychological mythicity to Drunna's circumlocutions-- a psychology that I associate with the nightmarish conviction that one can never know where reality begins and dream ends. To the extent that continuity matters, earlier volumes established that Drunna originally occupied a space-faring generation starship, though like most of the ship's occupants, she thought she lived on a regular planet, specifically a city infected by a devastating plague. By the time of CARNIVORA, Drunna has been taken aboard another starship, but everyone aboard this ship is aware that they are descendants of a devastated Earth, and that they are searching for a new planet to colonize. Druuna becomes a chess-pawn to various parties aboard the ship, sometimes being used for sex, sometimes as a means to fight against a tyrannical computer-intelligence. But whatever victories Druuna achieves in earlier volumes are abolished here, in a recursive world where, as the Einstein-looking scientist above says, dreams and reality can become confused.



The POV shifts from the scientist to that of Druuna herself, imagining herself back in the plague-city. She experiences the possible hallucination of being murdered by weird surgeons, then awakes in a bedchamber unharmed, where she meditates on her unexplained pregnancy (which is also apparently an illusion) and on "the perverse pleasure of waiting, that strange obscene desire." A strange man enters the room and abuses her, after which his phantom-like associates gather to cheer him on. 





But then Druuna finds herself back on the starship, awakening from the first of many demonstrable dreams. The ship's computer addresses her, and she learns that Shastar, her deceased lover from the plague-city, has had his consciousness merged with that of the computer. She meets Terry, a female crewperson, who informs her that many of the other inhabitants have been devoured by a carnivorous alien intruder (presumably the "carnivora" of the title). The creature imprisons its victims in membranous webs, but Terry avers that these crewpersons are as good as dead. 






Then Terry's supposed identity goes out the porthole. Two crewpersons appear and shoot her, revealing that she's a "replicant," a copy of the original female created by the invader. Druuna, though not a fighter by nature, kills the monster born from phony-Terry's guts with a weapon, saving the life of one crewman. The other crewperson, the real Terry, regards Druuna as another possible menace. She divests Druuna of her few clothes and chains her up in a room where some of the ship's degraded inhabitants, "the prolets," swarm forth to manhandle the bare-assed heroine.





While Druuna suffers the fate of the perdurable female, the captain of the ship, known as "Will," is seen on his own, meditating on the oppressiveness of  the universe. Druuna, or a replicant thereof, joins him. He has sex with false-Druuna a couple of times, but it doesn't do anything to lessen his mordant musings on the relativity of time. Awakening from post-coital sleep, he finds Druuna missing. Will wanders about looking for her, has a dialogue with an unnamed crewman imprisoned in the alien's webbing, and then finds fake Druuna-- and also fake Will, a replicant of himself. 



Meanwhile, real Druuna seems to awake, no longer tied up as she was before. However, this awakening is yet another engineered dream, as she converses with a hologram of dead lover Shastar. The hologram gives Druuna such helpful information as "Beyond this wall the universe is reflected upside down and time is inverted." Shastar tells Druuna to communicate the ship's peril to the crew, since the captain's been destroyed by the alien beasts. Then she awakes for real (or as real as things get here), though she finds that her assailants have apparently left her unbound and the door to the chamber open. She finds another crewman dead, while not far away, Terry encounters the false Druuna.




Perhaps because more crewpeople have died, Terry doesn't go off half-cocked this time, but this only permits Fake Druuna to accuse Real Druuna of being the alien copy. After tricking Terry into shooting Druuna, albeit non-fatally, the replicant summons one of its beastly allies to overpower Terry, who takes her own life so as to avoid becoming a hors d'oeuvre.




The ship's doctor finds the wounded Druuna and barricades the two of them in the computer-room. The doc pulls a sheet over Druuna's head, since she's apparently died, while outside the replicants order him to let them in, for they are true life and he is only "death and negation." Doc blows up the ship, but his consciousness is propelled into his own past. Then he somehow fast-forwards to a period before the ship ventured near the aliens' domain, and he talks the captain into reversing course. Druuna is alive again, but the doc can't help wondering if he actually succeeded, or if everyone he's encountered might be a fiendish copy of the real Earthpeople.

If TWELVE MONKEYS hadn't come out one year later than CARNIVORA, I would have said that this story was something of a cross between that mind-bending time-travel flick and 1982's THE THING. Druuna's sexcapades play a somewhat less direct role in the narrative here in comparison to other installments. However, it did occur to me that the recursive nature of dreams and illusions throughout CARNIVORA might be profitably compared to the ecstatic (and repetitive) nature of human sexuality, which also have, however briefly, the effect of abolishing the participants' consciousness of commonplace reality. In the end, though the reader can go on to witness more adventures of the picaresque heroine, those narratives also continue to de-center both Druuna and her world so that the idea of a shared reality seems as illusory as the dream of Chaung Tzu.




No comments:

Post a Comment