Black Gate

A few years ago, for one of Brian Swann’s anthologies of traditional Native American literature, I translated a quasi-historical story from Kwakwaka’wakw oral tradition that contained in it an episode in which a dead man is brought back to life by wolves. One of the English word choices I struggled with was the term the revivified character later used to describe why the wolves had done it.

Stories about wolves resurrecting the dead permeate older bodies of Kwakwaka’wakw story, and range from ancestor myths to first-person accounts of shamanic initiation. The myths have a subgenre featuring adolescent heroes who go out into the wild, enter the spirit realm, encounter dangerous and beneficient beings–not infrequently dying and resurrecting in the process–and return home with spiritual treasures. Does that not sound just a little bit Campbellian?

One problem with seeing this subgenre as more evidence of the universality of Campbell’s monomyth is that the genre as a whole also has stories featuring magical children and stories featuring mature heroes, each of which has a characteristic structure that is distinct from the adventures of the adolescent hero. …

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You may have heard that a fairly good copy of the iconic first issue of Action Comics that introduced the character of Superman — the first superhero — is on the auction block.  Recession be damned, some estimate a winning bid could be as high as $400,000.  For a comic book.

Like any other red-blooded American boy in the Cold War era, I was a comic book collector.  But, as my childhood chum and fellow collector once remarked, “The trouble was we actually read these things, so pages would be torn and folded.  So, even if we didn’t end up throwing them out,  they probably wouldn’t be worth much today as collectibles to people who are more interesting in owning the things as an object, rather than what they were originally intended for – something to make being a kid more bearable.”

I think I started collecting comics at around third or fourth grade, but by the time I got to junior high school it was, to use a Biblical phrase that has come into use of late in the political realm, time to put childish things away.  I had graduated to the tales of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and real books without pictures.  I wasn’t (or at least didn’t want to be treated like) a kid, anymore.  Consequently, I emptied my drawers of comics and sent them, I don’t really remember where.
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I thought I was done with this series of posts on planetary romance, a.k.a. sword-and planet, at least until the new edition of Kline’s Outlaws of Mars comes out. But then I came across a reference to James Blish’s Sword of Xota (a.k.a. The Warriors of Day). I had a hard time believing it was for real. Blish, the hardnosed “‘Sour Bill’ Atheling”, the apostle of modernism in literature and Spenglerism in history, the author of the quadruply ambitious trilogy After Such Knowledge (a four-book trilogy–ambition has no higher scope–no, I don’t believe in your five-book trilogy–sheesh, will this parenthesis never end?)–that Blish was the author of a planetary romance?

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As an anthropologist specializing among other things in myth and folk literature, and as a writer who has sat on many a con panel on myth, fairy tales, quest stories and the like, I often have to wrassle the monsters Monomyth, Universal Archetype, and their lesser-known littermates, who have been spawned by Joseph Campbell and other Jung-influenced writers.

The monomyth, a word Campbell took from James Joyce, is essentially a proposed universal structure underlying the hero’s journey, with phases that include The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, Crossing the Threshold (into the magical realm), and so on. What’s wrong with the monomyth? There’s no doubt that pieces of it are found not only in a huge percentage of fantasy fiction, but also in widely scattered mythic and folk literary traditions all over the world.

However. Is it universal?

Methodologically, what both Campbell and Jung have done is cherry-picking, and often from texts that have already been translated and/or rewritten to conform to Western notions of what makes a satisfying story. Let me start with an example of the latter. …

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I just started the latest from Neal Stephenson, which I notice has already hit the remainder tables after coming out in late 2008. It’s a little slow going, in large part because Stephenson really wants you to understand what he’s making up. Opening at a random page, here’s a random paragraph:

The praxis had done it with water power.  Far outside of our walls, upstream of the cataract — therefore, at an altitude well above our heads — they had carved a pool, like an open cistern, out of the river’s stony course, and made it feed an aqueduct that cut due south towards the Mynster, bypassing the cataract , the bridge and the bend.  After rushing through a short tunnel and loping on stone stilts across half a mile of broken terrain, this dove into the ground and became a buried pipe that passed beneath what was now a settled neighborhood of burgers.  The water in the pipe, pressurized by gravity, erupted in a pair of fountains from a pond that lay just outside of the Day Gate.  A causeway ran across the middle of that pond, connecting the central square of the burgers’ town, at its northern end, to our Day Gate at its southern, passing between those two fountains.

Geez, I would have just been happy to know there were two fountains in front of the gate that flanked the town’s central square!

I was reading a newish fantasy novel the other day and every time a new character or place was introduced, the author felt compelled to lather him/her/it in opaque chunks of backstory.

Binky “Bosco” Sorenson walked into the Taberna Generica. He was called “Bosco” because of his resemblance to [some guy named Bosco; a page or so of backstory follows]. The Taberna Generica had been established several centuries before so that parties of elves, wizards, rogues, dwarves and assassins could meet before departing on their quests. The first such meeting [was as dull as you might expect; a page or two of backstory follows].

As the door clicked shut, Binky realized he had never heard a door click shut like that before. [A page or two of exposition follows, documenting Binky’s talents in analyzing door-sounds.] He instantly realized that he was facing a danger neither he nor anyone had ever faced since the founding of the Imaginary City. [Scene break.]

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I originally planned to make today’s post a review of the film version of The Land That Time Forgot. But I decided that 1) I didn’t want to pack in too much Burroughs back-to-back, and my upcoming plans would start changing my Black Gate blogging into an “All-Burroughs, All-the-Time” radio station; 2) You probably don’t want yet another post from me that requires approximately three hours to read; and 3) …well, look, I just got too busy this week and ran out of time to craft the proper tribute to that movie.

And I ran out of time because I’ve gotten productive with my revision work these last two weeks. I’ve started to write “on the clock” and “punch in” whenever I start. The technique has worked so well for me that I’ve decided I can make a blog post out of it. And have it come in under a thousand words.

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