Sword-and-sorcery: A divergent path of the hero’s journey

Hey, this hero is made up of a thousand
faces... I see what they did there.

The following are some ramblings and observations conceived after a recent reading of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I’m not sure if I believe the ideas I’m advancing. I’m no Campbell scholar. Just presenting some thoughts here for commentary/disagreement/dismissal. Have at it.

Among the claims I make in Flame and Crimson is that sword-and-sorcery offers a sandbox in which to explore themes alternative to mainstream/high fantasy. The latter often closely follows the “hero’s journey” as described by Joseph Campbell in his classic 1949 study The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Sword-and-sorcery I am positing here offers an alternative exit ramp.

To set the stage a bit: Campbell (1904-87) was a teacher, lecturer, author, and editor who achieved fame with his compelling theory that mythologies the world round—ancient Greek, African, Native American, Northern European, occidental and oriental, and more or less everything in between—share striking similarities and patterns, including their use of the hero’s journey. The journey entails three major stages—Departure, Initiation, and Return—defined by familiar hallmarks and tropes like The Call to Adventure (which the hero may initially refuse), Dragon-Battle (symbolic of the fierce guardian the hero must overcome), and Whale’s Belly (our hero is swallowed, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively,  in a near death experience). The hero undergoes a supreme ordeal to obtain a reward, then re-emerges from the kingdom of dream and returns with a boon that restores the world. It’s a work that builds on the theories of Carl Jung, including the collective unconscious.

How does traditional sword-and-sorcery fit into this model? There is some significant overlap. We see calls to adventure in S&S, journeys into dark pits and underworlds. We see magical aid, from time to time. And plenty of battles against fearsome monsters and wizards. Robert E. Howard’s “The Scarlet Citadel” fits this mold very well, with Conan heeding the call to adventure (taking the bait on a trap set by plotters to steal his kingship, but riding out to heed that call). Captured, he is imprisoned in a dark hell-like underworld, swallowed if you will, and battles a giant serpent. He is offered magical aid by Pelias the wise wizard in the form of a flying mount. And he returns to lay waste to his enemies and would-be usurpers on the battlefield.

But I would argue that sword-and-sorcery diverges with the hero’s journey, often sharply, in the return, and what a return portends. Sword-and-sorcery heroes return (though not always, particularly in the works of Clark Ashton Smith, where they often die ignominiously). But when they do return, typically they do not bring with them a boon that restores the world. In fact, they usually refuse to return or reintegrate to society, and occasionally bring radical upheaval or destruction home with him.

My "new" Frank Frazetta post up on DMR blog

If you're interested in my latest ramblings, head over to DMR Blog to read "A Savage Strength: A Tribute to the Muscular Art of Frank Frazetta." The estimable Dave Ritzlin, publisher, posted my essay on his website yesterday. A slightly different version previously appeared on The Cimmerian website, for which I used to write.

While you're there check out Deuce Richardson's excellent post on Rafael Sabatini, a (semi) forgotten master of historical adventure fiction.

Frazetta, the greatest fantasy illustrator of all time (in my not so humble opinion), passed away on May 10, 2010, so we're closing in on the 10th anniversary of his death. Frazetta was to the painted canvas what Robert E. Howard was to pulp fiction--a fantastic, blazing talent, a pioneer, and an artist who changed the face of fantasy. All you need to do is take a look at the way Conan was portrayed from his initial Weird Tales depictions in the 30s through the early 60s, before Frazetta hit like a thunderbolt with Conan the Adventurer (1966). His fierce, muscular depiction of the Cimmerian took Conan beyond the wiry Roman legionnaire inspired covers of the Gnome Press editions of the 1950s, and remains definitive. It probably always will.

I've got a framed print of Frank's cover art for the John Jakes novel Brak vs. the Sorceress ("Apparition") in my man-cave. It's not a very good book, but Frank's artwork is stunning.

NOT an original canvas (I wish)

The balance

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic the argument rages: Freedom of the individual vs. accountability to society. Pick your side in a binary choice; one is right and the other is wrong. It’s a math problem, right, and we just need to arrive at the right answer?

Wrong.

Life is not a math problem, the truth does not lie with one set of political beliefs. I have found in my life that the truth is found in balance.

We cannot place individual rights at the apex of truth in the midst of pandemics. If you throw off PPE and spread germs (which happens asymptomatically), you can sicken and kill others and/or overwhelm our hospital capacity. Epidemiology doesn’t care about your politics.

Likewise, if you insist on locking down the country until we have a reliable vaccine administered to every man, woman, and child in the country, you crush the economy so badly it will take multiple years to recover. If you are one of the fortunate who has a job that allows you to work from home and maintain your income, please note that millions do not enjoy the same privilege, and small business owners are getting crushed in the lockdown.

Solution: The balance. Start widespread testing. Isolate spreaders and implement contact tracing. Move forward smartly and in stages. Get construction back up and running. Open up businesses like restaurants and hair salons that can’t exist without physical customers, but with social distancing measures and PPE requirements.

Freedom advocates will cite freedom of the individual as our nation’s founding principle. I am a sovereign individual, I will tell you how I will live my life, big daddy government does not. Don’t tread on me. Etc. These same folks however seem to have forgotten the U.S.’ history of the draft, which in the Civil War, World War I, World II, and Vietnam sent men against their will to fight and die. They abhor “draft dodgers” who are derelicts to duty and their country, but have no issue violating federal orders to stay at home and social distance—which is this year’s supreme duty to country.* There comes a time when duty to country, and your fellow man, trumps the concerns of the individual. This must be if we are to maintain societal cohesion. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not a license to trample others' rights to life and liberty.

I believe in the second amendment, and own a gun. But I realize that the right to bear arms does not permit me to own a modern machine gun or hand grenades. I believe in rigid enforcement of the National Firearms Act. Home defense and hunting culture, of which I am both a firm believer, must be balanced against public safety.

If this viewpoint makes me a whimpering “beta” milksop, call me that if it makes you feel better. Just know that I stand for reason, and common sense, and moderation, over blind allegiance to party or principle.

*The draft had the conscientious objector option, but this involved an application and review process, objectors were not always accepted, and if they were, were reassigned to non-combatant duty in service of the war and the country. They still had to serve.

An ode to Dazed and Confused, and days gone by

When cars were cars... 

Whoo-man, I just watched Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993) last night, and experienced an intense bout of euphoria, nostalgia, and escape from present circumstances. What a great film—a film about kids doing nothing, but nevertheless manages to be about something very important. It captures the ethos of the 70s, but more than that, it captures the spirit of being a teenager on the cusp of responsibility, but not yet—critically, not yet, and with their senior year still to come can still revel the pleasures of companionship in aimlessness, the joy of a summer night with a cold beer.

There is no politics in this film—thank you Richard Linklater. No heavy-handed moral message or sermonizing. There is the quarterback whose coaches are pressuring him to sign a behavioral pledge, essentially asking him to sacrifice a piece of himself to the team. The kid refuses—it seems he will still play his senior year, but he’ll do it for himself, and his friends, and their bond, and not the dictates of the coach and what he stands for—conformity, sober, serious, responsible adulthood. Which now that I’ve experienced two+ decades of it, isn’t always a noble goal or the best of all aims. We exchange paychecks and respectable homes and careers for servitude and mortgages and loans. We lose our ability to be in the moment like these kids are, as our life becomes a series of worries about promotions, our boss, raising our children and their struggles, watching parents age.

There is something in Dazed and Confused that’s hard to put your finger on. It’s a vibe, it’s a feeling of being in the present in a warm night in Austin, Texas, with a trunk of cold beer. There is a lot of beer in this film, and lots of weed. I was never a weed guy but man did I enjoy (and still enjoy) beer. Kids ordering kegs of beer. Underage kids buying beer in liquor stores. Kids pulling up in cars with trunks full of beer, going to baseball games with open beers. Beer is the tool that completes the passage into liberation.

I can’t ever return to those days. But I can revisit the emotional reality of those days. Dazed and Confused can get me there in a heartbeat, as soon as “Sweet Emotion” and that orange 1970 Pontiac GTO makes that slow roll into the parking lot (damn, cars were SO MUCH BETTER back then—that’s not even debatable). I didn’t have quite the same experiences as these kids, but I had many that were very close—out of control parties when my parents went on vacation, buying beer underage, ramming trash barrels with my car, playing football, ogling girls. What I did share exactly in common was the joy of just driving around doing nothing with my friends. Popping a cassette tape in the stereo and hitting the streets and feeling like anything was possible. Parking in some secluded area and rocking out into the night, windows rolled down, cigarette smoke. I did all that, and it’s a part of my life that I look back on with incredible fondness. And I’m grateful that Dazed and Confused can still get me there, instantly and effortlessly there, in its 102 minute run time.

"That's what I like about them high school
 girls"... McConaughey's finest role.

I remember, vividly, when getting concert tickets to my favorite bands—KISS, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, RUSH—was the most important “job” of my summer. And so for me the end of the film, with the kids grinning ear-to-ear, laughing, enjoying each other’s company, as they roll down the highway to “Slow Ride” (the ride is the destination—don’t you see?) with the hugely important task of scoring Aerosmith tickets, and summer just beginning, is impeccably well-done. And a perfect note to end on—anticipatory, but also reveling in the now. The ride will continue, that slow ride with nowhere important to go.

Back to the basement: COVID-19 and my home gym revolution

I love my Rogue R-3.

COVID-19 was the final push I needed to invest in a home gym, and now that I’ve got a taste of working out in the basement I can safely say I’ll never set foot in a commercial gym again.

I’ve been working out with weights for more than 30 years, going back to my high school days when my freshman football coach handed us an offseason workout plan. God knows I could have used it prior, when I was an untrained, un-athletic, 14-year-old lineman taking his lumps. By the time my sophomore year rolled around the allure of iron had gotten its hooks in me. I realized I could get bigger and stronger through my own efforts, and powerful at an age when many kids feel powerless. Working out and watching my bench press go up and my biceps get bigger I felt a little like a sword-and-sorcery hero from my favorite comics and books.

Some notes on Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor

A yoked Tarl Cabot beneath the
haughty gaze of Lara, Tatrix of
Tharna. Bondage! 

Daring admission: I am reading John Norman’s controversial Gor series and so far have enjoyed it, un-ironically. Tarnsman of Gor and Outlaw of Gor are entertaining sword-and-planet, with the latter ending on a cliff-hanger that has hooked me enough to want to seek out the third in the series, Priest-Kings of Gor.

Hold the pitchforks and torches for just a moment as I explain why.

Yes, they are a 100% unrepentant pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars. Tarnsman of Gor is a shameless clone of A Princess of Mars. You’ve got your strange interplanetary journey of the main character, Tarl Cabot, an excellent swordsman and general bad-ass back on earth. Tarl falls in love with a beautiful woman, saves the day, and at the end is sent back to a drab earth, left to pine for his love beyond the sun and dreaming of his eventual return.

The Gor series is of course more than little controversial. There are hints of the infamous S&M/dominance narrative creeping in after two books, and a few elements “problematic” for a 21^st century audience. Female slaves submit to men, and lose their autonomy, in a ritual that includes kneeling and placing their crossed wrists over their head. In general women in the Gor universe seem to spend an in ordinate amount of time cuffed, in chains, or asking to be whipped. Without question there is a weird undercurrent of what a healthy male/female relationship should look like, but in these early books it’s not so pronounced, and can be written off to Norman’s attempt at creating a unique, alien culture. There is no explicit sex, nothing (beyond ample violence, though this is largely stylized) to even warrant an “R” rating. From what I understand the series eventually goes entirely off the rails with S&M overwhelming the plot. But through two books at least these elements are (mostly) downplayed.

Is there better sword-and-planet to read? Absolutely. LeighBrackett is probably the best example of this sort of fiction, and of course you should go straight to the source and re-read Burroughs. Seek out Otis Adelbert Kline’s S&P, or Adrian Cole’s The Dream Lords Trilogy, for more examples. But honestly, the first two Gor novels are solid entertainment. Two books in and I find them to be entertaining, well-paced, with plenty of plot-twists and cliff hangers. Gor possesses an interesting alien culture. And Norman is a good writer. His style lacks a little of the Burroughsian/Howardian narrative drive, but it does the job, and in places is elevated, even inspiring.

If this makes me an awful person or just someone with unbelievably bad taste, so be it. I also think 80s metal is the pinnacle of music, so consider that in your evaluation.

1917 film review

Hell on Earth (but well done Hell).

1917 had been in my “to watch” queue for a long time (aka, floating around in the back of my mind), and last night I watched it with my older daughter, a self-described “film buff” who wanted to see what the hype was all about.

Two word review: Excellent film. It’s an intensely personal/soldier’s journey type of story, and also manages to convey the larger tragedy of the Great War. Outstanding costumes and set pieces, and deserving of its Academy Award for Best Cinematography. 1917 captures the enormous complexity/rat maze of the trenches in the latter stages of the war. It effectively juxtaposes the beautiful and relatively undisturbed green countryside of France existing behind the lines with the grotesque nightmare of no man’s land—massive shell holes collecting unimaginably polluted yellow water, ringed with corpses in various stages of decay, skulls and upthrust hands and filth. A little bit of Mordor.

Speaking of JRRT, a scene in which a young soldier (played by George MacKay) stumbles out of a corpse strewn river, on the verge of breaking, but is revived by the sound of Elf-like singing in the nearby woods, seems to me a bit of an homage to the professor.

It’s an engaging journey wrapped up in under two hours and I think it makes a great companion piece with Peter Jackson’s colorized documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018).

War films and the great stories build up a reserve of perspective on current situations. COVID-19 is scary. I’m worried about two parents in their 70s, one with a host of chronic illnesses including COPD, and my daughter who is still working part-time in a 62+ retirement community and putting herself at an elevated level of risk.

But when you think about men going over the top at the sound of the shrill brass whistle, with nothing but a cloth uniform between them and a machine gun bullet or shrapnel, present events are put into perspective.